Moscow’s virtual mayoral election is over. The result of this make-believe election surprised me more than anyone. What was especially unexpected was that many people I had no idea were even following what I do supported me and even campaigned for me. Thanks again to everyone. Sadly, I became mayor only in the virtual sense, but I got a clear signal that you do support my cheerful hobby of poking crooks with a sharp stick. I’ll keep going, and I urge everyone to join in. Special thanks to those who took part in discussing my ideas for Moscow’s future development. That, of course, is the most unpleasant thing about the way the city’s mayor is appointed. Muscovites are stuck in monstrous traffic jams. There’s no parking. The metro is overloaded. Healthcare is hellish. Housing prices are so high it’s hard to understand how anyone can buy a place at all. And so on. The mayor of a city of 12 million people is being replaced. And yet neither the open nor the behind-the-scenes discussion of candidates includes, IN PRINCIPLE, any substantive discussion of how the city is supposed to develop from here. Instead, a bunch of shady oddballs sit around deciding: *right, we’ll put Arkady in charge of construction. But roads—roads go to Gennady. Let Rafik handle healthcare, and with Grigory Petrovich we’ll swap the metro for the airports. This turf is mine, that turf is yours. This goes to the cops, that goes to the FSB (Russia’s security service). *The budget is huge, and the process of carving it up (after Luzhkov, the former Moscow mayor) is going to be long and exciting. What conclusions can we draw from this vote, setting personalities aside? These: Look, not a single “pro-Kremlin” candidate got more than 7%. Okay, I’ll accept the objection: the audience is too specific and doesn’t like the authorities. On the Kommersant and Gazeta websites, the readership is too sophisticated. And on Vedomosti too. On Echo of Moscow and Novaya Gazeta, it’s liberal. On LiveJournal, it’s scandal-mongers and contrarians. On VKontakte, fascists and perverts. On Superjob, managers. On Odnoklassniki, package tourists to Turkey. And nobody likes the authorities. I’m not saying this to argue that we should vote online and I’ll go on winning triumphantly. With some audiences I’d be hovering around 2%, but even then Shuvalov or Shoigu definitely wouldn’t be hovering around 45. They’d be right there next to my two percent. Where is that part of the internet where generic Putin loyalists are actually popular? RBC? Mail.ru? No. Right-wing conservative websites and publications? Definitely not. Channel One’s website? I very much doubt it. Even United Russia’s website is questionable. There isn’t a single corner of the World Wide Web where the party of crooks feels confident. And there are 60 million internet users in the country. Let’s set aside those who go online once a month from their grandson’s or son’s laptop. That leaves 40 million. And among them, the number of crook-supporters is vanishingly small. In practice, they’re basically just people who were bluntly hired to do it. Crook-supporters (nice word I came up with, huh?) are on the payroll. It’s an amazing thing. All the modernization blah-blah is aimed precisely at these 40 million people. All the hopes and prospects are tied to them. But those 40 million people (by no means a single unified group) can’t stand the people spouting that blah-blah. And of course all this leads to modernization projects becoming far more virtual than Moscow’s virtual mayoral election. In the medium term, both the crooks and the crook-supporters are doomed. Sure, they’ll steal plenty more money, but they have no future.