In September 2017, the United Democrats coalition created by Dmitry Gudkov and candidates from opposition parties defeated United Russia in 29 out of 125 Moscow districts, in 6 of which the ruling party lost all its mandates. Most of these districts are located in the center of the capital. & Nbsp;
Immediately after the elections, in the fall of 2017, a campaign was launched to expand the local representation of the ruling party. Both forceful methods and direct bribery of deputies were used. As a result, almost a third of independent councils returned to the status of controlled ones.
In four years, only half of Moscow's 29 initially democratic councils were able to retain their team. In the remaining 15 districts, some of the independent mundeps have become «hybrid», that is, they vote in solidarity with the United Russia party and support the government.
How we thought: How we thought: How we defined «hybridity»:
- Satisfactory assessment of the report the heads of the council in the event that the majority of the opposition mundeps consider its work unsatisfactory.
- On the distribution of funds for the improvement, the deputy votes in solidarity with the deputies from the «United Russia», provided that the majority of independent deputies vote against.
- In some cases, an additional sign of «hybridity» was voting for a candidate from United Russia in the election of the chairman of the council, as well as systematic ignoring of meetings at which the decision of the council depended on the vote of the deputy.
Since there is no data on the voting of municipal deputies in a uniform machine-readable format or in any other format (unlike, for example, data on the voting of State Duma deputies), we were forced to draw conclusions based on oral evidence. This is not a very reliable source, and in order to rule out that we were misinformed, we asked the deputies themselves: how did they vote? We sent inquiries to those who, according to their colleagues, could be “hybrid” in the sense of the definition given above (47 people). 10 deputies from the Akademichesky, Gagarinsky, Izmailovo, Kuntsevo and Presnensky districts answered us. Based on the results of studying the answers, we excluded Akademichesky and Gagarinsky from the list of «hybrid» districts.
“He fed me cakes”
“I got a call from a man who introduced himself as a law enforcement officer and asked for a meeting” — this is how three municipal deputies from different districts begin their story. p>
“I didn’t want to see this man, to which he began to talk about his connections and offered to meet in the State Duma with any deputy whom I respect. In the end, he persuaded me to drink coffee, — says the Mundep from the Ramenki district. — During a telephone conversation, he tried to interest me in ideas for the improvement of playgrounds, but when we met, he began to convince me of the need to vote in the interests of the city. In return, this man promised to improve my image as a municipal deputy. He offered to organize several PR events, overtake people there, hand out leaflets to everyone. ”
(In some cases, at the request of the deputies themselves — which is an indicator in itself — we are forced not to publish their names.)
To another mundep,
Tatyana Vasandani from the Akademichesky district, a person who introduced himself as an FSB officer, offered to become the seventh, missing, vote for a fee when agreeing a budget.
Independent deputies planned to allocate additional money for the improvement of the territory of the «Zapovedny Meadow», a draft of which was prepared by residents district. But the authorities did not plan to support this initiative. As a result, six independent mundeps sided with the council, but the seventh vote was not enough.
Elena Selkova from Cheryomushki told us a similar story: “We went to a cafe, where he gave me tea, fed me with cakes, and asked about my views and work in the council of deputies. In the end, I asked if I was ready to support my colleague from United Russia for the post of head of the district for a fee, I refused. ”
As a result, it did not work out to elect the head of Cheryomushki: neither United Russia nor the opposition have enough eight necessary votes, and the district is still headed by the chairman of the previous convocation, who did not even have enough votes to pass to the current one.
In 2020, a manual “Monitoring the activities of opposition leaders and initiative groups of Moscow districts” with a description of each independent mundep from “democratic” districts was posted on the Web. The dossier indicates the affiliation of the deputies with political figures, the degree of negotiability and leverage. For most, this is employment, assistance in business or politics.
For example, this manual says that the deputy of the Krylatskoye district Vladislava Gorshkova is allegedly interested in getting a job and dismissing the chief physician of the 130th polyclinic.
“Immediately after the elections, I began to receive offers to move to a new position. Then I worked in a children's clinic. At first, the condition was my vote for the chairman of the council from United Russia. Then the stakes increased, and I was asked to become a member of the party, — says Vladislava. — I have systematically refused. A couple of days after their final attempt, I was fired from the clinic. ”
We sent a request to the head of the Moscow City Media and Advertising Department, Ivan Shubin, to inquire whether the Moscow government knows about the existence of such a methodology and how correct the assumptions are mundepov that employees of the mayor's office may have something to do with her, but did not receive an answer.
Four more independent deputies faced the proposal to switch to the civil service.
