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A democratic socialist running for Russian parliament. What could go wrong?

By:   []

Date: 2021-11

But since then there have been so many waves of 'bordering' [the constant replacement of street curbs, which is believed to have links to corruption], so many situations when the Moscow authorities gave greenfield sites over to development, situations when public hearings over development were replaced by digital votes. These problems with roads and the all-out offensive by property developers have reached almost every courtyard in the city – and the situation has changed.

People hate the mayor’s office and its urban planning policy, calling it a cancer cell that grows and swallows more and more territory. I don’t have any sociological data, but purely subjectively, I feel that everything has changed on this front. We see a lot of discontent in the courtyards, on the streets. We see it on social networks, in neighbourhood chats.

Is it normal for single-mandate candidates to run for Parliament with a local city agenda? Why didn’t you run, for example, in the Moscow City Duma in 2019?

Most of my civic life was not associated with local problems – or rather, not only with them. I started my civic activities at Moscow State University, and am still involved there. This is the leading university in Russia, and its life is organised according to national legislation. These are the problems of higher education and science, and this is the domain of the State Duma, these areas are not regulated by the city or the municipality. It receives funding from the federal budget. So we have been dealing with national issues at the national level for many years.

As a democratic socialist, a person with left-wing democratic views, I am very worried about inequality, and instruments of self-organisation, such as trade unions, as an instrument of real democracy and the fight against inequality. This is an issue that cannot be decided at the municipal level or at the level of the Moscow City Duma – it can be influenced precisely from the State Duma. Plus, it is at this level that there are resources that can and should be used to solve problems. Municipal deputies do not receive salaries, they have no paid assistants and almost no real leverage.

A State Duma deputy receives a resource in the form of a noticeable number of salary assistants, his own salary, which can be put into action. He can hold rallies under the guise of a meeting with a deputy. He has real immunity. With the help of these things, one can help the development of the trade union movement, develop systemic, global mechanisms for solving local problems, and develop local self-government. We are trying to go where there are resources for solving the problems that we have been dealing with for years.

Can you give an example of parliamentary deputies who contributed to trade union activities in Russia?

There is Oleg Shein, he came out of the trade union movement in Astrakhan during the 1990s. He maintains ties with the Confederation of Labour of Russia, maybe not so actively. Back in the 2000s, we conducted a campaign together against agency labour. This problem had only just come to Russia from other countries – when a company outsources some of the workers who work directly at the plant, and the workers actually work at the plant, but formally they have lower wages, worse working conditions and no legal protection. This is a practice with dire consequences for people and the economy as a whole.

Independent trade unions tried to stop this emerging threat and tried to influence the pro-government trade unions. I went to their May Day demonstration with a large bundle of leaflets against agency labour, and we managed to convince them to support the campaign. As a result, some restrictions were introduced into the legislation, which narrowed the possibilities of using agency labour.

The State Duma has a certain number of deputies who help trade unions and other activists with deputy requests and the opportunity to hold rallies as meetings with deputies, including Valery Rashkin and Denis Parfenov [both from the Communist Party].

Do you have some kind of internal polling? What are the numbers like in terms of your support?

I personally do not apply the concept of sociology to election polling. Sociology is an important science, and it has nothing to do with polling before elections. It is customary in Russia to use the same word to describe this – polls and sociology. It is better to separate these concepts.

We do not spend our resources on polling. We collect money in small donations, and we are going to spend it sparingly, only on the most important things. Our job is just to campaign as widely as possible. To convince as many people as possible that these elections are important, that we can use them together to show our dissatisfaction, give the authorities a powerful slap on the head, and show how dissatisfied we are with their policies.

Then how do you understand who your voter is?

Our voters are all categories of citizens. We are running with a left-wing democratic agenda. Usually, in our society, these ideas confuse people, but when we decipher that this means fighting inequality, fighting for real democracy – not for the right to put a ballot in a box every two years, but for the opportunity to really influence our lives at all levels, we see that almost everyone is ready to subscribe to this. Despite the organisational weakness of the democratic Left in Russia now, there have been tremendous shifts over the past 15 years in terms of ideas and their perception in the intellectual, academic environment.
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