From the State Duma Information Bureau – Newspaper Kommersant No. 170 (7371) dated 09/15/2022

The Just Russia-For Truth (SRZP) faction on Wednesday proposed the creation of a certain structure under the State Duma to inform voters about the progress of a special military operation (SVO) in Ukraine. Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, who was skeptical at first about the idea of ​​the Social Revolutionaries, ordered to work on this issue. The SRZP is now more active on the subject of the SVO than other factions: the Socialist-Revolutionaries proposed to invite Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to the Duma and introduced a bill to deprive filmmakers convicted of discrediting the armed forces from state contracts. The expert believes that such actions of the party will not bring electoral success, but it also has another goal – to demonstrate its support for the “conditional security forces”.

At the plenary session of the State Duma on September 14, Dmitry Kuznetsov, a deputy from the SRZP, suggested considering the possibility of creating an information bureau under the lower house, which “will provide citizens with comprehensive, complete information from the relevant ministries and departments responsible for security.”

“Data coming from General Igor Konashenkov (official representative of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.— “b”) and military correspondents from the battlefields, due to objective circumstances, it is not enough from the point of view of citizens,” Mr. Kuznetsov is convinced.

The speaker of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, initially did not approve of this proposal: “If you think that these topics can be discussed publicly, it would be wrong.” But just in case, he asked the recognized Duma experts in military matters to speak on this matter – the chairman of the defense committee, Andrei Kartapolov, and his predecessor in this post, Vladimir Shamanov (both United Russia).

Mr. Kartapolov immediately warned the deputies that it was impossible to question the decisions of the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff. “If someone has questions about the course of the CBO, come, I will tell you everything. But let’s be solid and decent, let the professionals do their job, and we will do ours, ”he urged his colleagues. And Mr. Shamanov recalled how, during the first and second Chechen campaigns, “deputies such as Sergey Kovalev and a number of others directly called on servicemen to surrender and not to resist international terrorists.”

Then the floor was taken by the leader of the SRZP, Sergei Mironov, who explained that the deputy Kuznetsov was misunderstood and he did not at all call for sharing military secrets. After that, Speaker Volodin decided that the issue still deserves study, and instructed his deputy Pyotr Tolstoy (ER) to arrange this work.

“The idea is that the population does not have enough information that Lieutenant General Konashenkov gives us in the form of office supplies and dry figures – how many tanks were destroyed where,” Dmitry Kuznetsov explained to Kommersant after the meeting. “This does not mean that we want to know the plans of the General Staff . It’s more of a question of how to talk to us. Like in a family: I want dad to come and just talk to you – tell you about his motives, what to do, what to expect. The very fact that they are talking to us makes us, as a people, understand that we are respected, we are considered. And now the information work is built in such a way that people don’t feel it.” According to the deputy, Vice-Speaker Tolstoy already has “several ideas” on this matter.

“In a nutshell, we discussed that every week the deputies would come to the defense committee, receive information and then share it at their discretion,” Mr. Kuznetsov added.

It should be noted that for the SRZP faction, the topic of the SVO has become one of the main ones from the very beginning of the autumn session. So, on the first day of the session, September 13, when discussing the plan of government hours, the Social Revolutionary Oleg Nilov asked why it did not include a speech by the leadership of the Ministry of Defense, and the next day the SRZP itself officially initiated an invitation to the Duma of the head of the military department. “Following the results of the last meeting, the factions decided to propose to the Council of the State Duma to invite Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to a meeting of the chamber so that the deputies could talk with him behind closed doors,” Sergei Mironov said.

In addition, on September 14, a group of members of the SRZP, headed by Mr. Mironov, submitted to the Duma billaccording to which filmmakers should lose government contracts if the creative team includes at least one person who has received an administrative fine or has an outstanding conviction under articles on discrediting the use of the armed forces, fakes about the army, or calls for sanctions.

Political scientist Alexei Makarkin believes that the patriotic rhetoric associated with the support of the SVO will not bring electoral bonuses to the Socialist-Revolutionaries.

“It is difficult for patriotic voters and statesmen to vote not for the authorities. There is an ideological and politicized part of the voters who could subscribe to many SRHR statements, but they are stopped by memories. They remember how the SRs supported the protests and walked around with white ribbons in 2011-2012. Another problem with SRHR is that their traditional image is the struggle for higher wages, benefits and pensions. And then all of a sudden, “Everything for the front, everything for victory” – what kind of promotion is that? — says the expert. In his opinion, the initiatives of the Social Revolutionaries also have a hardware goal – to search for allies among the “conditional security officials” and demonstrate their support to them.

Ksenia Veretennikova