On April 11, 2013 (12 days ago), I urged everyone to have a little fun and make use of Obechalkin's promise that 100,000 signatures collected for a legislative initiative would guarantee its consideration in the State Duma (the lower house of Russia's parliament). We started collecting signatures for something absolutely everyone supports: a ban on officials buying cars costing more than 1.5 million rubles. In that time (over the past 12 days): The Administrative Directorate of the Head and Government of Chechnya ordered itself a Mercedes-Benz S500 for 5.5 million rubles.
http://zakupki.gov.ru/pgz/public/action/orders/info/common_info/show?notificationId=5950600
The Department of External Relations of the Head and Government of the Chechen Republic ordered itself a BMW 750 for 2.7 million rubles
http://zakupki.gov.ru/pgz/public/action/orders/info/common_info/show?notificationId=5859838
The Federal Customs Service ordered two top-of-the-line cars for a total of 5.2 million rubles
http://zakupki.gov.ru/pgz/public/action/orders/info/common_info/show?notificationId=5925236 The **administration of the Bystrinsky Municipal District (Kamchatka) ordered itself a Nissan Patrol for 3.2 million rubles (**what a blessing that we have such wealthy municipal districts—they can buy their head an SUV costing more than $100,000)
http://zakupki.gov.ru/pgz/public/action/orders/info/common_info/show?notificationId=5909083
And the Kaluga Regional Court really outdid itself. Apparently, there is simply no other way for them to drive around the city of Kaluga except in an Audi A8 in phantom black with a pearl effect costing 4.46 million rubles
http://zakupki.gov.ru/pgz/public/action/orders/info/common_info/show?notificationId=5940541
A very sound decision. Obviously, the authority of the judicial system would sink below the floorboards if the chairman of the regional court were to drive past the residents of Kaluga in something costing less than $148,000. It’s not just that people would stop respecting the Kaluga courts—even the crumbling roads, the burdock growing along them, and the kindergartens with leaking roofs would all be outraged if such a great dignitary as a Kaluga judge were to switch to some insulting Toyota Camry, Nissan Teana, or some other “cheap loser-mobile” for 1–1.5 million rubles. Ah, presumably the Council of Judges of the Russian Federation, chaired by our luxury-loving traveler Judge Krasnov, did not allow him to diminish the dignity of the judicial system by buying a merely expensive rather than an extravagantly expensive car. By the way, while we’re at it, I’d like to remind Judge Krasnov that for some reason he forgot to publish his financial disclosure. Not good. So there you have it. That’s just what the guys from Rospil found for me in 10 minutes. Spend an hour on it and there’ll be more. Why did this happen, and who is to blame? We know exactly who is to blame: walk up to a mirror and look into it. They do this because we allow them to do it. For example:
27,454 (you’re all wonderful, conscientious citizens. Thank you—I’m proud of you). But what about the rest of you? My LiveJournal gets 150,000 to 200,000 unique visitors a day. 95% are Russian citizens. 99% of that 95% are normal, decent people. The other 1% is United Russia (the ruling political party). In theory, we should have collected the signatures in a single day. In practice, even though we showed the best momentum (and basically got this whole ROI thing moving), the collection will drag on for three months. Soon every clown in public office will have a motor pool like a Saudi sheikh’s, all paid for with taxpayers’ money. And the taxpayers aren’t even stirring. Can you imagine the happy smiles on all these government crooks’ faces as they watch how slowly we’re collecting signatures?
At this rate, Putin will die of old age (or boredom) waiting for us to overthrow him. That is completely unacceptable. I’d like us to have time to bring him to a fair trial, rather than merely debating whether to remove his body from the mausoleum. Obviously, none of you is registered on Gosuslugi, the Russian government services portal, and therefore you can’t vote on ROI. But as far as I know, registering on Gosuslugi doesn’t require giving blood, passing Soviet-style GTO fitness standards, or paying money. And the registration will definitely be useful to you later too; it has plenty of useful functions. Once again: Register here. You can simply fill out the form on the website and wait a week for a notification to arrive by mail. In that case, you don’t even have to get up from your chair. Or you can take a short walk to a Rostelecom customer service center and get registered there in 10 minutes. If you think they’re just sitting there waiting for us to collect the votes, you’re mistaken. Crooks are always crooks. Even in the small things. Before, as soon as you went to the ROI website, you saw the most popular initiative and who its author was:
Now the authors’ surnames have been removed from everywhere, similar spoiler initiatives have been added, and the site’s homepage has some kind of “live feed” hanging on it that works in who-knows-what way—but no matter how many times I refreshed it, our initiative (the most popular one) never appeared there even once.
In other words, everything is being done so that: anyone who comes to the ROI website by any route other than through our campaigning won’t see the initiative. anyone who comes to support us but doesn’t have the direct link won’t find the initiative—or, getting confused, will vote for a different one. Looking at these petty, cheap tricks, it’s easy to assume there will be a bigger trick too: for ROI to show 100,000 signatures, we’ll probably have to collect 300,000 in reality. Nothing new there. Just like in elections. Even so, our task still doesn’t look all that difficult. After all, it’s just a matter of clicking a mouse and sharing links. To sum up: Enough being lazy already, for heaven’s sake. These Mercedes are being bought with your money. This link and a personal appeal to vote need to be spread absolutely everywhere possible. Most importantly: the initiative will not vote for itself. And officials will not impose limits on themselves. Without your vote, we will never collect those 100,000.