It’s hard to come up with a dirty trick that wasn’t used in the Russian elections. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, one of the country’s most famous politicians for the past 30 years, is just one example.
Zhirinovsky keeps screaming and cursing; he pours orange juice on his opponent’s face and then drunk and threatens to twist the gravity to cause a biblical flood in the United States. This loud demeanor – with no practical intent – will get him his part of the vote, as we have seen too many times throughout history.
However, Zhirinovsky is not a lonely spoiler. The actual opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, was banned from running for president in 2018 (and two years later he was almost killed). Instead, the Kremlin made way for Ksenia Sobchak, a journalist and celebrity who happens to be the daughter of Putin’s former boss. After getting her predictable 1 percent, she declared miserably on state television that the Russian people were simply not ready for liberal democracy.
Then, in a crude attempt to overshadow Navalny’s FBK foundation, the authorities created the FPBK – an essentially bogus organization whose leader is busy reporting every last independent media worker in Russia as a foreign agent.
But that’s not the last trick up the sleeve of Russian spin doctors. In fact, we can now declare it an early era of political operations and move towards cutting-edge clone warfare with St. Petersburg as a testing ground.
Boris Vishnevsky is a well-known opposition and human rights activist. In May he submitted his candidacy for both the national parliament and the St. Petersburg parliament; But there was a twist: two other men named Boris Vishnevsky ran for parliament in the same constituencies. The only difference was the patronymic – the father’s first name, which by law must be included in all Russian documents. The residents therefore found three lines with the words “Mr. Boris Vishnevsky” in the preliminary vote.
It can be argued that this name is not that unusual. That’s true, but unlike Boris Lazarevich Vishnevsky, who can look back on decades of success in local politics, the other two have no digital trace at all.
However, Russian agents are known for their poor preparation – like when a GRU spy was caught in the Netherlands with a taxi license in his pocket. Novaya Gazeta journalists took on the case and soon found something really conspicuous.
Let’s take a look at Boris Ivanovich Vishnesky who ran with an obscure party called The Greens. According to official information, he was born in a village in northeastern Russia, where five (exactly five) people currently live. There is only one man who was born on the same day as the candidate and later became a politician in St. Petersburg. He actually carries the patronymic Ivanovich, but that is the last bit of truth. Otherwise he was always known as Viktor Bykov, a notable figure in the local force of the ruling United Russia party.
As early as March of this year, he accepted visitors to the party office in central St. Petersburg before he made the life-changing decision to change his affiliation as well as his first and last name.
Number two, Boris Gennadyevich Vishnevsky, went the same route. Until recently he was known as Alexei Gennadyevich Shmelev and had never engaged in politics. But here he is, aiming to represent dozens of people on one legislature. Or rather, to do his only job of confusing passers-by whose signatures Mr. Vishnevsky needs to stay in the race.
The idea of using clones was attributed to a PR master named Alexei Koshmarov back in the 1990s. But also in 2016 it was successfully used again in St. Petersburg. Seasoned opposition MP Oksana Dmitrieva lacked about 8,000 votes to knock her rivals out of the ruling party, and she lost them to two women named Oksana Dmitrieva and Olesya Dmitriyeva.
If you want your voice to be heard in modern Russia, you need to be both courageous and observant. (The real) future of Mr Vishnevsky in politics depends entirely on the ability of his constituents to treat civil servants as cheaters by default and to closely monitor their every move.
Image: Dimitro Sevastopol
The post Kremlin uses clones in the fight against St. Petersburg's last opposition MP first appeared on Daily Florida Press.
from Daily Florida Press https://dailyfloridapress.com/kremlin-uses-clones-in-the-fight-against-st-petersburgs-last-opposition-mp/
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