Zhukovsky is an unbelievably awesome city. Last Sunday, elections to the People’s Council of Zhukovsky were held there. In some ways it resembles the Coordination Council, but organized on a territorial rather than political basis. Fifteen people were elected, and I congratulate them on that.
(a leaflet with the election results; those who won are highlighted in bold) This is real local self-government, built from the ground up. People are already sick of the “elections” staged by Churov (Vladimir Churov, then head of Russia’s Central Election Commission), so they organized genuinely fair elections themselves. It looks especially striking against the backdrop of what was happening that same Sunday in the “mayoral election” in Anapa.
http://youtu.be/XbmmXfvqhAE Tkachev’s thugs are already so brazen that they simply block the roads into the city with staged accidents so election observers can’t get through. The fact that hundreds of cars are also unable to pass along with the observers does not bother them in the slightest. And the most astonishing thing about the elections in Zhukovsky is that as much as 3% of the city’s population took part. That is genuinely a huge number, no irony intended. In our official elections, turnout is comparable. And those involve piles of state money, police, schools, teachers—everything is mobilized. Time off work, early voting by public-sector employees, grassroots theatrics, cheap pies at polling stations, and gifts for pensioners. Yet in the Vladivostok city council elections, turnout was under 11%. And in the Perm city council elections, it was 13%. In Kaliningrad, turnout in the mayoral election was under 18%, and that was an election for the mayor of a major city—a person with thousands of subordinates. So 3% voting in these supposedly “not real” elections for people’s deputies is a very large number. For Moscow, that would be close to 300,000 people. And note that there was no particular buzz about it on the “big internet” either. No “top bloggers” were promoting the election, and the major high-traffic websites were not writing about it. There may be no formal powers, but there is one small thing: the real support of all the city’s active, civic-minded people. Lyonya Volkov writes some details about how the election was conducted. It’s an excellent answer to the frequently asked question: “How do we unite the local opposition and act as a single front?” Hold an election and elect that very opposition. Sending rays of admiration to the people of Zhukovsky.