Regulations

Over the past two weeks, the Central Election Commission (CEC) has been enthusiastically uncovering individual violations during the Duma campaign.

First, the commission published false information about income and property identified in the declarations of candidates. As it turned out, A Just Russia concealed more than others (151 of its candidates provided inaccurate data), and United Russia turned out to be the most honest (only 9 inaccuracies). The list of “forgotten” objects is also impressive: for example, it includes a network of low-pressure gas pipelines and a koumiss farm (“A Just Russia”), a barge (“Right Cause”), a wine shop, a sausage shop and an alcohol storage facility (“Patriots of Russia”). However, candidates will not bear any responsibility for this: the Central Election Commission has the right only to inform voters about the revealed facts.

Members of the fact-finding mission of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) who recently visited Moscow were less fortunate: the head of the Central Election Commission, Vladimir Churov, complained about them to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Prosecutor General's Office. In his opinion, public criticism by Europeans of certain aspects of the elections violates Russian laws that prohibit foreign observers from commenting on the course of the campaign until its end. The CEC, apparently, will not excommunicate the entire PACE mission of 40 observers from the elections for this, but, perhaps, will deprive the accreditation of 2 parliamentarians who committed the unacceptable.

Finally, the Central Election Commission, through the Supreme Court, removed from the elections Marina Smirnova, who, in addition to her Russian passport, was found to have citizenship of Ukraine and Moldova. The court did not take into account the arguments of the party members that the Russian woman Smirnova had already renounced two foreign citizenships. By the way, shortly before this, according to the website of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the Pskov regional court refused to remove Mikhail Gavunas, who has Israeli citizenship, from elections to the regional parliament, citing the fact that the law does not distinguish between “full” citizens of the Russian Federation and persons with a second citizenship. But compared to the Pskovite, Smirnova had two aggravating circumstances: firstly, she is not the deputy head of the regional “United Russia”, and secondly, she is the daughter-in-law of the President of Transnistria Igor Smirnov, with whom Moscow is now waging a final and decisive battle ( see the material “Moscow is insidious” in “Vlast” N44 of November 7).

Reports from the "Front"

Number one on the United Russia list, Dmitry Medvedev, worked noticeably harder for the benefit of his native party during the reporting period than its leader Vladimir Putin. The President visited Khabarovsk, Yakutsk, Ufa, Vladikavkaz and Rostov-on-Don, and on his field met with disabled people, ballerinas, athletes, TV people, prosecutors and investigators, and also made a formidable statement that if American European missile defense system Russia will deploy its Iskander missiles in the south and west of the country.

Meanwhile, the prime minister met with members of the Federation Council, political scientists from the Valdai Club, hockey players and hockey veterans, and also attended a forum of rural intellectuals in Belgorod, the victorious fight of the mixed martial artist Fedor Emelianenko with the American Jeff Monson and the final meeting of the State Duma of the fifth convocation . True, the last two appearances were not very successful, since Putin seemed to be booed at the Olimpiyskiy (for more details, see the material “The Monson Effect” ), and in the Duma some deputies did not want to stand up to honor his arrival.

At the same time, the members of the tandem have only had one joint event over the past two weeks - a meeting with veterans and pensioners in the Grand Kremlin Palace. And the press did not celebrate the merits of the All-Russian Popular Front (ONF), supervised by the prime minister, too diligently, as a result of which the mention of the ONF in the media fell to a record low for the entire Duma campaign (see chart). However, Putin had to compensate for his temporary retreat into the shadow of his junior partner last Sunday (that is, after signing this issue of Vlast for publication): at the United Russia congress, the official nomination of the prime minister as a candidate for the 2012 presidential elections was expected.

Party activity

Over the past two weeks, opposition parties have mostly reported information of a scandalous nature.

Thus, the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Gennady Zyuganov turned to Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika with a request to respond to numerous facts of violations of election legislation. Among them, he, in particular, named “a broad campaign in favor of United Russia on all federal television channels” and “the dissemination of false propaganda materials allegedly from one or another opposition party.”

The LDPR, in turn, stated that it does not intend to refuse to disseminate its report “Russia’s New National Policy,” in which the Central Election Commission working group saw signs of inciting ethnic hatred. As the author of the document, leader of the LDPR Duma faction Igor Lebedev, explained, until the results of the inspection arrive from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the liberal democrats see “no point in abstaining.”

The Right Russia Party also suffered from the actions of the Central Election Commission, whose election videos were removed from television in several regions at once after Central Election Commission experts saw in them signs of inciting social discord. The party leaders considered that both the Central Election Commission and the television crew had exceeded their powers, but decided, without waiting for the outcome of the trial, to offer “new, even better” ones instead of the filmed ones.

Well, “Right Cause,” as usual, created a scandal without outside help. The head of the Moscow region right-wingers, Boris Nadezhdin, discovered that the second number on the party list, Andrei Bogdanov, despite the ban on participation in campaigning by the federal political council (see “Voting station” in “Vlast” N43 of October 31), speaks in debates on behalf of the party, “which causes harm to her,” and proposed to exclude him from the party list. However, this could not be done, since the period before which the party could recall its candidates expired four days before this issue was brought to the political council of the Right Cause.

Compromising evidence

The past two weeks were marked not only by a new batch of scandals related to the actions of officials in favor of United Russia (for more details, see the material “Warming up before the face-off” ), but also by a whole wave of accusations against the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.

Thus, law enforcement officers in the Tula region seized 90 thousand copies of communist propaganda products, which, according to them, defamed “one of the political parties.” Perm United Russia members demanded that the regional party list of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation be removed from the elections for bribing voters, which was expressed in the distribution of watches to party activists on the occasion of the next anniversary of the October Revolution. The Khabarovsk Election Commission suspected that the Communist Party was using the images of Stalin and Che Guevara without the permission of their relatives, and saw signs of extremism in the slogan “It’s time to change power.” And the secretary of the presidium of the General Council of United Russia, Sergei Neverov, accused the communists of illegally using the name and image of the gunsmith Mikhail Kalashnikov in propaganda, although the leaders of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation assured that they had all the necessary documents for this, signed personally by the creator of the legendary machine gun.

However, United Russia itself also suffered during the reporting period, and, in fact, from its own supporters. The management of one of the Novosibirsk passenger motor transport enterprises ordered the removal of advertisements placed by the local A Just Russia with the slogan “For Russia without swindlers and thieves” from minibus taxis. And in a document sent to the owners of minibuses, a scan of which was posted on the Internet, transport workers honestly explained that this advertising is “propaganda against United Russia.”

1 week before the State Duma elections