Popcorn Crunch Elections

The first weeks of October seem to be full of a wide variety of electoral expectations in Russia. In addition to the standard package of a single voting day, gubernatorial elections will start again in five regions after an eight-year break. At the same time, part of the opposition elects the Coordination Council . Passions, it would seem, should boil and go off scale. But if they are boiling anywhere, it is mainly on the Internet. Despite the cheerful forecasts of sociologists, election organizers have to resort to circus tricks in order to lure at least someone to the ballot boxes - and the show in some way becomes the main, if not the only meaning of what is happening.

Otherwise, it is difficult to explain, for example, the frankly parodic scandal in Bryansk, where United Russia governor Nikolai Denin, removed from the race by the regional court , is defended by the local Yabloko and personally by Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Defenders and the candidate himself do not hesitate to publicly declare that the scandal is the result of corruption that has affected the entire region, including the court. It’s as if the Bryansk region in the last eight years was not led by Nikolai Denin, who is now unfairly persecuted.

In Khimki near Moscow, which is going to elect a mayor on October 14, United Russia members have not yet been removed from the elections. But there Sergei “Spider” Troitsky is running for mayor , who promises to make Khimki the second Las Vegas, to organize a zoo for children with solar-powered cardboard animals and to forever establish good weather in the city using devices invented in Skolkovo by Dmitry Medvedev.

Fierce oppositionists, naturally, are confident: Spider was hired to distract the townspeople from voting for the defender of the Khimki Forest Evgenia Chirikova , who is challenging the position of mayor from the acting mayor Oleg Shakhov . Although in reality, the Spider’s relatively innocent antics attract at least some positive attention to the campaign. It is possible that the few people he lures to the polling stations will ultimately vote for Chirikova.

The fight between Chirikova and Shakhov, in theory, should be a battle of good and evil - like the one that Oleg Shein gave in Astrakhan in the spring . A few days before the election, opponents must stand in full arms against each other, and their flags must flutter in the wind in full view of everyone. But here’s the paradox: the only way the average resident or guest of Khimki can learn about this battle is from the trash that is stuffed into mailboxes and laid out in hallways. Otherwise, there are no flags or heralds: as if the outcome of the battle was clear to all participants in the battle in advance.

The picture is approximately the same with the elections of the Coordination Council. As expected, this initiative mainly remains within the framework of a small segment of the RuNet - the one that is being virtualized almost in its entirety at the March of Millions.

An ordinary citizen who shares the thesis about fair elections and the demand for the resignation of President Putin can, after spending some time at the computer, take part electronically in a certain procedure, the rules of which are not entirely clear to the initiators themselves. At the same time, he is asked to share with the system a much larger amount of personal data than at a regular polling station. If a citizen does not have the Internet, his chance to take part in the Constitutional Court election procedure becomes illusory: the organizers talk about about a hundred polling stations throughout Russia, and their functioning depends on local volunteers. There is no notification about the location of polling stations, no basic navigation - where to go, how to vote - anywhere, except on the Internet.

But the organizers say that as a result of this campaign they will receive a legitimate structure for managing the protest movement, based on a broad civil consensus. This is no less absurd than Spider in the role of the mayor of Khimki. A broad civic consensus occurs when crowds of people wishing to vote pour into squares and stand in lines at polling stations - as was the case, say, at the first partially free Soviet elections in 1989. When several tens of thousands of people know about the entire procedure in a country of 140 million people, the broad civil consensus, sadly, consists of those who do not know and will never know about the next Internet flash mob. Meanwhile, even within the group of initiates the show is triumphant: the leaders of the television debates on the Dozhd channel are Mikhail Shats and Tatyana Lazareva. It's undeniably cute. But not seriously.

The booth ceases to be the main element of elections if elections are a tool for real influence on reality for both voters and candidates. Then it is not so important who is elected - the governor or the opposition Coordination Council. When placing a ballot in a ballot box or entering your mobile phone number into a form on a website, a person must be sure that he is not a participant in the simulation. And if there is no such confidence, neither the Spider nor Tatyana Lazareva will help.

The procedure is, of course, very important; neglect of the regulations can cast doubt on the legitimacy of what is obtained as a result - as happened with the 2011 Duma elections. But a procedure without meaningful value content turns into an empty imitation. Politics is based not on procedure, but on values, that is, first of all, a certain system of clear answers to the questions that reality poses to people and the country.

There are many questions. But answers are in obvious short supply. All the notorious passivity from Russian society will be blown away by the wind as soon as there is a sign of a more or less intelligible answer. This roughly happened in December 2011. The problem is that the guys who tried to formulate an answer were somewhat carried away by the process of their own transformation into “professional revolutionaries” and the division of seats on the presidium. And the demand for values ​​is still huge (and this seems to be understood by those liberals, leftists and nationalists who shy away from participating in the “curias” of the Constitutional Court). Politicians, whether on Staraya Square or on Bolotnaya, are unable to satisfy this demand while they are busy with procedure and do not answer questions on the merits. So you have to lure the audience with cooled popcorn.