Russian Voting Tinged With Green
Environment Outmuscles Kremlin Controls in Mayoral Election
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, April 10, 2009; Page A01
MOZHAISK, Russia -- For nearly two months, Dmitry Belanovich woke before dawn to make the two-hour drive from Moscow to this small, bucolic town west of the capital.
Every day, from 6 a.m. until 11 p.m., the burly, bearded environmental inspector campaigned for votes in the snow, working street corners and storefronts, even stopping residents as they picked up milk, trying to persuade them to elect him mayor.
And every night, he drove back to Moscow because the inns in Mozhaisk turned him away. "I was under a certain administrative pressure," he explained, alleging that local officials made it clear that anyone giving him a room would be punished.
But if the odds were against Belanovich as he challenged Vladimir Putin's United Russia party, which dominates and often fixes elections in this country, he built his campaign on an issue that seemed to resonate -- environmental protection. And when the votes were counted March 1, he won in a landslide.
The surprise victory showed that, despite a decade of tightening political controls by the Kremlin, it is still possible to take on Putin's ruling party in a local election and prevail. The win was also a small milestone for Russia's environmental movement, which has struggled against public apathy and government pressure since Putin came to power as president and then prime minister.
Other candidates running on green platforms have won seats on local legislative councils in Russia, but Belanovich is the first to win a mayoral election, his supporters say.
In recent weeks, United Russia's candidates have also lost mayoral contests in the cities of Murmansk and Smolensk, and a volatile race is underway in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, host of the 2014 Winter Olympics, with former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov and maverick billionaire Alexander Lebedev in the running.
The interest in municipal elections may seem misplaced given the limited powers that most Russian mayors enjoy, but these races are among the few remaining venues for open political competition in Russia, said Vladimir Milov, a Nemtsov ally in the democratic opposition movement Solidarity.
"Russia is suffocating from a lack of real, open politics," he said, but mayoral elections offer an outlet for voters to express their frustration with the government -- and for opposition politicians to address concrete problems and prove themselves as effective managers to a skeptical public.
Putin eliminated elections for regional governors, and his government has often blocked opposition candidates and parties from the ballot in federal races. But the Kremlin's ability to influence local elections such as the one in Mozhaisk is limited in part because candidates can bypass its control of the media.
Belanovich, 34, said his bid to become mayor of this town of 70,000 received no coverage on television or in major newspapers. But by speaking to residents directly and distributing campaign brochures, he won 45 percent of the vote, compared with 27 percent for the second-place United Russia candidate. He attributed his victory to his promise to protect the natural ecology of this rural municipality, which he calls the "lungs of Moscow" because nearly half its territory is covered with forests. He campaigned on pledges to block construction along rivers and a major reservoir, clean up a polluting pig farm and promote agriculture and tourism instead of industry.
"It shows that people are growing more concerned about ecological issues, not less," he said of his victory. "People in Mozhaisk aren't indifferent. They understand that a clean environment means a healthy nation."
The green movement enjoyed broad public support in the final years of the Soviet Union, when it emerged as a channel for permissible political activity. But it has suffered under Putin, who has rolled back environmental protections while imposing new restrictions on activist groups and limiting their access to the media.
Some environmentalists have hailed Belanovich's election. But others have played down its significance because of Belanovich's ties to Oleg Mitvol, the deputy chief of the federal environmental watchdog agency and a controversial figure in the movement.
Mitvol made headlines in 2006 by accusing Royal Dutch Shell of violating environmental regulations at a huge oil and natural gas project off the far eastern island of Sakhalin. Belanovich was a senior inspector at the agency and served as Mitvol's representative in Sakhalin at the time.
Critics have portrayed Mitvol as a Kremlin attack dog who used the environmental charges to pressure Shell to sell its controlling stake in the project to the state energy giant Gazprom. But Mitvol has also gone after Russian firms, and the head of his agency has been trying to fire him for more than a year.
Belanovich came under pressure too last year and decided to leave his job and make the mayoral bid in Mozhaisk with Mitvol's support. The two men campaigned together and launched an organization called Green Alternative with a Russian pop star, Alyona Sviridova.
Belanovich had no connection to Mozhaisk before the campaign but said he was born in a nearby town and recalled childhood visits with his parents to its woods and rivers. There is no residency requirement for the mayor's post.
Sergei Isakov, editor of the Mozhaisk Review, a local newspaper, said he impressed residents by reaching out to them and even seeking their support at the local banya, or public steam bath.
"He's a huge man who speaks quietly and calmly, and it gives a feeling of confidence, reliability and security," he said, adding that Belanovich's status as an outsider helped because many residents believed his rivals were beholden to local businesses.
Since he took office, several officials suspected of corruption have already resigned, Isakov said.
But Alexei Yablokov -- a scholar who served as an adviser to President Boris Yeltsin and is often regarded as a founding father of the Russian environmental movement -- questioned Mitvol's motives, describing him as an opportunist who engineered Belanovich's victory to win a leadership position in an opposition party.
Other activists defended Mitvol, saying he has drawn attention to environmental causes. "He may not be the most knowledgeable environmentalist, but he has good intentions," said Ivan Blokov, director of the Russian branch of Greenpeace.
A millionaire who made his fortune in the early days of Russian capitalism, Mitvol is not shy about his role in the Mozhaisk election. In an interview at a Moscow restaurant, he said he "took Belanovich by the hand" and helped him win by touting their record of prosecuting corrupt officials and other environmental criminals.
On election day, he added, the campaign bused in 350 people to serve as observers at the polling stations and kept a team of lawyers on call. Belanovich did well at every site except one on a military base off limits to their monitors. There, Mitvol said, the United Russia candidate won almost all the votes.
Mitvol described Mozhaisk as a trial run and said Green Alternative plans to field environmental candidates in local elections across the country.
"Everybody says you can't win elections in Russia, that the ruling party always wins," he said, "but I want to try for myself."
