Election Interlude

The topic-searching, prospectus-writing drama is ongoing but I thought I’d take a break from it all to tell you about the “high drama” of the local elections here in Kazan last Sunday. Over 77 Russian constituent regions held 7,900 elections with over 109,000 candidates and the seats of 53,259 deputies and heads of local governments at stake across Russia, including elections for the city council and some form of administrator in Kazan. However, when I google-news-ed “Russia” in English the morning of election day, it spit back stories of Russia’s defeat of Ireland in the Euro 2012 qualifier, a spacecraft docking at the International Space Station, the Finance Minister’s projections for the economy based on current oil prices as well as a slew of stories still talking about President Medvedev’s ouster of the Mayor of Moscow two weeks earlier and a few on Arnold Schwartzenegger’s trip to Moscow’s new technology hub (with a stop in Kazan!), but not one English language news story on the local elections. Russian media had only a little more coverage, all very dry and pre-programmed emphasizing the unusually large number of elections in one day, the new voting machines in Chelyabinsk and the security provided to keep the elections safe from terrorism.

I was at first appalled by this journalistic travesty. Look how everyone was snubbing the periphery again. But then I went out to the polls with my host mother and it all became very clear. It was a crisp but sunny day as it’s been in Kazan the past week and we strolled along through the back alleys of neighboring apartment bloks to get to the school where Valeria would vote. On the way she told me more about her ex-husband. Apparently, they divorced 4 years ago because he cheated on and then left her for a younger woman. She said she wasn’t upset because she was tired of him anyway but the loss of the second income had made her life financially difficult. I asked if he paid her any alimony and she looked at me like I was crazy. He cheated and left and then took it upon himself to divide up their assets from on high giving her the apartment and some money from the sale of a garage though using the bulk of that profit to buy a new apartment in another city for himself and the new wife. He also got the dacha and was kind enough to let her use it but recently has been threatening to sell it. This has caused Valeria immense distress because as Soviet urban as she seems with her high heels and over-reliance on hairspray and blue eye shadow, she goes out to the dacha almost every weekend to get some clean air and pick vegetables—most recently we wound up with a kitchen full of mushrooms that sat in huge wicker baskets until they were variously boiled, canned, pickled and set out on the balcony in jars. Recently she had hatched a plan to sell part of the land on which the dacha sits and use it to buy out the husband and keep the dacha for herself. Unfortunately, it seems no one is interested in buying the land so she’s back to the state of dacha-induced stress in which I first found her. I asked if any of this seemed fair to her since he was the one who had cheated and left and why she didn’t just take him to court. Again I got the blank stare meant to remind me of our different “mentalities” and she curtly stated that she had no desire to get the courts involved in her private affairs. And it is always surprising to be reminded of just how indoctrinated into the American ethos I am. Stepping back it is actually a strange concept that the state would or should step into a personal relationship and decide that a cheating husband has to compensate his wife financially for his sexual infidelity, and I can see how years of fighting to preserve that small personal space separate from the totalitarian state has made Valeria wary of giving them any entry into her private life now, and how all other experiences since have signaled that the new incarnation of the Russian state is not particularly concerned with helping her out. Still, the uppity entitled American in me is appalled that she just has to suffer while he gets the girl and the lion’s share of their property in addition to the power to sell the dacha and its mushrooms out from under her high heels.

We arrived at the school and from the street the signs for the election were not even visible. As we got closer there were two small sad fliers on the door and some kids playing on a swing set but not another voter in sight. Inside, a small room of the school was set up as I’ve seen hundreds of post-Soviet schoolrooms set up for election day: a row of sleepy officials with lots of paperwork, two booths with polyester curtains, some policemen milling about. On the way there Valeria had mentioned that she had no idea what the elections were for or who was running. I walked up to a board with all of the relevant information to figure it out for myself as she signed in and got her ballots. There were four standard-issue stern-faced pictures of the candidates for an administrative position that at the time I assumed was the head of the city council but later could not confirm as such—3 Tatar, 1 Russian, all grim and Soviet looking. Below each picture was a brief profile that listed their education—all “higher” meaning college or technical school, their professions—one docent in the Politology faculty of the University, one director of a chemical factory, one that I can’t remember and one, the Edinaya Rossiya (i.e. Putin’s ruling) party candidate, was currently the administrative head of Naberezhnye Chelny, the next big town over from Kazan. It also listed their salaries—the highest of which was the factory director’s at 900,000 rubles (about $30,000) per year. Next to the esteemed gentlemen was a list of the parties competing for the council seats—Putin eliminated the direct election of representatives and replaced it with a closed-list party system a few years back—and they were Edinaya Rossiya, a regional Tatar party, the communists and LDPR, in that order.

