City on the protest map

On April 10, I and several (at that time) of my comrades went to Astrakhan, where by that time Oleg Shein and 20 of his associates had already been starving for the fourth week. The main purpose of this trip is solidarity. Whether we manage to achieve re-election of the mayor of the city there or not was not so important from the beginning. A person must do what is right to do. In Astrakhan, people are starving not only for their political rights, but for ours too. There was a real candidate for mayor of the city, he had a positive program, he went to the polls and won them. And then some local bandits outplayed the situation in their own way, took away his victory. Opponents say: no election is worth a life. But it's not about the elections! It's about truth and self-respect.

Oleg Shein is a third-generation Astrakhan, he knows everyone here, everyone knows him. In public, he, his team, a huge number of people were humiliated, trampled on by completely unworthy people, about whom the whole city knows that they are crooks. And Shein is not starving for the post of mayor. It's just that sometimes people have nothing else to do. The same Sergei Udaltsov went on his numerous hunger strikes out of complete desperation. Every time he left the house, he was detained. He consistently starved and achieved his goal: in relation to him, this complete lawlessness was stopped.

In Astrakhan lawlessness continues. But an important feature of this story is that Shein, unlike many, did not wipe himself, deciding that nothing could be changed. He gathered a core of supporters around him and continues to fight. The method chosen by them is radical, but there really was nothing else to do. They turned the protest into a matter of life and death. This is a serious thing, such a protest cannot be simply sympathized from a distance. Therefore, anyone who has the time and opportunity to spend a couple of thousand rubles on a ticket to Astrakhan should go there. If there is no solidarity with people who are doing the right and serious things, then there will never be any serious protest. After all, it’s not us, like some political guest performers, who sit and draw future protest points on the map of Russia: Yaroslavl, Astrakhan, and then we’ll go to Volgograd… -something else ... And we just have to go along this route.

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The Kremlin itself draws the map of protest, it is drawn by people who carry out lawlessness - today in Astrakhan, tomorrow somewhere else ... And we just have to travel along this route

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There will be more and more stories like this. First, because people's interest in politics is returning - the regions have begun to wake up. Secondly, thanks to the Internet, which has demonopolized the media space and thanks to which any person can inform everyone about his trouble as soon as possible. Now you do not have to wait for the city newspaper to write about your problem, everyone can become a local media, as happened with Shein, who publishes hunger strike reports on his blog, and tens of thousands of people read them. Or in the situation in Kazan - with lawless people from the Dalniy police department. Someone dumped the information on Twitter once, a second time, someone picked it up and wrote it on LiveJournal, a day later there was a scandal all over the country.

This is a fundamentally new situation that the current political regime, accustomed to resolving any issues with the help of manual control, cannot cope with. Astrakhan is an excellent illustration in this sense: everyone, from the governor and local elites to the Central Election Commission and the State Duma, understands that re-elections are needed. And everyone is waiting for the decision of one specific person - Vladimir Putin. Without his personal intervention, the situation will not be resolved in any way, because no one in this vertical of power will take responsibility for canceling the election results. Therefore, the tension in the system will only grow, and in the end it ... no, it will not burst with a bang, splashing everyone in the world with its insides. It will break down gradually. And by and large, we are already seeing it.