Translated material
Receive the mayor
Yuri Luzhkov joined the fight for the post of Sochi mayor
The Sochi mayoral elections, scheduled for April 26 and the last in Russia, when candidates still had to pay a deposit rather than collect signatures, have actually already begun. Almost 3% of voters voted early, the chairman of the city's municipal election commission, Yuri Rykov, said yesterday. “Among these 3% of those who voted early, there are many entrepreneurs and employees of health resorts who will work on April 26 - election day. Two health resorts in Adler even provided transport to take employees to the polling station for early voting,” said Mr. Rykov.Yesterday, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov flew to Sochi for one day. The official purpose of his visit was to sign an agreement with the resort administration on organizing recreation for Muscovites. The capital's mayor's office undertakes to purchase vouchers to Sochi health resorts for socially vulnerable residents of Moscow, and the Sochi administration promises to do everything possible to ensure that vouchers for Muscovites are sold at discounts. At the moment, the Moscow mayor's office has purchased 5.5 thousand vouchers to Sochi health resorts.
It is quite obvious that these vouchers will not solve the problem of occupancy of the Sochi resort complex, which accommodates more than 100 thousand vacationers at the same time. But the agreement signed by Mr. Luzhkov was presented at the resort as one of the achievements of the new acting director. Mayor of Sochi Anatoly Pakhomov. And the capital’s mayor praised his Sochi colleague as best he could. It is clear that the vouchers were only a reason for one of the leaders of United Russia to support the candidate from his party, Mr. Pakhomov, on the eve of the elections for the mayor of Sochi.
Initially, 26 people notified the Sochi City Electoral Commission of their desire to participate in the mayoral elections, but in the end only six candidates remained: individual entrepreneur Pavel Emelianenko; co-chairman of the democratic movement "Solidarity" Boris Nemtsov; First Secretary of the Sochi City Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Yuri Dzagania; Director of Invest-Land LLC Vladimir Trukhanovsky; And. O. Mayor of Sochi Anatoly Pakhomov; coordinator of the Krasnodar regional branch of the LDPR Alexey Kolesnikov.
Only three of the six candidates are actually fighting for the post of mayor of Sochi - Boris Nemtsov, Yuri Dzagania and Anatoly Pakhomov. Yuri Luzhkov urged Sochi residents to vote for Pakhomov. Mr. Nemtsov (he is pictured during a regular meeting with townspeople) was campaigned for by the former prime minister and current chairman of the opposition party Russian People's Democratic Union, Mikhail Kasyanov, and the former world chess champion, leader of Solidarity, Harry Kasparov. They, like the mayor of Moscow, also flew to Sochi on purpose. And candidate Yuri Dzagania is probably perceived in the Communist Party of the Russian Federation as an absolutely self-sufficient figure: none of the party “heavyweights” visited the resort for his sake. And in the campaign of this candidate, who participated in all the elections held in Sochi, but never won, there is nothing new: the same rallies at the Lenin monument, gathering 100-150 participants, and the same elderly Sochi residents distributing leaflets and newspaper "Pravda".
On the eve of the elections, the results of surveys conducted by various organizations among Sochi residents appeared in the federal media (by the way, Sochi newspapers and television companies do not cover the elections at all). In some, Mr. Dzagania is ahead of Mr. Nemtsov, in others, Mr. Nemtsov is in the lead relative to Mr. Dzagania. Most likely, Sochi observers believe, there is no mistake in either the first or second options: both Boris Nemtsov and Yuri Dzagania will receive approximately the same number of votes - from 10 to 15%. Well, the fact that the undisputed favorite of the race is acting. Mayor Anatoly Pakhomov, all polls show.
Mr. Pakhomov himself, or rather, the power structures that stand behind him (United Russia, the Kremlin administration, the federal government and the Krasnodar regional administration), of the remaining candidates on the list, considers Boris Nemtsov to be his main rival. They simply do not notice the communist Yuri Dzagania. But at the end of the election campaign, Mr. Nemtsov was hit with all the force of administrative resources.
As the Vremya Novostey newspaper has repeatedly written, the current elections for the mayor of Sochi are taking place in a complete information vacuum, created by the authorities for everyone except the candidate from United Russia. Boris Nemtsov and Yuri Dzagania do not appear with their materials either on TV screens or on the pages of local newspapers. But Anatoly Pakhomov reigns supreme there. And in recent days, the news releases of all Sochi television companies have been reduced to one pattern: first stories about the wonderful candidate Pakhomov, then stories about the “disgusting” candidate Nemtsov.
At the end of last week, the 20-minute film “The Nizhny Novgorod Myth, or the Adventures of the Jumping Man” was shown repeatedly on all Sochi channels. It was built on negative information that journalists from Krasnodar, serving Mr. Pakhomov in the elections for the mayor of Sochi, collected in the Nizhny Novgorod region, where Mr. Nemtsov was governor. This week, the evening news of all Sochi television companies showed a story based on provocative material against Boris Nemtsov, which was published the day before by the Internet portal Life.Ru.
The video captured Mr. Nemtsov and two members of the Korean diaspora getting into the Gazelle he rented in Sochi. Then an alleged recording of a conversation between mayoral candidate Boris Nemtsov and Koreans is played, and one can hear how “a man with a voice similar to Boris Nemtsov’s” guarantees his interlocutors that if he becomes mayor of Sochi, the 2014 Winter Olympics will not take place in Sochi, and in South Korea, in the city of Pyeongchang. Which, as you know, also competed for these Games, but lost to Sochi. And for this, “a man with a voice similar to Mr. Nemtsov’s” was allegedly ready to accept a very decent amount in USD.
The headquarters of Boris Nemtsov confirms that there was a conversation with representatives of the Korean diaspora: they asked Mr. Nemtsov to give them a few minutes, and the candidate, who was about to leave for the next meeting with voters, invited them to talk in the Gazelle. But we were talking about something else. Then the Koreans, who turned out to be provocateurs, handed over the dictaphone recording they made, as Boris Nemtsov’s headquarters believes, to the Krasnodar special services, who re-edited it and turned it into compromising evidence against the candidate for mayor.
That this was indeed a carefully planned provocation, based on a point in Boris Nemtsov’s program, in which he advocates not for the cancellation of the Olympics in Sochi, but for its decentralization - the transfer of some competitions to other cities of Russia, where there are already appropriate sports facilities, - another fact testifies. Two days earlier, a group of young people wearing T-shirts with the words “Korea 2014” appeared on one of the Sochi streets. They said they supported Mr. Nemtsov's idea to cancel the Games in Sochi. The guys were from the Sochi branch of the pro-Kremlin Nashi movement, and many city residents recognized them.
But Boris Nemtsov can answer and explain to voters that these are provocations only at meetings with people on the streets. Moreover, even if he shouts into a bullhorn, only a few can reach him. His loss is predetermined. Although the headquarters of the opposition candidate still hopes for the opposite effect of anti-Nemtsov propaganda: they believe that the Kuban political strategists went too far and aroused a feeling of disgust towards the authorities even among those who initially sympathized with the acting. Mayor Pakhomov.
On April 26 everything will become clear.