— Alexei, is this your first time in Tomsk? What are your impressions of the city and its people? What had you heard about Tomsk before coming here? Have your expectations been met? — Yes, this is my first day in Tomsk, and unfortunately I haven’t had the chance to see much. But we did drive around the city. I had heard a lot about Tomsk’s wooden architecture, and that was the first thing I noticed on the way to the hotel. Even though many of the buildings are in poor condition, your historical heritage is impressive. Tomsk is a wonderful city. And paradoxical as it may sound, poverty is helping the city survive. Because the city is poor, its center has been less disfigured. In cities with a lot of money, historic buildings were demolished and replaced with glass monstrosities that Europe and the United States stopped building back in the 1960s. So Tomsk’s center is, of course, very beautiful. For me, Tomsk is an important city because we talk a lot about education, and Tomsk is still one of the country’s educational capitals. There are universities here that I’ve also heard a lot about, so personally I associate Tomsk with great hopes. — And the snowbanks along the roads and the ice on the sidewalks didn’t put you off? — The city is clearly neglected. We’ve heard in many places about this year’s unusually snowy winter, but even taking that into account, the snowbanks on the streets here are too big. There is an outrageous amount of snow in the streets, and no one is clearing it. Tomsk is an astonishingly beautiful city, yet it has been struck by the main Russian disease of all cities: chronic budget underfunding. The city’s budget is 13 billion rubles. For a city like Tomsk, that is laughably little. Moscow, for example, allocates roughly the same amount to reconstruct the Garden Ring. That’s one street! And here that money has to cover schools, hospitals, housing and utilities, snow removal, road repairs, and so on. — Tomsk’s two previous mayors were convicted of official misconduct. The current mayor seems to have decided to behave so cautiously and so without initiative that it feels as though the city has been drifting backward in recent years. You ran for mayor of Moscow. What should the mayor of a modern Russian city be like? — First and foremost, he should have more authority. And more money. By the way, you put it very well when you mentioned Tomsk’s two previous mayors and the current one, because what Russia has is the appearance of an anti-corruption fight. It hasn’t defeated corruption at all, but it has disoriented Russian officials, who keep stealing but are now terribly afraid to do anything at all. For a city mayor to actually govern the city, he needs authority and money. State powers need to be redistributed across the country, because Russia is too large for everything to be decided in Moscow. To come to Tomsk today for the opening of my campaign headquarters, I had to leave Moscow yesterday at ten in the evening. The issue of time zones alone shows that a country like this cannot be governed from Moscow. Especially not in the current way, where all taxes are first collected in Moscow and only then redistributed back. This style of governance has reached a dead end. Today it is obvious to everyone that this tax redistribution mechanism does not work. Back in the early 2000s, Kudrin and Putin went around saying how great it would be if we collected all the money in Moscow, reined in all the regional barons, and then handed money out from the capital. A lot of people liked that idea at the time, including in the regions. But today it doesn’t work. There is not a single developed city, not a single developed country, where mayors have no real power the way they do in Russia. I support devolving powers downward—to governors, and from governors further down to the level of local self-government. — So what should the mayor of a Russian city be like? — It should be an elected person who wins in a fair election. He must understand that he is accountable. And beyond that, he must have a modern understanding of what a city is in the first place. You see, in Russia today we are governing cities of the 1960s. And we are still building them that way. Over the past half-century, the urban paradigm has changed several times: people wanted to live in the suburbs, then moved back to the center, then back to the suburbs again, while we keep discussing projects and building houses and residential districts that were relevant 50 years ago. And that is a major problem for the country, because mayors often do not understand what they are actually supposed to do with a city. This problem is also tied to the lack of political competition in the country. — Speaking of political competition. Tomsk is holding what is essentially a re-election of the incumbent governor this year, and he has no clear opposition rivals and won’t have any. What do you think explains such low political activity? Has political competition disappeared in the regions, and have decent people stopped emerging who are willing to run in elections? — But you did have Oleg Pletnev. Sadly, he died. — That was a very long time ago. — Tomsk always had an active political life. It was considered an active city in that respect. There was competition among local elites here, and that influenced regional politics. In many other cities, even that didn’t exist. And now, indeed, it exists nowhere at all. Because everything has been crushed, and all decisions are made in Moscow. You were right to call it not an election but a re-election of Governor Zhvachkin. Because how many voters does Zhvachkin have? Exactly one: Putin. And how many does your mayor have? Also one: the governor. — Forty thousand people voted for Tomsk’s mayor; he was elected by popular vote three and a half years ago. — Yes, Tomsk