We’ve decided to do the following: a public opinion survey in the stanitsa (Cossack village) of Kushchyovskaya, where the Tsapok gang terrorized local residents for years under the protection of the prosecutor’s “roof” (criminal slang for cover/protection). And they would still be doing it now, continuing to successfully set up businesses with people from Chaika’s circle, if they hadn’t made a mistake in 2010 — if they hadn’t killed too many people in a single day.
So, the population of the Kushchyovsky District is 70,000 people, and we want to survey them using a proper representative sample to find out whether they’ve heard about our film, whether they knew about the prosecutors’ protection of the Tsapok gang, about the ties between the Chaika family and the Tsapoks, and so on.
Obviously, ACF is an interested party — we are the authors of the investigation, and the survey will be conducted by our own polling team. Even so, we want to do everything as objectively and honestly as possible, so we are announcing a call for volunteers who want to take part in the survey, and we are offering interested journalists full access to the process.
The survey will run this weekend and through next week.
The pool of possible phone numbers for the Kushchyovsky District is 30,000. That means that, given the sample, there’s a high probability we’ll end up reaching one of Tsapok’s or Tsepovyaz’s relatives as well.
So if you sign up as a volunteer interviewer, you might be the one who gets to hear: “I’m Tsapok himself; it’s not all so black and white here...”