I spent the end of last week in Yekaterinburg, where I went to support leonwolf, who was illegally removed from the election race by crooks, and his team. By the way, during Volkov’s campaign, something unprecedented happened: through the internet (I posted an announcement too, if you remember), he raised more than 1 million rubles in voluntary donations for his election campaign — officially, with all the ridiculous formalities required for candidate financing fully observed. So you could say that the crooks from United Russia, who kept Volkov off the ballot, stole not only his personal money invested in the campaign, but also our shared million rubles. And besides the money, about 20,000 hours of volunteer work disappeared too. The latest polling showed that leonwolf was headed for a clear victory and a seat in the regional legislative assembly, but... More generally, I got the impression that Yekaterinburg was filled at once with a very clear sense of lawless abuse by the authorities — and a sense of just how deeply those authorities are hated. And hated in a very concrete way. I was told more than once, quite seriously, stories like: "in Uralmash (a working-class district of Yekaterinburg), they beat up United Russia campaigners." At a meeting with Volkov’s volunteers, the guys were saying, "we can walk around the city alone, but United Russia people don’t campaign alone — they might get beaten up." An interesting thing, by the way. I’ve dealt with volunteer campaigners a million times. In 99% of cases, they’re women aged 55 to 65. Here, the volunteers were mostly young men. Average age around 26. What made them suddenly drop everything and start working for free in an election campaign? I already wrote about the unexpected meeting with Novikov. There were lots of different events. A press lunch. And simply a "meeting with civically minded citizens." To my surprise, the hall was packed.
Everything has been carefully documented, recorded in detail, and supplied with proof links here, in Dmitry Gorchakov’s LiveJournal, many thanks to him for that. I also stopped by to see Yevgeny Roizman roizman and finally met him in person — until then, we had only spoken by phone.
His Museum of the Nevyansk Icon is an amazing place — I highly recommend visiting it. In general, both he himself and the place where he lives are nothing like what you might imagine from the many stories told about him. He looks more like a professor. Everything is piled high with books (his home is basically a book warehouse), people are sitting around restoring icons. The whole thing has a completely academic feel. He has genuinely preserved an entire layer of history. Very impressive. The last event I attended was an excellent rally against the Crooks and Thieves at Defenders’ Square. A big crowd, great energy, and again mostly young people. And it was very local in the best sense of the word: everyone knows each other, kids are crawling around on the stage. It was completely clear that these people are ready to act together.
(source) Here Volkov is basically saying to crook Misharin: we’re watching you and your billionaire daughter. In the last election, the Party of Crooks and Thieves got 35% across Sverdlovsk Region and 31% in the city of Yekaterinburg. Now their ratings in the city are at around 20–27%. The question is whether the real result can be protected from fraud. And fraud and falsification are United Russia’s only chance in the Urals. We’ll see, but it seemed to me that the people of Yekaterinburg are ready for the battle for their city.