A Ripped-Out Poem, or How I Voted in Russia’s Parliamentary “Election”

September 20. The day I can go to the Russian Embassy in London and vote for some political party.

I don’t particularly want to. For years, independent parties and independent candidates have been denied access to “elections”. And the votes for those who are allowed to participate are counted with numerous falsifications.

Moreover, this time, voters abroad get only one ballot instead of two — unlike voters inside Russia in this same “election”. Why two? Since 2014, Russia has been using a mixed electoral system:

1. Half of the 450 members of parliament are elected through proportional representation, with a 5% threshold. You vote for a particular party, and if it gets more than 5% of the vote, it gets seats — the more votes, the more seats.
2. The other half are elected via a first-past-the-post system. You vote for a particular candidate in one of 225 constituencies. The winner takes all — meaning the one and only seat — and the votes for the losers get no representation.

During the 2021 election people voting abroad would also get two ballots. London was assigned to a constituency in the Tomsk Oblast, a region in Siberia. Counting the votes usually takes a few hours, and after a few hours they can generally tell who’s winning. Along the way, the district election commission can “steer” the count by pulling various dirty tricks. The candidate from United Russia (the main government party) was leading by a few hundred votes. And almost all votes were in.

But then the votes from overseas polling stations came in, including a thousand votes from London for the runner-up — and threw a wrench into the whole operation. Instead of an absolute ghoul from United Russia, we elected a slightly less ghoulish ghoul from a controlled opposition party, the LDPR — “Liberal Democratic Party of Russia” — which is neither liberal nor democratic, but that’s a whole different story. And as someone who had voted for that slightly less ghoulish ghoul, I was pleased that, for once, my vote had actually made a difference in Russia.

But in 2023, the State Duma passed a law under which overseas polling stations would only issue the proportional-representation ballot. One less reason to go to the election.

So when I woke up on September 20, I was debating whether to go at all. A friend of mine, officially designated a “foreign agent” in Russia, messaged me to say she’d be coming to protest around noon. With a heavy heart, I decided to make the trip to the other end of London after all.

Outside the embassy, there was a small crowd of Russians. Some had already voted and were just hanging around, others were about to go in. A few volunteers from various civic organisations were conducting an exit poll and handing out slices of apple cake. Presumably for people who weren’t yet fed up with Russian politics.

A little further away, across the street from the embassy (which, incidentally, is called Kyiv Road), stood another crowd — protesters waving Iranian and Ukrainian flags. They held signs saying things like “Stop the Gremlin in the Kremlin” and “Your Vote Is a Bullet Fired into Ukraine.” The logical connection behind the latter escaped me.

So I hung around the embassy for another hour, chatted with various people, stood with an anti-war sign for a while — and then ventured into the belly of the state machine. That is, the embassy.

At the entrance, they asked me to empty my pockets into a storage locker — the kind they used to have in Russian supermarkets. Maybe they still do — I haven’t been to Russia in ages. I complied, passed through a metal detector, walked around the embassy building in a wide arc, and, having gone through the appropriate door, found myself at the polling station. I showed my passport, signed next to my name on the voter list, received my ballot, marked the least repulsive party (“New People”) there, folded the ballot in half, and dropped it into the ballot box.

Then I walked around the embassy from the other side, retrieved my belongings from the locker, and stepped back out onto Kyiv Road.

I exhaled. Being inside the embassy had been a little nerve-racking. It’s a big building — you get the feeling there’s plenty of room in there for someone to get disappeared.

My friend suggested we pay a visit to Russian-language bookshop called Idiot Books. I’ve been meaning to go there for a while and it turned out it was only a ten-minute walk from the embassy. Let’s go then.

The shop was small but cosy. Some of the books were in Russian, others in English. One caught my eye: a slim bilingual volume of twenty unrhymed poems called Ovid Void, by Maria Stepanova, translated by Eugene Ostashevsky. Price tag: £24.

I later told another friend of mine about the book, and if he’s to be believed, Stepanova is apparently a pretty fucking big deal in Russian poetry. But I didn’t know that at the time, and £24 for a thin, fifty-page book seemed excessive. With a heavy heart, I bought it anyway. Sure, for the same money I could probably get a much denser and informative wall of text, but lately I haven’t had the patience to read those anyway. All in all, if you aren’t going to read a book, at least minimise your regrets by not reading a smaller one.

It was around three o’clock. Voting was supposed to continue until eight, so I headed back to check out the action outside the embassy.

On the way, I was thinking it would be cool to read this poetry to a cute girl I’d met there. And even cooler it’d be to tear out a page and give it to her — but only if she liked the poem, of course.

The entire way back, I was trying to overcome the internal resistance to this hypothetical act of violence against the book. Just casually ripping out a page? That’s practically vandalism. I kept looking at this action from every possible angle in my head.

Suppose I’d bought a set of postcards instead of a book. I would have had absolutely no problem taking one out of the set and gifting it to someone. So what’s the difference between a book and a set of postcards, really? The book is a sacred temple of knowledge and I’d be desecrating it? No one but me to even theoretically give a shit here — it’s not like I’m going to modify a library book, it’s my own.

Besides, contemporary art is non-representative. It’s less about the object itself and more about the idea it expresses. Why couldn’t tearing out a page be an artistic statement? I’m not damaging the book — I’m, um, deconstructing it. Turning a static object into a performance. Taking one work of art and turning it into two.

And for fuck’s sake, I can’t be that much of a good, well-behaved boy. I made these rules into a prison for my mind. Gotta be a bad boy sometimes and channel Big Dick Energy into the surrounding reality.

When I finally got back to the embassy, the cute girl was gone. Fuck.

But there was another one. Also cute. A young mermaid with colourful dreadlocks.

— Want me to read you a poem?
— Yes. Page fifty-eight.
— There aren’t that many pages. But the poems are numbered from one to twenty.
— Number thirteen.

I spent about a minute reading her poem number thirteen. She enjoyed it. And then she said:

— Can I take a picture of it?
— …

Without a moment’s hesitation, I performed the very move I’d been mentally rehearsing the whole way back. In one confident motion, I. Ripped. The. Fucking. Poem. Out.

The heavens did not come crashing down. No storm clouds suddenly gathered above me. No lightning bolt struck me.

And the girl seemed somewhat impressed by this turn of events. We ended up talking for an hour: about Instasamka’s cancelled concert in London, about illegal London coffeeshops selling weed, about a ballot someone had smuggled out of the polling station in her bra.

Recently I went on a date with her. Delicious. Like licking honey from a razor blade.

And you know what? I’m glad I went to perform my civic duty. You can tell yourself, “voting won’t change anything”, in an attempt to conserve your energy. Or you can keep stubbornly tugging at the Fortune’s hem — and sometimes she’ll turn around and smile at you in ways you never expected.

I mostly blog about psychotechnology, but there are occasional personal stories, like this one. Subscribe for more!