The four-month experiment is coming to an end and has to be признed a failure. You probably remember my initiative on the Russian Public Initiative website (ROI) to introduce a visa regime for the countries of Central Asia and the South Caucasus — and many of you voted for it. The experiment, essentially, was to test the claim: "Navalny, stop hammering away at us every day with your cries of 'vote.' A good initiative will promote itself and get votes on its own." The last time I urged people to vote was almost four months ago. Since then, I haven’t posted a single link to the vote on LiveJournal, haven’t written a single tweet, and haven’t mentioned the initiative at all. Here is the last screenshot showing the number of votes:
(from here) This is what it looks like now:
https://www.roi.ru/5336/ So, "organically," without active promotion, we picked up 14,000 votes over four months. The vote accumulation chart is also very telling. It is also worth noting separately that almost all voting on ROI "dies" if we do not actively promote our initiatives together:
These ROI statistics show that the last major surge of interest in promoting public initiatives was on October 13. October 13 in America was already October 14 for us — the day I published a post calling on people to support the introduction of a visa regime. So, as a result of this experiment, we have once again — for the hundred-millionth time — confirmed that: advertising drives demand; you can’t catch even a fish from a pond without effort; water does not flow under a lying stone; the political awareness of our fellow citizens is directly proportional to the energy with which you hammer your idea into their heads; nothing happens by itself. When I kept hammering away at you, urging support for the bill banning officials from buying cars costing more than 1.5 million rubles, that is how we collected 100,000 verified votes in three months. I know some people will say: fine, you collected them — so what? Nothing changed. First, something did change, at least a little. And second, if it didn’t change today, it will change tomorrow. But if we don’t do a damn thing, then nothing will ever change. What is good about voting on ROI is that we can formalize political demands supported by a broad segment of the population. This is an agenda that genuinely matters to people. At this point, we have two initiatives supported by 100,000 citizens: a ban on the purchase of expensive cars, and one against internet censorship. I think that is very revealing. Citizens are making it clear that they do not want officials going crazy with their privileges, and they want freedom. Let’s show that we also strongly support the introduction of a visa regime as an important part of a civilized solution to the migrant issue. In fact, I decided to write this post after looking at the results of the referendum in Switzerland. There, a majority of the population supported migration quotas for EU citizens.
Against that backdrop, claims that introducing visas for the countries of Central Asia and the South Caucasus is some kind of horrible fascism look completely absurd. If we want to live like Europe, then let’s adopt civilized European measures to limit migration. Visas are not a cure-all, but they are a basic and fundamental step. Without them, nothing else can be done. Opponents of visas, perhaps without even meaning to, are only helping bring about idiotic and genuinely discriminatory laws, such as banning migrant children from attending school. Look at the package of laws United Russia (the ruling political party) is pushing in response to public demand: nonsense and rubbish that will breed corruption without solving any problems. Clumsy, illiterate idiots are demanding that migrants know Russian, even though it is obvious that this is only an additional requirement, after the basic one: regulating the number of migrants. Answer this question for yourself: should Russia itself decide how many citizens of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, or Azerbaijan we allow to stay in the country? Or do the citizens of Uzbekistan decide that themselves — however many want to come, come? If you support visas, then go here and vote: http://visa.navalny.ru/ If you have already voted, urge your friends and acquaintances to do the same. Add one more vote to the common pool besides your own. Share the link http://visa.navalny.ru/ on social media. Let’s make it clear — both to ourselves and to the authorities — that a visa regime with the countries of Central Asia and the South Caucasus is one of the country’s key public demands. PS As we now understand, I will once again be writing constantly about visas and urging you to vote. Help out. We have set up email collection on http://visa.navalny.ru/. This is to build a database of people registered on Gosuslugi (Russia’s government services portal) and ready to take part in voting for useful initiatives. Please register too — that way we will be able to collect the required number of votes more quickly.