Of course, the hardest conversation right now is with those who said, “You can’t sit down to play cards with cheaters by the cheaters’ rules.”
And in fact, that is exactly what this was—let’s be honest. We said so openly: we were barred from running in three regions that were electorally dangerous for the Kremlin (Novosibirsk, Magadan, and Kaluga), where campaigning would have been easier for us because a large share of the population lives in the biggest city. So instead, we would clear the threshold where it was hardest to do so—in Kostroma Region—by campaigning in villages and small towns. And we would do it in three weeks, amid the arrest of our first campaign manager and despite all the obstruction the Kremlin would throw at us.
So yes, just like in the Yelkin cartoon above—we would play chess with our hands and eyes tied and still win.
Was it an overconfident, self-satisfied attempt doomed to fail? Some will say so. But I would say we did it because we are confident in our moral rightness.
The same people should not be in power continuously since 1999. Eighty percent of the nation’s wealth should not be in the hands of 15 families. The president’s dacha neighbors should not be becoming billionaires. In the 21st century, wars must not be started on a ruler’s whim.
Do we have the right to say all this and campaign for it? We do. So we set up a headquarters, brought volunteers together, and went out to do what we believe in—urging people to formalize their support for our ideas by turning it into votes and independent deputies.
It’s true: we did not manage to get enough votes. The result looks entirely unimpressive, especially given that the campaign’s last poll gave PARNAS 8% in the city and 5% in the region, while the exit poll showed 6% of the vote. If we had not had so many observers, I would not have doubted for a minute that the votes had been stolen by some new, clever method.
Were there falsifications and stolen votes? Absolutely. Here is one indisputable fact:
11% of all votes (at the time of writing) came from massive at-home voting (if you remember, this was exactly how Sobyanin manipulated the result in 2013).
In other words, that 11% of the vote was almost entirely ballot-stuffing for United Russia. This neatly explains an anomaly far more striking than the PARNAS result: the extremely low regional results for the Communist Party and A Just Russia, and the high result for United Russia. Compared with the 2011 election, the numbers rose or fell twofold. That is impossible. It contradicts both our exit poll and even the rigged VTsIOM one.
United Russia got 45% in the Kostroma city vote for the regional legislature, but 38% in the election to the Kostroma city council (in which PARNAS did not participate). That does not happen without ballot-stuffing.
However, even these falsifications do not explain PARNAS’s low result. You have to win 10% in order to end up with 6%—that is exactly what is implied by the game with cheaters that we got ourselves into.
All of this needs to be carefully thought through and calculated, but first of all we should probably acknowledge our defeat (a temporary one!) in the struggle against the zomboyashchik (a slang term for propaganda TV), which reigns supreme in small towns and villages. As they say in *Game of Thrones*: the information space of Westeros is dark and full of terror.
In Moscow, TV reports about the unlawful arrest of a campaign manager provoke protests and bring in more volunteers, while stories about “American ambassadors” are laughable. In Antropovo (a small town with 3,000 voters), they are a serious matter and a source of fear.
All night I kept thinking about my speech on Pushkin Square in 2012, after Putin’s “election,” when he got more than 50% of the vote: we need to build an alternative system of informing people. A Good Machine of Truth, or whatever you want to call it. Since then, the Kremlin has tightened its grip on the internet too, while we have not made much progress.
In short, there is plenty to think about if we are to improve our tactics.
This was a lost episode in an important struggle, and we will come out of it stronger. We will correct our mistakes and improve, but we will not wring our hands: Tuleyev’s 97% in Kemerovo or Minnikhanov’s 97% in Tatarstan are, in the bigger picture, far more troubling than the Kostroma results. But those results have not taken away our appetite—we know what they are worth.
I want to thank everyone who took part in the 2015 campaign: those who organized and participated in the primaries in every region; those who worked to collect signatures in Magadan, Novosibirsk, Kaluga, and Kostroma; and those who went on hunger strike in Novosibirsk and secured for us the right to run in Kostroma.
Special greetings and thanks to Andrei Pivovarov, who is still sitting in pretrial detention (SIZO, a Russian remand prison) without any guilt whatsoever.
Thank you to everyone who donated money to all these campaigns—without you, none of this would have existed.
Thank you to the RPR-PARNAS party, which became the foundation of the coalition and agreed to all these primary-election experiments.
Thank you to Open Russia for helping with election monitoring.
Thank you to the Moscow call center.
Thank you to the entire huge Kostroma campaign team—both the main one and the heroic teams in Sharya, Galich, and Nerekhta. It was, without question, the best campaign team I have ever seen. It was a great pleasure to work with all of you.
Thank you to all the observers and members of the mobile teams who spent this sleepless night at work.
The main thing I want to say is this: these elections were not only about percentages, but also about our right to tell people the truth wherever we choose—in Moscow, Kostroma, or Soligalich.
No one but us is going to tell that truth right now. That means we were doing our duty.
In this risky game with cheaters, our prize could have been the great exhilaration of success. We did not get that prize, but then let us not hand the cheaters the prize that matters to them—our despondency.
The things we believed in yesterday remain the things we will believe in tomorrow.
On September 20, come to the rally in Moscow. They are still giving us the runaround over the venue, just as they did over the elections, but it will definitely be approved.