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A Day in the Life of the CEC Chairman
Special correspondent Andrey Kolesnikov spent half the day with chairman of the Central Election Commission Vladimir Churov yesterday. He learned there was a shortage of ballots in South Ossetia and how Garri Kasparov is like Paris Hilton. Finally, he saw Churov be accused of violating campaigning rules.
At 3:20 yesterday, chairman of the Central Election Commission arrived at the mayor’s office in Moscow with his absentee ballot to cast his vote. Churov, who is registered in St. Petersburg, chose that polling station for a reason. He used to live in the building across the street from it. He told journalists that his grandfather was a victim of Stalin’s repressions, but he was lucky enough to be released in 1940 and even receive an apartment in that building.
As soon as Churov entered the booth, an elderly woman dressed in black said loudly, “Well, that’s it. Churov broke the law. That’s what we’re writing.”
“What did he do?” I asked, mystified.
“He started talking about arrests!” she replied indignantly. “About his grandfather. That’s campaigning. It’s illegal!”
“Who was he campaigning for?” I still hadn’t caught on. “His grandfather?”
“Not for whom, against whom,” she huffed. “And I am an observer he to record it.”
“Who do you represent as an observer?” I asked.
“The Communist Party of the Russian Federation!” she yelled into my face, with such fury that you could have thought that she hated it.
I told the CEC chairman this story when we were in his car.
“So whom did I campaign against? Stalin?” he asked.
He has a pillow in the back seat of his car. He told me that sometime he sleeps there. He spent last night at the CEC, and slept five hours. I was with him that night. About 20 foreigners came into his office at 10:30 that night. They were journalists and representatives of nonpolitical organizations in Europe. He spent more than twp hours with them.
“They asked me about Kasparov for the third time,” Churov said, throwing his arms up. “Again they want to know why the parliamentary candidate is being persecuted. But I already told them that he didn’t run. He is not a candidate. But hen I couldn’t stop myself. ‘How is Garri Kasparov different from Paris Hilton?’ I asked. They were silent. ‘One got a month for disturbing the peace, and the other got five days.’”
Churov said that not one of them mentioned that Farid Babaev, a Yabloko candidate in Dagestan, was shot during the campaign. He called Minister of Emergency Situations Sergey Shoigu, because they took the injured candidate to a ministry hospital, and then the head of the hospital called him every half hour, but he said from the first that Babaev was wounded in the head and there was almost no chance that he would make it. Churov also said that they nearly went crazy trying to understand why the CEC did not register the Greens, the party of Sazha Umalatova and that of Sergey Baburin. Finally they had to accept that they were disqualified for problems with their signature gathering.
“No one knows that the whole CEC spent two hours trying to find the last 102 signatures for the party of Sazha Umalatova. She was 102 signatures short. We made every allowance we could. But they weren’t there. Baburin called once an hour.
Churov said that journalists were to blame for everything, as usual. They misquoted him after the March of the Dissenters. He told them that “no complaint was received from candidate Gozman with his medical certificate,” but they wrote that Churov asked that he provide that certificate and he said they didn’t give him one.
“The [candidate and RAO UES of Russia board member Leonid] Gozman got offended,” Churov sighed. “Then I phoned [Union of Right Forces leader Nikita] Belykh and if you want to continue this story, give us a certificate. And he said that they have no problems with me.”
The Churov recalled how the CEC was suspected of making one of the balls with the numbers on them that determined the parties order of listing on the ballot heavier than the others, so that the United Russia Party could be No. 10. The ball was heavier because it had been placed in a refrigerator.
“I’m not a physicist,” Churov said. “I took a similar ball home and put it in the refrigerator. I left it there one day, then another. When I took it out, it was hardly cold. Oh well, I thought, I didn’t put it in the freezer. So I put it in the freezer and took it out again in two days. There was a layer of frost on it. And when the frost melted, there was a puddle. So that was nonsense.”
After midnight, I dropped in to the “demonstration center,” that is, the Election 2007 information center, where journalists and observers were to meet in the morning. Former CEC member Dmitry Oreshkin was preparing the software. Now he is candidate from the Union of Right Forces, but I think he was happy to do it.
He showed me two dozen computers that journalists wouldn’t be seeing. I wasn’t supposed to see them either, probably, because one of them showed how systems administrators voted as a test. It wasn’t a real vote. They simply pressed any button to get a result to generate graphics from.
But they must have thought a little about it. Otherwise, United Russia would not be in its legal 10th spot with just 4.5 percent of the vote.
Now Churov came to the CEC with his wife, who voted with him. He was pleased with the high turnout.
“Irina Vladimirovna is worried about your beard,” his wife told him.
About three months ago, Churov promised in an interview with Tigran Keosayan that he would shave off his beard if there was anything dishonest, or even nontransparent, in the elections.
“I wouldn’t even recognize him without his beard,” said Larisa Nikolaeva Churova (nee Efremova). “He already had his beard when we met. I can’t even imagine him without his beard.”
She seemed to be preparing herself for it.
“I remember meeting her,” Churov broke in. “That was in 1970! When I was in the institute.”
I asked how many ballots has been counted. He said that it was 0.4 percent.
“But nobody knows the results but me,” he added.
“Why did you say that…” I muttered.
“He does it on purpose to puff himself up,” his wife said with an affectionate smile.
The car was going down Mokhovaya St. in heavy traffic.
“You don’t have an escort,” I noted.
“No escort, no bodyguards. I don’t need them.”
“Today you might.”
“Today? They told me that all the approaches to the CEC look like the Maginot Line on Election Day. I told them that’s not so, because there’s not a single concrete fortress around it. The comparison is incorrect.”
