Seven skilled

Galina Kovalskaya

Regional heads must remain loyal to the president. Then everything will be fine with them

Wherever governors managed to combine their own elections with the presidential ones, they triumphantly won in the first round. All of them (even the Reds) energetically supported Vladimir Putin. Apparently, in the minds of voters, the current bosses are the governor and acting. president - combined into a single image of real power. (Photo: EPA )

All seven clever governors who managed to postpone their re-elections to March 26 - Altai Alexander Surikov, Birobidzhan Nikolay Volkov, Kirov Vladimir Sergeenkov, Murmansk Yuri Evdokimov, Saratov Dmitry Ayatskov, Khanty-Mansi Alexander Filipenko and Yamalo-Nenets Yuri Neelov - have triumphantly confirmed their powers already in the first round. Volkov scored less than others - only 56%, the rest were even more confident, and Alexander Filipenko received as much as 90.82% of the votes. There was no real struggle anywhere.

In the Saratov region and the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug, the elections turned out to be essentially uncontested. And in Yamalo-Nenets, candidates who decided to compete with Yuri Neelov, even in the reports of the election commission, were usually called “two other contenders.” In this serene and relatively well-fed Gazprom region, no one wanted to seriously oppose the current boss: understudies were put forward so that no one would find fault. In Saratov, all somewhat dangerous rivals (the first secretary of the regional committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Valery Rashkin and the former head of the Saratov Central Internal Affairs Directorate Vladimir Ponomarev) were simply not allowed to participate in the elections: the regional election commission found many flaws in the signature lists; The regional and then the Supreme courts agreed with the regional election commission. In the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug, an opponent was allowed to participate in the elections, and then removed “for bribing voters”: Sergei Atroshenko, organizer of the Pensioners Party, promised, if elected, to provide each voter with his personal share of the district oil - sort of like in Kuwait or Emirates - and issued vouchers to those who wished, according to which they could receive this share. The vouchers were considered bribery; Atroshenko’s attempts to sue, of course, led nowhere. As a result, Alexander Filipenko had to fight with applicants who could not even collect the required number of signatures and pay a deposit. By the way, in these three regions more people voted “against all” than for the most popular competitor of the current governor.

Accusations of voter bribery were also made during the Kirov elections. But there they sounded exactly to the address of the ruling governor. One of the candidates said that Vladimir Sergeenkov’s public stories about how he gave a washing machine to a voter and a computer to a school were an admission of bribery. The court of the Kirov region, however, turned out to be more lenient than the Khanty-Mansiysk, and did not consider the governor’s gifts to be bribery.

In Murmansk and the Jewish Autonomous Region, the governors' rivals were genuine. But there was no talk of any political or ideological struggle either. In Birobidzhan, Volkov was opposed by the former secretary of the regional committee of the CPSU, now the head of one of the richest companies in the region, engaged in geological exploration, gold mining, production and sale of consumer goods, Boris Korsunsky. Volkov himself is formally non-party (in the last elections he was supported by the NDR), but he was paired with a “vice” - the secretary of the regional committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. In Murmansk, Yuri Evdokimov was also opposed by the “former” - the former head of the regional administration, Yeltsin appointee Evgeny Komarov, whom Evdokimov beat in November 1996. In both regions, the campaign essentially boiled down to determining personal merits. And it is known from experience that the incumbent governor rarely loses such a fight. In the Murmansk region, at first, a candidate was put forward who could become a candidate from local democrats: the regional Yabloko chose the former chairman of the largest trade union of mining and metallurgical industry workers, Boris Misnik, a strong and authoritative politician with strong democratic views. Misnik could hardly count on winning against Evdokimov, but the campaign would at least have lost its bazaar-kitchen character and would have turned into a struggle of ideas and positions. However, Evdokimov managed to come to an agreement with Yabloko: Misnik was nominated as a deputy to the State Duma in the district where the by-elections were held, and enjoyed the support of the governor. And Yabloko supported Evdokimov.

The atmosphere of the current gubernatorial elections is strikingly different from the one in which the December ones took place - combined with the State Duma elections. At that time, an unusual nervousness reigned among the regional leaders: they seemed to have forgotten how to conduct a campaign, began to fuss, began to pit the well-fed media against completely harmless rivals, and as a result, sometimes even lost (like Alexander Ryabov in Tambov). Now everything has returned to normal: once again one can hear the confident tread of the commanders of the “party in power”, who cannot lose simply because they cannot, and are fighting not against competitors, but to get more votes than their neighbor who is being re-elected.

In December, the nervous behavior of the provincial authorities was caused by the “Putin factor.” Then it seemed that the Kremlin had decided to rein in the arrogant appanage rulers: they waged a decisive and successful war against “Governor #1”, Yuri Luzhkov himself, St. Petersburg Vladimir Yakovlev was blocked from being re-elected when it was convenient for him, they started talking about “united for all laws" - in a word, they hinted at a change in the established rules of the game, according to which every elected governor is an autocratic and unlimited ruler in his patrimony. The balance of power between the Kremlin and the governor’s community was clearly changing not in favor of the governors, and it was not very clear what to do about it.

The elections on March 26 showed that provincial governors have become quite comfortable with the “Putin factor.” It became clear that, despite the tougher grip, Vladimir Putin in his attack on the provincial authorities will not go beyond the border that is completely acceptable to them. Firstly, it turned out that the acting I’m not so confident in my popularity as to neglect the “administrative resource” of the regional barons. In any case, on the eve of the elections, he absolutely did not want to quarrel with them. Yuri Luzhkov, and he publicly showed his favor and even went to football games with him. The re-elected bosses willingly headed Putin's election headquarters and thereby insured themselves against interference from the Kremlin. Even the “red” Surikov and Sergeenkov, without publicly renouncing the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, managed to make strong friends with the local branches of Unity and swear allegiance to Putin.

Secondly, in more than three months it became clear that the “compromising evidence” from Putin’s “dossiers” with which they frightened the governors was not necessarily given a formal treatment. Its presence does not even entail the automatic inclusion of the governor in the list of the president's least favorites. Unity recruited precisely those of them whose reputation was considered, to put it carefully, not impeccable. Nazdratenko, Rutskoi, Gorbenko behaved correctly: they demonstrated complete obedience to the future president. And they calmly continue to reign in their regions in the same manner as before. The only one whom the Kremlin has firmly taken hold of is St. Petersburg's Vladimir Yakovlev. But his example is a lesson to others. After all, Yakovlev was ordered to leave Fatherland on the eve of the Duma elections, but he did not listen. Now they are demonstrating to him and others: even for a single act of disobedience, the governor will be severely punished, and no subsequent bows and assurances of perfect devotion will allow him to avoid punishment. However, most likely, they will find some other dust-free position for Yakovlev. It’s not for nothing that he’s working so hard now.

So, with the advent of Vladimir Putin, the feudal formula of relations - sovereignty (financial and legal sovereignty in one's own domain) in exchange for loyalty - remained unchanged. Further confirmation of this is the recent meeting of the acting with several members of the Federation Council, during which the governors asked permission not to limit their stay in power to two terms, and Vladimir Putin reacted generally positively to this. No one is trying to force governors to play by the rules of democracy. It’s just that a young and strong president naturally demands a large portion of loyalty for his former sovereignty. Most of our bosses are experienced people, they understand the fairness of this requirement and are ready to comply.