A debate has unfolded within the opposition over what strategy to pursue in the upcoming State Duma elections. The elections will be held in December. Not a single genuinely independent party has been allowed to take part. That is why the question "what is to be done?" is entirely appropriate, and it should concern not only "professional opposition activists," but all decent people. I am very glad this discussion is taking place, and I urge everyone to take part in it and/or follow it, because by September we need to wrap up all these debates and, if possible, arrive at a consolidated decision.
My position here is completely unambiguous, and I have stated it many times: United Russia is a party of crooks and thieves. Come to the polls and vote for any party except United Russia. This strategy creates the greatest number of practical problems for the Kremlin crooks and turns activists from every political party except the Party of Crooks and Thieves into our allies. For some reason, this strategy has come to be called the "Navalny option," and that is the name under which it is being discussed, although I claim neither authorship nor any exclusive right to it. The idea is obvious enough, and many people voiced it long before I did. Here you can see how the question of "what to do in the elections" is being discussed in "Solidarnost". Here is Leonid Volkov's view from "Parnas". As I understand it, Demvybor, which is part of "Parnas," has already officially endorsed "Come to the polls and vote for any party except United Russia". I am also following the discussion of this issue in nationalist movements very closely, and although no formal decisions have yet been made there, I have the sense that DPNI, ROD, and a number of other organizations will support exactly this option. I will write about this many more times, but for now I want to draw the attention of everyone who likes to "really dig into things" to today's article by one of the best experts on elections, Alexander Kynev. The piece requires careful reading, but it gives an excellent picture of the voting trend for the Party of Crooks and Thieves, and therefore of the prospects for working against it: The most catastrophic situation for United Russia was in Sverdlovsk Region in the regional duma elections: 39.8% (in 2007 it had been 62%, that is, down 22 points; in the regional duma elections of March 2, 2008, it won 58.43% of the vote, meaning that even compared with the regional duma election two years earlier, the drop was about 20 points). A similarly steep decline was seen in the Altai Republic (down 25 points), Kurgan Region (down 23 points), Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug (down 15 points), and Khabarovsk Territory (down 13 points). The decline was significantly smaller in Kaluga and Ryazan Regions (8 and 6 points respectively). The only region where, in March 2010 compared with 2007, United Russia showed an increase was Voronezh Region (62.55% instead of 57.5%). There, on the one hand, the extremely unpopular governor V. Kulakov had been replaced by the much more popular A. Gordeyev, while on the other hand there are serious questions about both the conduct of the vote and the counting. The end of 2010 looked much more optimistic for the ruling party: on October 10, 2010, the decline had narrowed to 5-6 points (Kostroma, Magadan, and Chelyabinsk Regions). At the same time, the results of the "elections" to the Supreme Khural of Tuva (the regional parliament of the Republic of Tuva) looked strange, with United Russia being awarded 77.4% of the vote (which was still less than the supposed 89% in the 2007 Russian State Duma elections). The 66.2% won by United Russia in Belgorod Region looked suspiciously similar to its State Duma election result in 2007 (65.4%). The worst of the regional legislative assembly elections for United Russia were in Novosibirsk Region (a drop of about 14 points, from 59% to 44.8%). However, the optimistic end to 2010 was followed by March 2011, which showed a further deterioration in the situation for United Russia. The main zone of decline was Central Russia, whose regions in 2008-2010 had reduced the ruling party's results much less sharply than the regions of Siberia, the Urals, and the Far East. This recalls other cases in which the rural heartland of Central Russia reacted to nationwide electoral trends with some delay (for example, the triumph of regional blocs once began in the Urals and Siberia, but later spread to central Russia as well). It is quite possible that the elections of March 13, 2011, were an example of an "electoral wave" reaching Central Russia from the east. In these final 12 regional parliamentary elections before the federal elections, United Russia's results fell in every region except Tambov Region, where the results were blatantly falsified (there, United Russia even rose from 59.8% to 65.1%). In six regions, the decline amounted to 16-20 points, and in two it exceeded 20 points. Thus, in 2008-2011, regional elections proceeded in a sense in waves, resembling a corrugated board sloping downward.