Democracy in Russia has not yet been formally destroyed completely. No one can be elected to any legislative body above the municipal level without permission from the current regime, because they will not even let you get onto the ballot. But at the municipal level, independent candidates are still able to get on the ballot. For this very reason, a fairly large number of opposition figures have been elected as municipal deputies over the last few years.
This has had very little impact on the decisions made at the municipal level. Independent deputies are usually in the minority. They are typically not allowed into even remotely important commissions. They are not given the floor at meetings. In practice, they can only achieve something in the districts they were elected from, but the powers of deputies at this lowest level are completely negligible. To top it all off, as a result of every sufficiently large protest action, deputies are collectively sent behind bars, because they either participated in it, called for participation, or could have called for participation.
Today in Moscow, municipal deputies from over fifty regions gathered for the “Municipal Russia” forum to get to know each other, socialize, and discuss possibilities for horizontal interaction. Now, instead of a conference hall, they are carrying out the planned program in police vans and at police stations.
Any attempt to engage in unauthorized political activity in the legal or illegal field today in Russia is interpreted by the regime as a crime against the regime and is punished quite arbitrarily—from preventive detentions without a formal report to killings. For a reason I do not understand, many opposition figures claim that if they had not heroically held back the advance of the Leviathan, things would be even worse now. This assertion is in blatant contradiction with the observed reality, in which the tightening of the regime occurs strictly in response to protest demonstrations. The suppression of grassroots activity is a resource-intensive activity, and those who would prefer to spend resources on palaces rather than batons hire the baton-bearers strictly as needed. In the absence of protest, they would spend roughly the same on palaces, but they would not breed so many security officers and so many laws allowing those officers to commit any kind of robbery.
The best thing we can do in this situation is to leave the country and succeed in a new place. This will not bring down the regime in Russia in any way. A submissive Uzbek will be brought in to take your place—there are eighty million of them, and they have it even worse; that will be enough to fill the vacating positions. But that is not important. If you are behind the wheel, you follow the principle of giving way to the fool. Give these fools the road in politics. If you honk your horn, they will run you over and keep driving. We only have a chance if we are the majority. Therefore, we need to concentrate where that majority is easier to secure. That is exactly why we chose the sparsely populated Montenegro.
From now on, I will regularly report on how the project to create a libertarian outpost in the Balkans is doing. Forgive me, but this seems much more important to me than attempts at political activity in Russia.
