Gennady Gudkov
Former State Duma Deputy, A Just Russia party
Votes: 26,973
Rank: 14

About 170 thousand people said they were prepared to choose the leaders of the opposition, and more than 80 thousand took part in the election. That’s a lot. It speaks to the fact that there’s a mood for protest in Russia, and that protest movement supporters number in the tens of thousands. I even think that it’s in the hundreds of thousands. For its first time, the election was entirely successful, although, of course, it wasn’t free of mistakes.

Our main task is to express the will of the people, who right now want real, not decorative, changes in our country, who don’t want to live in an atmosphere of lies and falsifications, who don’t want Russia to have an illegitimate government, and who don’t want the country to be imbued with an atmosphere of double standards and hypocrisy.

Undoubtedly, it’s going to be difficult for the members of the Council to agree with each other. But I think that we can resolve this issue.

Boris Nemtsov
Co-representative, RPR-PARNAS
Votes: 24,623
Rank: 16

The elections went well; they were good, and honest. I feel that this is a unique experience. It’s the first instance of electronic voting in Russian history, where the most active, non-apathetic people, with a sense of personal dignity, took part. Naturally, I’ll be glad to work on the Coordination Council, and I’m going to do what’s necessary for the resolutions from Bolotnaya Square and Sakharov Prospect to become real-life documents. I feel totally comfortable in my rank between Navalny and Udaltsov. We need to understand that our ranks on this list are our places in line behind bars. I’m sixteenth. This also makes me glad. It doesn’t entail access to the budget, property, or a television set. It’s more like a ticket to repression. I should mention that I’m the only person on the Coordination Council with experience working in provincial government, the only governor, the only vice prime minister, the only deputy chairman of the State Duma, the only head of a faction. It seems to me that there were all sorts of moments while I was in those posts where my experience can be helpful.

The main task now is to put a stop to the repression. I don’t see any other tasks. We need to begin our session not with organizational questions, but precisely with questions having to do with freeing political prisoners, including some who have been jailed very recently, such as Leonid Razvozzhayev and Konstantin Lebedev. I fear that we’re going to have to work on this for the course of the entire year, and work very hard.

Difficulties that the Council might face include repression against its members. This is already happening. Of those who were voted onto the Council, Razvozzhayev and Daniil Konstantinov are behind bars. We need to do everything so that the members of the Council can move about, work, and remain free. The rest are resolvable issues; they’re nothing compared to freedom and repression. So far, in, for example, the Organizational Committee for the protest movement, we’ve managed to come to agreement with each other one way or the other, although it wasn’t simple. Now there are many people who took part in organizing the protests who’ve been voted onto the Council. There are new people as well. It seems to me that the responsibility we have before the people who voted for us, plus the tasks that we are obligated to resolve, should evoke feeling in even the most mettlesome people. We have to be reserved, stubborn, persistent, and calm if we’re going to achieve anything. Of course, there are very many people who want to make us quarrel and split us apart, but there’s always going to be a lot of people like that. Nevertheless, over the course of the year, all attempts to do that have failed. I hope that this is always going to be the case.

If we divide the Coordination Council into factions, I think that the liberal-democratic one would be the largest. Kasparov, Yashin, and I, along with our whole liberal wing – Vladimir Kara-Murza, Piontkovsky, Parkhomenko, Bykov, and Gelfand, of course, have liberal-democratic views. I think that more than half of the Council consists of people with these views. Some of them don’t advertise it much, but still, if you look at their “political compasses,” you can understand – it’s clear from their attitudes towards private property, privatization, and so on.

PARNAS made an official decision not to participate in the Coordination Council elections, and so we, the members of PARNAS, took part in them in a private capacity. But since our representation on the Council is rather significant – at the very least, it’s Yashin, Kara-Murza, and I – I think that cooperation is inevitable. This might not be laid out in any official documents, but it’ll just become the fact of the matter. PARNAS Co-representative Vladimir Ryzhkov is one of the authors of the Bolotnaya and Sakharov Prospect resolutions, which are a main task for the Coordination Council, and he will bring them to life. To be honest, I don’t know how we couldn’t cooperate.

Gennady Gudkov, State Duma Deputy from A Just Russia

In conditions where there’s hydrochloric acid in the pool, it’s going to be difficult to win, considering that our opponent is swimming with paddles in clean water, and we’re in a pool of hydrochloric acid. With the kind of administrative and bureaucratic support that United Russia has, it’s going to be difficult to compete with the party in power. The elections are very dirty – dirtier than in March. In Chelyabinsk, for example, federal employees are being forced to vote in several different areas. We’ve been informed about this.

We’re counting on victory in the municipal elections of a number of outer-Moscow cities and on good results in several regions. If the elections were even a tad bit honest, United Russia would have joined the opposition long ago.

Sergei Mitrokhin, Yabloko Party Leader

It’s difficult to make predictions in our electoral process. I think there’s going to be ballot-stuffing in United Russia’s favor everywhere. How many will be stuffed, nobody knows. If it’s too few, then the governors, mayors, and regional administrative leaders will be risking their posts.

During the March campaign, we had good results in Tula in the Tverskaya region. There’s a positive trend, but there are no grounds at all to say that the elections will be honest. There’s going to be massive absentee voting in Chelyabinsk.

Boris Nadezhdin, Political Council Member of Right Cause

In the places where our tickets had good chances, they were removed [from the ballots]. This happened, for example, in Kazan and Kostroma. We have tickets left in Magadan and Chelyabinsk; I’m counting more on Chelyabinsk. Because first of all, a very scandalous campaign is going on in Chelyabinsk, and secondly, we are participating alongside Yabloko, and that means the chances of either party winning decrease considerably.

Andrei Andreyev, State Duma Deputy from the Communist Party

Currently I’m in Magadan, working on the elections. The electoral campaign is extraordinarily dirty and cynical. Magadan television, and the channel MTK in particular, is heaping utter garbage onto the three parliamentary parties besides United Russia.

Ilya Yashin, Solidarity Bureau Member

It wouldn’t be right to talk about the chances of the candidates, since this country has long since ceased to have elections, and instead there’s an appointment process reminiscent of elections only in appearance.

Candidates from the non-systemic opposition can participate in elections in order to hurt the government’s reputation, but they can only achieve success in the case that the system malfunctions – as happened, for example, in Tver and several other regions.

Yevgeny Shevchenko, Representative of the Patriots of Russia:

We see the chances of our regional branches in participation in the elections positively, since they accomplished very good work. However, the news from the regions gives some cause for alarm. We are cautious about the fact that party tickets were taken off the ballots for unsubstantiated reasons. We have fewer complaints than in previous years. Clearly, the regional authorities have finally listened to the president and have begun to create the conditions for competition in the regions, but there is lawlessness in the municipal elections in a whole swath of regions.

Sergei Ivanov, State Duma Deputy from the LDPR:

I see the chances for the LDPR in the elections as very good. We’ve been up against the administration’s resources since 1989, and we always find our voters.

Aleksandr Khitshteyn, State Duma Deputy from United Russia:

I can only say what work I do, and I’m in charge of elections in Samara. I’m convinced that United Russia candidates will get the majority of the mandates in city duma elections. As far as the elections for mayor are concerned, I’m convinced that Dmitri Azarov will win – what’s more, in the first round. The campaign has been sufficiently calm. Naturally, what’s unpleasant is the use of administrative resources by the current mayor, Victor Tarkhov.