After every hugely successful rally—and that is exactly what happened on August 10—all decent, intelligent people feel a little anxious and scared.
Because right after the inspiring “Look how many of us there are!” comes the anxious thought, “What do we do next?” And a little later, the panicked and dreadful one: “What if FEWER people come to the next rally?” Really, how are we supposed to survive that without smashing ourselves against Facebook pages? There were 60,000 people at the last rally. At the next one, we’d like to see 60,535. And the very thought that only 58,273 might show up is unbearable. All the online masochists have long since raised their hands over the keyboard.
Their fingers are trembling with impatience, ready to write posts saying that once again nothing worked, the protest has been sold out. The cast is coming off, the client is leaving (a famous line from the Soviet comedy The Diamond Arm). Resistance is pointless, and you either have to leave the country or get a job in Sobyanin’s museums and theaters, or become a decorator at VDNKh (Moscow’s Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy), decorating the restaurants and pavilions owned by Sergunina. They say the contracts there are pretty good.
But even if we forget about the whiners, cowards, and hacks—let them write whatever they want; we won’t pay attention—that still doesn’t answer the question of what to do next. What is our plan?
There is a plan. It was described from the very beginning. Later, both I and several independent candidates spelled it out more specifically, together with large numbers of campaign volunteers—candidates who became the first among those whose desire for political representation was supported and shared by the thousands who gathered on Sakharov Avenue on Saturday.
More than that, I can say that everything is going according to plan. The only major adjustment is for the utterly inexplicable stupidity and cruelty of the authorities, who took a situation where we were hoping for a five out of ten on the political-interest scale and turned it into an eight, maybe even a nine.
The plan was and remains clear: to undermine United Russia’s political monopoly in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and, where possible, in other regions where elections will be held.
And, forgive me, this plan even has a clear KPI:
Sobyanin and Sergunina drew up a list of 45 people whom “Muscovites” are supposed to elect. And who cares what they actually think. To paraphrase the famous line about the Ford car that can be any color as long as it’s black, Moscow City Hall is telling us: you may elect any candidate you like, provided that candidate is on our approved list of 45 deputies.
The maximum version of our plan is to take seats away from United Russia and give them to really excellent, capable people: Sobol, Yashin, Rusakova, Zhdanov, Jankauskas, and others.
This can be done through Smart Voting. We’ve done the math.
The minimum version is to mobilize Muscovites and NOT LET UNITED RUSSIA’S PLANS SUCCEED. Not let them seize a majority of seats again. Not let them establish a monopoly. Not let these 45 crooks become deputies.
Don’t forget: this is what lies at the core of it all. You are being beaten over the head with batons because you are challenging the authorities’ sacred right to make the deceitful Kasamara or the secretive billionaire Metelsky your representative, regardless of what you think.
A fairly obvious tactic followed from this plan:
The Kremlin will be frightened by Smart Voting.
Sobyanin will be afraid that Yashin and Sobol will be sitting in the Duma, asking him about the procurement cost of paving tiles and Sergunina’s privatization schemes.
They will try to keep them off the ballot by declaring the signatures fake (they always do that).
And we will collect signatures completely openly and transparently. No one will have any doubt that they are genuine.
If the candidates are still kept off the ballot (and we assumed that our five were in the “risk group,” along with those who would almost certainly win with Smart Voting—Gudkov, Rusakova, Galyamina, and others), then they must not lose their nerve and should appeal directly to the people.
People will be enraged by the obvious injustice.
There will be some protest actions. Most likely not very large, since elections to the Moscow City Duma weren’t thought to be of much interest to the general public (it’s funny to write that now).
The weaker independent candidates will be registered. The stronger ones will have to be fought for.
All this confrontation will draw attention to the elections, bring voters to the polling stations, and they will take part in Smart Voting.
As a result, we will give United Russia a serious beating. We definitely won’t let it keep its current 85% of the seats, and ideally we will deprive it of its majority.
That is what we were preparing for, and that is what we are doing.
Who could have guessed that the Kremlin and City Hall would descend into collective madness?
