If there is a fountain in the city, occupy it!

Having written an article about the detention of Udaltsov, I discovered that I was mistaken. I argued that Kaliningrad is not in danger, because there is not a single decent fountain in the city center. And immediately received a response from the homeland of Immanuel Kant. An indignant resident of this glorious Baltic city informed me that the situation with fountains there has changed radically over the past few years: several were built at once, one of them on the site of the Lenin monument.

So the investigative committee can be understood, and Udaltsov too.

However, after reflection, the investigators of the investigative committee limited themselves to letting the oppositionist go home, taking a written undertaking from him not to leave. If the attacker is prevented from boarding the train, then the ancient capital of East Prussia can sleep peacefully.

Udaltsov’s assistant Konstantin Lebedev was less fortunate. He was arrested for two months. Apparently it was he who arranged that ill-fated meeting with the Georgians.

It seems the authorities themselves are confused. What to do with incriminating video footage? Everything is so stupid, so infantile, that the very participants in the conversation should not be put in prison, but put in a corner. But it remains unclear who was filming and on what basis (on the territory, we note, of a foreign state), and if our special services, and not the Belarusian ones, were doing this, then why are taxpayers’ money being spent on a video hunt for Udaltsov, and not on something else? more important. Loud cries about betrayal of the Motherland that sounded at first were replaced by awkward silence. Well, which Udaltsov is the villain? The character is not at all suited to the role assigned to him, turning any conspiracy plot into a farce and parody.

Who was chatting with the Georgians in Minsk and about what is of absolutely no interest to anyone. And if Udaltsov betrayed anyone or anything, it was only the left movement and his comrades in the Left Front, whose opinions he ignored by joining the elections of the Coordination Council, started by the liberals. He will undoubtedly get his place on the council, regardless of how the elections turn out and how the investigation ends, since the liberal press is just as diligently molding him into the image of a hero, just as the Investigative Committee and pro-government media are creating the image of a villain. However limited progress may be along the way, the combined efforts of the two sides are enough to impress those who have already registered for this strange election.

And the candidates themselves, starting from Pavel Pryanikov and ending with Ilya Ponomarev , say that the elections are turning out to be extremely strange. The latter even decided to suddenly withdraw his candidacy, saying that “a number of worthy candidates and significant organizations, seeing this trend, refused to participate in the elections.” The elections themselves are organized unsatisfactorily, everything is ruled by the Moscow liberal crowd, provincial candidates do not receive equal representation, and in general everything is extremely undemocratic. In fact, Ponomarev only confusedly recounted what critics of the Coordination Council, including the author of these lines, had said from the very beginning, and repeated the arguments on the basis of which the Forum of Left Forces announced a boycott of the elections. However, at the same time, Ponomarev himself threw mud at us a few days ago and called us agents of the Kremlin because we said exactly what he writes and publishes today in his own name. The fact that in such a case, at a minimum, one is supposed to apologize, naturally does not occur to the State Duma deputy.

The funny thing is that, having condemned the undemocratic nature of the elections and withdrawn his candidacy, Ponomarev immediately attached a list of candidates for whom, in his opinion, they should vote. How valuable such support and propaganda will be for the people he listed is anyone’s guess, but it is striking that the list he proposed roughly corresponds to Udaltsov’s previously voiced recommendations . The essence of the matter comes down to the fact that the names of the left are mixed in it with the centrists and the right, obviously for the sake of “balance.” While the “left” candidates prove to their own perplexed supporters that they decided to participate in this venture solely in order to “shift” the balance of power in the Constitutional Court in their direction, the most famous representatives of the “left” flank of the liberal opposition are calling for the exact opposite. In general, again betrayal. Or, at best, a setup.

Meanwhile, all attempts by the “left oppositionists” to influence the outcome of the vote are a priori blocked by the mass registration of fans of Sergei Mavrodi , whose number is obviously greater than the number of any opposition organizations. If at first it was possible to talk about the CC as the organ of the emerging party of Echo of Moscow listeners, now a real competition is brewing. Only the struggle will not be between left and right, not between socialists and liberals, but between MMM and Echo of Moscow.

It is easy to guess that there will be no more political meaning in such a struggle than in the occupation of fountains. But it will be fun to see the results.