Yesterday saw the first action by our volunteer campaign headquarters, whose launch I wrote about four days ago. The first meeting took place on Friday:
And yesterday we already had six street campaigning pickets in central Moscow using our signature cubes, invented in Kirov.
A huge thank-you to everyone who took part. This is exactly how we will crush the vile, nauseating propaganda of Putin and United Russia. I’m very glad to see people emerging who understand that no one else is going to do this for them. In Moscow, there are hundreds of thousands of people who understand perfectly well what is happening in the country and are ready to spend a couple of hours a week convincing those around them that they are right. We just need to get organized. That’s what we’re learning to do together. Watch the videos to get a better sense of the atmosphere:
http://youtu.be/RXuX_eO1Ta8 Tens of thousands of people pass by each such picket. We manage to speak briefly with many thousands of them (and with some, quite thoroughly). We’ll be conducting special studies to assess the effectiveness of this kind of campaigning, but even from first impressions it’s working extremely well.
At the pickets, we handed out a leaflet with the main points of the platform. We will present the full platform on July 1. The main goal of the pickets is to destroy the mythology created by the Kremlin riffraff through its zombie-boxes (a slang term for television): "The opposition has no constructive program. Fine, Navalny fights corruption—but then what? What are they proposing? You can’t get very far on ‘crooks and thieves’ alone."
These kinds of pickets are excellent at reaching the notorious "grandmothers without internet access who get all their information from television". A conversation with someone genuinely driven by conviction is something they will remember forever, and it will make more of an impression on them than a hundred viewings of the program Vremya (the main evening news on Russia’s Channel One).
Everyone always talked about offline campaigning. Well, here it is in the flesh:
So everything went great, and it will continue today. I would have ended on that upbeat note, if not for the Moscow police, who yesterday evening SUDDENLY started sending out press releases that, in the vivid phrase of Yevgeny Roizman, sounded like the "ravings of a stoned junkie". Candidate for Moscow mayor Navalny started campaigning earlier than allowed According to the law "On the Election of the Mayor of Moscow," campaigning may begin no earlier than 40 days before election day; members of the campaign staff of Moscow mayoral candidate Alexei Navalny violated the law. MOSCOW, June 30 — RIA Novosti. Police and the Moscow City Election Commission recorded the illegal distribution of printed campaign materials in support of Moscow mayoral candidate Alexei Navalny, the press service of the capital’s Main Directorate of the Interior Ministry told journalists. According to the agency, as part of a routine operation called "Transcrime," traffic police officers in Moscow’s Southern Administrative District stopped a GAZelle van carrying Navalny campaign materials on Saturday afternoon. "Because the driver did not have compulsory motor insurance, an administrative offense report was drawn up against him. There were no complaints about the cargo, and the vehicle proceeded to its destination," a press service employee said. He explained that an authorized picket was taking place on Trubnaya Square at 4:00 p.m., during which campaign materials in support of Navalny were being distributed. "According to the law ‘On the Election of the Mayor of Moscow,’ campaigning may begin no earlier than 40 days before election day, therefore members of the campaign staff were acting in violation of existing legislation. A representative of the Moscow City Election Commission who arrived at the scene acknowledged that the actions of Navalny’s campaign staff in distributing campaign materials were unlawful," the directorate specified. "In accordance with the law, the printed materials were confiscated," the representative added. http://ria.ru/politics/20130630/946607239.html It’s hard to tell what you want to do first: exclaim "WHAAAT?!" or call a drug treatment clinic to report suspicious hallucinations in the police force. Interestingly, even the RIA Novosti article "Navalny Started Campaigning Ahead of Time" is accompanied by their own infographic with the campaign calendar:
http://ria.ru/infografika/20130611/942801677.html Moscow election law is absolutely unambiguous on this point: campaigning by a candidate begins from the day of nomination. Deputy Katz has already written an angry post on the subject, laying out the legal basics and even sending a formal deputy’s letter to the Moscow police—have a read. What’s more, the claim that some leaflets were confiscated at our picket on Trubnaya is also drug-fueled nonsense from the Moscow police. Here is Zhora Alburov’s tweet from yesterday about the successful end of the picket:
Everything went perfectly for them. At one point, a lady from the Meshchansky District administration showed up:
But they showed the lady the relevant article from Moscow’s election code and sent her back to the district office. And that was that. The "representative of the Moscow City Election Commission who documented violations" and the "confiscation of leaflets" are pure fiction invented by someone in the Moscow police headquarters, who was evidently writing the press release in the evidence room for crimes under Article 228 of the Russian Criminal Code (drug offenses). Everything is fine on our end. We are not breaking the law. We are very pleased that our team is the only one running a real election campaign. Around 5,000 people have already joined the volunteer groups. Join us, we’ll learn to work together and we’ll beat everyone. http://vk.com/teamnavalny https://www.facebook.com/teamnavalny http://instagram.com/teamnavalny http://www.odnoklassniki.ru/group/52873526575342 https://twitter.com/teamnavalny http://email.navalny.ru/h/i/610F2DC5FF1DA7E9