Lev Shlosberg, a deputy in the Pskov regional parliament, has just been stripped of his seat by a vote of the other deputies. It’s obvious this was because of his newspaper’s investigation into the Pskov paratroopers, but the formal pretext was that Shlosberg represented his nonprofit organization in court.
In other words, he showed up, spoke on behalf of the “Revival” Center for Social Design, which he headed, and thereby dealt an irreparable blow to Pskov parliamentarianism—2015.
I don’t even want to discuss the substance of this nonsense: how can other deputies throw out a deputy elected by the people?
What’s interesting is something else: the overwhelming majority of our cases involving undeclared palaces and bank accounts do not lead to anyone losing a mandate, even in such obvious cases as Fetisov. The governor of the Pskov region, Andrei Turchak, was also found to have secret property in Nice, yet there were no formal consequences at all. And such a “trifle” as plagiarized and stolen dissertations, which Dissernet finds among deputies in bulk, is not even treated as misconduct.
So even if we assume that an elected deputy can be thrown out for “bad behavior,” the fact is that United Russia does not consider undeclared property abroad or foreign bank accounts to be bad behavior, but representing an organization’s interests in court—yes, that counts.
So, all the best and solidarity to Lev Shlosberg, now a former deputy from Yabloko.
In the beautiful Russia of the future, it will be impossible to expel deputies like this. Those caught lying will resign on their own under pressure from public opinion and their parties, and as for representing an NGO in court—there’s no particular problem with that; if it isn’t allowed, then the court itself should say so: no, you can’t, go back to your parliament.