On 25 May, United Russia’s preliminary voting got under way. Seeking nomination as a State Duma candidate in the sole single-mandate constituency in Tomsk Oblast is Tatyana Solomatina, deputy chair of the State Duma Committee on Health Protection. However, many doubt her chances of winning the primary, since a criminal case has been opened against her daughter right now.
An experienced administrator and businesswoman
If a criminal case had been opened against the children of most sitting United Russia deputies, the question of their re-election to the federal parliament would most likely not even arise. Yet Tatyana Solomatina is an experienced administrator and deputy; over more than two decades of parliamentary work and three decades of administrative work, she has accumulated a large number of real achievements and merits.
As far back as 1985, she became the head doctor of the regional polyclinic for preventive check-ups. In 1997, she set up the first private medical enterprise in the region — the Zdorovye group of companies, which included several legal entities, among them the preventive check-up polyclinic. In 1999, together with the future governor Sergei Zhvachkin, she launched the “floating polyclinic” project to provide medical examinations and healthcare to residents of remote settlements in Tomsk Oblast — a northern region where many corners are impossible to reach by ordinary road. In 2017, Tatyana Solomatina topped the Forbes Woman ranking of the ten wealthiest women politicians in Russia; her declared income for 2016 was 56 million roubles.
An effective politician
Solomatina first ran for the regional duma in 2011 from United Russia, but unsuccessfully. However, in 2013 she won a by-election in a single-mandate constituency and became a regional deputy. A year later, Solomatina became co-chair of the regional branch of the All-Russia People’s Front (ONF), and in 2016 she was elected to the State Duma in a constituency.
In the State Duma she was visible, regularly introducing bills concerning the regulation of the medical and pharmaceutical sectors, and in her latest term she has strictly toed the party line. The DumaBingo project notes that her activity was “linked to initiatives on the protection and social support of participants in the ‘SMO’, countering LGBT ‘propaganda’, banning the dissemination of information on the illegal manufacture of ammunition, and toughening liability for sabotage activities.” She also co-authored the bill that exempted the overwhelming majority of deputies from filing annual income declarations.
She introduced her latest bill — on strict control over pharmaceutical and medical activities — on 20 May 2026, in a solid cross-faction group of co-authors: besides Solomatina, the authors were Fedot Tumusov (A Just Russia), State Duma Deputy Speaker Vladislav Davankov (New People) and Leonid Ogul (United Russia).
However, even such active work in full conformity with the party’s guidelines could not protect the deputy’s family from the attention of the security services.
The criminal case
Solomatina’s daughter, Ekaterina Felzinger, was arrested on 31 August 2023. She was initially sent to a pre-trial detention centre, but six months later a court transferred her to house arrest. She is accused of fraud.
Ekaterina Felzinger was the head of the organisations OOO Zdorovye and OOO Santé (until 2016, Solomatina had been their director). Their main line of business is the activity of hospital organisations. As reported by the Tomsk Oblast Investigative Committee, the criminal case was opened on the basis of materials from the regional FSB directorate under part 4 of Article 159.2 and part 3 of Article 238 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (fraud in obtaining payments, and performing work or providing services that do not meet safety requirements, resulting in the death of two or more persons through negligence).
According to the investigation, state funds (from the Mandatory Health Insurance Fund) allocated for the treatment of cancer patients were embezzled at the Santé clinic: an oncologist prepared invoices for payment for medical care provided to patients, into which she allegedly included medical services that were not actually provided due to the absence of the necessary drugs. As a result of the accused’s actions, the investigation estimates that damage of more than 26 million roubles was caused to the budget of Tomsk Oblast.
The media also reported that, besides Ekaterina Felzinger, oncologist Evgenia Semenova and head doctor Sofia Mazeina are accused of committing the crime. Mazeina has already repeatedly come to the attention of law enforcement agencies: in 2020 she was convicted of embezzling 507,000 roubles when she worked as the head doctor of the regional oncology centre. In 2023 she was found guilty of misappropriation and embezzlement, sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in a penal colony, but the sentence was deferred until spring 2032 because of her child’s age. On 28 December, the commercial director of Santé, Pavel Khramov, was also detained; already in September 2024 he was sentenced to 1 year and 3 months in a general-regime colony for fraud on an especially large scale.
In February 2025, the case against Ekaterina Felzinger and her colleagues was transferred to court, but the trial is closed to the public and the media because the case file contains documents constituting medical confidentiality: the names of patients, the medicines and the treatment they received. The defendants, meanwhile, were against closing the trial: “This is an attempt to conceal the disappearance from the criminal case file of expert reports conducted by the investigation itself, and accounting examinations concerning SibSMU that vanished from the file. <…> Perhaps the aim is different — to make it inaccessible to the public that the results of internal audits of SibSMU by the Russian Ministry of Health, which established facts of drugs being written off in the absence of need to the sum of more than 12 million roubles, are also concealed from the case file. Perhaps the investigation wants to hide the missing documents that were seized at Santé and that confirm the purchase of the medicinal products mentioned in the text of the charges,” one of the lawyers told the judge.
The 2026 elections
At the previous elections, Tomsk Oblast had two single-mandate constituencies. In one of them, in 2021, the LDPR candidate Alexei Didenko won; after the death of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, his relations with the new party leader Leonid Slutsky did not work out. The second constituency went to Tatyana Solomatina. After last year’s redistricting, the two Tomsk constituencies were merged into one, and it is entirely possible that the two sitting deputies will face off there. But it is more likely that both will be pushed out by their own party colleagues.
At the very least, Solomatina’s rival in the primary has become Tomsk City Duma deputy Ilya Leontyev, who enjoys noticeable party support. For example, on 25 May, State Duma Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Property, Land and Property Relations Vladimir Samokish withdrew from the primary in Leontyev’s favour, so Solomatina’s chances do not look very good. Admittedly, it cannot be ruled out that she will ultimately be nominated by another party, since her daughter’s case has entered the home straight, and help from her deputy mother will not go amiss.