The rule, exactly. Before an election each citizen chooses: to vote — or to take a payment and not vote in that election. The payment is a percentage of the median income, set by referendum; there is no fixed sum. One ballot is one vote, with no multiplier in the count; the vote is amplified only in that each ballot's share grows as others step out. The budget pays under law; a candidate never pays. Only a referendum of all citizens — simple majority, no quorum — introduces, changes or repeals the rule.
The protocol has been introduced nowhere and no pilot has been run: shares, turnout and outcome figures in the chapters are estimates, and the protocol promises nobody an election victory. If a chapter says otherwise, Exact Answers and the Charter are correct. For a candidate: ten questions and ten steps. For a citizen, a mayor, a finance officer, a donor, a journalist, a scholar, a lawyer: answers by role. Everything in force in one file: llms-full.txt.
Russia: Contract Soldiers, the Separating Equilibrium and the Tenfold Leverage¶
Chapter: 09 — Cases: Other Countries File: 09_056e · v1 · 15 September 2026 (Gemini dialogue, session 15-09-26) Source: sociological profiles of contract soldiers (Chronicles, Russian Field, Levada, the work of N. Zubarevich, D. Nekrasov) recast into the A/B choice; estimates are model-based, not measured. Supplements 027 (the vanishing men) and 056d.
How to read this chapter (note of 02.10.2026). The text contains wording that is easy to misread: "a x2 vote", "x3", "the weight of a vote" are the arithmetic of a share, not a multiplier: every ballot counts as one; the efficiency bonus has been removed. The exact-answers sheet 1d and the charter 048m are in force.
1. Who goes to fight for money¶
The profile of the average contract soldier of recent years is almost devoid of romanticism: men aged 35–55 from depressed small towns and subsidised regions; total indebtedness, microloan debts, a ceiling of 30–45 thousand roubles a month until retirement. Motivation: 10–12 % ideological ("against NATO", believe the TV), 88–90 % economic calculation: a signing bonus of 1.5–2.5 million roubles, a salary of 200,000+, close the debts, buy a flat for the children, leave "funeral money".
The utility of the choice for a person from a monotown. U(vote) ≈ 0: from birth he has lived in a system where the vote is stolen, rewritten or sold for tinned meat; elections are a ritual for the bosses. U(money) = absolute: a closed mortgage, a roof, a child's education. If a person is ready to risk his life at a probability of death or injury above 40 % for 2 million roubles, he will agree in a second to sell an abstract tick at zero risk.
| Segment | Share of the flow | Choice B (dividend) |
|---|---|---|
| Indebted workers and the unemployed | 65 % | ~100 % |
| Prisoners / ex-security personnel with debts | 20 % | ~95 % |
| Marginals | 5 % | ~90 % |
| Ideological Z-veterans / officers | 10 % | ~30 % (70 % — vote) |
Result: of 100 people ready to sell their bodies for the front, 93–95 take the dividend and legally exclude themselves from the elections.
Why this hacks the mobilisation economy. The regime buys people for the war precisely because apathy is free and poverty is maintained artificially: a person from the provinces has two legal ways to get a large sum from the state — a contract, or death with compensation to the family. The protocol creates a third, competing channel: a dividend simply for staying home and not voting. The value of the deadly contract falls; to drag people to the front the signing bonus would have to rise not to 2 but to 10–15 million roubles — the budget would not last a couple of quarters. (The model of a UBI-like monthly payment, which the AI inserts by inertia, is wrong here: the payment is once per cycle; but the "third channel" effect holds, because a one-off contract is compared with a one-off dividend.)
2. The separating equilibrium¶
In mechanism design theory (Nobel 2007) this is called a separating equilibrium through self-selection. The hidden-information problem: the state does not know who understands and cares and who came on orders or for a hand-out. One option for all (just a ballot) gives a pooling equilibrium — the smart and the stupid, the free and the dependent merge into a grey mass where the administrative resource wins. A menu of contracts forces the types to separate themselves: political will means nothing to you — take B; it is critical — pay for it by refusing the money and receive a heavier vote. People sort themselves.
