Moscow
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
The candidate, Oleg V. Shein of the Just Russia party, says that falsified tallies cost him the March 4 election, in which a member of Vladimir V. Putin’s United Russia party was declared the winner. Complaints to election officials and the courts hit dead ends, Mr. Shein said.
So for 27 days, he and a small group of supporters have refused to eat solid food, insisting that they will not do so until the results are overturned and a new vote is called.
On Tuesday, their effort was joined by several of the stars of this winter’s street protests, including a popular anticorruption blogger, Aleksei Navalny, and two opposition members of Parliament, Dmitry Gudkov and Ilya Ponomaryov, who tried — and failed — to help broker a deal with the local authorities.
The appearance of the
They are now seeking to mobilize in regions away from
“It’s a crucial moment,” Mr. Navalny said in an interview on a downtown plaza where about 200 supporters of Mr. Shein had gathered. “We need to inspire these people. You know these small little conflicts; we have a lot of them.”
Mr. Navalny said that attention was rarely paid to local injustices until the national news media shined a spotlight. “The local authorities, they just don’t care,” he said. “When the federal media is promoting this information and it’s promoted from the Internet, it’s a real problem. That’s why it’s so important to attract people from
But the relatively modest number of protesters who turned out on Tuesday — fewer than 500 people in a city of around half a million, in the evening after the end of the workday — suggested that it could prove increasingly difficult for opposition leaders to gain traction the farther they get from Russia’s largest urban centers.
Sergei Parkhomenko, a radio host, wondered on Facebook if his fellow Muscovites were more interested in the mayoral race in
For its part, the Kremlin did not seem alarmed. A spokesman for Mr. Putin, Dmitri S. Peskov, told the Interfax news agency that the president-elect had been fully briefed on the events in
The
“There was no point in Navalny and his supporters coming here,” Mr. Zhilikin wrote. “They don’t know the region, the people, our culture. And they have no idea that Astrakhaners are hospitable people, with good intentions.” He also accused Mr. Shein and his supporters of lying about drinking only water for more than three weeks, writing that people who have gone so long without food could not act as “aggressively” as they did at Tuesday’s rallies.
While there was some minor scuffling with the police, the rallies were mostly peaceful.
Mr. Shein, who turned 40 in March, has served three terms as a member of the State Duma, the lower house of Parliament. He ran for mayor of
At Tuesday’s rallies, amid 70-degree heat and thick humidity, Mr. Shein looked rail thin and said he had lost about 20 pounds.
He wore black jeans and a black button-down shirt, the only glint coming from his belt buckle and the clip of a Parker pen sitting in his breast pocket. Throughout the day, he often had a black cellphone to his ear, and once in a while he would pull a small point-and-shoot camera from his back pocket.
He said that he was certain he had won the election, and that he would not eat solid food until the results were thrown out. He said he would be going back to court with another challenge. “We struggle for freedom and democracy,” Mr. Shein said. “And these are great values.”
In the report cited by the governor, regional prosecutors said they had checked 134 polling stations and interviewed 1,657 people and found only a handful of “insignificant violations.” The majority of Mr. Shein’s complaints, the prosecutors said, could not be substantiated.
Mr. Navalny and other supporters of Mr. Shein say there is ample evidence that he should have won the election. They say he won a majority of votes at polling stations that used new, electronic counting systems, while at polling stations where tallies were done by hand, he typically received only 2 percent of the votes. Videos posted on the Web show election observers being forced away from polling stations during the counting process.
The official results proclaimed the winner to be Mikhail Stolyarov, the United Russia candidate, with about 60 percent of the vote, and Mr. Shein in second place with about 30 percent. “There will be no revote,” Governor Zhilikin wrote on his blog late Tuesday. “Stolyarov is the duly elected mayor.”
Before leaving for a meeting with the governor, Mr. Ponomaryov said that demonstrators were trying to make a real difference in Russian society. “We do not hold protests for the sake of protests or hunger strikes for the sake of hunger strikes,” he said. “We are not extremists. We are not terrorists. All we want is that the law should take the upper hand.”
Ellen Barry contributed reporting from
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"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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