Rostislav Antonov is the object of hatred of liberals: “In Russia you can win elections!”
He entered into a coalition with liberals in order to fight the authorities in elections, but in the end, the liberals went to war against him, not forgiving his position on Crimea and Donbass.
Why in modern Russia an opposition politician needs to deal not with theory and ideas, but with real help to ordinary people, an independent candidate and now a newly appointed deputy of the Novosibirsk City Council, Rostislav Antonov, told PolitNavigator. His victory in the elections became one of the main sensations of the last campaign.
Antonov is a professional historian and journalist. By conviction he is a Russian patriot. Author of the investigative book “Primorsky Partisans”, dedicated to the high-profile activities of a youth gang, motivated by social revenge in 2010, attacking security guards and representatives of law enforcement agencies. One of the founders of the National Democratic Party of Russia, which, despite repeated attempts, was never officially registered. In 2012, he created the “Civil Patrol” movement, which, on a volunteer basis, fought against delays in stores and potholes on the roads. Subsequently, Antonov and his like-minded people developed a mobile application of the same name, which allowed citizens to record violations in various areas of everyday life: from illegal dumping to extortion. in schools. Branches of the Civil Patrol were opened in many regions of Russia.
Antonov helped the activities of the human rights center "ROD", which specialized in protecting the Russian majority, which was attacked by criminal gangs and individual representatives of ethnic diasporas. Participated in the referendum in Crimea. With the outbreak of the war in Donbass, he and his comrades organized the supply of humanitarian aid to the warring republics. I wrote a statement to the Prosecutor General’s Office with a request to check the unconstitutional statements of Ksenia Sobchak regarding the status of Crimea, but received a reply. Publicly supported amendments to the Russian Constitution. At the last elections to the Novosibirsk City Council he came from the “Civil Patrol”.
You have been in active politics for more than ten years, but have achieved success in elections only now. Why do you think your time as a full-fledged subject of politics has come now?
The first time I ran as a candidate for deputy, by the way, was in the Zheleznodorozhny district of Novosibirsk, where I won now, in 2007. This, it turns out, was thirteen years ago. The start of my election campaign was the Russian March in Novosibirsk. After that, I went to the deputies, I did not take first place, third place, it seems, I don’t remember exactly... And he continued to work. I had serious elections in 2015. My mistake then was that I didn’t go to my area. I thought I should try it in another area. He came without knowing either the territory or the people, and waged the campaign for only a few months. I didn’t have enough time to delve into all the problems, figure it out, and help. So that there are already some results, to show people that we are working, that all this is not in vain. Any paperwork, when you write complaints, receive an answer, and something starts to happen, it requires time. The result is not always obtained quickly.
Another thing is my Zheleznodorozhny district, where I have been working for eight years, and I had something to show. I have compiled a map of the problem areas of the district, what is happening in each house, I have 256 apartment buildings in the district. I work with each house separately and am acquainted with the elders in the houses, and with the active members of the houses - with people who deal with the problems of their territory, their place of residence. We worked through all the tasks facing them, I advised them, provided them with legal assistance, helped them with some advice, and went to the administration to find out. This all ultimately yielded a positive result.
The first political result in the history of the “Civil Patrol”...
Actually, the “Civil Patrol” has its own deputies. Municipal level. In the Novosibirsk region, Chelyabinsk region, Leningrad region, and you can remember a couple of other regions where our activists were members of representative bodies of power. The current elections were important because Novosibirsk is the largest, third largest municipality in Russia. The elections were significant for us. I didn’t come from the party, I came from the “Civil Patrol”. People didn't vote for the party, people voted for the Civil Patrol. My ballot said “Civil Patrol.” This is a test of strength, a test of pen. As a socio-political movement, we march under this brand, under our own name, under our own banner, and we win. This was very important to prove. They took the third city in the country, albeit with one deputy. But it was an honest, hard-fought victory.
Well, in general, as far as I understand, “GP” has grown so much that it may well turn into an all-Russian party...
We are growing. We have success in the Leningrad region. There is a very difficult water situation there, we are dealing with this problem. We are doing very serious work in the Voronezh region, where we are suing a large subsoil user, but the trial has ended. A lot of work is going on in Yekaterinburg, where we cooperate with the Public Chamber and deal with the problems of the region, these include hospitals, roads, and landscaping. Many questions. A huge amount of work is also going on in the Chelyabinsk region, where we have elected a municipal deputy.
In healthcare, the situation with the condition of hospitals is terrible. Peeling walls, cockroaches, wet rags. And you watch all this and think: is it possible to be cured in this hospital? Okay, Zlatoust or Borisoglebsk, where we received complaints from, but this is also St. Petersburg and the Novosibirsk region. We write complaints, provoke movement, they begin to repair something, do something, that is, they react, but why couldn’t it be fixed earlier? Why was it necessary to wait for public outcry?
