It was late in October evening, the country road pitch black, when Russian policemen pulled up a white Lada. A member of the State Duma sat at the wheel, a dead moose lay in his trunk, neatly gutted. Valery Rashkin looked drunk when the police questioned him, later video footage of it appeared on the Internet. The 66-year-old gives his name, date of birth and job, he looks grimly into the camera.
He would later claim that he had already found the moose dead, and that he had not drunk anything. The long-term MP faces up to five years imprisonment and a million ruble fine for illegal hunting, as well as a fine for refusing to take the alcohol test.
The matter has long since become a political issue. Valery Rashkin is not just anyone, but first secretary of the Moscow City Committee of the Communist Party of Russia (KPRF), and has been a member of the State Duma for almost 22 years. That alone should actually make him a predictable part of Putin’s power system. The communists are a systemic party. These parties are supposed to simulate political competition in the Russian parliament, the Kremlin tolerates them because it can control them. Or could control?
In any case, the communists’ relationship with the presidential administration has become noticeably more complicated – that between Rashkin and the Kremlin was never easy anyway. He is one of those who, despite their mandate, does not shy away from clear criticism.
“A colossal fake”
After the State Duma election in September, Rashkin accused the authorities of “a colossal forgery”. Several communist candidates had lost in their Moscow constituencies. Some of the Muscovites voted electronically, their votes were counted with a long delay – and then turned the election results in favor of Kremlin candidates. The Kremlin party stole these mandates, Rashkin complained at the time. “The KPRF does not recognize the elections in Moscow.” He and other party members called for protest – something independent oppositionists have not dared to do for a long time.
Even before the Duma elections, the communists behaved as if they wanted to seriously challenge the Kremlin. They put up non-party candidates, who are genuine oppositionists, as the authorities actually want to prevent. In addition, some communist party members have called for Alexei Navalny to be released. Her party has benefited from his campaign strategy like no other: Navalny had recommended voters in their constituency to vote for the candidate who has the best chance against the Kremlin party, mostly a Communist candidate. Not only leftists, Soviet nostalgics and Lenin fans now voted for them – but also many Kremlin opponents. Putin can’t like that.
Raschkin himself has been balancing a fine line for years. As early as 2019, he helped numerous Navalny supporters to register as observers in the Moscow City Duma elections. When Putin decided to change the constitution in early 2020, Rashkin loudly criticized the approach. Now he railed not only against election fraud, but also against the government’s corona measures.
The fact that Raschkin has been hunted as an “elk killer” by the state-controlled press for weeks can be understood as a warning – to him and the party. After all, he wouldn’t be the first Duma deputy to break the rules when hunting. Nobody knows how many Russian politicians got away with impunity after much worse offenses. In Raschkin’s case, Russian journalists were at the scene of the crime suspiciously quickly, and the matter seemed staged from the start.
Rashkin himself defended himself in interviews and published a statement on video. He certainly didn’t do himself a favor by constantly changing his story: At first he didn’t want to have shot at all. Then he supposedly thought the moose was a wild boar and pulled the trigger. In general, he was told that hunting was allowed in the Saratov region. He believed his friend who invited him and supposedly had a license to shoot moose.
The independent opposition has already been thoroughly dismantled
At the end of November, the State Duma dealt with the moose and discussed it for more than an hour. Rashkin complained that never before had so many words been lost about a cloven-hoofed animal, “I last saw so much fuss after Kennedy was murdered”. In the end, a clear majority of MPs voted to lift Raschkin’s immunity. It is true that none of the communists supported this vote. Your parliamentary group occupies less than a tenth of the Duma seats.
The Kremlin hardly has to worry about the independent opposition; his power apparatus has thoroughly dismantled them, brought critics to justice, imprisoned them, and chased them out of the country. Now it seems as if the Kremlin wants to remind the rebellious system opposition of their place. “First they crushed the nationalists, then Navalny’s team, now they are coming for the communists,” Sergei Obukhov told the news site Meduza, he is secretary of the party’s central committee.
In addition to Raschkin, millionaire Pavel Grudinin has recently come under pressure, a candidate for the presidential election in 2018. He wasn’t even allowed to run in the Duma election in September. Communist Nikolai Bondarenko took part in a demonstration for Navalny and was arrested; he wanted to challenge the influential Duma spokesman Vyacheslav Volodin in his constituency. Other groups are also hit: in 2020 Sergei Furgal, governor of the nationalist LDPR, was arrested in Khabarovsk. The popular regional chief has been uncomfortable for the Kremlin since his election victory.
The system parties now have two options, writes the Russian political scientist Tatiana Stanowaja: Either they have to “submit themselves completely to the presidential administration,” or prepare for the same fate as the independents. It is of no use that Raschkin has now offered to replace the moose.