The funniest thing is that the explanation is simple. It’s not even apathy — it’s that nobody wants to mess around with registering on the Gosuslugi website. At least two million people know about RosPil’s bill to cap the price of cars purchased with budget funds, and at least one and a half million know that we want to use Putin’s campaign promise and collect 100,000 signatures in support of the bill to force the State Duma to consider it — and only a little over 40,000 people have actually registered and voted:
https://www.roi.ru/poll/petition/gosudarstvennoe_upravlenie1/zapret-chinovnikam-i-sotrudnikam-kompanij-s-gosudarstvennym-munitcipalnym-uchastiem-priobetat-legkovye-avtomobili-stoimostyu-svyshe-15-millionov-rublej/ The signature collection trend looks like this:
(from here) 2.66% is probably not such a bad conversion rate, but that doesn’t make it any easier. We need 100,000 people to register and vote. I realized the scale of the problem a couple of weeks ago when it turned out that even my wife hadn’t voted. Naturally, she had never registered on Gosuslugi, naturally she didn’t know her SNILS, and of course, like any normal person, she had no idea where you’re even supposed to find out your SNILS (Russian pension insurance number). Try a little experiment: walk up to any acquaintance and ask, “Do you know your SNILS?” Everything will become clear immediately. And there’s nothing you can do about it. Our state is over-bureaucratized, inefficient, and corrupt. What would an official system for collecting signatures for a public legislative initiative look like in a state like that? Exactly: inefficient, over-bureaucratized, and designed to make it as hard as possible to collect signatures for anything not coming from United Russia (the ruling political party). So, nothing new there. It just means we need to put in double and triple the effort to get what we want and, sooner or later, make the state more effective. With that in mind, it seems to me that the only people who can he***lp us collect the remaining 60,000 votes are the 40,000 people who have already voted. So, for example, I’m finally going to register my wife on Gosuslugi. You register your wife. Or your husband. Or your mom and dad. Better yet, your wife, your mom and dad, and your grandmother. And while you’re at it, convince your best friend too. Keep reminding them until they register and vote. In short, everyone who has already voted needs to bring in at least one more person and run a personal mini-campaign. Then it will work relatively quickly. Because, like me, you’re probably tired of waiting already. That’s why we created a special website dedicated to the initiative: http://navalny.ru/roi/ Why do we need it? We discovered that promoting the idea online (for example through Yandex.Direct or Google Ads) is difficult because, paradoxical as it sounds, we don’t actually have anything suitable to link to. We can link either directly to the vote or to my post announcing the start of the signature drive. Both options are bad, because someone hearing about the initiative for the first time — and probably never having heard before that it’s even possible to collect signatures for draft laws — looks at those links like a sheep staring at a new gate. They understand absolutely nothing, but they’re being asked to register. A link to my LiveJournal post with explanations also doesn’t work for people who have never heard of me, RosPil, or LiveJournal. It looks strange, and my style of writing is pretty specific. If you’re not used to it, it can be intimidating. Here everything is explained very briefly, but, it seems, clearly. So please help promote this site in your blogs, Twitter, and social networks. It matters. We love promoting all kinds of nonsense, but useful things (even if they’re sometimes boring) — not so much. For example, this photo about Medvedev’s and Putin’s family life on my Facebook was viewed by about 500,000 people. Let’s also all click the “share” button at the bottom of this site, and within a couple of days a few million people will see it through Facebook and VK. Even if the conversion rate drops to 0.5%, that will be enough for us. Please note that you can also download a flyer for offline campaigning from the site to stick up on the wall in your apartment building entrance:
Also a useful thing. So, to sum up: Vote yourself — bring a friend along too (and force a relative with threats and blackmail). Promote the site http://navalny.ru/roi/ however you can and, above all, don’t be lazy about clicking the “share” buttons at the bottom (not of the post, but of the site). And finally, you’ve probably heard that China has introduced a similar ban on officials buying imported luxury cars. The Chinese decided it was too costly and a sign of corruption. In Russia, a 6 million ruble car for some bureaucratic fossil is completely routine.
And if you look at the fleets of these “state-owned” “companies,” the Sultan of Brunei looks modest by comparison.
Nobody considers this corruption, or even harmful to the budget. You could almost be happy that we’re apparently so much richer than the Chinese — if the GDP comparison between the two countries didn’t look like this:
And no one but us is going to stop this. Vote. Promote it. Update: Dagestan strikes back: Dagestan to buy luxury SUVs worth 13 million rubles http://lenta.ru/news/2013/05/14/lux/