Good reports on Saturday’s events in Astrakhan: http://www.kommersant.ru/theme/1656 http://lenta.ru/articles/2012/04/15/astrakhan/ http://www.gazeta.ru/politics/2012/04/14_a_4345821.shtml http://www.izvestia.ru/news/521986 http://www.echo.msk.ru/blog/edeilman/878949-echo/ http://newtimes.ru/articles/detail/52204 Updated photo albums: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.403089616376794.97049.124964357522656&type=3 (mainly me here) http://vk.com/album-21239875_155576705 (everything is here) What I want to say: Huge thanks to everyone who spared no time or money to come support the people of Astrakhan. You’re amazing. The biggest thanks of all go to the Astrakhan residents themselves, who on Friday spectacularly wiped the floor with the local United Russia crooks, who had spent the whole week insisting that "only Shein himself and a handful of outsiders are upset, while native Astrakhan residents are happy and satisfied with their situation. They don’t care about election fraud". That was fantastic. It was worth going to Astrakhan just to see the long faces of the local/Moscow Nashi activists (pro-Kremlin youth movement)/United Russia people and the frightened police lieutenant colonels, who had to stand in the cordon themselves to symbolically block off the streets along which the march was passing. The next steps should be determined by Shein himself and his comrades, based on the planned actions in the courts/the Central Election Commission, the physical condition of the hunger strikers, and so on. Another march is planned for this Saturday. The week in Astrakhan once again proved how necessary it is to build the Good Machine of Truth, if only to sharply reduce the stupidity and chaos of our actions. As usual, whenever there’s a need to make a leaflet/sticker/poster, it turns out there’s no designer and no layout specialist. At the same time, everyone understands that there are tons of designers and layout people ready to help quickly and professionally. But they’re all “somewhere out there on the internet.” By the time you find one, half a day is gone. There should be a list for every major city of print shops willing to print things the authorities won’t like. There are lots of excellent, active students ready to organize meetings and campaigning at their universities, but they don’t know each other. There are just countless people ready to chip in money. When Zhora Alburov wrote on Twitter that he’d run out of money on his phone, people sent him 9,500 rubles (about 9,500 RUB) in just a few minutes, even though he only had 5,700 followers. All expenses for print shops, transport, and so on can absolutely be covered through crowdfunding, but there’s no infrastructure for it. People can pool money and publish paid announcements in local media, but who the hell knows which outlets would agree to it. At any given moment, 5,000 to 8,000 Astrakhan residents are online on VKontakte (Russian social network). Many of them are guaranteed to be willing to help, and work with them should start immediately. I could add another hundred thousand points. All the prerequisites are there for the GMT to work: taxi drivers are happy to distribute materials, minibus drivers put posters up inside their vehicles, people on the street take leaflets without any problem and are ready to talk, and so on. We just need to get all this organized and reduce the messiness of what’s going on by 30%. Then we’ll beat them all. The week in Astrakhan threw off our work schedule on the GMT, but still, we’re slowly coming down the hill.