Let's take the situation with vaccines. A couple of years ago, in Russia we had a severe shortage of polio vaccines. People stood in queues for months. This is one of the first vaccines given to a child. The situation was kept silent, and we were the first to bring the problem to the level of top officials of the state. We created a map of where complaints were coming from; we had information throughout the country. Ultimately, the situation was resolved, albeit with difficulties and shortcomings, but the problem was solved.
Education. Even in my district, they turned the eleven-year school into a nine-year one. And schools are still closed. How many of them are there in the country? They are trying to optimize them, so much so that villages die after schools.
Kindergartens. Getting into kindergarten is a whole challenge. We write both complaints and appeals. And as a result, we achieve something. Not everything, but something works. Roads, landscaping, emergency trees. We try to respond to everything that concerns the quality of municipal services.
We have activists in virtually all regions. And in the most distant regions there are activists who have registered in the system and occasionally send us information. We have about thirty structured branches. What holds us back from the next step - the transition to the quality of an all-Russian public organization, the creation of a near-party structure - is the lack of resources. In this regard, we are too small, we still need to grow up. These elections were a test of the pen, which was not only successful, I think this is a brilliant result, I am proud of our team.
They call you a Russian nationalist, but other Russian nationalists tend to focus on theory and ideology, while you deal with the everyday problems of people, somehow not at all in a nationalistic way….
I'm just a Russian person. Nationalist, not nationalist... What's the difference? I live on this land, I am the master here. This is the first thing a person should have, the understanding that he is the master of his land. My ancestors lived here, and I answer to them with my descendants. The owner sees that his fence has fallen down - he goes and fixes it, he does not expect anyone to do it for him. This is the essence of civil patrol, we go and correct if something is wrong. And you can call it whatever you want.
As practice shows, including these elections, empty words are worth nothing. There must always be real action behind the social movement, the social force. In Novosibirsk we are perceived as a social force capable of changing the surrounding reality for the better.
Well, this is for now, but in order to get into big politics at the State Duma level, they say, you need to get approval from the Administration. No other way.
You just have to work. I have been going to this election for thirteen years. With breaks. It was aimed at breaking through this ice, and it did. Politics is not done in the moment. A politician lives in perspective, not in spirit: he became a deputy, bought an apartment, became corrupt, and forgot why you were elected. Here we are, consistently, step by step, slowly moving towards our goal. Over the eight years that we have existed, this goal is beginning to emerge. Yes, we are patriotic, yes we are Russian, yes we are a civil movement, and sooner or later we will occupy our niche in Russian politics.
In Novosibirsk at the time of the elections, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation was in power. Have the fighters for the happiness of workers used administrative resources against you?
We had to work against administrative resources. We didn’t get into any school, but our main opponent, a communist, was supposed to hold a pre-election event at the school. This was stated, he collected orders from schools, they helped him in every possible way, they used administrative resources to implement their election tasks. We didn’t have such a resource, other than what we had done over the years and personal contact with people. I walked and just talked. And during these elections, I thus communicated with thousands of people. Only personal contact is the key to success.
And who could somehow stop me? I know how to collect signatures. I collected more than 500 signatures, I selected 143 ideal ones, and no violations were found there. Many who collected not so well and not so much were hacked to death. We passed this filter.
(Opposition - ed.) the coalition put up election cubes, they broke the cubes, but we didn’t put up anything, we worked differently…. And what could I do? Registered deputy, do everything according to the law, pay from the election account? What to cling to? You can’t really resist me, you can only put pressure, convince the voter that I’m wrong, and some other candidate is not like that. Based on what I read about myself from Messrs. Vishnevsky, Katz, Schlosberg and other wonderful people, communists seem to be just children who wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Now we come to the most interesting part: what, in your opinion, made the odious liberals take up arms against you?
We have created an opposition Coalition. Three founders. I, as a representative of the patriotic wing, are Navalnists and Yabloko supporters. We united, started working, people came to us, but then some kind of rabid campaign began on the part of the federal Yabloko that it was impossible to work with Antonov because of Crimea, Donbass and something else.
As a result, I supported the amendments to the Constitution for one point that interested me: the ban on dual citizenship for senior officials of the Russian Federation. For me it is significant and important, and I voted specifically for it. But whether Putin will be re-elected or not... I don’t know a single ruler of Russia whom the Constitution would prevent from being re-elected, and I don’t believe in this nonsense that the opponents of the Constitution were talking about.
