Back then, we used to hold flawless party congresses. They were so impossible to fault that, in order to find a pretext for refusing to register our party, "People’s Alliance," Volodin, that shady dacha owner, had to order his “political strategists” to steal our name. So when, after holding our third founding congress, we went to the Ministry of Justice, they replied with a kindly smile: sorry, a party with that name already exists. We can’t register you. We were faced with a choice: spit on it and stop trying to register the party, or make one more attempt and bring our party-building idea to its ultimate conclusion — hold an ultra-mega-perfect congress. Of course, we’re not naive, and we understand that Putin is afraid to let me (us) take part in elections.
He actually said it outright himself: President Vladimir Putin said that if Alexei Navalny posed a threat in the mayoral election, he would not have been allowed to run: “If he posed a threat to those in power, he wouldn’t have been allowed onto the ballot.” The fabricated Kirovles case + amendments restricting the right of people with criminal convictions to run for office. And so, under the current law, I cannot run in elections at any level for the next 15 years. They register all kinds of parties — just not a “party of Navalny supporters,” which means that you and I, all of us together, are also barred from running in elections. So our greedy old man Putin and his administration are demonstrating quite openly: we’re afraid of them, and we won’t let them into elections. Nevertheless, we decided to hold yet another congress and even change the name. It was pretty unpleasant: it meant giving in to a bunch of crooks and giving up our own name. But in the end, you have to think not about symbols, but about principles. As I already wrote: I have not the slightest doubt that we would beat them in an election under any name, even “Ham and Sausage.” So we scheduled the congress, and the evening before, we simply went to a nearby café (so the name wouldn’t leak through “wiretapping”) and chose a new name for the party: “Party of Progress.” The main reason for the choice was that the word “progress,” in no form, gender, or grammatical case, appears in the list of existing parties andor registered organizing committees. There had been no party with that name in Russia’s modern history. The only immediate Google result was the Norwegian “Progress Party.” Wikipedia says Breivik was a member, and we even laughed about how long it would take before the Kremlin crowd started pushing that line. They started quickly:
And in substance, of course, it’s a good name. We stand for Russia’s development, for social and economic progress, and against the chimerical “stability” used to describe Putin’s kleptocratic regime and the raw-materials oligarchs. So last Saturday, our party, “People’s Alliance,” was renamed the “Party of Progress.” All the documents are flawless, and we even checked every party member’s passport against the passport database so that later they can’t tell us something like, “three of the passports are invalid.” Now we’re waiting for an answer. I’m genuinely curious what they’ll come up with this time. If we have a party, we’ll take part in elections. If we don’t have a party, we’ll work with those who aren’t afraid to nominate truly independent candidates. If they block the electoral path entirely, we’ll find other ways to fight for our country against the Crooks and Thieves.