The previous State Duma elections took place five months before the start of the “special military operation”, yet now it feels as though that was in a different life. Back then, not a word was uttered during the election campaign about the coming hostilities or the future hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded on both sides.
However, the work of the new convocation of the Russian parliament began with a shot that, in many ways, set the tone for its subsequent activity. This is the detective story involving an elk — or, more precisely, the criminal case on illegal hunting that led to the stripping of parliamentary powers from the newly elected leader of the Moscow communists, Valery Rashkin.
The hunt for Rashkin
Valery Rashkin had been a State Duma deputy since 1999. After the election results were tallied in September 2021, he was regarded as practically the only potential “troublemaker” in a carefully filtered parliament. By 2021, the regulatory framework already made it possible to effectively cut out undesirable candidates — including those from the parliamentary opposition — using administrative and criminal mechanisms even at the distant approaches to an election.
The incident began cinematically. An October night in Saratov, a forest near the settlement of Lysye Gory, a group of men — comrades in a difficult line of work, a Russian-made car with a butchered animal carcass — and the dramatic appearance of a forest ranger with security officers and a film crew on a forest road. It turns out that the hunting party has no licence to shoot elk. The very next day, federal media will recount the event in detail; what follows is the opening of a case, an investigation, the lifting of parliamentary immunity… a trial, a suspended sentence.
The public impact was compounded by Valery Rashkin himself. His emotional and at the same time inconsistent line of public defence minimised the chance of cementing what was happening in the public perception as a provocation or political persecution. The evolution of his position from the initial “found the carcass” to an admission of the fact of the hunt became a textbook PR failure.
At the time of his detention on 29 October (almost on the eve of Halloween), Rashkin stuck to the version that he had supposedly found an already butchered carcass in the forest and decided to take it to the police. Some time later, when it became clear that the matter was being taken seriously (procedurally and in the media), a more plausible explanation followed — that he had planned a different kind of outing, but friends said hunting was allowed, he mistook an elk for a wild boar in the dark, and so on — this came in a special video address. Much later still, there were vague admissions of guilt with lamentations about a confluence of circumstances and being misled about the legality of the hunt.
In parallel, party comrades promoted a narrative of political provocation by the security services — indeed, it is hard to ignore the coincidences: the rare luck of the forest patrol, the full video recording, the disregard for the deputy’s status, the rapid and wide media coverage. Yet the kaleidoscope of explanations noticeably undermined this “victim of the regime” line.
The most opposition-minded deputy
The context in which the elk incident occurred was interesting. Autumn 2021 was a period of loud scandal around the election results in Moscow.
Experts sensed a catch in advance when it became known that “re-voting” was being introduced in the Moscow REV system — while commissions and observers had virtually no way to verify the tallying of results from the electronic ballots received, which made the count unverifiable. The wider public noticed that something was wrong when, because of an allegedly occurring technical problem, the decryption of electronic ballots and the tallying of results was delayed until morning instead of the expected hour or two, without coherent explanations from the organisers.
The REV result in Moscow, which was eventually published in the morning, looked like magic — absolutely implausible for sociological and statistical reasons. REV overturned the voting results in eight of the 15 single-mandate districts in Moscow, depriving at least several opposition candidates of mandates, including those nominated by the Communist Party. Rashkin, who entered the Duma on the party list but lost his own district, could not stay away from this issue. His public activity promised a prolonged headache for the Moscow authorities (with damage to Sergei Sobyanin’s political image) and also jeopardised plans for the large-scale promotion of REV at the federal level.
We now know that there was also a broader political horizon: the country was still living in a relatively calm agenda, whereas decisions requiring maximum controllability of the political system were already taking shape at the top leadership level. In such a configuration, the appearance in parliament of a charismatic deputy inclined to public defiance looked undesirable. The level of this defiance is illustrated, for example, by his high-profile parliamentary inquiry calling for an investigation of Dmitry Medvedev in connection with Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption investigation “He Is Not Dimon to You”. The demarche of a single deputy was unlikely to change the strategic decisions that the new composition of parliament was destined to formalise, but it was entirely capable of spoiling the picture of political “consolidation” during the preparation for and conduct of the coming war.
The rout of the opposition in Moscow
The denouement proved predictable (and inevitable): in April 2022, a court sentenced Rashkin to three years’ probation, and in May he was stripped of his parliamentary mandate. For several years, an influential opponent of the federal and Moscow authorities was successfully silenced. Fellow party members and competitors on the opposition flank noted caustically that the experienced politician Rashkin had been let down by his political instinct and an incorrect sense of the boundaries of the permissible. However, in autumn 2021, hardly anyone could have gauged the scale of the coming changes.
The significance of this story is not limited to the sterilisation of the State Duma and the personal consequences for Valery Rashkin.
First, it was a clear signal to regional politicians and public critics about the boundaries of what is permitted — a kind of calibration of the level of acceptable disloyalty in the new political season.
Second, the negative effect touched Moscow in a particular way. The criminal case and the prospect of losing the State Duma mandate provoked Rashkin’s resignation from the post of first secretary of the Moscow city committee of the Communist Party, after which the leadership was replaced with a more mayor’s-office-loyal one, and a gradual purge of the opposition party activist base followed. In the “protest” 2010s, it was precisely Rashkin’s politics — including his readiness to engage with the democratic opposition and civil society, which had been excluded from the electoral field — that secured the Communist Party a noticeable electoral base in Moscow. The loss by the Moscow branch of the Communist Party of its former independence from the regional administration and its considerable autonomy from the party’s federal leadership led to a significant erosion of the electoral base in the capital region. And city activists and independent opposition politicians lost their last legal channel for political participation and communication with the authorities.
At the end of last year, Valery Fyodorovich, who had temporarily stepped back from public politics, reminded people of himself when he began to muse about possible participation in future parliamentary elections. However, the political environment has changed in that time: the conditions of admission for the systemic opposition have become stricter. If Rashkin does return to elections, it will be in a different format — different arrangements and different boundaries of the permissible.
In any case, “Rashkin and the elk” is not merely a private story, but a revealing and instructive episode in which a political scandal turned out to be intertwined with yet another stage in the strengthening and homogenisation of the power vertical in the country.