Unfair city

The St. Petersburg Social Revolutionaries, who performed well in the municipal elections on March 1, are losing one municipality after another. At first, almost all the deputies from the “fair” municipalities “Sennaya Okrug” and “Kolomna” (as well as some of the people’s representatives from the Admiralty Okrug) wrote statements of resignation from the party. And in the fall, most likely, the Social Revolutionaries will lose almost their last bastion - the Avtovo municipal council. The situation there deserves a separate description.

Automatic self-dissolution
The Avtovsky municipality has long been in a special place with the St. Petersburg authorities. Firstly, it is not controlled by Smolny: the head of Avtovo, ex-Lensovet deputy Gennady Truskanov, is the head of one of the local branches of A Just Russia. And secondly, the municipal council and the Avtovo election commission actively opposed fraud in elections at various levels, which have occurred with alarming regularity in recent years. And by complete coincidence, in 2007, Avtovo was one of the three municipalities of the city that tried to limit their powers. True, it was unsuccessful: after a complaint to the Charter Court, they left him alone.
As it turned out - only for the time being.
The elections of deputies of the current, third convocation in Avtovo took place in two stages. Ten deputies were elected in February 2005, the remaining ten were elected only in repeat elections in March 2006 (in two of the four five-mandate constituencies, the elections were declared invalid due to insufficient turnout; the 20% voter turnout rule was still in effect at that time). Both were elected with a four-year term of office, but the council held its first meeting in its authorized composition only on March 15, 2006, and the municipalities believed that they should work until March 2010. They believed that the Legislative Assembly thought the same thing: in October 2008, when they adopted the law on extending and shortening the terms of office of municipal councils and set a single voting day for March 1, 2009, Avtovo was not on the list of municipal councils, who must be re-elected, nor in the list of those whose terms of office are either extended or shortened. However, it turned out that everything is not so simple...
In April 2009, the St. Petersburg City Court received complaints from citizens, the essence of which was that the term of office of ten deputies elected in February 2005 expired on March 1, 2009, and therefore the council became illegitimate. No one had raised this issue before, especially since there were similar precedents in the 90s: although some of the deputies of the Legislative Assembly of the first convocation were elected in the spring of 1994, and some in the fall (just like in Avtovo, in half of the districts elections were held from the first times failed due to low turnout), the term of parliament was counted from the first meeting - December 14, 1995. And this is not the only example.
Nevertheless, realizing that the court (the position of the applicants was also supported by the City Electoral Commission) would most likely make a decision not in their favor, Avtovo acted in an extraordinary way. On April 22, the council decided to dissolve itself and scheduled early elections for June 14 (to catch the school closures for the summer). But it was not possible to hold elections - the Kirov district administration refused to transfer information about voters to the Avtovo IKMO in due time. And when the IKMO postponed the elections to October 11, the City Court on May 14 upheld the aforementioned citizens’ complaint, blamed the municipal commission for “inaction” (for not scheduling elections for March 1) and decided to form a temporary election commission in Avtovo. This is what the City Electoral Commission did - and this commission turned out to be completely different from the previous IKMO: representatives of the opposition play a small role in it, to put it mildly.
According to the chairman of the IKMO (it has not been dissolved, but has been removed from holding the autumn elections) Pavel Tsyplenkov, “the will of Avtovo voters will definitely be distorted and falsified.” The destruction of the current composition of the municipality Truskanov and Tsyplenkov is called a “political order,” but most likely nothing will be done now, although IKMO has appealed the decision of the City Court.

Exodus from the party
The scheme is not new - approximately the same thing was done in 2008 with regard to the Grazhdanka municipal council, which was then controlled by the Yabloko members. Here, too, at first they did not allow the elections appointed by the council to be held, then they appointed a temporary election commission, then they carried out a forceful seizure of the council’s premises... As a result, although the head of the administration of “Grazhdanka” and the deputy chairman of the St. Petersburg “Yabloko” Nikolai Rybakov got the court to recognize the illegality of his dismissal, new elections in March 2009, a temporary election commission was already held, and Yabloko supporters (including Mikhail Amosov and Olga Shtannikova) were simply not allowed to participate in these elections. And now on Grazhdanka there is peace and quiet, in the sense that there is no obstinacy from the municipalities in relation to the administration.
Avtovo, apparently, faces the same fate - although, as practice shows, different methods are applied to different obstinate municipalities. Those who can are not allowed to participate in the elections; if this fails, they falsify the results, and if this fails, they use the carrot and stick method. The case with the “Socialist Revolutionaries” in the Admiralteysky district, mentioned at the beginning of the article, is very indicative: the heads of the Kolomna municipalities, Vladimir Savelov, and the Sennaya Okrug, Natalya Astakhova, also left the party, and Legislative Assembly deputy Sergei Solovyov, who headed the district branch, was expelled for “actions that harm the political interests of the party and discredit it.”
The formal reasons for the conflict are that the deputies in Kolomna did not want to elect as head the one whom the party recommended to them (former head Viktor Bykov), but chose Savelov, and when the leadership of the Social Revolutionaries was indignant and began to take measures, the deputies, as well as their Colleagues from two other municipalities in the district submitted letters of resignation from the party. Solovyov says that the deputies have “lost faith in the party” and do not want to be used for incomprehensible political games. Socialist Revolutionary leader Oleg Nilov says that the apostates “have shown that they cannot work in a truly opposition party,” and Sergei Mironov states that “some of these people may have made such a decision against their will, and some are defectors and traitors, the conversation with them is short.” However, other hypotheses are also expressed: they say that the municipalities were given acts of inspection of the PSC, and made it clear that they had a completely free choice between leaving A Just Russia and initiating criminal cases...
This exodus from the party is not the first - the “Timofeev-Marchenko incident” is well known, when two deputies of the Legislative Assembly, elected on the SR lists, subsequently left it, but remained deputies - the law does not allow depriving them of their mandates, and they themselves, naturally, did not they add up and vote, to put it mildly, differently from the faction (and even sit separately).
Now there may already be three of them (Soloviev, however, says that he will not change seats) - and taking into account the fact that Evgeni Plushenko practically does not appear in the Mariinsky Palace, the “Socialist Revolutionaries” have only nine out of thirteen real votes left. True, the faction introduced a bill on an “imperative mandate” (for which it is necessary to change both the city charter and the federal law), which would make it possible to deprive the mandate of those who were elected according to the lists, but then left the party or were expelled, but the likelihood of this initiative being adopted extremely small. Although it is quite logical: voters in elections vote for this or that party to have a certain number of deputy mandates, and if someone changes his political views, he should no longer represent the corresponding voters.

Boris VISHNEVSKY