I’d honestly issue a formal thank-you, if only I knew whom to thank. Maybe it was United Russia, maybe the NOD movement of my favorite deputy, Fyodorov, or maybe the local administration. Most likely all of them together, especially since my travel schedule is clearly being passed along by the security services.
One of the problems with my trips around the regions to open campaign offices is their... how to put this correctly... insufficient presidentialness.
We don’t have a private jet. We also can’t yet bring a large entourage with us. A lot of people come to the campaign office openings, but we still haven’t started reaching that crucial 50% of people who don’t know me at all.
What’s needed here is buzz, word of mouth—but if a candidate arrives in town in a compartment on the Samara–Nizhnevartovsk train and then gets into a taxi outside the station, what kind of buzz is that going to create?
And then this kind of help comes along.
You arrive at Ufa station at eight in the morning, gloomy and rumpled. And there’s already a whole happening waiting for you—about twenty people meet you by the train car with signs declaring that they are U.S. agents. Some are holding American flags.
Right there on the platform they stage a rally with megaphones and chanting. There are lots of people at the station—Ufa is a big city, after all. A bottleneck forms at the exit from the platform. People just stare at this spectacle in mute astonishment, with no idea what’s going on.
Then our procession spills into the station building, and we keep moving along like a parade. There are even more people here, and they all gather around with enormous curiosity to see what this is. As if either someone’s transporting a crocodile or filming a movie.
It’s especially interesting to watch the police, who bustle around, realize that some outrageous breach of public order is taking place, but can’t do anything about it, repeating, “There are only four of us here.”
The poor police officer walking beside me gets hit with eggs too—the louts in the back rows start throwing them with their faces concealed.
You can read it on the law enforcement officer’s face that this is a first for him. He looks like he wants to say, “Citizens, throwing eggs at me is strictly forbidden.” But who exactly to say that to, and what to do, is entirely unclear.
The procession emerges onto the square outside the station. The rally continues until I get into a taxi.
The atmosphere doesn’t really come across in photographs, but believe me, it was loud and attention-grabbing. They’ll probably post the footage themselves—there were several camera operators there.
Of course, there was one side effect—I then had to spend 20 minutes wiping bits of eggshell off myself that had splattered from the police officer. But on the plus side, the roughly thousand people at the station who witnessed such an exotic scene were definitely intrigued, later told their friends—“You won’t believe what happened, I even took a picture”—googled my last name, and immediately came across the film “He Is Not Dimon to You” (nearly 4 million views). In other words, word of mouth kicked in.
And for any outside observer, the optics are clearly on our side: a bunch of drunks trail after a man through the station, shouting obscenities. That’s unlikely to win anyone over.
There was one unquestionably negative moment: a random passenger was getting off the train and was hit in the eye with an egg. I hope he’s all right and that his eye wasn’t injured. Dear victim, if you’re reading this post, I apologize for the actions of these clowns.
Funny enough, the taxi driver who saw all this looked at me with wild, bulging eyes and asked, “Who even are you?!”—after which he started complaining about local problems: they don’t clear the snow, and so on.
Well, why not? If someone is traveling around with that much pomp, maybe it means some big boss from Moscow has arrived. On an inspection.
All in all, you never know where you’ll gain and where you’ll lose.
At 3:00 p.m., we’re opening a volunteer headquarters here.