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.

The editors at Yezhednevny Zhurnal sat down with some of the freshly-elected representatives to the Russian opposition’s new Coordination Council to ask what they thought about the election results, the Council’s initial tasks, and what difficulties they might have to face. Theotherrussia.org will continue to bring you several of these responses over the next several days, so stay tuned for more.

Ilya Yashin
Member, Solidarity movement
Total votes: 32,478
Rank: 5th

We had prepared for the difficulties that might come up during the election. The government organized a massive DDoS attack, which, despite the problems we had on the first day, was successfully taken care of and the site worked quite well after that. In Chelyabinsk, the FSB attacked our activists on the regional electoral committee, confiscated computers, frightened people, and the committee simply couldn’t function. There were provocations – prosecutors filed criminal cases about supposed embezzlement of funds. I’m glad that we were able to overcome these difficulties, and in the end, tens of thousands of people took part in the election – this is probably the single largest civil project in years, and shows that the opposition has maintained significant capacity to mobilize civil activity. This is probably the most important result.

The difficulties that await the Council in the future are obvious. They have to do with the fact that the people elected are very different. Although, yesterday, after the election, the elected members of the Coordination Council gathered on the Dozhd channel and had a rather emotional discussion that proved that it’s not going to be very hard to work or to find common ground. We foresaw these difficulties: since there were people of different viewpoints among the candidates, we formed congregations that would guarantee that the entire political spectrum would be represented; we knew that it was going to be rather complicated to find compromise on a whole set of issues. But everyone is generally prepared for this. In fact, one of the tasks of the Coordination Council is to create a dialogue between representatives of various opposition groups and find the common ground that unites us.

It seems to me that there should be several directions our work should take. One of our key tasks is to form a substantive agenda for the protest movement, a structural project that we have long been criticized for lacking, although not entirely fairly, in my view, since the opposition has generated a not insubstantial number of constructive ideas. Now there’s going to be a united platform that will promote our projects in the name of the united opposition. These projects, of course, are going to have, it seems to me, a much larger resonance. One of our main tasks is to formulate within the course of a year our main proposals concerning political reforms that, as we hope, the government will be ready to discuss at some point. Even if it’s not, we should still offer this to society.

The second direction is to support regional politicians, both in elections and within the framework of anti-corruption projects. I think we’re going to offer organizational, political, and sometimes even financial help to people who are forced to battle with local swindlers and thieves and need our help, in small towns and in the regions.

The third direction is education, which has to do with the dissemination of various types of anti-corruption reports and reports dedicated to the results of Putin’s rule. In addition, a background theme will be the defense of political prisoners. I think that right now we should mobilize all the resources we have to give the maximum amount of help possible to people who are currently sitting behind bars because of their dissent.

The liberal wing is represented in the Coordination Council rather heavily. This has to do with the fact that the protests on Bolotnaya Square and Sakharov Prospekt were represented to a significant degree by people of liberal-democratic views, which has been established by nearly all sociological surveys, and voting during the election for the Council confirmed that the basic part, the nucleus of the protest movement, is, like before, people who hold liberal-democratic views. The social portrait of the protest area, it seems to me, is very clearly reflected in the election results.

An Alternative Agenda
October 24, 2012
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

Garry Kasparov
Leader, United Civil Front
Total votes: 33,849
Rank: 3rd

We managed to hold the election, despite extremely unfavorable external conditions. The Democracy-2 system, which Yekaterinburg programmers, led by Leonid Volkov, released this past year, proved its efficacy. There were some conflicts, of course, but on the whole the election was free and fair, because all of the decisions by the Central Electoral Committee were completely open. This stands in direct contrast to [Federal Central Electoral Commission Chairman Vladimir] Churov’s elections – it’s totally clear how and why various decisions were made. Of course, someone might want to challenge them if they don’t like them, but the entire procedure was fully transparent.

The fact that hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens went through the verification process in the online voting system (which involves agreeing to enter their passport and phone numbers) shows a growth of protest sentiment and of people’s desire to participate more actively in shaping the protest agenda. You could say that the result of this campaign, albeit a short (but still striking) one, is the emergence of a totally legitimate opposition body. The number of people who took part in this transparent process created a body that has legitimacy to speak in the name of the entire protest movement.