If someone had told me back in winter that they would
bar ALL independent candidates, arrest ALL independent candidates, declare the signatures of 150,000 people fake, call Sobol a bedbug and carry her out together with the couch, carry out mass detentions in the thousands, fabricate a whole pile of criminal cases so blatantly that even cautious artists would be outraged, and, without any embarrassment in front of cameras, punch a defenseless woman in the stomach and send a detainee into an insulin coma,
I would have laughed at such a vivid fantasy and said that there are thieves in the Kremlin, but not idiots. And that Putin would not lose 20% of his approval rating in Moscow and rack up an 80% disapproval rating among the “under-30” demographic for the dubious pleasure of getting Kasamara elected and Stepan Orlov and Metelsky re-elected.
We expected a Jesuitical strategy of resistance, involving deception, setups, intrigue, paid smear jobs, and the bribing of candidates and liberal opinion leaders. Candidates would be registered and then removed step by step. In other words, all the things that would keep the elections on the periphery of public attention and shift them from a matter of dignity into the realm of political squabbling over how Sobol’s platform differs from Gudkov’s.
And yet something happened, and Putin really did agree to turn Moscow into a city hostile to him, burning up his support level on the sacred bonfire of Sergunina’s offshore companies, Rakova’s jewelry, beautification budgets, and so on.
Entirely in keeping with the precepts of the group IC3PEAK.
Why did this happen? I don’t know, but I can guess. All the versions about evil “siloviki” (security-service hardliners) are complete bullshit.
Sergunina and Sobyanin are the main hardliners.
They have become maniacally fixated on the idea that there must not be a single uncontrolled deputy in the Moscow Duma.
As Sonin rightly writes, we like to think history is driven by great deeds and ideas, but in reality the whole mess started over a cartload of firewood.
Sobyanin has to appear before the Moscow City Duma every year and answer questions. He personally finds it unpleasant and uncomfortable if Yashin, with a sarcastic smirk, starts pressing him with questions about corruption.
Sergunina is afraid that her very primitive theft schemes will be exposed.
Some shabby little Nemeryuk is stealing 100–200 million rubles (about $1.6–3.2 million at the time). You don’t know who he is and have probably never seen him. But if you google him, you’ll find out that he used to organize jam festivals in Moscow, and now—under Sergunina’s supervision—he is in charge of elections. He, too, simply does not want some inquisitive deputy getting into the Moscow City Duma and poking around in those jam festivals. So he came to a meeting and said: I propose we bar everyone at once and declare the signatures fake. We’ll act tough. Here is our list of 45 people; only they will become deputies. No liberal softness.
“Agreed,” said Sobyanin and Sergunina.
Then they called Kiriyenko’s office in the Presidential Administration and said: “Listen, Sardilenych, we’ve decided to go with the hardline option. We’ve got everything under control anyway; no one is paying attention to these elections.”
Sardilenych replied: “Got it. I’ll report to Mikhal Ivanych.”
That’s all.
But then the barred independent candidates turned out not to be timid people. And the people who had signed for them refused to declare themselves dead.
They held a rally, loudly shouted “Let them run,” and declared that they would keep protesting until the candidates were allowed onto the ballot.
So they had to go to Putin. But Putin does not want to get involved in this. And no one else does either. That is why, as you’ve noticed, no one is commenting. No one is stupid enough—it’s politically very disadvantageous. Polls show that the majority are against United Russia and in favor of the independents.
And even by the mafia’s own code, they understand that Sobyanin’s people have pulled some kind of bullshit. We only just dealt with the aftermath of Bolotnaya (the 2011–2012 anti-government protest movement centered on Bolotnaya Square), and now because of their paving-tile contracts they’re starting it all over again.
So why doesn’t the voice of reason prevail? Why doesn’t Putin sort the situation out the “right” way—the clever way?
Because ideologically, the Russian authorities in 2019 are a mix of prison, the army, and a village in Dagestan.
That code says: we do not yield to pressure. We respond to calls for order with disproportionate aggression. In response to ultimatums, you are supposed to shout obscenities about what you did to someone’s mother and behave in such a way that people think twice before dealing with a madman.
