Press Release, 09.03.2018

Presidential candidate Grigory Yavlinsky and Yabloko are conducting the largest election campaign in the past 15 years. Such a statement was made by Nikolai Rybakov, head of Grigory Yavlinsky election headquarters, at a briefing today, on 9 March.

Rybakov voiced some figures that characterize the coverage of the audience and the geography of the campaign. Thus, during the campaign Grigory Yavlinsky visited 15 Russian cities – from St. Petersburg to Krasnoyarsk in Siberia covering a distance of more than 35,000 kilometers. Despite the tight schedule associated with participation in the televised debates, there will be planned visits to Yaroslavl and Chelyabinsk before the end of the race.

The total circulation of campaign printed materials distributed among citizens amount by now to 26,745,000 copies, including 3,685,000 copies of the booklet “Strong Economy Means Rich Russia!”, 11,720,000 copies of the “Presidential Newspaper” of Grigory Yavlinsky, as well as 9,880,000 copies of the newspaper prepared personally by Yavlinsky. It is expected that the final circulation will exceed 30 million copies. “This has not happened since the 1990s,” Rybakov stressed.

According to Rybakov, the attendance of Grigory Yavlinsky’s pages in social networks also rose sharply. In 2017, the audience of the official YouTube channel of Grigory Yavlinsky was 1.5 million people. From January 1 to March 7, the videos on the channel collected 9,745,073 views.

The average monthly coverage of the Yavlinsky Facebook page for the last year was 2.16 million people, and in February 2018 it was already 8.2 million. The coverage of the Twitter account for the presidential candidate from January to March rose to 3.2 million.

Rybakov also told that Grigory Yavlinsky campaign videos that were broadcast this week on federal TV channels and on the Internet, would be nominated for participation in the international advertising festival Cannes Lions.

Human resources involved in the campaign are also impressive. Over 1,600 people work daily as campaign postmen and distributors of the campaign materials. Regional headquarters function in 79 regions (out of total Russia’s 85 regions) and 87 cities.

However, Rybakov noted that the distributors of materials regularly faced problems. Thus, for example, special brigades were organised in Ufa that follow Grigory Yavlinsky volunteers and pull out from the mailboxes newspapers and leaflets in support of Yabloko’s candidate. One of these brigades was detained in Stepan Kuvykin street – the members of the brigade confessed that they receive payment for the destruction of Yavlinsky propaganda materials. In addition, it became known that cleaners of blocks of flats in the Belorechensky district of Ufa were ordered by the authorities to pull all the campaign materials of Yavlinsky out of the mail boxes in these residential blocks. The regional headquarters of Grigory Yavlinsky prepares a complaint to the electoral commission of Bashkortostan and law enforcement agencies, Nikolai Rybakov said.

The head of the staff thanked all participants of the volunteer project of the Grigory Yavlinsky headquarters who despite all this have had been bravely conducting their daily work, informing citizens of Russia about Yavlinsky’s programme. According to Rybakov, over 17,000 volunteers work within the framework of the project throughout the country.