Translated material
Transformation of "white collar"
White collars: they fled from politics - she came for them. The party of the authorities must say: the shamelessness of the parliamentary campaign and the scale of falsifications suddenly made it obvious that the middle class had been formed in Russia. The same class that is not rich enough to receive preferences from power, and is not so poor as to say that he has nothing to lose. When his representatives stole property - business, dignity, voice - they became civilian activists, and then unexpectedly went to street rallies.
The New Times watched the transformation
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Vadim Korovin is 34 years old. A year ago, he had his own business, but then “illegal actions by law enforcement officers”, as he says, he was forced to abandon the business. I used to prefer costumes: in the photograph that I sent, a black suit in a white thread, a strict white shirt, there is no tie, but on the hand there is an expensive watch. Now he is dressed in a white T -shirt with a famous logo about a batch of crooks and thieves, jeans, sports shoes. However, the habit of shaking his head and did not change his head. He invested the money that remained of the business in the online store “No EDRU” (NET-DRU.NET): sells stickers on cars “I am against a party of crooks and thieves”, ribbons, badges and T-shirts with a similar slogan, calendars, where the first persons of the country and senior officials are depicted in a very obscene form. The free distribution of tapes and icons is carried out through the Opposition resource "Rosagit" (www.rosagit.info). Part of the products are sent for free to civilian activists to the regions, which Korovin finds through social networks - it was these ribbons that the student Alexander Blinov and his friends, which were written by The New Times *** “Tver Anomaly” - The New Times No. 41 of December 5, 2011, were distributing to Tver. Products. “I had to start an electronic wallet at Rosagita,” he grins. - I spent 100 thousand rubles on these tapes and badges, I can’t finance this project alone. ”
Anticarusel
And then the parliamentary campaign began, and then he met Alexei Navalny. We talked. And in a two-room apartment of a residential building, where there was an office of his opposition online store, a week before the election he arranged the headquarters of Antikariel, a volunteer organization that, during the vote, was tracking these very famous carousels: when a group of people on buses and cars runs around the city and votes-each-one absenteeism in many polling stations. “The idea of“ Antikaril ”came to me after a conversation with Navalny a couple of weeks before the elections,” says Korovin. “I myself knew little about falsification technologies - I learned from Navalny, and when I learned, I decided that I should try to cover these falsifiers.” To help, he attracted the students whom he met through social networks on the Internet. With one of them, George Alburov, they made the Antikarusel.ru website on the Google platform, a page for sending anonymous messages, opened a mailbox, Twitter, organized several mobile numbers. “One number for the participants, the second - for journalists, the third - for observers in the elections, who also threw us information about the“ carousels, ”explains Korovin. - One number “collapsed” to us - they made an attack of continuous calls within 2 hours. And there was one attack on the site, but they could not break. ” 2 more members of the group - Oleg Tsymbalenko and Julia Arkhipova.
Icons, ribbons and stickers that Korovin spread, become more popular
On December 3, Navalny announced the project in his LiveJournal. “We immediately began to receive calls from those who wanted to participate. In the day we collected 50 cars. And by night, they painted people in the areas closest to their houses. In the morning they began on duty. As soon as they noticed something suspicious, they immediately began to call, ”says Korovin. Already on the day of the elections, new participants joined them - as a result, the Moscow “carousel” pursued more than 60 cars, this is about 150 activists.
The technology is simple: if the observer from Antikariel noticed that a gazelle, minivan or bus full of people came to the voting point, he had to fix it on camera, and then go for this car to another site and shoot, as the same people go again. Ideally, to shoot a license plate of the car, the face of people and how they vote.
The headquarters listens *
The author watched the activities of Antikaril on December 4 at the headquarters. Mobile phones did not stop for a minute. The thin, awkward and very serious Tsymbalenko in the proprietary T -shirt “against the party of crooks and thieves” rushed around the room, stumbling all the time about the same chair, from the computer to the huge map of Moscow, on which the blue buttons were noted, near which activists were on duty; The cheerful red -haired Julia Arkhipova, without looking up from the cell phone, loudly repeated the observers' messages aloud, who noticed in the sections of the “carousel”. Lawyer Kirill (he asked his last name not to indicate), a tall unshaven young man of 30 years, who appeared in the project literally on the eve of the elections, twisting, sat in the quietest corner and quickly fixed the routes of “carousel” in the laptop. 
“During the day of work - 291 anonymous message, 1,200 calls and 125 Sesapes about violations - even the mobile phones of the Carousel coordinators were sent,” Korovin said. - The most funny thing is that the information sometimes threw up the information themselves. So one informed the guys that he was paid 8 thousand rubles for a bus trip in 25 sites. ” They called from the regions, asked: are there no Antikururuseli branches in their cities? “We answer them: they will if you organize. In St. Petersburg, there is a department, there the people gathered 8 cars, ”the founder of Antikaruseli shared.
The material assembled by the crews is now processed - this is more than a hundred videos, several hundred calls with messages about falsifications. All this will be posted on the site. Then lawyers will prepare complaints to the prosecutor's office for each case. Negotiations with crew participants are already underway: whether they agree to act as witnesses. The project participants have no doubt that they are full of work ahead: “We will create clear instructions for the headquarters and crews, take into account all the mistakes. And we will be ready to catch the "carousels" already in the presidential election. " "
During the day of work - 291 anonymous message, 1,200 calls and 125 SESMECs about violations - even the mobile phones of the Carousels coordinators were sent
» Election experience
If Vadim Korovin had a serious motive not to love the power and her party, then the 22-year-old Ekaterina Lavrova, the PR manager of the branding agency, strictly speaking, zero: she simply did not intersect with them. But she wanted to see: what is it - elections. So she ended up on the polling station as an observer from the Fair Russia party: “I didn’t care what party to go, I just wanted to observe the process, see with my own eyes: how honestly the elections are,” she says. “And I did not have the goal of opposing United Russia or for“ Fair Russia ”, there was another goal: to do everything in my power to make the elections transparent and fair.” It didn’t work out: she was removed for activity from the site, she complained to the higher instance, the territorial election commission, returned - and was horrified by how the votes were counted: her, the observer, to the table, where they believed, did not give out copies of the protocol, did not show and did not announce the results, threatened and insulted. “This is a real hell, and something needs to be done with it,” concludes Katya.
