Soviet demographic categories like “workers,” “collective farmers,” and “intelligentsia” were useless to win elections. Pavlovsky experimented with a different approach to assembling an electorate. Instead of focusing on ideological argument, he targeted different, often conflicting, social groups and began to collect them like a Russian doll. It didn’t matter what their opinions were; he just needed to gather enough of them. “You collect them for a short period, literally for a moment, but so that they all vote together for one person. To do this, you need to build a fairy tale that will be
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