This book is about your city. The capitals with their big elections, “Dukhlessami”, billions and Mercedes are far away. But here and now we also need to choose power. No matter how you want it, politics will get you. It will penetrate your life like a virus. Conversations in the smoking room, a leaflet in the mailbox, a tongue-tied student agitator. Read this book, find out how it all begins, dive “to the bottom” of the elections. Usually at the beginning of the work they write “All characters are fictional, all coincidences are random,” to make it more interesting for you, I’ll say right away: All characters have real prototypes, all events actually happened. The election campaign that you will read about took place not so long ago, at the beginning of the 2000s. Find out the truth, it will be a glamorously sleek truth, not from Moscow political scientists bursting with dollars, not from “talking heads” on TV, not from sleek representatives of the regional elite. This will be a real “trench” truth, a look at the elections from the bottom level. And you can draw your own conclusions about what modern politicians and the election system are worth. Unless, of course, you still buy books and haven’t forgotten how to read.