The office on Ukhta's Bushueva Street where the city's teachers "voluntarily" gave their signatures in support of Vladimir Putin's candidacy. Source: VK.Imagine Russia’s election procedure as a human body: even back in 2012, it looked like a corpse, one that was animated, briefly, by pulses of electricity. We witnessed spasms of movement here and there, before the true extent of decay became gruesomely apparent. Today, when the decomposition is nearly complete, neither the media-savvy presidential campaign of Ksenia Sobchak, nor the heroic image of state farm director Pavel Grudinin can save it. But this corpse still has a few scraps of skin left, and now we’ll see the skeleton dance. Russia’s public sector workers, better known by the term “administrative resources”, are one of the last remaining mechanisms that can make the corpse move.
Recently, an anonymous message appeared in a local VKontakte group in Ukhta, a town in Russia’s northern Komi republic:
“Yesterday, an announcement was posted in our school: it requested all teachers visit an address [...] and sign some papers there. People who couldn’t for whatever reason sign the papers yesterday were threatened with having their bonuses removed. Today, the director of the school personally went into all the offices in the building to remind everyone of their obligation to visit that specific address with their passport. Today, I visited the above-mentioned address. I found a rather large queue: the teachers of all schools and pre-school institutions had been forced to sign documents there.”
