The idea of early elections to the State Duma is increasingly taking hold in the Kremlin, as the outlet Proekt reports. I don’t know how true this is, but it should be treated as a possible scenario, especially since it is all anyone in the Duma itself is talking about.
And here it is crucial for us to draw the right conclusions from the case of Dmitry Medvedev’s political destruction. It matters to us directly, which is why we even conducted special research on the subject—shortly after the investigation was released, and again now.
On March 2, 2017—three years ago—the film He Is Not Dimon to You, the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s most high-profile and successful investigation, was released.
Over three years, the film has racked up 33 million views. Dmitry Medvedev has, suddenly, ceased to be prime minister, and United Russia—the party he officially led all these years—is planning a rebrand. Are these events connected? What contribution did each person who watched, retweeted, and shared He Is Not Dimon to You make to changing Russia’s political climate? A new study by ACF’s sociological service, prepared specifically for the anniversary of Dimon, answers these questions. In a telephone survey, we asked exactly the same questions we asked in March 2017, in a poll conducted in the immediate aftermath of the film’s release. The results are highly illustrative.
See for yourself.
Over three years, the number of people aware of *He Is Not Dimon to You* has grown 3.5 times. (But note that still only about a third of respondents “know about it or have heard something.” Looking at this slide, stop and think: have all the people close to you seen the film?)
Now we ask a direct question: have you personally watched it or not? We ask, of course, only those who know about it or have heard something. Three years ago, such people made up 20% of all respondents, and 23% of them had watched the film—that is, less than 5% of all Russian citizens. (Our sample is representative, so with a certain margin of error the survey results can confidently be extrapolated to the entire population. That means that in March 2017, 6–7 million people had seen the film, which aligns well with the number of views at the time.) Now, 31% know about it or have heard something, and nearly half of them have personally watched the film. So, according to our survey, about 20 million Russians have seen *He Is Not Dimon to You*. This fits well with YouTube’s statistics (33 million views), since many people undoubtedly watched it more than once.
But the main question for us, of course, is not whether YouTube’s statistics are accurate, but how deeply the film affected its viewers.
Twenty million people watched it over three years—so what changed?
This is what changed. Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev—Putin’s right-hand man, a long-serving prime minister, and former president—was destroyed as a politician. From the vantage point of 2020, it now seems to us that he was always a pathetic, laughable little man, fit only for memes showing him picturesquely asleep in different poses at various meetings. But that was not always the case. Medvedev, once a “president of hope” for a significant part of society, may have lost his charm after the 2011 “castling” (the Putin-Medvedev job swap), but in 2017 he still had approval ratings most politicians in competitive democracies would envy. Forty-nine percent of voters viewed Medvedev positively, and his negative rating was low.
A politician like that can serve as a successor and lead the ruling party.
By 2020, all that grandeur had been reduced to smoldering ruins. His approval and disapproval ratings had effectively switched places. Dmitry Medvedev had become a toxic asset that needed to be discarded urgently, because he was dragging down Putin’s entire political system.
Of course, even Dmitry Medvedev’s retreat into the shadows will not spare him responsibility for his corrupt crimes in the Beautiful Russia of the Future. That is, after all, the will of the majority of Russians:
So: although about 20 million people saw *He Is Not Dimon to You*, and two-thirds of Russians still had not even heard of it (!), even with that level of audience reach, it caused a dramatic shift in voters’ attitudes toward the man who was then the country’s second most powerful figure. Naturally, such a blow to his ratings affected not only Medvedev himself, but also United Russia (the party he still formally leads) and Putin (the patron with whom he worked in close tandem for many years).
So do not be surprised that three years later the authorities are trying to do everything possible and impossible to erase *He Is Not Dimon to You*. They are smashing ACF, opening criminal cases, and preparing to put ACF director Ivan Zhdanov on trial. It may seem to us that everyone around us has seen the film, but in reality that is far from true—and Putin understands perfectly well what will happen if everyone watches this film and ACF’s other investigations. The Kremlin also does a great deal of sociology, and it knows how anti-corruption investigations are actually perceived by ordinary people and what kind of threat they pose to Putin.
And the main conclusion everyone should draw is this: every click matters. *Dimon* was not shown on television. Its wide reach was the result of the work of hundreds of thousands of people who tirelessly hit the “share” button. They were not too lazy or too embarrassed to send the link on WhatsApp and by email to friends and acquaintances. They posted the video on social media instead of thinking, “What’s the point? Everyone has already seen it anyway.”
Then they went out to rallies across the country, but remembered that the main precondition for any mass action is awareness and outrage. So after the rally, they kept spreading it.
If there are early elections, we can reduce the ratings of the “renewed” United Russia to the same smoldering ruins in a month.
We can create a political atmosphere in the country in which United Russia candidates in single-member districts will fail, just as they failed in Moscow.
Or we may fail to create it. Better to create it, of course.