Penza, 24 December 2013. PenzaNews. Former coordinator of the opposition movement “Left Front” in the Penza region Sergei Padalkin called the CPRF demands, stated at their last rally that the governor Vasily Bochkarev should pension off and the mayor Roman Chernov should resign, good but pointless.

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“Slogans are nice, I support them but they seem to be pointless. This meeting was to observe formalities, there was no point in it. We should expect no positive results. Such initiatives have practically no effect,” the oppositionist said during his meeting with journalists on Tuesday, December 24.

According to Sergei Padalkin, he had plenty of time in the army to think over effectiveness of protest activities.

“I had time to think. Actually, it is bad to think in the army. You shouldn’t think, someone else thinks for you. But if you start thinking, you start having problems. But I was silent in my thoughts and I came to the conclusion that those initiatives that we organized were usually useless. For example, the Communist Party holds rallies, some meetings. My personal attitude towards Georgy Kamnev [the First Secretary of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party, a member of the Legislative Assembly of the Penza region] is good, he is my comrade, we worked together in Komsomol (Young Communist League), I respect him but I am skeptical about rallies against the bad and for the good. I do not find them effective,” the oppositionist said.

He also spoke about how “Left Front” worked in the region to achieve the result, but along with that he admitted again that the majority of meetings was useless.

“We took a problem, for example, a transport problem with its traffic jams and poor traffic service. And dealt with it thoroughly. We sent requests to the department of transport, we asked how many buses were in the route and how many of them were planned to be brought. Then, we got answers, we studied them and compared the information. Then, we posted everything on our website. We organized rallies in the micro district. We offered solutions to the problems. We referred to the responses of authorities. We explained why we did not act that way. Let’s say that was because of the transport lobby sitting in the City Duma and consisting of some particular deputies. We tried to take a problem and handled it. With all that, we managed to reach some minor results. Most of the rallies were just useless. They could resolve nothing,” Sergei Padalkin concluded.