In the Airport area, according to the Moundep Anna Shcherbachenko, she was invited to talk by the deputy prefect — Gadzhimurad Izutdinov. “Immediately after the elections, he invited everyone for a personal conversation, during which he diplomatically tried to interest us with something. For example, I was offered a good job. »
«Novaya Gazeta» sent a request on this matter to the prefecture of the Northern District, we were answered with one phrase: «The information … is not valid.»
Photo: EPA/p>
Pavel Yarilin, another deputy from the Council of the Airport, also told Novaya Gazeta about the dubious proposal. According to him, another official of the council allegedly tried to interest Yarilin in the position of his deputy with the prospect of taking his place in the future. But with one condition — to hand over the mandate.
This official is currently retired, so we could not send him a request to verify this information.
In Cheryomushki (shortly before the loss of five opposition votes) one of the deputies, Elena Selkova, «a person close to the mayor's office» offered, according to her, a job in a contractor company for the administration of the Moscow region.
In return, Elena was required stop attending meetings for six months. This would allow the uniforms from United Russia, who lacked one vote for the majority, to block the initiatives of their opposition colleagues.
“For the sake of interest, I demanded a salary of 250 thousand rubles a month — it was approved for me, but I refused anyway,” says Elena.
Among the mudeps there are those who cannot be bought either by government positions or large sums … Deputy Chairman of the Presnensky District Anatoly Yushin is the owner of a successful law firm. He was elected to the council from the Gudkov project and has a reputation as a liberal. However, as his colleagues recall, Yushin at some point began to support the council.
Advertising agencies of the deputy's wife and daughter, Valeria and Alisa Yushin, received seven orders from the Moscow City Duma for «information and analytical support of events» in the amount of more than 100 million rubles in 2016–2019. In six of the seven auctions of the firm Yushinykh — «AST-Advertising» and «Media Tsifra IT» — competed only with each other, passing the primacy from mother to daughter and vice versa.
At the request of the editorial board, Anatoly Yushin replied that he is a municipal deputy, therefore no purchases of the Moscow City Duma can create a conflict of interest and affect the performance of his duties.
In the Izmailovo district, a company owned by Yabloko deputy Friedrich Barats also had business success. Since 2018, as it is assumed in the investigation of the independent deputies of the district, the company «New Network Solutions», which the deputy previously rewrote to his son-in-law, allegedly begins to receive contracts for overhaul in the district.
Friedrich Baraz, in response to a request from the editors, confirmed that in October 2017 he sold his company to his son-in-law, Dmitry Shevelev. From 2018 to 2020, New Network Solutions, according to Mundep, regularly won tenders, including for overhauls, with a total amount of 691 million rubles.
In 29 councils of deputies we interviewed, 8 people confessed to a direct attempt at bribery. The rest of the deputies recalled «diplomatic» conversations, hints and requests for cooperation from the authorities of the council and the city.
“Public advisers who work for the council could call doubting deputies, invite them to a meeting at the council, organize a buffet table for them on the boat,” recalls Maxim Gongalsky, head of the Ramenki district.
In the Molzhaninovsky district, the head of the council, according to the recollections of the chairman of the council, Andrei Shinkarenko, allegedly offered the mudeps assistance in re-election for the next term, but for one service — to vote in favor of removing a number of powers from the district deputies.
We sent a request to the head of the council, Alexander Khusainovich Valitov, with a request to confirm or deny this information and received an answer: “The organization of the electoral process and the provision of any kind of assistance in the re-election of deputies, according to the Moscow Government Decree No. 157 … is not included in the powers of the Molzhaninovsky District Administration, respectively no such proposals were received from the council to the deputies of the Molzhaninovsky municipal district. ”
The head of the Presnensky District Council, Alexander Mikhailov, immediately after the election, according to the deputy Anastasia Romashkevich, allegedly called everyone: “He asked to think about improvement and residents, and not about politics”.
History repeated itself before the election of the chairman of the council: Mikhailov again allegedly invited the mudeps for a personal conversation, but with a supposedly more specific request: to vote for the candidate from United Russia to the post of head of Presnya.
When asked by the editorial board, Alexander Mikhailov replied that he “has no right to participate in the election of the chairman of the council and, as a result, is not empowered to exercise control over the voting.”
How deputies are being pressured
In some districts, forceful methods were used. Deputies face pressure at their place of work, with the prosecutor's office, courts, guardianship authorities, military registration and enlistment offices.
On July 12, the head of the Krasnoselsky district, Ilya Yashin, announced his resignation. One of the reasons is the pressure of the prosecutor's office on the municipality. “Since the beginning of the year, 70 percent of my staff’s working time has been spent answering inquiries from the prosecutor’s office,” says Yashin. — Over the past year, they pulled out literally all the documents from our accounting department. This paralyzed the work of the municipality. » Prosecutorial inspections, according to the deputy, are a fight with a specific oppositionist, so he decided to step aside and gave way to the head of the district to Moundep Elena Kotenochkina.