Will Putin get upset and leave if people don’t vote for his Constitution? Let's evaluate the amendments based on their usefulness or harmfulness; I believe that the amendments, in general, are useful.
Considering this whole frenzied campaign, which began to harm the very idea of the Coalition, we parted ways. Not in conflict, because we don’t have any hatred or hostility towards each other, yes - we are different, yes, sometimes our views on federal issues are diametrically opposed, but at the regional level if the yard is not swept, if there is dirt in the entrances, if there are potholes everywhere, then what difference does it make what your views on all these problems are? We need to get together and solve them together.
However, we had to part ways. I thought that was all over, but it turned out that Yabloko had other plans. They destroyed their branch in Novosibirsk, seven people who joined the Coalition were simply kicked out of Yabloko, and the head of the branch was also kicked out. For the name Antonov and for the fact that I do not have the same views as people with “bright faces”. But this seemed to them not enough; they apparently decided to prove to me that they could not let me become a deputy, and nominated the new head of the department to be elected in my district. Everyone knew that this district was mine. My opponent, Mrs. Chubykina, as it turned out later, through her activities strengthened the position of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and not Yabloko, and waged a campaign in whose interests it is unclear. Moreover, Yabloko members went to negotiate on “Smart Voting” so that it would support them and not me. After they staged all this bacchanalia, they went to negotiate to support their candidate! But how can you deal with such people?
And, of course, when it became clear that Smart Voting would not be supported by Yabloko, but by me, because I had completely different electoral positions, and everyone understood perfectly well what work I had done, how people treated me, and What are my prospects for election, they staged this absolutely ugly, this boorish and undignified outburst with their campaign against me, “Yabloko” hit one municipal deputy with all its guns (Katz, Schlosserg, Vishnevsky spoke out against Antonov on the Internet, on the radio, on YouTube - ed.).
At first I was shocked, but then I was even grateful. And I’m grateful because they portrayed everything so grotesquely that people started calling me, writing and even transferring money.
Taking this opportunity from your media, I want to say thank you to Maxim Katz, thank him for the involuntary help that he gave me. Because I simply did not have enough money for the final part of the election campaign, and people transferred donations after it became known that the liberal part of our society sees me as a universal threat.
By the way, in your opinion, how much did liberal propaganda influence the opinion of residents of the outback towards the events in Crimea and Donbass? Have you ever encountered a negative attitude from voters towards your participation in the “Russian Spring”?
During the election campaign, I had the choice of either hiding some facts of my biography or talking about them directly. I chose the second one.
In the newspapers that we published, I told my biography, including episodes related to Crimea and Donbass. Our publications were published in circulations that covered the constituency, and the residents of the district were well aware of my previous activities and were well aware of who they were electing.
So, during meetings with voters, I met two active opponents of my activities in Crimea and Donbass. The rest either supported her or remained neutral.
What steps do you now plan to take to begin your parliamentary activities?
I’m going to document all the orders that I received, they need to be included in the unified system that we have in the city, see what orders I got from the previous deputy, where they coincide, how much budget is needed to fulfill all this . What do people expect from me? They don’t expect me to fight to the death with Yabloko and anyone else. People expect me to tidy up their yards and sidewalks.
I am ashamed of Novosibirsk, I am ashamed of the city center where I won. You can’t go into the courtyards! Thousands of Chinese tourists come to our city. They walk along our streets with flags. And I’m wondering, isn’t the Novosibirsk mayor’s office ashamed to show all this? In my district is the heart of Novosibirsk, the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, where, through the joint efforts of civil society and the Orthodox Church, a monument to Nicholas II was erected, which was chopped down with an ax and has now been restored. And in the heart of Novosibirsk we need to create a historical quarter, restore historical buildings, we need to develop a project.
The embankment of the Ob River, Novosibirsk is located along the river, but people don’t see the river, it’s all blocked off by fences, landfills, I don’t understand what. The goal is for us to have a program for landscaping the territory, a recreation area for people, so that people do not leave the city, but go out and take a walk, swim, play sports games, and just sunbathe.
It is necessary to clear the center of unnecessary cars and install intercepting parking lots. And comprehensive landscaping of the territory. Such questions should be asked by a deputy.
To summarize our conversation: are fair elections still possible in Russia?
Are there elections in Russia? Elections exist in Russia. This is a summary from my campaign. What happened was truly the people's choice. Our people went and voted in families, they called and reported. If a real person can be convinced to vote for him, he will win.
Those who say that “it is impossible to win, the system cannot be broken,” they are lying. This is said by those who either themselves are sincerely mistaken or deliberately mislead others. Can. You can win in Russia.
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