Is this not a place for young people?

Petersburg. March 4th. Sunday. We are opening the polling station for voting. I am on the precinct commission from Yabloko. On my desk is book No. 7 with voter lists.

At exactly eight in the morning they appear. Two old men. They give us passports and sign. But even before they leave, new ones arrive. There are more and more of them. By nine o'clock it's already a real sell-out. And, with the exception of a couple of people, everyone is completely retired. I barely have time to enter their numbers and issue ballots. Some of them put an X right there. In the last column - for Putin. “We have nothing to hide,” they say. The ballot box begins to fill. On those ballots that I can see, there are marks only in the last square.

At 10, an energetic, smiling old man appears. He tells everyone his last name, first name and patronymic in a loud voice.

- Today is my holiday! Turned 88 years old!

He sits down at the table and shows everyone a color picture. “Look what nasty stuff they put in my mailbox!” This is a drawing by the famous cartoonist Yolkin. It depicts Putin in the image of Lenin, proclaiming the slogans “Oil to friends!”, “Money to offshore!”, “Schools to priests!”. Should I not know this picture! After all, I was the one who put them in mailboxes a few days ago.

- I vote for Putin! He is our president! - the old man announces.

I try to be calm.

By twelve o'clock the flow of pensioners weakens somewhat. The book is already a third full. I decide to take a break.

At two o'clock in the afternoon, our chairman reports that the communist and I are going home with a portable trash can. I ask my fellow observer to be especially careful.

We start walking around the apartments. The same old people, but in even worse condition. The majority - and these are pensioners well over 70 years old - greet us warmly and even somehow affectionately: “Hello, finally! We are waiting for you!". The atmosphere of the Khrushchev-era buildings leaves a feeling of hopeless unsettledness. All old women, without exception, have disabilities. Some people cannot sign; their relatives help them. Everyone also puts a cross in the last column. More precisely, all but two. One of them is an Armenian, not yet a very old, benevolent man. He puts a mark on the ballot, covering it with his hand from us. But I see that it is not at the end of the list. Then he folds it in half.

- Yes, you don’t have to fold it, throw it like that! - says my “colleague”, a communist. Our voter unfolds it, but lowers it, turning the white side towards us. In another apartment there is a quiet old woman. She does the same. The mark she made is at the beginning of the list. “They are afraid of us,” I suddenly realize. What if we report to Social Security that they did not vote for Putin, and they will be deprived of some pathetic handouts? I feel disgusted and ashamed.

Last apartment. Already on the stairs I hear the door open and a clear child’s voice can be heard. I'm getting up. This is my friend - an energetic old man who came in the morning. “Oh, dear, good ones, come in!” An old, sickly-looking woman sits in the room.

- They came from the commission! - the old man announces. Let's vote! “I’ve already voted,” he tells me.

I remember...

The woman still hasn't uttered a single word. She signs with effort. We submit the ballot.

- For Putin! - the old man tells her.

Then a boy of about five appears.

- Seryozha, we are electing a president! Here's a leaflet for you!

The boy, realizing the solemnity of the moment and smiling, puts the ballot in the box.

Of course, at the end of the day other people were already going to vote, and yet, looking through the voter lists, I see that in the blank columns there are mostly people born in the 70s and 80s.

Late in the evening we go with the protocols to the territorial commission. They let me in unhindered, I get to know other observers and look at the data for other areas in the summary table. In some polling stations, up to 80% of the votes were cast for Putin, with a turnout approaching 90%. Are there only nursing homes there?

And then my friend’s son, a student, calls me. I learned from him how rudely they treated observers, especially young ones, deliberately provoking them to leave. They forbade us to go to the toilet, saying that they would not be able to go back. If it was not possible to remove it, then they ignored it and not only circumvented the law, but pointedly spat on it. For example, having counted to herself (a violation of the law!) a stack of ballots for Prokhorov, a member of the commission told the chairman the figure in her ear. His eyes widened. The protocol recorded numbers in the Prokhorov-Putin ratio of 4 to 1, although visually Prokhorov’s pack was only half smaller.

District administration officials are scurrying around everywhere. They look worried but satisfied. One administrative lady greets the other two ladies from the precinct commission who are out of breath with a smile. They know each other, of course.

- Finally!

And, intimately lowering his voice, in his ear: “What percentage?”

Closer to midnight, the administrative ladies begin to go home. Each one's eyes sparkle with anticipation of some pleasant gift.

And at night the next day I delivered food to police stations for the guys detained on St. Isaac's Square. There are more than four hundred of them, and most are about twenty. With me in the car is Pavel, a student at St. Petersburg University. He's almost half my age. On December 10, he and his friends were detained by two hundred riot police for lighting candles on Senate Street - it was a “Funeral of Democracy” flash mob. The police in the department where 26 people were taken went crazy when they heard in response to a question about their occupation: “Physics and mathematics student,” “history department student,” “philology department student.” And now I think: “Is there a place for young people in this country?”