"I don't believe I'm enough of a criminal to go into hiding or run away. I will cooperate with the investigation."
This wonderful phrase was spoken today by Astrakhan mayor Stolyarov during a court hearing on whether he should be placed under arrest. Stolyarov was detained while taking a bribe — he was receiving money from developers in exchange for allocating land plots. How could one not remember our trip (in April 2012) to Astrakhan to support Oleg Shein, who was on a hunger strike and had won the mayoral election against Stolyarov, but never became mayor because his votes were stolen. At polling stations with KOIB electronic ballot scanners, Shein won almost everywhere; where votes were counted by hand, Stolyarov "won" by a huge margin.
How the whole of United Russia — both in Astrakhan and at the federal level — squealed back then. They called us nothing less than "outside vandals destroying Astrakhan statehood." Members of Nashi (a pro-Kremlin youth movement) ran after us with cameras everywhere we went; Yashin even punched one of them in the face. The local administration staged a fake attack on the United Russia office and threatened to open a criminal case against me for incitement:
Every day in Astrakhan there were fake pickets "in support of the lawfully elected Stolyarov,"
with public utilities workers being herded into them. It's very interesting to read the pro-Kremlin media articles from that time: all the usual nonsense we've been hearing for years — "Stolyarov is a strong manager," "He knows how the city works," "The opposition only talks, but Stolyarov understands housing and public utilities." Well, this is how he "understands" it, just like all those United Russia "strong managers": if he was planning to get 200 million rubles from just one developer (about $6 million at the time), then how much was he making in total, and how much time did he even have left for all that "strong management" with a "business" operation on that scale? Back then, everyone in Astrakhan knew that Stolyarov was a thief and a bribe-taker. That is exactly why the city saw the largest unauthorized march since the time of the Golden Horde (the medieval Mongol empire that once ruled the region):
http://youtu.be/rOP8gZMDnKc I would very much like all those people who, a year and a half ago, were churning out posts in support of Stolyarov and against the "Muscovites who came swarming in to support a bunch of local outcasts" to now write a few lines about this wonderful United Russia mayor. Greetings to all the people of Astrakhan who stood on the side of the forces of good back then. I hope that new elections will be held soon, and that Oleg Shein will win them. And not just win the vote count (he has already done that twice), but actually become mayor.