The School/Polling Station from Afar, No Sign of Election

Valeria called me over before she stepped into the booth to show me the ballots and explain who was running. I looked self-consciously around at the police and election officials ready to be reprimanded for “family voting” but apparently they didn’t care that there was some American girl exerting her influence on a voter in front of them. She said that she didn’t know any of the candidates and shrugged as she went into the booth. I stood there thinking about the contrast between these local elections and the ones at home in the States. As my address is always in flux, I’m still registered to vote in Pennsylvania at my parents’ house and usually they convince me it’s crucial that I come home or send in an absentee ballot because every vote really does count in our small-to-medium sized township. My dad will feed me stories of who is suspected of mismanaging funds and who made a fool of himself on local television at the supervisor’s meeting, while my mom will gossip about how that woman backstabbed her friend and they now don’t talk when they run into each other at the supermarket. They know these people running for office intimately well from “the community,” from the seemingly endless civic organizations to which my dad belongs and committees on which my mother has served, from my dad’s own foray into local politics as the town auditor and my mother’s stint as PTA president, as well as from local events they’ve helped organized like the Taste of the Suburbs and the Optimist Club Annual Trout Rodeo. It’s the embodiment of what Tocqueville and Putnam described a few centuries apart about the thriving, churning milieu of American social life feeding into politics via the dense social networks of civil society organizations. There are 20 year rivalries, personal friendships, shoddily produced campaign materials and sometimes even scandals like a hate letter that was hand-delivered to everyone’s mailbox one year. It has a completely different quality than presidential elections because it’s so personal and in a way it is almost like there is more at stake. Not that anyone will actually make any radical policy changes in the Township and have any kind of noticeable effect on good old King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. But it is more like high school student council elections, like a highly personalized popularity contest that gives the winners social status, bragging rights and an air of smugness, while leaving the losers bitter and grumbling for the next few years. And it’s true that I am a terrible citizen in that I don’t do my own research and figure out the platforms of the different candidates. I just listen to what my parents have to say and am happy to add another vote to the family block on my way to get some Wawa coffee.

And then here I am in Kazan, this comparatively huge metropolis with an almost infinite number of rivaling constituencies from big businesses and pensioners to different ethnic groups and religious communities and the local politics are dead and flat, devoid of any drama. Despite the fact that the local government actually controls a relatively large budget and is responsible for things with real impact on daily life like schools, roads and healthcare, there is absolutely no sense that one party or candidate stands for a different position on which roads to fix, which schools to refurbish, which health programs to initiate. There’s no tie to local issues, no information on who these wooden candidates might be and whose interests they might represent. Politics here are in that sense apolitical. And it makes perfect sense that none of my journalist friends or their colleagues bothered to take a trip out to report on this colossal non-event in action.

The Only Election Poster I Saw Anywhere, for the Communist Party

There was also this notice informing residents of my building that they could vote 

with a mobile ballot box if needed

But they would have to find said notice to the right of all the others

Georgi Derlugian, whose Tale of Two Cities is one of the most brilliant and funny juxtapositions of American and Post-Soviet life I know of if you haven’t read it, came to a Comparative Politics workshop I attended last year and mentioned the fact that political scientists never talk about variation in the “emotional energy” of politics. And at the time I remember thinking since he is from and writes about the Caucasus that he meant the kind of emotional energy in politics that results in a drunken 16 year old Dato and the rest of his teenage friends being handed machine guns to fire on the Parliament during the 1992 coup in Georgia. But thinking on it now, it’s exactly the emotional energy coursing through my parents’ veins as they go to the polls to very peacefully vote in friends or vote out foes in the US that is completely lacking in the apolitical politics here in Kazan. Everyone I’ve talked to since who bothered to vote in the election had never heard of any of the candidates. They voted out of some sense of civic duty engrained from Soviet times when voting was not just mandatory but a huge celebration. There used to be concerts and a huge buffet, my host mother nostalgically recalled as we left the polls and headed home. The buffet was a big deal, she said, because at the time you couldn’t buy anything in the stores so the government laying out tables of smoked fishes and meats and mayonnaise-laden salads was such a huge incentive to draw people to the polls that they rarely had to go rapping on doors to remind them of their obligation to vote. “Now we can buy all the things in stores if we have enough money and the government no longer provides the buffet” she explained unwittingly encapsulating one of the best descriptions of the post-communist transition that I’ve heard.

And obviously everything I’ve just written is all anecdotal. I have no way of telling you whether the factory director running as a candidate for the head of Kazan’s city government was just a stooge who never stood a chance, if he faced any kind of repression from the authorities that had kept him from actively campaigning, if there really was a big constituency of like-minded citizens or mobilized factory employees behind him or if there was any actual competition or doubt introduced into the outcome of the race between these 4 candidates on election day. I just know that my host mother cast her vote for Edinaya Rossiya, as one does, not under any pressure or with any hope for improvement in the city or her own situation, and that these elections seemed really sad and Soviet, but without the buffet.