Ilya Yashin. Photo: Vlad Dokshin/»New»
“I spent two and a half years appealing against illegal fines,” says a deputy from Ramenki, Emilia Khokhlova, who works as the chairman of the HOA. «The reason for the endless checks of our house was anonymous letters to the prosecutor's office.» The first complaints about the HOA's work began to arrive after the deputy refused to cooperate with the council.
Vladislava Gorshkova from the Krylatskoye district has two children. After three unsuccessful attempts to persuade the mundep to join United Russia, the guardianship authorities received several anonymous letters. “They reported, for example, that ten dogs live in our house, with which the children are left without my supervision,” recalls Gorshkova.
Two deputies from the Ramenki districts spoke about attempts to deprive the council of independent votes through the military enlistment office of Novaya and Filevsky Park.
“In November 2017, a former employee of the district administration hinted that I needed to go to serve, otherwise they would have to take care of me,” recalls Nikita Belov, a mundep from Ramenki. Six months later, Nikita was called up, despite medical contraindications and the application for choosing an alternative civilian service. The deputy had to appeal against the decision of the draft board through the court, which refused to Nikita in both instances.
Another Moundep, Denis Prokuronov, from the Filevsky Park district, was drafted into the army by his colleague, United Russia deputy Dmitry Prokhorov, who is the head of the draft board for the district.
Just like Nikita Belov, he had to appeal the summons that came to Denis during his postgraduate holidays in court.
During the proceedings, these municipal deputies managed to enter graduate school, where they are currently studying.
With pressure through the employer, according to the mudeps from the Airport district, their colleague, an employee of the state company «Far East Development Fund» Leonid Balanovsky, faced. The deputy himself agreed to the conversation, but refused to comment on the pressure at work.
In three districts — Ramenki, Konkovo and Kurkino — independent mundeps had to defend their rights through the courts.
The most critical situation has developed in the Ramenok council, whose work has been blocked since September 2020. The head of the district of the last convocation, United Russia Party member Stanislav Dmitriev, despite the results of the election of the new chairman of the council, is not going to leave his post. Deputies Ramenok twice elected a new head, but Dmitriev successfully appealed both decisions of the council. On June 30, the Nikolsky court satisfied his claim. The decision says that the chairman himself had to convene a meeting on his resignation.
The authorities are completely on the side of Dmitriev: the prosecutor's office demands to cancel the decision of the mudeps to elect a new head of the district, and the tax authorities refuse to register him. At the same time, the position of United Russia in court, according to the deputy Ramenok Nikolai Bobrinsky, fully coincides with the position of the departments of the executive authorities.
The opposite story happened in Konkovo, where in 2019 five independent mundeps dismissed the head of the district. The head himself, Sergei Sokolov, connects «separatism» with the refusal to approve the budget of 300 million rubles for the council, and other mudeps, allegedly with the sawing off of money for double salaries of the employees of the municipality and government orders from a friend-contractor.
The re-election of the head did not make the independent deputies any better: after the removal of Sokolov, the United Russia party enlisted the support of three independent deputies and were able to elect a new chairman of the council — Sergei Malakhov, whose income after the election of the head grew from 600 thousand to two million rubles a year. Since 2019, Malakhov has owned a network of vending machines. Votes in solidarity with the deputies from United Russia.
Attempts to judicially remove from the post of head of an opposition-minded deputy are also taking place in the Kurkino council. In 2017, all the mandates went to the self-nominated opposition candidates, but soon two deputies, according to the head of the district, split from the team.
On their initiative, a criminal case was initiated against Ilya Svetikov, the head of Kurkino. The formal reason was the trial, where he represented the interests of residents in the case of charging tariffs for heating. By law, the head has no right to represent the interests of third parties in court. “I took a conscious risk and won the argument. It concerned almost half of the district's population, ”explains Ilya Svetikov. In 2018, three unknown persons beat up Svetikov. The deputy associates the attack with the protection of citizens in court.
Photo: RIA Novosti
To the editor's request to two Mundepas — Larisa Bildanova and Vitaly Fedotov — it was not they themselves who reacted, but the adviser to the Moscow City Duma deputy (! ) from «Fair Russia». A man who introduced himself, but asked not to publish his name, allegedly called at the request of Bildanova.
A deputy with prosperity (Larisa Bildanova works as an expert at Aeroflot), according to the interlocutor, is strange to be accused of bribery. Svetikov's team, on the contrary, in his words, deserves special attention: the head «did not fulfill a single pre-election promise», and also signed, as he believes, an alleged «sawn-off» project of the Palmira park.
