We are not alone

Moscow is part of the country - this is my main discovery from a trip to Tomsk and Novosibirsk together with the League of Voters.

Tatyana Lazareva says it right: we went to travel around cities and meet people who are interested in what kind of protests are happening in Moscow, because the media are not doing their job. The television does not talk about what is happening in Moscow in detail - it only shows reports from rallies, at which funny and not so funny posters flash. He speaks about the League of Voters only as a fact - there is such a public organization, all sorts of famous people are members of it in order to advocate for fair elections.

But even less media reports about what is happening throughout the country. Therefore, all of us - Tatyana Lazareva and Sergey Parkhomenko from the League of Voters, Matvey Petukhov from the "Citizen Observer", Maxim Blunt, Nikolai Levshits and I - as active citizens who, in one way or another, organize various actions and specific actions, starting from December 10, - We went to meet people about whom we understood little.

And, to be honest, I imagined us as such missionaries. When we arrive, we will be bombarded with questions like this: “It’s easy for you there in Moscow - the city is big, you are famous people, but we are scared here, we are small and can’t do much.” Well, in response, of course, we will tell and show everything.

Of course, we talked about a lot of things. Only we talked not with people who are waiting for recipes to be brought from Moscow, but with people who live in the same activity as in Moscow. It’s just that in Siberia, VKontakte is more developed than Facebook, so they have groups of 15 thousand activists on this social network. And in the same way, February 19 is a car rally, and February 26 is a procession or rally. 60 cars at a car rally in Tomsk, where 500 thousand people live, is approximately the same ratio as 2,000 cars for Moscow with a population of 10 million.

So we talked about very specific things, the same ones that we talk about with each other on Facebook or on Dozhd. How to cope with the fact that rallies are “hijacked” by politicians - and therefore people do not want to go out, so as not to get into supporting someone else, although they are ready to protest against election fraud. How to monitor TECs during elections - because half of the people who came to meetings with us in Tomsk and Novosibirsk are already registered as observers, but they are afraid that they will not do everything they need to do. How to interest people who are not on social networks. What will we all do after March 4, when Putin wins?

Novosibirsk activists - organizers of observer schools, by the way, taught us wonderful things. That in the regions observers should be sent only to TECs, they don’t even have to be sent to local polling stations. There will be more results there, because these people definitely don’t expect any observers, no one ever gets to them, and the main falsification is precisely there when, as Parkhomenko says, “night falls, civilians fall asleep, and the mafia wakes up.”

All this was a discovery - and, it seems, for us (for me - certainly) more than for those to whom we came. That is, they were also surprised to discover that everything was similar, and they also rejoiced at this no less than we did. But they knew that they were going to talk about painful issues with famous people Lazareva and Parkhomenko. And we didn’t even imagine them.

Now I will no longer fall for all these tricks about the “mink revolution” and the Moscow “creative class”. Because lawlessness, corruption, PzhiV and “12 more years - thank you, no” have definitely brought the whole country to protests. And the activity of this protest is the same everywhere, and it lives by the same laws. And there will be no fewer observers at the March 4 elections in Novosibirsk and Tomsk than in Moscow.

And now it no longer seems strange to me that in response to our stay program they write to me from Vladivostok: “We will share our experience with you.” They will share, no doubt. So the meeting of Moscow with a country and a country with Moscow is not an acquaintance of different civilizations, it is the joy of recognizing similar ones. Moreover, let’s get to know each other more and more, since no one tells us anything about each other.