Well then, my dears, you’ve obviously already read that the nasty old man Churov was kicked out of the Central Election Commission and that a new composition of the Central Election Commission has been formed.
You’ve also read that experts are treating the new lineup with cautious optimism and are welcoming the appointment of Ella Pamfilova as head of the Central Election Commission (which will happen in the next few days).
And you’ve also read how important it is for Putin to avoid the inevitable accusations that the upcoming State Duma elections will be illegitimate. That is exactly why he replaced the odious Churov and Co. with the less odious Pamfilova and Co. — they are supposed to rig the elections and run wild much less blatantly.
And here I ask you, my young lovers of politics: why believe experts and journalists and speculate about how the new Central Election Commission will operate when there is the wonderful Progress Party (which, incidentally, remains the most popular of all pro-democracy parties despite having been forcibly dissolved)?
The Progress Party will test everything and prove it empirically.
So.
The task: to test whether the new composition of the Central Election Commission is inclined to take part in election fraud and in blocking candidates from running.
What this test requires is an election campaign taking place this spring.
Requirements for the election campaign:
Ease of registration. Any refusal to register a candidate would have to have an obvious political motive.
A real possibility that an undesirable candidate or candidates could win.
The victory of an undesirable candidate or candidates must be politically sensitive.
(most importantly) These must be elections personally watched by Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. The kind where he practically stamps his feet, demands that it “must not be allowed,” sends in flying monkeys, and gives orders to underground trolls, walking corpses, swamp vipers, and the rest of his administration’s staff.
“Hmmmm...” you’ll say, “it’s not easy to find an election that fits all those criteria.”
“Such an election does exist,” I’ll reply. “Welcome to the Russian Beverly Hills — the rural settlement of Barvikha.”
Razdory, Barvikha, Zhukovka, Kalchuga, Rozhdestvenno, Podushkino — every Russian official feels a sweet tightening in the chest at the sound of these names.
This is the most expensive land and real estate in Russia. Probably 80% of the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s cases on illicit enrichment include an investigation into a country house in this area.
A specially protected zone. Cameras on every pole. All the roads are federal highways. State dachas and oligarchs clustering around them.
And then there is Barvikha’s other side — ordinary five-story apartment blocks and prefab housing. Savage traffic jams for anyone without flashing official lights. Monstrous land schemes. Ordinary people who, by force of circumstance, found themselves living in a place that became the “Russian Beverly Hills.” The settlement of Usovo, left in transport isolation after its commuter trains were canceled.
As you can see, there is even a classic barracks-style building — who would have thought one could survive in this part of the Moscow region. And people live in it.
A typical conflict broke out in Barvikha: the new governor started imposing his own choice for head of the settlement (obviously, so the land could be grabbed more easily), some of the local deputies were outraged and resigned. The council lost its quorum and was dissolved under the law. New elections have been scheduled for April 24.
There are only 6,000 voters in total. Ten deputies are to be elected.
There are two five-seat electoral districts. In other words, the candidates who finish first, second, third, fourth, and fifth become deputies. That makes it harder to use administrative pressure and state resources to control the outcome.
And best of all: do you know how many signatures are needed to register a candidate? Ten.
A significant share of the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s time and effort already goes into untangling land schemes on Rublyovka and in Barvikha above all. So we decided to combine the useful with the useful and put forward a slate of candidates in this election from our political wing, the Progress Party.
These people will have no task other than bringing order and transparency to Barvikha’s land and finances so that they work for everyone who lives there.
We are sure that even the wealthy and well-off people living in the area are deeply unhappy with how it is being developed, with the chaotic construction, the total lawlessness in land allocation, and the secrecy surrounding urban planning.
Local self-government in Russia is badly crippled, but if you look at the powers of local deputies, they do still exist, and there are quite a lot of them — enough, at the very least, to monitor the schemes that take place every day in land management across the area.
And if you look at the budget of the rural settlement of Barvikha, you can see that on a per capita basis it is second only to Moscow and exceeds that of every other city in the country.
And if you compare the budget properly — not with cities, but with other rural settlements — then Barvikha stands apart like the planet Mars from a loaf of doktorskaya sausage (a common Soviet/Russian bologna-style sausage). Yet despite that kind of money, you still cannot say the area is well maintained or offers a high quality of life.
For the sake of this test, we will put forward a team of professionals who will definitely sort everything out and know exactly what to do. Among those running will be Anti-Corruption Foundation director Roman Rubanov, the head of our legal department Ivan Zhdanov, and Georgy Alburov from the investigations department. In total there will be up to 10 people, possibly a bit fewer, and we will simply support the honest deputies from the previous convocation so as not to create unnecessary competition for them.
These are not full-time deputy positions, and meetings are held once a month, so we did the math and realized this would not interfere with professional work at the Anti-Corruption Foundation. On the contrary, as I wrote above, we are already constantly dealing with officials’ dachas in Barvikha anyway.
We fully understand that it is precisely the professionalism, independence, and energetic opposition-mindedness of the people on our slate that guarantees they will try to throw us off the ballot and falsify the results.
The Barvikha settlement is the center of administrative Mordor: all the Kremlin people live there, they drive around with their blue flashing lights, everything is controlled by the Federal Protective Service, and the leadership of the FSB is involved in land fraud there.
The appearance at points of oversight — and a deputy is exactly such a point — of people who cannot be bought off or intimidated will provoke wild fury in the Kremlin.
But that is exactly the experiment: let their new “honest” Central Election Commission decide whether they are ready to uphold the legality of removing our candidates when registration requires only 10 signatures, each one collected under video recording.
Are they ready to cover up “cruise voting,” “carousel voting,” and fake home voting, given that there are only five polling stations there and each one will have excellent monitoring?
Our experiment leaves the Kremlin choosing between two chairs:
- either honest elections and the risk of ending up with troublesome investigator-deputies in the actual living zone of Putin and his hangers-on;
- or the traditional protection against troublesome deputies, but with it the burial of any hopes for a “rebranding of the Central Election Commission.”
All in all, this will be useful, instructive, and fun. Join us.
And one more thing — if you actually live in the settlement (or, better yet, are officially registered there) and are ready to sign or help with campaigning, write to us at email.
And if you think the Anti-Corruption Foundation is doing the right things, then take a look here and send us a couple of hundred rubles (roughly a few U.S. dollars).
Let there be democracy and equality throughout Barvikha! (And throughout all of Russia too, of course.)