If you live in Moscow, you’ll agree: the main political event of the past few months has been the elections to the Moscow City Duma. Several people decided to run, rallied supporters around them, opened campaign offices, collected thousands of signatures, and lawfully demanded to be allowed onto the ballot. They were refused, mass protests followed, and many of the candidates ended up under arrest. Some are still in jail, while others were released only recently.
What conclusion can we draw from this? If you work honestly, account for every step, and submit flawless signatures to the election commission, you’re barred from running. But if you’re a pro-government candidate, you can loaf around, lie, and steal — and you’ll still win. Our electoral system is broken. It filters out good candidates and rewards bad ones.
Let’s look at a real-life example of how one actually CAN become a Moscow City Duma deputy. Who really occupies the seats we’re fighting for, and how they get there. We have a perfect example: Kirill Shchitov, the candidate in District No. 26 (Brateyevo, Zyablikovo, and part of Orekhovo-Borisovo). He was born in 1985, but he is running for the Moscow City Duma for the third time — he first became a legislator in 2009. He was 24 then.
Impressive, isn’t it? How did that happen? Maybe Kirill Shchitov, the supposed representative of the residents of Zyablikovo and Brateyevo, has some outstanding achievements to his name?
His first and main achievement is posted on his official website. In 2003, at the age of 18, he joined the United Russia party. He made that choice while studying at either his second or third year at MGIMO (the Moscow State Institute of International Relations).
Then Kirill spent another three years in youth politics with the Young Guard of United Russia, and by 2006 he was already on the United Russia party list, running for the State Duma from Moscow. At 21. He didn’t make it into the State Duma in 2007, but 2009 was not far off. He did a bit more youth politics — and there he was, already a Moscow City Duma deputy, fully supported by the state. Now that’s a career path, that’s a fight for a parliamentary seat. Not like ours.
Let’s take a close look at the leaflet Kirill Shchitov is distributing right now in Zyablikovo, Brateyevo, and Orekhovo-Borisovo. Maybe it contains answers to our questions about his remarkable political career?
Father: an engineer. Mother: a schoolteacher. If you believe this leaflet, Deputy Shchitov is really one of the people, isn’t he? But you can’t believe it. Shchitov is lying to his voters.
Here is Shchitov’s father — Vladimir Nikolaevich Shchitov.
Since the early 2000s, he worked in the Presidential Administration’s Property Management Department and affiliated structures. And not as an engineer, but as a deputy head of a main directorate. Here is his 2009 declaration. From it we learn that, despite his modest official’s salary — 90,000 rubles a month — and his wife’s very small income, she (the schoolteacher, if we are to believe Kirill Shchitov’s leaflet) owned a sizable 180 sq. m apartment and a Jaguar worth 4 million rubles.
Shall we take a look at the apartment too? Here it is: 5 Ostozhenka Street. It would be hard to imagine anything more central or more expensive in Moscow. That’s where our Brateyevo-Zyablikovo deputy lived.
Here he is in the photo, 23 years old, walking into the building.
He parked his Audi A6 in the courtyard.
And here is a photo taken inside the 180-square-meter apartment. Carpets, Louis XIV-style furniture, and of course a white grand piano. Who among us hasn’t had that?
These photos were taken in 2008, when Shchitov for some reason gave an interview to an American publication in which he talked about how much he loves Putin, Peter the Great, and Stalin. And in 2009 he became a deputy and moved into an official apartment that we pay for.
There’s also more to add about the mother, the “schoolteacher.” She is, after all, the wife of a government official, so her income and property are matters of public interest. If the 4-million-ruble Jaguar impressed you, just wait: from 2013 onward, the deputy’s mother was driving an Aston Martin worth more than 6 million rubles. Almost like James Bond.
Look: here is a photo of her grandson inside that car. And the touching caption reads, “Thanks, Grandma.”
So, Kirill Shchitov, our successful parliamentarian from Zyablikovo, turns out on closer inspection to be an ordinary Moscow rich kid. With all the usual accessories. Living off his bureaucrat father in a 180-square-meter apartment on Ostozhenka, studying at MGIMO, speeding around in a red Audi with a privileged license plate in the bus lane. He lived at his parents’ expense (which raises a separate question, by the way — where did that parental money come from? His father was an official in the Presidential Administration, and his mother earned 30,000 rubles a month), and then 10 years ago he switched over to being supported by you and me. Now it’s not Mom and Dad giving him money — it’s us. And he’s perfectly happy about it, and wants another five years of the same.
What does he even do there in the Moscow City Duma? Does he earn the money we pay him? I don’t think so. He serves as chairman of the most useless of all the useless commissions in that institution — the one on physical culture. And here’s something else our public servant was doing in 2013. He was writing denunciations about me to Alexander Bastrykin (head of Russia’s Investigative Committee), officially on Moscow City Duma letterhead. In connection with the Yves Rocher case. He asked for four additional criminal charges to be added. Apparently the investigators had overlooked something, but Deputy Shchitov, Ostozhenka’s vigilant guardian of justice, was on the alert. The city can sleep peacefully.
We pay him a lot — 7 million rubles. Almost 600,000 a month. And that’s not counting an official country house, a car, and other parliamentary perks. But even that very large amount of money would still not have been enough to buy a 122-square-meter apartment in the Fili Grad residential complex.
It costs more than all of his income over the past five years combined. Looks like someone helped out again.
So, it’s been 10 years since Deputy Kirill Shchitov climbed onto our backs and has stayed there ever since. Pay me for this, pay me for that. Shchitov can’t even set up his own campaign cubes (campaign stands). Janitors from the state-run utility service Zhilikshnik do it for him. All at the government’s expense.
And we paid for those campaign materials too, by the way. Two front foundations sharing an office with United Russia allocated 20 million rubles for the campaign of this so-called “independent” candidate.
A spoiled Moscow rich boy who has never worked a normal job for a single day simply took a deputy’s seat that dozens of decent people were fighting for — people running real campaigns, collecting signatures, and enjoying obvious support from Muscovites. Who supports this Shchitov besides his mom and dad? How disgusting it is to pretend you care about some resident of Zyablikovo or Brateyevo when you yourself spent most of your life in a 180-square-meter apartment by the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and have never ridden in anything worse than an Audi A6.
Kirill Shchitov is now being elected for the third time, and then it will be a fourth, a fifth, and a sixth. He wants to live like this his whole life. Do nothing, and once every five years become active for a month and “campaign” — at us, with our own money.
I urge the residents of Brateyevo, Zyablikovo, and Orekhovo-Borisovo not to vote for this rich kid under any circumstances. Go to the Smart Voting website. Enter your street and building number there, and find out which candidate has the best chance of defeating the United Russia candidate. Come to the polls this Sunday, the 8th, and vote smart.