Moscow?€™s Kennedy Has My Vote

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The October Moscow Duma elections could just as well turn out like the ones before them. All Russian elections at the federal and local levels over the past four years have lacked anything even close to the semblance of actual competition.

But there is still a good chance that these elections could be a game changer, just like those in 1989 at the Congress of People’s Deputies that were the first relatively free elections in the Soviet Union. “Opposition candidates” in 1989 — the quotes are needed since the only thing that the candidates had in common was that they did not represent the controlling Communist Party — had it easier and tougher than opposition candidates today. It was easier because the dissatisfaction with the Communists that had been accumulating over the years was much greater than it is now with the current leadership, while the political environment made it much tougher because the access to modern campaigning tools was much tighter.

People are definitely tired of today’s leadership. The only thing left to do is to convince Muscovites that the opposition candidate is the better one.

Ilya Yashin, one of the leaders of the liberal opposition group Solidarity, is the most promising opposition candidate from the Universitet district, where I happen to live. Yashin managed to receive 15 percent of the vote in the previous elections in 2005. Although at first glance this may seem modest, it was a big success for a young politician. I have no idea what will secure Yashin the thousands of votes he needs to be victorious, but I can say that he has my vote. Should another candidate deliver what I want, then I guess I will just have to weigh the situation in an honest manner.

I intend to vote for the candidate who has visited each and every block — or better yet courtyard — by the election campaign’s conclusion and has become aware of the problems in each of the courtyards. Yashin has a LiveJournal blog that would be pretty interesting to glance at each day to find out which apartment buildings he has visited, which courtyards has he made speeches in and what the latest concerns are in those courtyards. The key to a successful campaign is the candidate’s ability to convince each voter that whatever problem people may have — whether it be uncollected trash in the courtyard or the need to install a new pedestrian crossing — is now the candidate’s personal problem as well.

A little more than 400,000 voters live in the Universitet district. Meeting with at least 20,000 in person during the remaining six weeks of campaigning is not out of reach. Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy, albeit from aristocratic backgrounds, won their first elections using this method. The same can be said for French President Nicolas Sarkozy and U.S. President Barack Obama, two politicians with more modest backgrounds.

Meeting in person with voters and finding out what their real, down-to-earth problems are is exactly how seemingly powerless candidates triumphed over district committee secretaries and large factory managers. In the end, I personally would like to vote for the winner.

Konstantin Sonin, a professor at the New Economic School/CEFIR, is a columnist for Vedomosti.