Voting in prison is not a bad form of entertainment. Dozens of prisoners are escorted to the ballot boxes simultaneously, providing a rare opportunity to chat and exchange news with your neighbors.
We were assembled in the “gully” and launched in pairs into a room equipped for a polling station. The convicts had fun arguing who to vote for. Mostly, of course, there were juicy quotes from Leningrad’s song about elections….
With a clear conscience, I wrote “FOR RUSSIA WITHOUT PUTIN” on my ballot paper. After that, I conducted a spontaneous exit poll at the prison polling station, thanks to which it transpired that most of the inmates had voted for anyone, just not for [ruling party] United Russia. Only one of them admitted that he had ticked the box for [incumbent Moscow mayor Sergei] Sobyanin. The guy, however, is a United Russia activist himself: he embezzled a factory and is now serving a sentence for fraud. So it all makes sense.
And I also saw and hugged Sergei Klokov (Vedel) for the first time in several months. For a year and a half, the man has been doing time for a telephone conversation with relatives, bugged by the security services, during which the murders in Bucha were discussed. He looks tired and misses his family, including his two young children. But he is slightly encouraged by the news that Ukraine is willing to exchange its collaborators for Russian political prisoners. I hope Sergei will be released soon. He’s a good guy.
Source: Ilya Yashin (Facebook), 11 September 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader
Olga Kolokolova, the head of the Perm regional branch of the Yabloko Party for many years, won the elections to the City Duma in Krasnokamsk (a satellite city of Perm). Moreover, she won running on the slogan “I’m for peace!”
Having received 55.2% of the votes cast, Olga Arkadyevna was returned to the Krasnokamsk City Duma, of which she was a deputy from 2005 to 2018.
Kolokolova is a veteran of the Perm loyal democratic opposition. (I say this without the slightest hint of judgment: the loyal opposition has its own positive mission, especially during periods when the regime relaxes the rules.) She is one of the most well-known politicians in Krasnokamsk, and the most consistent and most well-known Yabloko Party activist in the region.
Despite her status as a member of the loyal opposition, the election of Olga Kolokolova as a deputy in our time, and running on such a slogan, is really an unusual event, a kind of relic or vestige of the Putin regime’s bygone hybridity. In any case, it is impossible not to be happy for Olga Arkadyevna.
Source: Igor Averkiev (Facebook), 11 September 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader
Inside Russia’s sham ‘election’ in occupied Ukrainian territories (Open Democracy, September 6th)
Ukrainians in occupied territory forced at gunpoint to vote for fake candidates in Russia’s pseudo-election (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, September 4th)