The autocrat's electorate divides into: core ideological supporters (10–15 %) — will not disappear, will refuse the money; the administratively dependent (40–50 %) — vote out of fear of losing crumbs; the poor and apolitical (20–30 %) — by inertia and for a hand-out before the election. Group 3 the protocol removes with a legal large payment bigger than any one-off hand-out. Group 2 is the most powerful blow: the chief physician says "tomorrow we all vote, send a photo of the ballot", and the employee officially takes the dividend, and the director has nobody left to manage. The autocrat's paradox: he cannot outbid, because it is his own money — the protocol cuts out the intermediaries (governors, buckwheat, bonuses) and tells the voter "take your share directly". To keep his electorate the autocrat must ask "don't take the money, come out for me" — the level of fanaticism needed to burn a month's wage for a tick exists in at most 10 %.
3. The 10× leverage¶
When 90 % go into the dividend, the active pool shrinks to 10 %, and the weight of each remaining vote rises to 1/0.10 = 10: one vote of an entrepreneur or a principled oppositionist weighs as much as ten did before, while the passive votes the regime herded in for a day off have left the count. This is the arithmetic of those who stay, not a legal multiplier (033c.9b); "x3" in the early texts is the same calculation with two thirds exiting. On Wall Street a 90/10 ratio would be called a ready-made hostile-takeover scenario.
Double-spending. The observers' main pain is dead souls: lists of non-voters (40–50 %) are used for ballot stuffing. At 90 % payouts the scheme technically dies: choice B is not absence from the polling station but a legally recorded transaction; stuffing a ballot for someone who received the dividend creates a conflict (treasury statement vs paper in the box), verifiable by automatic audit without catching teachers red-handed. (See the analysis of observation and falsification — 048e.)
Hypersensitivity. When 90 % sit on the dividend, stability is hypersensitive to the economy: it is enough for 5–7 % of that pool to be disappointed in the amount and switch to A for the opposition's weight to double. The regime is in a vice: it cannot cut the payments (an inflow of the enraged, each of whose votes weighs tenfold) and cannot print (inflation cuts the purchasing power of the dividend).
4. Why this does not resemble the opposition's technologies¶
The opposition and the protocol come from different universes: the opposition's toolkit was created by lawyers, journalists, philosophers and dissidents of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the protocol is built on cybernetics, game theory and institutional economics. Three planes: preaching vs mechanism design ("a person must be conscious" — against "you don't care about elections? here's money, step aside"); a demand for heroism vs zero cost (a rally means risk of prison, a vote against the boss means risk to the bonus: an occupation for the 3–5 % bravest; the protocol requires a legal, socially approved action — claiming a payment); playing on the opponent's field vs changing the rules (the Kremlin writes the law, remote e-voting, the three-day vote, the municipal filter — and political technologists calculate turnout on Sunday at noon; the protocol makes the dictator's budget pay for dismantling his own base). "The traditional opposition are knights in armour demanding a fair duel in the middle of a minefield."
5. Weak point of the case¶
The percentages in the table are expert guesses on top of the sociology of motivation, not the result of a poll about A/B. The 10× leverage is arithmetic under the assumption of 90 % exit, which for the country as a whole (not for the contract-soldier cohort) the repository estimates at 55–65 %; at 60 % the leverage = 2.5×. Both figures should be shown together. The first version of this section said 30× and 7.5×: the arithmetic of those who stay had been multiplied by "x3" once more, that is, counted twice; corrected per 033c.9b. 🟡
Related: 027 (the vanishing men) · 056d (the opposition's deadlock) · 048d (army, police, security services) · 047 (zugzwang) · §13 (game theory) · 019b (the poor voter's price) · 048e (observation and falsification)