For the freelance designer Peter Morgorsky, the last straw, as he says, was the announcement of the election results. He went to his polling station, voted, went home, turned on the TV in the evening, saw a broadcast from the cyc and did not believe his eyes: “The same with what demonstrative cynicism and impudence they changed everything from me.” That's exactly why he came-for the first time in his life-to a rally for pure ponds, although he used to treat street actions as a relic of the Soviet Union: “I had to understand who these are dissatisfied people and whether it was possible to fit into some business with them. Yes, you can. " Many of his previously apolitical friends also began to gradually “get out of the shell”: “My acquaintances are designers, a didjal producer, a photographer, a manager, a student-graph design, in short, the very“ hipsters ”. We have no clearly formed requirements. We do not want a revolution. We want us not to be on*like this. We want a new, from scratch, voting. We want to really have someone to vote for, ”says Morgorsky.
And for the 22-year-old Ilya Zakharov, a specialist in the software of one large company, the results of December 4 became a revelation: "It seems that normal people came to vote, but it turned out as usual." He says: “I stumbled upon an entry on Twitter Rustem Adagamov, one of the most famous bloggers of the country, he wrote just what I thought: it seems that we had to go to pure ponds.” He went, was not detained. And even more plunged into the political life of social networks. So now it sometimes seems to him that there is nothing around but rallies around. "I wrote on my Facebook:" Is it becoming fashionable to be politically active? " - And my friend from Brazil wrote: “Yes. This is a complex process through which you still have to go, ”says Zakharov.
Street-therapist
On December 10, 24-year-old Roman Garin went to the rally, although earlier the street meetings did not attract him: “The state insolently deceived me and my loved ones,” he says. -I am not a politician, I do not know what to do in such situations, I consider the revolution to arrange a revolution, but something needs to be done. It was necessary to take the first step, and I took it. ” Garin believes that if people rally, as it is now, then they have a chance to get concessions from the authorities and avoid bloodshed.
The 35-year-old founder and head of the Royber Production Center Maxim Spiridonov, who was creating web services and Internet media, wrote on his blog, which would also definitely go to the rally on December 10, and urged everyone to join him. “I regularly have the feeling that they were holding me by an idiot,” Spiridonov wrote. He is outraged by how “political pantomies are played out with our money with dipping intractable politicians into the mud, thousands of events are organized for little consideration of adolescents, and lush parties are held, where we will tell us who we will choose in the presidency.” Spiridonov is sure that if now, after all the outrages of December 4, do not show the teeth of power, not to force it to cancel the election results, then for the next 12 years “in the country, not just stagnation will come, but totalitarianism. Because managers who feed on our money will understand from the authorities - they definitely get away with them. ” 
“I was at a rally on Monday, December 5, I will be on Saturday,” says 26-year-old Igor Sadreev, editor-in-chief of the fashionable Moscow city newspaper The Village. - The first and second rallies in my life happened in one week. Honestly, Boris Nemtsov, Ilya Yashin and even Alexei Navalny are not very pretty to me. I did not stand under the banners of "solidarity". It's not about them. It’s just that this time a threshold has been passed-and it’s already a shame to brush it off out of habit. ” Sadreev admits that the “universal network hysteria”, which erupted on December 4, helped to overcome this threshold. “It is unlikely that the carousels and mass stuffed up in 2011,” he agrees, “but when so many shit is falling on you, it is difficult not to feel humiliated.”
In the dry residue
These “white collars”, quite, although to varying degrees, successful, often having their own cars, and by no means “Lada”, accustomed to Fridays to go to clubs, and on vacation to get abroad, do not crave to get under the batons of riot police and rather condemned (and many relate) to those who capture bureaucratic offices or douses with water or dousing water prosecutors. Moreover, many of them with a well-known prejudice belong to a street rally, and someone is afraid of it. “My sister, she has a VKontakte account, says that there all this shkolota and overlaps revel in their revolutionary, not particularly understanding why and what to do. These can provoke aggression. Fuck knows what these guys are ready for, ”says designer Morgorsky. And Igor Sadreev does not believe that thousands of rallies will lead to global changes in the country. But what is curious: he thinks that the experience of street activity changed many: “I am sure that after this week many will become much more attentive to each other, more attentive to what happens not only with them, but also with others. Such a strange therapeutic effect, ”he grins. "
I wrote on Facebook: "Is it becoming fashionable to be politically active?" - And my friend from Brazil wrote: “Yes. This is a complex process through which you still have to go through "
“However, the 43-year-old Sergey Sychev, a private lawyer, is, either by virtue of already lived years, or having seen a lot of things in his profession, it is more radical in his profession, although the rally on December 10 is also the first for him. He is not satisfied with“ creeping the restoration of the scoop in its worst manifestations ”, the“ mockery of the constitution ”, the destruction of justice. Finally, the judicial system, in the judicial system, in the system. which “captured power” or close to them is above justice. He is a personal enemy of power and will again go to the rally on its own.
Photo: Olga Beshley, ITAR-TASS, NET-DRU.NET