Vyacheslav Maltsev

The second position was held by Andrey Zubov with 1665 votes.

According to PARNAS members Natalia Pelevina and Ilya Yashin, Maltsev's victory should have been explained by the low turnout and the fact that the Saratov blogger managed to mobilize his like-minded people.

Yashin noted that it was not party supporters who voted for Maltsev, but his own audience.

Vyacheslav Vyacheslavovich Maltsev (Вячеслав Вячеславович Мальцев; born 7 June 1964 ) is a Russian politician, three-time member of the Saratov regional Duma (elected in 1994, 1997 and 2002).

He is an active blogger, the author and host of the Russian language news program 'Bad News' on a YouTube channel Artpodgotovka ("preliminary bombardment").

Vyacheslav Maltsev was born on June 7, 1964, in Saratov.

In 1981, he graduated from secondary school No. 8, after which Maltsev worked as a statistician in the Kirov district Committee of the Komsomol and enrolled in the evening department of the Saratov State Law Academy.

In 1982–1985, he served in the border troops, after which he transferred to the full-time department of the institute.

In 1987 he graduated from the Saratov Law Institute.

After studying, in 1987 he got a job in the police as a district inspector of the Factory police department, but in 1989 he quit because police officers began to be sent to disperse rallies.

On October 18, 1989, he established the Allegro security agency, and served as General Director until 1996.

According to Vyacheslav, his agency employed two thousand employees.

At that time, he was supposedly one of the richest people in the Saratov region.

Subsequently, Maltsev stated that he had sold all his property.

In the 1990s Vyacheslav Maltsev was a member of the Fatherland - All Russia party, then in 2001, when the political blocs "Unity" and "Fatherland – all Russia" merged with each other to create the Saratov cell of the United Russia Party, Vyacheslav became its member, but left the party in 2003.

In May 1994, Maltsev was elected deputy of the Saratov Regional Duma of the first convocation, and then – in August 1997 and September 2002 – he was re-elected.

He headed the committee on legality and combating crime, after which he became secretary of the Duma.

In 1995, he participated in the elections to the State Duma in the Engel's electoral district No. 159, according to the results of which he won 18.5% of the votes.

He was ahead of the candidate from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Oleg Mironov.

In November 2003, Vyacheslav Maltsev, together with the former secretary of the Regional Security Council Alexander Miroshin, founded the "Anti-Ayatskov Foundation".

The purpose of the foundation was to remove Dmitry Ayatskov from the post of Governor of the Saratov region.

The "Anti-Ayatskov Foundation" collected signatures against the governor, picketed and staged hunger strikes.

One of the rallies against Ayatskov was held in Moscow opposite the presidential administration building, where Maltsev brought his supporters by bus.

In 2006, Maltsev organized the Fridtjof Nansen Foundation and became its president.

Vyacheslav organized this foundation in order to gather like-minded people and achieve the construction of a monument to Nansen Fritjof.

A place was chosen for the monument on an island in the city park, but the Saratov authorities did not allow him to do this.

He was a deputy of the Saratov Regional Duma until 2007.

In 2007, he headed the department of "Great Russia" in Saratov, in the same year he created a branch of Mikhail Kasyanov's RNDS in the city.

At the beginning of 2007, Maltsev, as a deputy of the Saratov Regional Duma, proposed amendments to the laws "On Guarantees of Electoral Rights" and "On State Civil Service", according to which a citizen nominating for election or wishing to become an official had to indicate his sexual orientation in the questionnaire.

In October 2011, in the evening in Saratov, Bunyatov inflicted a fractured jaw and a closed head injury on Maltsev in a fight, and he shot him with a traumatic pistol, which led to injuries to both thighs.

In 2012, Maltsev tried to run for deputy of the Regional Duma from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation in one of the single-mandate districts in Saratov, but lost to the representative of United Russia Alexey Mazepov (63.76% of the votes), Maltsev was preferred by 21.41% of those who voted.

Maltsev claims that the elections were rigged, and the victory should have gone to him.

On the eve of the elections to the Russian legislative election, Maltsev decided to participate in the Primary election of the PARNAS party.

The first place in the federal list by default went to the party leader Mikhail Kasyanov, the composition and order of the rest of the list was supposed to be determined by voting registered on the "Wave of Changes" website of voters.

In May 2016 Maltsev won the primary elections of the People's Freedom Party, PARNAS and was granted a 2nd place on the party's election list for the 2016 Russian State Duma elections.

Voting was launched on May 28, 2016, and was supposed to stop on May 29 at 21:00.

However, it was suspended until the scheduled date, as a link to the database with personal data of voters suddenly appeared on the PARNAS website.

The party leadership called the incident a "hackers' attack" and apologized to the affected users.

At the time of the voting stoppage, Maltsev occupied the first place by a large margin, 5,471 votes were cast for him.

Since 2019, he has been a member of the Board of the International Association "Institute of National Policy".