“Listen,” I said. “Did you know that people wanted to see you an hour ago because they wanted to vote but they didn’t receive absentee ballots. Mainly people on business trips.”
“I know,” he said with annoyance. “It’s a flash mob. An organized action. People get absentee ballots before they leave on trips. Can you imagine several dozen people on business trips meeting in one place and giving interviews before coming to see us? It’s a flash mob.”
“You know, the same situation arose during the last elections in 2003 as well.”
“Yes, there was a flash mob during the last elections too.”
I thought that the term hadn’t been invented yet in 2003, but the phenomenon existed.
Two generals followed us into his office. I knew one of them, Deputy Defense Minister Nikolay Pankov.
“Chukotka is finished,” Churov reported to him. “Counting has begun in Yakutia. Turnout is high everywhere.”
“It’s high in the armed forces too,” Pankov replied. “We got 95 percent in the military districts.”
“Where could they go in a closed garrison?” shrugged the chairman.
“You know what we were worried about,” the deputy minister told him. “This time we have a lot of contract servicemen and they live spread out in apartments. But we explained things to them and they showed up. And something else. There are issues in South Ossetia. We’re dealing with it.”
“What?” Churov looked concerned.
“There aren’t enough bulletins,” the general confessed.
“What? More than 28,000 came to vote?”
I understood from the generals’ explanation that the situations was complicated, to put it mildly. Using the figures of the Foreign Ministry, 28,000 ballets were printed for Russian peacekeepers stationed in South Ossetia. And it wasn’t enough. That is, more than 100 percent of the voters voted.
“They need another 1000 ballots,” the general said. “They are standing in line and not leaving.”
“Maybe we can send some that are already printed,” Churov suggested. “From North Ossetia. Probably people from North Ossetia went to South Ossetia for the weekend and that’s why there wasn’t enough.”
“The text is different,” said a CEC worker responsible for voters abroad who had come in.
“What if we send file with the right text?”
“Illegal.”
“They already printed some dummies just to calm people down,” one of the generals said.
People in Tskhinvali were upset that they couldn’t vote with their Russian passports. They had been so waiting for that moment. The complicating factor was that upset people could start shooting there. So they printed up some ballots that no one would count.
“How about Abkhazia?” Churov asked.
“There were enough there. [Abkhazian President Sergey] Bagapsh voted.”
“What? He’s a Russian citizen too?”
“Well, of course.”
“Of course, 28,000 is the upper limit,” Churov said. “What should we do? We allow voting at polls abroad.”
“[Communist Party leader Gennady] Zyuganov warned that they would bus voters into South Ossetia.”
“There are only three polling stations there.”
“We owe them an apology,” Churov said finally. “We have to say that we will learn from our mistakes before the presidential election.”
“Of course! that’s is a good position to take. Principled.”
The generals left happy and Churov’s telephone rang.
“So far so good,” he told someone on the other end. “Turnout is high. Take care of Electrogorsk, huh?”
Electrogorsk, where the mayoral election was called off, had been worrying Churov since last night. Ballots for the local elections were stolen. The ballots for the State Duma election were not taken.
“I’ve had CEC member Ermakova there personally all day,” Churov said. “We are holding the federal elections there. They are responsible for the failure of the local election. It’s time for me to take the stage.”
He had a teleconference with the elections commission of Chechnya in the information center.
“Then I have a cosmonaut’s wife, and then the cosmonaut himself, on the line.”
We sat in a back row as the CEC chairman waited his turn to speak. The general he had just been talking to were finishing their report to the camera. The an OSCE observer started speaking.
“The voting is being conducted democratically. No pressure was brought to bear on us,” the observer said.
“But he talks as though he were under pressure,” I observed to Churov.
“They’re like that,” Churov sighed, remembering how miserable they made him over Kasparov.
The deputy mayor of a small town in France was saying that he liked “all the tasty things” you could eat at the polling stations.
“Churov’s pies!” Churov called out with glee, so loudly that people turned to look at him. “I said that I associate elections with two kinds of rice pie from childhood that they at the polling stations.”
While we were still waiting, I asked about the working group from United Russia that would count the votes along with the CEC.
“Oh, it’ stupid,” Churov said. “We always create working groups from members of the CEC. For various issues, including turning in the protocols with the final results. So they asked us why we created the group by resolution of the chairman and not by resolution of the CEC. You can do it either way. I wasn’t thinking of having United Russia members there. But it’s nonsense, because they will only accept the protocols. The CEC members will still do the counting. It’s time…”
The teleconference with Chechnya started. They talked about the absence of irregularities and the importance of stability. And about the weather, of course. It’s overcast in Chechnya.
When we returned to his office, Churov showed me a white mouse sleeping in a big cage in the next room. It was a recent gift he received.
“He always sleeps days,” Churov said with a tender smile. “Our problems are no concern of his… Although everything seems to be going fine.” He caught himself.
When we went back into his office, television host and Public Chamber member Nikolay Svanidze entered. He wasn’t filming today and had been meaning to drop by and get acquainted with the head of the CEC, who immediately asked him his impressions of the elections campaign.
“Mixed,” Svanidze said thoughtfully. “One party, you know the one I mean, took advantage of state resources…”
“And that could have backfired,” Churov responded with feeling. “The foreign observers asked me yesterday if I had seen the huge sign for United Russia neat the Duma. I told them that, if I had been their campaign manager, that sign wouldn’t have been there. Quantity exceeded quality in a very complex way.”
As he was leaving, Svanidze told me worriedly, “You know, I go on two hours later in space today.”
Andrey Kolesnikov
All the Article in Russian as of Dec. 03, 2007
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