What politicians said about the image of the future to young civil servants and security forces

On August 18, Russian politicians discussed at the youth forum “Territory of Meanings” in the management workshop “Senezh” how they see the image of the future of Russia.

They spoke to the participants of the fifth shift, which is called “Serve”. Among its 350 participants are young officials, employees of the Federal Penitentiary Service, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and other law enforcement agencies, as well as activists from parliamentary parties.

The first to speak on August 18 was Alexander Kharichev, Head of the Presidential Department for Supporting the Activities of the State Council (UGS), with the topic “The image of the future of Russia through the prism of pentabizis”.

Kharichev began by saying: “Russia is one of the centers of the world order, creating a strategic balance of civilizations: East and West, North and South.” “This is the “ark of mankind”, which keeps natural resources and ecological heritage of world importance, cultural and historical traditions and spiritual and moral values, without which there is no future,” the official said (quote from the press release of the forum, since the speech of the head of the UGS was closed for the media).

Then he talked about the fact that the world should be multipolar, Russia stands for “respect for its own development models”, that the sovereignty of countries is a guarantor of world stability.

Then Kharichev told the participants of the shift about the “pentabasis” itself, and after that – about the image of the future.

“How do we see our country? We see a great Russia with a powerful economy and armed forces, an authority in the world that evokes a sense of pride. We see a well-organized country where life is comfortable and safe: with a decent salary, high-quality roads and affordable social services. Finally, we see Russia as a country of equal opportunities. This is how the images of the future look for different groups of the population,” the official said.

Vedomosti wrote about social research conducted by the presidential administration, during which five images of the future of Russia were identified.

After Kharichev, Ella Pamfilova, chairwoman of the Central Election Commission, spoke. She began by saying that the “coolest” event of 2024 will be the presidential election in Russia, which will be important not only for “our country, but for the whole world.”

According to her, since 2016, the CEC has been sweeping out everything unworthy from the electoral system, and the rejection of falsehood and the demands on the work of the CEC have greatly increased. Then they showed a video about the “history of Russian democracy” – from the People’s Council to the amendments to the Constitution in 2020.

After that, the chairman of the CEC showed a presentation “in the genre of ancient Greek mythology” of the current electoral system. According to her, he “debunks the myths about the Russian electoral system.”

There were five myths in total:

“votes are counted by obedient officials” (according to the CEC, civil servants in the electoral system 6%);

“No one trusts the election results” (sociology shows that this is not so, those who go to the polls have confidence in them);

“remote electronic voting (DEV) is unreliable” (and the CEC believes that the secrecy of the vote is protected, and everyone has the opportunity to observe),

“observer tied to a place” (Pamfilova believes that the optimization of all processes has simply passed);

“Elections are more democratic in the West” (In the US, elections are indirect, while in Europe elections are organized by officials, Pamfilova said).

After that, Pamfilova was asked questions by the participants of the shift. For example, one of the young people asked how she felt about words Presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov that elections in Russia are “not exactly a democracy, but an expensive bureaucracy,” which he told The New York Times.

Pamfilova remembered this words Putin about Peskov, however, did not quote them (“I watch on TV and think: what is he talking about there? Who instructed him to do this,” the president was perplexed in 2018 in an interview with NBC). Pamfilova herself said that democracy is a way of forming power through elections, while in the West now the power of a minority: “We don’t need such a democracy.”

The day ended with a meeting of the youth with the leaders of the Duma factions. Entering the tent where the meeting was held, the Komsomol members began to shout at the top of their lungs “Lenin. The consignment. Komsomol”. Even members of the Young Guard of United Russia failed to outshout them.

The session with Vladimir Vasiliev (United Russia), Gennady Zyuganov (KPRF), Sergei Mironov (A Just Russia – For Truth), Leonid Slutsky (LDPR) and Alexei Nechaev (New People) was entitled “Image of the Country’s Future: Struggle for the minds of the youth.”

When asked by a Komsomol member whether it was time to turn away from capitalism to socialism, Zyuganov recalled Putin’s words that capitalism had reached a dead end (“Everyone says that the existing model of capitalism [исчерпала себя]and this is today the basis of the social structure in the vast majority of countries, has exhausted itself,” the president said at Valdai in 2021).

The leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation agreed with this and invited everyone to taxi to the Soviet socialist construction site. Mironov said that A Just Russia has a project “USSR 2.0”, which stands for “Socialist Sovereign Fair Russia”.

A representative of the youth wing of the Liberal Democratic Party said that he had recently discovered that only 15% of the territory had been developed, and asked the deputies what would happen next. Here, almost all the deputies agreed that young people should be sent to explore Siberia and the Far East.

The deputies were also interested in what to do with those who left Russia. Nechaev said that after the start of the special operation, not as many people left as after the mobilization. According to him, there are those who switched sides in the information war, but there are no more than a thousand of them, many who left have already returned to Russia, but in general, Russia must be made attractive, such that “everyone will envy how we live here, and returned.”