How Much Did Candidates Pay Per Signature?
This is from February 3, but it's still interesting.
Political analyst Maksim Kats has looked at the declared spending of each campaign so far to see how much each candidate spent gathering their signatures. He compares that with how much he had to pay per signature when he ran for the State Duma in 2014. Putin got his for just 14 rubles per signature. Sobchak paid 42 rubles. Yavlinsky paid 196 rubles.
Kats argues that the numbers show that Putin used "administrative resources" to get his signatures. The numbers for Sobchak indicate that she tried to get her signatures legally at first, he says, but was having little success and so used administrative resources. She paid 581,000 rubles to people collecting signatures and 10 million rubles for "consultants." Yavlinsky paid 22 million to his signature collectors (didn't need any consultants!).
Never mind...
...the March 18 presidential election.
According to a commentary titled Apolitcal Therapy in Novaya Gazeta by Yuliya Galyamina of the Moscow-based School of Local Self-Administration, it is local referendums that will be the engine of change in Russia -- fueled by less highly politicized, grassroots issues.
A Nizhny Tagil furniture store has started a marketing campaign in which some of its furniture is named after candidates: "Ksenia" pillow, "Volfich" (nickname for Zhirinovsky) sofa, "Gennady" wardrobe. And people got all indignant about it.
Here's the report from Current Time TV:
It's clear from the accompanying text story that the candidates and their parties are not amused.
- By Carl Schreck
Asset Declarations
Putin has declared his income and assets to the Central Election Commission, a requirement for presidential candidates.
Here's a link to his and others' declarations so far.
And here's a breakdown of Putin's declaration via RBK.
Putin's total declared income for 2011-16 was 38.5 million rubles ($674,000) from his presidential salary, bank deposits, and a military pension. Ahead of the 2012 election, he declared an income of 17.7 million rubles ($309,887) over the previous four years.
Putin added in the declaration that he owns one 77-square-meter apartment and a garage in St. Petersburg, as well as two Soviet-made cars from the 1960s, a Russian-made Lada off-road vehicle from 2009, and a small camper.
The Kremlin has long denied claims that Putin has a vast hidden fortune. Individuals seen as being part of his inner circle, however, have become enormously wealthy during his 18 years in power as either president or prime minster.
Navalny has explained why he was summoned to the Investigative Committee.
During questioning, he says, he was shown a medical report in which a police officer claimed Navalny kicked him in the right knee.
Campaign Trail
Putin is on a trip today to Krasnoyarsk, touring facilities ahead of the Universiade in 2019 and meeting with the governor and the region's "main economic players" in part to discuss environmental issues, according to spokesman Dmitry Peskov. Those big "players" could include Vladimir Potanin and Vladimir Rashevsky, as well as Oleg Deripaska or a representative.
Putin's then heading to Novosibirsk.
Ninety minutes of raw video feed of Sobchak at CSIS. It was a 15-minute talk by Sobchak followed by a Q&A session. (You can get our rundown by Mike Eckel in Washington here.)
Grudinin says Stalin Russia's greatest leader of last 100 years
"What other leaders have we had? If you don't count Lenin -- he was more a theoretician and he didn't manage to bring many of his ideas to life since he died young," mk.ru quotes the Communist Party candidate as saying.
Stalin is good, Grudinin says, because "he took an absolutely illiterate country and turned it into the country with the very best education," increased the country's GDP by 15 percent, and created Soviet medicine (which amazed the Americans and British).
Grudinin acknowledges that Stalin repressed people but says he didn't murder them.
He says he opposes showing the Death of Stalin movie despite an "extremely negative" view of censorship. "We shouldn't laugh at people who are in the grave. That isn't art, but a mocking of our history." He says it isn't a matter of censorship but of "decency."
Putin may for the first time cast his vote not in Moscow but at a polling station in the Crimean city of Sevastopol, newspaper Kommersant writes on February 7.
Russia's seizure of Crimea in 2014 was met with jubilation in Russia, and the authorities appear to have shifted the date of these elections so that they fall on March 18, the fourth anniversary of the annexation.
But Putin's purported plans to cast his vote in Crimea could reflect the desire to boost turnout there and illustrate the "lack of administrative successes" in the region in 2014, the newspaper writes. In September 2016, at the first federal elections held under Russian control, turnout was just 49 percent.