is one of the few cities where direct mayoral elections still exist, but the political field has been hollowed out. There are still no other candidates. And the municipal filter in gubernatorial elections is impossible for anyone to overcome except one single candidate. I say this as someone who, in the Moscow mayoral election, had to get signatures from United Russia deputies just to pass the municipal filter. So even if a normal candidate does appear, he won’t be able to do anything. — Is low voter turnout a consequence of what you’re talking about? — Yes, because people are not fools. They understand perfectly well: why go there if nothing is really decided there? Vote or don’t vote, the outcome is obvious. And today that has become completely concrete. I was recently in Yekaterinburg. There is a place there called the Yeltsin Center. And hanging there as a relic is a ballot from the 1996 presidential election. And it has the same names on it as today: Zyuganov, Zhirinovsky, Yavlinsky—only instead of Putin, it’s Yeltsin. Twenty-one years have passed. A new generation has been born, and the names on the ballot are still the same. — Are you personally acquainted with any politicians who have worked or are working in Tomsk? — No, I won’t lie. Of course, I know that some of them exist, but I don’t personally know any Tomsk politicians. I understand how the whole system works in the regions, including in Tomsk; I know what political forces are there and what processes are underway, I read about it, but I don’t know them personally. — You mentioned Tomsk’s universities and your hopes for its educational sector. Tomsk is a student city, but aren’t you overestimating the current activism of students, who are becoming increasingly passive in public life? — Yes, today’s students are not politicized. And they haven’t been politicized for the past 15 years, or even longer. Unlike in Eastern European countries, our students did not play a major political role in the 1990s or even in the late 1980s. These were not student movements like in the Czech Republic or Poland, for example. Perhaps that is one reason why nothing worked out in Russia. The theme of change in the country was picked up by the old nomenklatura (the Soviet-era ruling bureaucracy), and university students were no longer involved in it. — Why did that happen? — One reason is that universities have no autonomy. University autonomy is a crucial part of educational development and a crucial part of the political development of any country. In Europe, university autonomy has existed for hundreds of years. And it is supported, because young people must play their role and live an independent life in the country’s politics. As for us, education is degrading in general. Less and less money is allocated to it, rectors are essentially appointed, and then there are all these scandals involving fake dissertations... So it would be naive in principle to expect the university community, or the educational community in general, to generate a powerful political signal. But we are trying to change that. — One of your latest investigations is devoted to Mikhail Abyzov, the minister for Open Government. At one point he nearly became the owner of Tomsk’s energy sector, and the very structure of the company TGK-11 was openly designed for him. But something didn’t work out, and now Tomsk’s large energy complex belongs to the state company Inter RAO. It sells heat and electricity here. But water supply in Tomsk, for example, is essentially private: the municipal property complex of the Tomsk water utility is leased to a private company owned by individuals. Do you see a contradiction in all this? On the one hand, the state is stepping away from owning and managing assets in housing and utilities, but on the other hand it continues to be present there. Where should the boundary of state involvement in such important infrastructure lie, and where does private business fit into this story? — By the way, I’m a shareholder in Inter RAO. I was a shareholder in RAO UES of Russia, and when the company was liquidated, I became a minority shareholder in Inter RAO. — So you own a small piece of Tomsk’s power generation? — Yes, so if you decide to sue them, get in touch—I’ll help. That’s why I bought those shares in the first place. As for your question, I think the main thing is that there must not be a monopoly. Because even electricity generation today is perfectly capable of being competitive. For some reason, we are still being told that generation and pipelines are such complicated things that they must belong either to the state or to a monopolist. And what does a monopolist do? Once or twice a year it raises tariffs, and we go along with it. But we can see that in Europe today there are hundreds of thousands of electricity producers. Tens of thousands of people in the United States install wind turbines and earn as much as $5,000 a month by selling the electricity they generate, without any super-grids or anything of the sort. So I believe the main problem is monopoly. And in principle the state should not be involved in this. We have many different generating companies, and the state should exit their capital and simply make sure the companies pay taxes. That’s all. It should not manage them. What have we gained from the state owning Inter RAO? Nothing. Some people’s kids are sitting there running the company—and we know whose kids they are. So monopolies need to be fought. The monopoly in housing and utilities must be broken up. Until we do that, we will not see any improvements in public utilities. Without that, services will not get cheaper. Show me any developed country where utility tariffs rise by 5–10% a year. There is no such country. But that’s how we live.
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