Despite the statements of the defender Bildanova, we have no reason to accuse Kurkino's council of not fulfilling its election promises: based on the report of the deputies (available to the editorial office), at the moment, only 5% of what was promised in 2017 has not been fulfilled (we took the list of the opposition's promises and looked how many points were not fulfilled: there were only 2 of 40 declared in the electoral program). Svetikov replied to the accusations of sawing that he controlled the expenditure of funds allocated for the improvement of the Palmira park and was interested in the contractor's conscientious work (corresponding parliamentary inquiries to the council and the customer — Zhilischnik of the district — with claims to the quality of work of the contractor LLC Neon — at the disposal of the editors). We did not get the impression that Svetikov's accusations of sawing off are in any way justified.
In one form or another, cases of pressure on opposition-minded deputies occur in every council.
Most often, mudeps remember the provocations of «public advisers» at meetings. These are people who work for the council, disguised as ordinary residents, systematically visit the municipality
and loudly criticize the work of independent mudeps during their reports. “Several times, among the provocateurs who come to our meetings, I noticed the» landing «- residents who regularly go to support the provocateurs in the Gagarinsky district,» says Alexander Gagarinsky, a deputy from Troparevo-Nikulino.
In the same Troparevo-Nikulino Marina Orlova, a deputy from Yabloko, according to two colleagues from the council, surrendered her mandate allegedly under psychological pressure. Strangers knocked on the door of the deputy’s house, anonymous letters came to the post office with a request to resign, and “residents” interrupted her at council meetings.
Where do the deserters come from?
Most of the independent mundeps were elected in 2017 with the support of the United Democrats project of Gudkov and Katz. Almost all of them faced politics for the first time.
“When we were campaigning in Moscow, no one wanted to come to us. A municipal deputy has neither salary nor authority. Moreover, many did not believe in the success of the project, — says Dmitry Gudkov. “As a result, we received 3000 applications, of which we selected 1067. Of these, about 200 people are local activists, whom we supported on the basis of the principle of“ smart voting ”, since it was important that United Russia does not win in the district. They made up the bulk of the defectors. ”
Hybrid deputies, according to Gudkov, are the most obvious cost. But we have to put up with it if we want to see new people in politics, the politician believes.
“In fact, we expected that after the elections half of the deputies would fall off, but we managed to save ¾. This is a good result, says Gudkov. “Moreover, I don’t think that“ hybrid ”deputies are a big problem. If out of 12 mundeps there were 4 independent, and now there are 3, then this does not affect anything, since these 3 deputies are still the most active in the council. ”
Dmitry Gudkov. Photo: Vlad Dokshin/»New»
Vitaly Venediktov, head of the department in the Gudkov project, is sure that every municipal deputy faces pressure: “Sometimes it is enough to call the employer or offer the position of deputy head of the council, but more often the government works softer: in a personal conversation over a cup of tea, the recruit is explained that he was elected not to engage in politics, but to set up shops, so we need to cooperate. ”
As a result, out of 1,067 candidates, the United Democrats selected 267. Even before the elections, each went through a three-stage screening process, the purpose of which was to prevent desertions.
Raiding
Despite the tough screening of candidates, 70 out of 267 municipal deputies, according to Vitaly Venediktov, lost contact with colleagues and made compromises with the council. At the same time, as Gudkov notes, not all of these 70 deputies are uniquely «hybrid».
According to Novaya Gazeta's estimates, 55 independent mundeps have become «hybrid». In almost every region where United Russia was unable to take the majority of the mandates, there are «defectors» of their own.
Arbat in 2017 became one of four districts where the opposition divided seats with United Russia in half. But already at the first meeting, Yabloko deputy Sergei Gorbachev said that he supported the ruling party, leaving his colleagues in the minority.
Of the three other constituencies where independent deputies took half of the mandates, only Maryina Roshcha managed to maintain a balance by 2021.
The Soviets, where United Russia is not represented at all, managed to completely preserve their team in the Khamovniki, Gagarinsky and Akademichesky districts. At the same time, in the last two mudeps faced significant disagreements, which often interferes with the work of the councils. The rest of the «democratic» districts — Ostankinsky, Kurkino and Troparevo-Nikulino — lost two or three independent deputies each.
The Kuntsevo district suffered the most, where only one independent deputy remained of the predominantly opposition council. & Nbsp;
Shchukino stands alone. In 2017, 8 out of 15 independent deputies passed to the municipal assembly. The district lost its opposition majority after the death of the Communist Party mundep. In September 2021, after the «remote electronic voting», there were only 5 independent deputies left. Moreover, if the results were summed up by regular voting, there could be 8 independent deputies in 2021.