In the Yaroslavl and Kostroma regions, United Russia showed the worst results in the country. It's all because of administrative resources.

In the Yaroslavl region, the authorities used it very limitedly, and the campaign turned out to be very liberal by today's standards. After the elections, Yaroslavl residents on the Internet even thanked their governor Sergei Vakhrukov for being democratic and for not putting pressure. True, the result of such tactics was the last place for United Russia in Russia - 29.04%.

In the neighboring Kostroma region the situation was exactly the opposite. Head of the region since the end of 2007, Muscovite Igor Slyunyaev uses an authoritarian management style. At the beginning of his term, he fired disloyal officials from the regional administration, then took control of the regional capital Kostroma (Slyunyaev forced the elected mayor of the city Irina Pereverzeva to resign early), regional centers and the press (the media write only good things about the governor, many topics, for example, economic problems of the region are under an unspoken ban). The last stage was the cleansing of the political scene. The only person left in opposition to the governor was the leader of the regional branch of A Just Russia, a deputy of the regional Duma and one of the richest entrepreneurs in the region, Andrei Ozerov. Closer to the elections, he turned from an irreconcilable opponent of Slyunyaev into his personal enemy, and the entire Duma campaign came down to a confrontation between the deputy and the governor heading the regional list of United Russia. Police from the center for countering extremism were regularly involved in the conflict on the side of the latter. Not all Kostroma residents liked this. For the time being, they could vent their dissatisfaction on Internet platforms, but two weeks before the elections, for criticizing the head of the region, the authorities closed the most popular Internet site in the region, “Forum of Kostroma Jedi” (see the article “Father of the Opposition” in N47 dated 28 November 2011), which turned several thousand more citizens against Slyunyaev. As a result, on December 4 in Kostroma, United Russia lost to the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (25.24% versus 30.12%), overall in the region it gained 30.74% (first place in the region, but second from last in Russia), slightly ahead of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (28, 85%) and “A Just Russia” (18.58%). People voted not so much against the party in power as against the regional leader. Even employees of the regional administration did this, based on the logic “let’s give Edro a ride and Slyunyaev will be fired.”

Thus, the excessive use of administrative resources led to the exact opposite result of what the governor probably expected. Due to the low performance of the party in power, there will most likely not be a United Russia deputy from the Kostroma region in the State Duma, but the governor’s personal enemy of the Right Russia, Ozerov, is entering parliament, having received an unplanned bonus in the form of votes cast not for him, but against Slyunyaev.

Alexander Kukolevsky

A resource with two ends