Villagers near Ryazan Voted for Pensions and the Church, not for Putin and the Empire, Degyanov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 7 – By packaging amendments together and using administrative resources, the Kremlin guaranteed the percentages it needed to pass the measures and extend Vladimir Putin’s time in office. But many in rural Russia, who voted yes, did so not because they wanted that but because they cared about other things, Andrey Degtyanov says.

            The Russian historian bases that conclusion on his conversations and observations in his native village to which he returned during the period of voting. And he says that even election officials recognized that reality. When people asked what the amendments were about, they told them that they were about getting pensions and having the right to attend church, he says.

            Thus, the residents of this decaying village which has lost three-quarters of its population over the last two decades and no longer has the school or medical point it had in the past in effect voted for their own personal interests rather than for what the Kremlin leader in fact wanted and claimed he had received (region.expert/dusk/).

            What this means, Degtyanov continues, is that villagers who don’t work directly for the state and thus can be pressured that way into voting the way the Kremlin wants had to be pushed into voting correctly “not for the empire” or for its Kremlin leader “but for their pensions.” And by voting for their own interests, they are also turning away from all-Russian ones.

            One KPRF district leader even remarked about the whole fake vote that “this is your Muscovite Putin, your Muscovite Constitution, and your Muscovite amendments.”  Such attitudes openly expressed show that “the procession of the regionalization of the imperial opposition has begun.”

            And a second communist leader remarked that “Ryzan is not Moscow, and Moscow is not Russia!” reflecting an attitude that seems set to grow into the idea that “Russia is not an Empire!”  What the Kremlin calls “’the deep people’ are tired of the Imperial vertical” and won’t vote for what the vertical wants unless bribed, something the regime is ever less able to do.

            This trend “opens a window of opportunities” in the upcoming elections because the regionalization of the opposition such attitudes require will make the voting entirely different than it has been before. No longer will “hurrah patriotic” attitudes dominate. Instead, people will vote out of a sense that they are victims of profound injustice.

            This doesn’t mean that Russia with its thousand-year history is irrelevant or is about to pass from the scene, the historian observes, but it does mean that “the twilight of the imperial system” is already present and spreading. If the Kremlin refuses to see that, so much the worse for the Kremlin.