Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 13 – The Kremlin has
conducted a behind the scenes poll to determine how the heads of federal
subjects are viewed by their own people, with all of them ranked according to
the difference between those who are supported by them and those who their
people would like to see removed, the RBC news agency reports, citing anonymous
sources.
Those where the number of residents wanting
a replacement exceeds that of residents supporting
the incumbent was greatest, according to the poll, were Sevastopol in Russian-occupied
Crimea, Arkhangelsk oblast, Komi Republic and the Republic of Ingushetia (rbc.ru/politics/13/05/2019/5cd833c69a79473d96e31d96).
Ingushetia’s Yunus-Bek Yevkurov was
at the very bottom of the list: with 62 percent wanting him to be replaced and only
22 percent favoring his retention, a situation not surprising given the
protests that have roiled public life there since he gave away 26,000 hectares
of Russia’s smallest federal subject (other than cities) to neighboring
Chechnya last September.
Those governors at the other end of the
scale, whose support outnumbered opposition were Sergey Sobyanin in Moscow city
(a 59 percent advantage of support over opposition), Aleksey Dyumin of Tula
Oblast (57 percent), Aleksandr Tsybulsky of the Nenets Autonomous District (56
percent), and Aleksandr Moor of Tyumen Oblast (55 percent).
This is at least the second such
poll the Kremlin has commissioned because the sources told RBC that some
governors had gone up and others down in the rating while others remained “stable”
in either positive or negative territory.
But experts with whom the
journalists spoke cautioned against assuming that these poll ratings represent a
true surrogate for the elections that no longer occur or matter. Instead, they
suggested, the Kremlin will continue to take into account personal
relationships and the fact that some federal subjects are more difficult to
rule than others.
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