Paid political rallies do brisk business in Moscow

(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – August 26, 2013) Paying or coercing participants to come to rallies is an ongoing issue in the capital’s political sphere

It’s a warm summer morning, and I’m standing with a disjointed cluster of about fifteen people outside Tretyakovskaya metro station. A young blonde woman ­ dressed in grey sweatpants and a hoodie with dangling rabbit ears ­ calls us to circle up around her. She hands each person a small slip of paper bearing the word “Marusya.”

“Don’t lose this,” she tells us. “It’s your receipt. Without it, you won’t get paid at the end.”

Everyone obeys, carefully tucking the slips of paper away.

Across the courtyard, a woman holding a sign that says “Moscow region” is handing out similar-looking slips to a much larger crowd. “Do you think they’re getting more money than us? There’s so many more people over there,” a pension-age woman whispers to me. “Who’s this rally for, anyway?” someone else behind us asks.

It’s Thursday in Moscow, and we’re about to get paid to attend a political rally in support of Russia’s nationalist LDPR party.

Everyone in our group has signed up in advance to be rally participants through a Russian website, massovki.ru. The site operates as a forum: organizers in need of a crowd post events and payment details, and people willing to participate for cash sign up to come.

Recent postings on massovki.ru have included calls for conference attendees (“nicely dressed, groomed, and sober” were the requirements), requests for “residents” to attend a neighborhood meeting about parking, and offers for youth 18 to 27 years old to fill seats at the August 10 opening ceremony of the World Athletics Championships.

Political rallies have their own section on the site. Some postings specify what party the event is supporting (LDPR, A Just Russia, and United Russia have all been named specifically in posts over the last three months), but others are spare – posting just a time, a date, a meeting place, and (of course) compensation.

The particular event that we signed up for was sparse with details. “On August 22 a sanctioned meeting, dedicated to the mayoral elections, will take place on Bolotnaya Ploshchad,” it read. “It will start at 12 p.m. The length of the event is one hour. 300 rubles compensation for showing up!”

We were instructed to meet “Nikita” outside the Tretyakovskaya McDonald’s. Only 29 people signed up on massovki.ru, but judging by the throngs of participants clustered around other organizers barking orders through megaphones in the courtyard, additional methods of crowd-gathering were also at work. Several groups were dropped off by tour buses and led by organizers waving “Moscow region” signs, suggesting that they were driven in from the suburbs.

Time to rally

After being rounded up, we set off on the short walk to Bolotnaya Ploshchad ­ trailing other streams of organized crowds, some of whom are decked out in LDPR baseball caps or patriotic Flag Day scarves. Russia’s national Flag Day holiday also falls on August 22, and other postings on massovki.ru were advertising for paid participants in commemorative holiday rallies.

When we enter the square, trickling one by one through police security scanners, the rally has already started. A mass of white shirts and blue LDPR flags, waving in the sunshine, are visible at the far end.

Rather than taking us towards the stage, though, our organizer halts the group near the entrance and tells us to stay. No one seems sure of the purpose of the rally. “I won’t vote for Zhirinovsky in September,” one red-haired man declares, apparently unaware that Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the head of the LDPR party, is actually not running in September’s mayoral election (LDPR’s candidate is 32-year-old Mikhail Degtyaryov).

My fellow paid participants do seem sure, though, of the reason so many people are there. “It’s all for money,” says a middle-aged woman who identified herself as Miranda, waving her hand in the direction of the crowd.  “No one would come if they weren’t paid,” the red-haired man asserts.

“I live in the Moscow region ­ we have a different mayor there,” Vera, a pensioner, adds. “I won’t even vote in the Moscow election. But I get paid kopecks at work, so I’m here for the money. If it was for free, I would never come.”

Three hundred rubles for roughly three hours of work is not much. But the monthly stipend for Moscow pensioners is only 12,000 rubles, according to 2012 numbers from the Moscow City Hall website. In this case, the chance to get paid for standing around may be worth it ­ and accordingly, many in our group of participants are pensioners out to earn a little extra cash.