So when Sobyanin, Sergunina, Nemeryuk, and Sardilenych came running to Putin shouting, “Vladim Vladimych, it’s all lost, they’ve given us an ultimatum!”, Putin put on his wrestler’s singlet and said: “Damn, well now of course we can only crush them. We do not yield to ultimatums. If we show weakness now, they’ll get cocky, feel they have room to breathe, and start demanding more. Holding rallies.”
So there’s your political analysis, for those interested in thinking about the causes.
And I’ll go back to why I started writing all this in the first place: what the plan is and what to do next.
We need to stop endlessly counting people at rallies and remember the goal for which all this began.
What we need is not to hold the biggest rally possible—though if that happens, great—but to defeat the ruling party in the elections. We must not let the Kremlin and City Hall achieve what they are punching people in the stomach for: the effortless installation as Moscow deputies of a list of 45 nobodies who will then claim that they are the political representation of 15 million Muscovites.
The advantageous difference between the current situation and Bolotnaya-2012 is that back then people protested after the elections. And by that point, the political anger and dissatisfaction that had built up in the streets could no longer be translated into electoral action. If the State Duma elections had been held not on December 4, 2011, but in April 2012, United Russia would have received half as many votes nationwide and four times fewer in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, and Novosibirsk.
Right now we have just under a month until the elections. We need to keep rallying and protesting, but remember the main thing: we will win a serious victory in this struggle not when we hold the biggest rally in 20 years, but when for the first time in 20 years—and in fact for the first time in the entire history of the Moscow City Duma—we break the ruling party’s monopoly in the parliament of the country’s largest region. Politically and legally proving to ourselves and to the whole country that the party and ideology on which Putin and the Kremlin have relied all these years no longer have majority support.
You and I can do this. In the last Moscow City Duma elections, turnout was 21%. This time it will be 24%. Moscow’s protests are supported by 37%.
We need to bring 13% of voters—that is, one-third of those who already support us—to the polling stations and explain to them that it is important not to scatter their votes, but to support our list of 45 candidates.
If that works, then this whole gang—from Putin and Pamfilova to Ebzeev and Nemeryuk—will lose in every district.
Yes, of course, we would like not just to take down the bad ones, but to make the good ones deputies.
But almost all the good ones are now where I am—in places where you have to write posts by hand.
So we need to take down the bad ones and try to get 45 different people elected, among whom there will be 5–6 genuinely decent ones, 1–3 truly excellent ones, and the rest at least not from United Russia. That is the goal of our plan: Smart Voting.
We need to stop discussing the already tiresome, decade-old “but how can we vote for Stalinists?” Bring everyone to the polls to take part in Smart Voting. Take as many districts as we can, breaking United Russia’s monopoly.
Then we must defend the election results. I think it is obvious to you, as it is to me, that their main method of countering Smart Voting can only be fraud. And have no doubt that right now Gorbunov is holding endless meetings on how to organize the biggest falsifications in Moscow’s history.
If that happens, then it will no longer be just tens of thousands whose signatures were stolen who must take to the streets, but hundreds of thousands whose votes were stolen.
The 60,000 who came out to rallies can easily persuade 600,000 to go vote and take part in Smart Voting. There is still time, though it is already running short. Each of us must do our part. And as for rally strategy, that part is clear: come out, come out, and come out again. To any rally.
The “bold” rallies—the ones the authorities call unauthorized—move us forward, change the political landscape, and make the greatest sense.
The “cautious” rallies—the ones the authorities call authorized—visibly show that we are the country’s largest politically active class. We cannot be ignored, and we must have political representation.
There is no contradiction between these types of rallies. They complement each other. Without the “bold” ones, there will be no mass “cautious” ones.
Mass “cautious” rallies give extra courage to participants in the “bold” ones. In turn, the street gains much more meaning when it is connected to an electoral voting strategy.
That’s it.
One final request. For obvious reasons, my ability to campaign is extremely limited right now. It would be good to record a video about this—couple of million people would watch it—but I have to make do with a post. And judging by the way they are extending the arrests of independent candidates, it looks like they won’t release me either, at least not before the elections.
You can help me spread this plan and encourage discussion of it. If you agree with me, post it on your page and add a couple of lines. If you disagree—even better—post the link and criticize it. That will help too.
And register for Smart Voting right now.