July 28, 2021

Kremlin deploys clones to fight St. Petersburg’s last opposition MP

topic:	Election
located:	Russia
editor:	Andrew Getto

It is difficult to come up with a dirty trick that hasn't been used in Russian elections. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, one of the most recognisable politicians in the country over the past 30 years, is just one example of that. 

Zhirinovsky yells and curses constantly; he spills orange juice in his opponent’s face, then drunkenly threatens to twitch the Earth’s gravitation to cause a biblical flood in the United States. This loud demeanor - devoid of any practical agenda - will win him his share of the ballot, as we saw too many times throughout history.

Zhirinovsky is not a lone spoiler, though. The actual opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, was forbidden from running for President in 2018 (and nearly got killed two years later). The Kremlin instead cleared space for Ksenia Sobchak, a journalist and socialite, who happens to be the daughter of Mr Putin’s former boss. After getting her foreseeable 1 percent, she grievously declared on state television that the Russian people are just not ready for a liberal democracy. 

Then, in a clumsy attempt to overshadow Navalny’s FBK foundation, the authorities created FPBK - an essentially bogus organisation whose leader is busy reporting every last  remaining independent media worker in Russia as foreign agents. 

But that’s not the last trick up the sleeves of Russian spin doctors. In fact, we can now declare it an early era of political operations, and we’re moving towards cutting-edge clone warfare, with St. Petersburg as the testing ground.

Boris Vishnevsky is a well-known opposition and human rights activist. In May, he submitted his candidacy for both the national and St. Petersburg parliaments; but there was a twist: two more men named Boris Vishnevsky ran for parliament in the same constituencies. The only difference was the patronymic - the father’s first name, which is legally required to be present in all Russian documents. Local residents therefore found not one but three lines reading “Mr Boris Vishnevsky” on the preliminary ballot.

One can argue that this name is not that uncommon. That’s true, but unlike Boris Lazarevich Vishnevsky, who has a decades-old track record in local politics, the other two haven’t had any digital trace at all. 

However, Russian operatives are known for their poor preparation - like that time when a GRU spy in the Netherlands was caught with a taxi slip in his pocket. Journalists from Novaya Gazeta took on the case and soon found something truly striking.

Let’s take a look at Boris Ivanovich Vishnesky, who ran with an obscure party named The Greens. According to official data, he was born in a village in North-Eastern Russia, currently populated by five (that’s right, five) people. There is just one man who was born on the same day as the candidate and went on to become a St. Petersburg politician. He actually bears the patronymic Ivanovich, but that’s the last bit of truth. Otherwise, he had always been known as Viktor Bykov, a notable figure in the local posse of the ruling United Russia party. 

As early as this March, he was accepting visitors in the party’s office in central St. Petersburg, before making the life-altering decision to change both his affiliation and first and last names.

Number two, Boris Gennadyevich Vishnevsky, took the same path. Until very recently, he was known as Alexei Gennadyevich Shmelev, and had never been involved in politics. But here he is, eager to represent dozens of thousands of people in a legislative body. Or, rather, to do his  only job of confusing passers-by, whose signatures Mr Vishnevsky needs in order to remain in the race.

The idea of using clones was attributed to a PR master named Alexei Koshmarov back in the 1990s. But it was used again successfully in 2016 in St. Petersburg. Seasoned opposition MP Oksana Dmitrieva lacked about 8,000 votes to beat her competitor from 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 bold and observant. (The real) Mr Vishnevsky’s future in politics depends entirely on the ability of his voters to treat officials as con artists by default and watch their every move closely.

Image: Dimitro Sevastopol 

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