Who, precisely, is financing the attendees is unclear. “It’s not your business,” one of our organizers answers, when questioned who’s paying for our group. A spokesman for the LDPR press office also could not be reached for comment on paying protesters for this rally by press time.

The crowd looks to be a mix of young and old: pensioners, dozens of whom sat down on the curbs during the rally, and students ­ many of whom, wearing matching white-and-blue LDPR T-shirts, also stood around looking bored.

When asked why she came, one teenage girl says, “For school, they drove us here.” A woman wearing an LDPR flag as a cape walks by. “A guy gave it to me and told me to put it on,” she says. It transpires that she’s another paid participant from a Moscow region group.

No one seems more enthusiastic than an organizer walking along the row of people sitting on the curb, loudly urging the Moscow region people to get closer to the stage.

Fake grassroots

Paying rally participants is a version of astroturfing ­ the practice of masking the sponsors of a movement to make it appear as though it originates from a grassroots source.

The term, allegedly, was coined by U.S. Senator Lloyd Bentsen in 1985. Speaking about a pile of letters promoting the interests of insurance companies, Bentsen reportedly said, “A fellow from Texas can tell the difference between grassroots and Astroturf [fake grass].”

Astroturfing is not a Russia-specific phenomenon, nor is it strictly political. Such misdirection happens worldwide ­ including documented cases in the American tobacco industry, the U.S. National Hockey League, and at Microsoft, to name only a few. China, in reports by the Guardian and BBC, has long employed groups of astroturfing bloggers to peddle pro-state agendas.

In Russia in 2002, “hacktivist” group Anonymous published emails it claimed were hacked from pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi, showing evidence that Nashi had paid thousands of bloggers and commentators to pursue a pro-Kremlin agenda online and had bought positive articles about the group’s annual summer camp, Seliger, in two popular Russian tabloids.

The effectiveness of astroturfing, though, is hard to measure.

“Suppose you advertise toothpaste and suddenly your sales go up,” Maria Lipman, a social expert at the Carnegie Moscow Center, told The Moscow News. “It would be really difficult to prove that one ad was responsible…as always with paid services, the person who gets commissioned tries to prove to the one who’s paying that it has an effect. But I don’t think such proof can be cogent.”

According to Lipman, rallies-made-to-order have little or no tangible effect on an election outcome, but could instead be a more symbolic gesture ­ being able to report to higher-ups that a rally was organized and had a sizeable turnout. It doesn’t even necessarily have to involve paid participants, Lipman noted ­ attendance can be produced by “gentle, or not-so-gentle” suggestions from employers or administrators to gather a crowd.

Reports and accusations of astroturfing ran rife in Moscow several years ago. Russian officials accused the U.S. of financing mass protests on

Bolotnaya Ploshchad in December 2011, and observers claimed participants in a pro-Putin rally on Poklonnaya Gora in February 2012 were paid or coerced. Novaya Gazeta reported that the director of a Moscow training center lost her job for failing to ensure her employees’ attendance at the February rally.

The practice, it seems, is alive and well in the run-up to Moscow’s mayoral election on September 8. Activist Nikolai Levshits reported evidence of crowd coercion at a constituents’ meeting for incumbent Sergei Sobyanin in mid-August.

Sobyanin is the overwhelming favorite to win the race, leading with 67-68 percent of potential votes compared to second-place blogger and opposition activist Alexei Navalny’s 13-15 percent, according to recent surveys by state polling agency VTsIOM.

Back at LDPR’s rally, participant Miranda theorizes that paying for gatherings like the one we were attending would actually help Sobyanin, of the United Russia party, to win.

“If there were no alternative meetings, everyone would understand that there’s no competition, and no one would vote,” Miranda says. “It’s all to give the image that there is competition, so that people will turn out for Sobyanin in the election. I’ll vote for Sobyanin, probably, too.”

The rally is coming to an end, and our group walks back to our meeting point in the courtyard next to McDonald’s to reunite with our organizers. The blonde woman with the rabbit-eared hoodie pulls a thick stack of hundred-ruble notes from her duffel bag, and everyone lines up to receive compensation for the day. She gives us a big smile as she hands us our cash.

“Thank you for your support!” she says.