With his dark eyes and his full-bodied figure, Yevgeny Roïzman looks more like a western actor than a state official. In a country where politics feeds a visceral mistrust, the names of local representatives are often unknown to the administered. Roizman's sounds like a brand. In Yekaterinburg, his hometown in the Urals – Sverdlovsk, in Soviet times – he is known to all. In the midst of generally interchangeable personality profiles, Yevgeny Roizman stands out.
Deputy to the State Duma from 2003 to 2007, the man really imposed himself in politics in 2013, when he was elected mayor of Yekaterinburg. The outcome of the election was unusual enough to create an event: Yevgeny Roizman won against the candidate of United Russia, the Kremlin's party, and a personality assimilated to the opposition installed himself in the administration of Russia's fourth largest city (1.5 million inhabitants).
The function, essentially representative, actually gives him few responsibilities, but the new mayor introduces practices that are not very common in Russia, where political exercise is frozen in verticality: Yevgeny Roïzman ensures permanence during which he receives the inhabitants of the city and listens to their grievances concerning medicine, housing, justice.
Dumbbells and art books
This role of intermediary between citizens and decision-makers shapes its image as an accessible elected official. In Yekaterinburg, Yevgeny Roizman travels without a bodyguard. In a book published a few years ago, a Russian journalist under the spell called him "the Robin Hood of the Urals". Accustomed to cumbersome protocols, foreign press correspondents were disconcerted to be welcomed at the city administration without prior verification or escort. Yevgeny Roizman entertained in his office in jeans and a t-shirt, dumbbells on the floor and art books in the library.
It is necessary to dissociate the legends from the facts to retrace the career of this atypical elected official. A young man in his thirties when the USSR collapsed, Yevgeny Roïzman did business in jewelry, in a city where criminal organizations reigned and clashed. "Like everyone else in Russia," he says, he has been in prison: when questioned on the subject, he avoids this youth sentence, which he presents as a useful and formative experience.
"In the political world, rivals tried to use this sentence to harm him, but it did not harm him in public opinion," said journalist Dmitry Kolezev, founder of the Yekaterinburg-based news website It's my city. On the contrary, Roïzman appears as someone who knows life and who has been able to move forward and undertake different things." Yevgeny Roizman also studied at university before founding Russia's first private icon museum in 1999. He has built up an important art collection – icons of the Nevyansk school in the Urals, but also works by artists from the region.
"Strong and patriotic"
This sportsman with an imposing physique publishes art books, is passionate about history, writes verses – he loves Villon and Nerval – but he is also known as a ruthless activist against drugs. The year he inaugurated his museum of icons, Yevgeny Roizman also founded his reception center for drug addicts. At a time when the country is experiencing a disastrous health situation, the initiative is welcomed. The methods used are controversial because they are considered brutal, but commensurate with the seriousness of the problem, he said.
"Tackling drug addiction and police corruption has made him very popular," said Kolezev, now a refugee in Lithuania. Roïzman is perceived as a solid fellow, raw in formwork, patriotic, whom politics has not corrupted and who is also an intellectual. Its originality lies in the fact that it appeals to both the ordinary citizen and the intelligentsia." He also escapes one of the reproaches regularly addressed to political opponents: easy criticism, detached from any concrete experience. "Roizman held official office." Opposition figures such as Alexei Navalny or Vladimir Kara-Murza inspire more mistrust, constantly presented as agitators paid by abroad.
His notoriety is also based on the character he has created for himself on Twitter. Yevgeny Roizman has become accustomed to expressing himself on current events in an outrageous way – he makes extensive use of "mat" (filthy jargon) to comment on aberrations of Russian politics, court decisions and propaganda content. Projections shared greedily and which earned him a community of faithful. Compared to an extremely smoothed public expression, on the contrary, this flowery language seems to be imbued with sincerity. "He swears like a carter, but people have now understood after the war that it is the only language capable of reproducing reality," Kolezev added.
Yeltsin's legacy
During his tenure as mayor, Yekaterinburg has repeatedly emerged as a city with strong protest potential and distinguished by its artistic vitality. In 2015, a museum dedicated to Boris Yeltsin (1931-2007) was inaugurated there, which has since become the center of gravity of the city's cultural and intellectual life. Originally from the Urals, the former president is first presented as the one who carried democratic ideals for the young and fragile Russian Federation. "Yeltsin was never resentful or angry, he never prosecuted anyone, and he had the courage to relinquish power and introduce change," Roizman said in an interview with Yuri Dud, Russia's most popular YouTuber.
In 2018, the election of the mayor by universal suffrage was opportunely abolished by the local parliament. The choice is now up to the Members of Parliament. Yevgeny Roizman knows that the maneuver is to remove him and withdraws. "I refused to legitimize this deception," he told Novaya Gazeta. Yet he continues to be on duty – now as a committed citizen – at the headquarters of his charitable foundation, which finances medical care for the poor.
When in 2022, the Kremlin launched its "special operation" in Ukraine, the opponent dared to call things by their name: Russia is waging a war. He had previously consistently supported political prisoners – Ukraine's Oleg Sentsov, Alexei Navalny – unmolested. But in the new Russian reality, the immunity that seemed to grant him his popularity is over. At the age of 60, he in turn found himself caught in the Russian judicial vice. In the media, his name is now followed by an infamous asterisk stigmatizing "foreign agents", according to the terminology used by the Russian state. Accused of "discrediting" the Russian army in a video posted on YouTube in July 2022, Yevgeny Roizman pleaded not guilty on Wednesday, April 26. The website It's my city reports that access to the courtroom has been restricted to state television channels. Yevgeny Roizman refused to give in to intimidation and, unlike the majority of opponents, ruled out leaving Russia. "I was born and raised here, I love my country. In the name of what should I leave?"
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