Yesterday:

The story of how opposition figure and social activist Yevgeny Roizman beat the authoritarian system and won the mayoral race in Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, is truly amazing. It’s a story about raw courage and what it means to be a man.

How Yevgeny Roizman Became Mayor | Opinion | The Moscow Times 9/17/2013

Today/Tomorrow:

A Jewish anti-drugs campaigner defeated the party of Russian President Vladimir Putin with his election to mayor of Russia’s fourth-largest city

Jewish candidate beats Putin’s man in crucial race | The Times of Israel 9/19/2013

This news arrives on my desktop while I’ve been turning the pages of Ben Judah’s Fragile Empire: How Russia fell in and out of love with Vladimir Putin.

Related: ECFR’s blog. Putin’s fragile empire | European Council on Foreign Relations 7/12/2013 Interview with Ben Judah.  Excerpt:

Russian democracy – when in my opinion it inevitably breaks out – will not look like what we are used to in the EU. Think the politics of Turkey or Israel. For example in the Urals the most popular politician is Evgeny Roizman. He’s an opposition activist, a nationalist, a poet, half-Jewish and a democrat. But not exactly a liberal – he runs a vigilante organisation that locks up drug addicts and incarcerates them in private lock-ups in the forest where they are cuffed to beds and given only water, bread and garlic in this horrific “cold Turkey” treatment. Roizman though is an unbeatably popular man in the Urals – in a democratic Russia he’d be the mayor of Ekaterinburg, the governor of Sverdlovsk oblast – or more.

The bold italics are mine.

Wikipedia notes of the new Mayor of Yekaterinburg, “Roizman was a State Duma deputy between 2003-2007 and attempted to run for parliament from the Fair Russia party in 2007, but was taken off the election list after a conflict with Fair Russia leaders.[6] He is a political ally of Prokhorov[7] and is supported by the Civil Platform party.[8]”

It would seem Russia is now truly democratic.

Well, perhaps with Roizman’s election it is a little more so for its politics having become a little less totally manageable.

Incidentally, my inner jury is out as regards how to think about President Putin in his inhabiting the role of autocrat.

# # #