The obvious difficulty that the Opposition Council is going to face is that it consists of very different people with different ideologies, and that it will have, let’s say, many political newcomers. I, along with several of my colleagues – Andrei Illarionov, Andrei Piontkovsky, Boris Nemtsov, and especially the others who were also in the Other Russia movement and the National Assembly – have experience in this type of cooperation. But such people are now a minority in the Coordination Council – that’s an objective fact. It’s very important that the Council is able to overcome these dangerous problems and form a constructive agenda.

From my point of view, the most important task, besides writing regulations and organizing normal functioning for the Coordination Council, is to build up our electoral base – not just the people who vote, but and who participate in the entire process; people who want to follow the Council’s work continuously, to make remarks and proposals. They should have that opportunity. This is what we’d like to build and call the Free Russia Forum. All of these people are registered, and they should be as full participants of this process as the members of the Coordination Council are. In my opinion, the Council should hold referendums on important issues as often as possible. Tens of thousands of people, if they want, should have the opportunity to vote on some type of key issue. In the same vein, the next issue is expanding the Council beyond the Garden Ring. Of course, we do already have quite a wide regional base – only 35% of those who voted in the Council election were Muscovites, just more than a third. But it’s very important that activeness increases, so that people in the regions, where there are many potential voters, create their own coordination councils, meaning that they build up a local infrastructure.

Yevgenia Chirikova
Leader, Movement in Defense of the Khimki Forest
Votes: 32,221
Rank: 7th

It seems to me that the most important thing right now is to establish a system to provide people with information. In Khimki, I was confronted with the fact that the propaganda that currently flows from Channel One, NTV, and local television is effective, and has an absolutely corrosive effect on people. Our task is to make it so that they know the truth. We absolutely need to support local media in places where we plan to participate in municipal elections.

It seems to me that, because [the local media] had been destroyed in Khimki, we had low turnout, people were disappointed in everything and didn’t believe that it’d be possible to change anything. We need our own media system, since we need to be able to have an impact on people. In places where you can impact people, everything else is possible: defending human rights, defending nature, defending the rights of prisoners. If the citizens trust us, if we can get through to their hearts and minds, then we won’t have a problem calling them, for example, to come to a picket in defense of prisoners or a rally in defense of a forest.

The biggest difficulty of our time is to remain free. But whether or not it’ll be possible to negotiate is going to depend on external factors – the harder they push, they easier it’ll be to negotiate. The way things are going now, we will have a wonderful time negotiating!

Leonid Volkov, a representative of the Council’s electoral bureau (TsVK), said at a press conference on Tuesday that there will be three events organized by the council for the candidates, who are free to campaign independently as well.

The first TsVK event will be a series of televised debates, scheduled to air live on the independent channel Dozhd. According to Volkov, the debates will take the form of a tournament, in order to ensure a level of fair competition between the 216 people registered to run for the council’s 45 seats. The first stage will consist of 54 groups of four, from which one person each will be chosen. Another six candidates, who were chosen as the most popular through online voting, will then be added to this group of 54. The 60 resulting candidates will then be broken into 20 groups, one person from each of which will be chosen, eventually resulting in five.

The debates, which are not a part of Russia’s electoral tradition, stand in stark contrast to President Vladimir Putin’s comments that he is “too busy” for such activities. Despite this being his third term as president, he has never participated in a debate with his opponents.

Volkov called the second event a “political compass,” in which TsVK representatives will question all candidates about their political positions. The results will then be posted on the KS website for voters to consider.

The third part of “official” TsVK campaigning will be a contest among the candidates’ political programs. Candidates will write essays on how they picture a future Russia that has undergone a change in ruling government, and on what the role of the KS should be. The essays will then be posted online without the authors’ names, and voters can choose which ones they most prefer.

None of the results of these events will have any direct bearing on candidates’ ability to run in the election, Volkov stressed – they are simply meant to inform the public of who their choices are.

The Opposition Coordination Council elections will be held on October 20-21, 2012. Currently, more than 38 thousand people have undergone the thorough verification process to register to vote online. Volkov said he expects those numbers to reach around 150-200 thousand by late October. In addition to online voting, organizers are planning to open 70-80 electoral committees all across Russia where people will be given internet access to vote. The resulting committee, made up of 30 general delegates and five each with particularly left, liberal, or nationalist views, will aim to give the non-systemic opposition a stronger, more united voice in the face of ongoing persecution in Russia.