Paul Goble
Staunton,
October 9 – In Russia today, Aleksey Baykov says, there exists “a system of
internal apartheid, one which divides all the population into two categories
with unequal rights, into Spartans and helots, citizens of the polis and
non-citizens, [and] into ‘Cossacks’ and ‘aliens,’ in short into local people
and immigrants.”
The
Moscow commentator notes that this system has a name: “the institution of
residence permits or propiskas”
profoundly who can vote and where, a set of consequences clearly shown in the
last few elections in the city of Moscow (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2018/10/08/78108-kazaki-i-iloty).
According to the
Moscow city election authorities, as of July 1, 2018, there were 7,202,493 people
with the right to vote in a city which has between 21 and 25 million residents.
Some of those without that right are too young, of course, but most of those
who can’t vote are residents, who work and pay taxes but are treated as aliens.
Worse, this very same situation
exists in St. Petersburg and all the other Russian cities which are the destinations
of migration flows. It should be clear to everyone that “this contradicts the
very logic of democracy,” Baykov says.
According to him, “present-day
democracy is above all ‘the state of the tax payers,’ in which those who work
and spend money which gives others the possibility to work are the ones who
vote.” But that isn’t the case in
Russia. Not only those from other countries but those from other regions of Russia
can’t vote where they work.
The latter of course are allowed to
return home to where they are registered, but few are going to incur the time
and expense of travelling perhaps thousands of kilometers to do so. They are
thus disenfranchised by their own government’s laws. Some 20 regions have
adopted rules following international practice, but they don’t publicize the
fact very much.
What is especially depressing, the
Moscow commentator continues, is that the Russian opposition which should be
interested in acquiring more votes has seldom if ever taken up the cause of
those excluded because of the propiska
system which is unconstitutional but very much in practice in Russia
today.
Because Russian citizens who move from one place to
another to work can’t vote, no one takes much interest in them because they can’t
offer any candidate something of value, Baykov says. Those who think “such an
order of things is just” should “stop calling themselves ‘democrats,’” because
they aren’t.
Unlike
in the EU, only Russian citizens and people from Belarus, Turkmenistan,
Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have the right to take part in elections for local
offices. Few do because no one tells these people they have the right. As a
result, Baykov continues, only a microscopic number – ‘from 20 to 30 people’ –
actually do.
This
system must change, he concludes, and opposition parties have the greatest possible
interest in changing it.
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