Politics & Power Quote by Alexander Rutskoy

Democracy, Rutskoy implies, can be hollowed out without ever canceling an election. By yoking “the right to vote” to “the right to know,” he’s drawing a hard line against a familiar post-Soviet sleight of hand: keep the rituals, control the information, and you can claim legitimacy while steering outcomes. The sentence is blunt on purpose. It sounds like a civics textbook, but it’s really an indictment of a system where ballots exist alongside secrecy, propaganda, and the quiet throttling of independent media.

Rutskoy’s phrasing also shifts democracy from a moment (election day) to a condition (continuous public visibility). “What is happening in the country” is deliberately broad: not just policy, but corruption, backroom deals, military decisions, economic crises, and who benefits. It casts citizens less as voters who periodically grant permission and more as shareholders entitled to the books.

The context matters. As Russia staggered through the early 1990s, power struggles were waged as much through television studios and controlled narratives as through formal institutions. A vice president invoking an epistemic right is signaling that the real battlefield is public knowledge itself. It’s a warning: if the state monopolizes truth, the vote becomes theater - and democracy turns into a brand name stamped onto managed politics.