It takes 28 seconds. He nervously rattles off his electoral pitch: a few sentences about supporting large families. “Perhaps something else will come to mind? The remaining seconds are filled with the ticking of a clock.
“GOOD AFTERNOON, dear voters,” says Alexey Chernov, a portly 44-year-old in a plaid flannel shirt. “That’s all?” asks the host in the television studio, reminding him that the rules allow him to speak for a minute. “No, nothing else will come,” he says.
Because they benefited from the status quo; the broader population saw it as a sign of stability, elites consented to the charade. Because they think it will make a difference but as a safe way to vent frustration, but some who previously considered themselves apolitical are planning to vote, not. The Kremlin has been steadily turning Russia’s democratic institutions into simulacra since the early 2000s. It aims to discourage any dissenting voters from turning out, while coercing public-sector workers, who can be pressured into voting, to plump for Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party. But this year the exercise has reached an absurd new low. In previous elections the Kremlin maintained a semblance of pluralism by allowing a few opposition candidates to run, and occasionally win. If necessary, the result could be tweaked with some rigging. Educated and politically conscious Russians who voted in the past no longer see much point in the charade. Ukraine’s deep strikes are starting to bring such attitudes far deeper into the country. He is planning to spoil his ballot paper.
Russians are calling this year’s Duma ballot a “special electoral operation”, by analogy to the “special military operation” that is the government-mandated term for the war against Ukraine. Dmitry, a 35-year-old Muscovite who has never voted, says he will “go to these elections and write what I think of them on the ballot paper”. “We are not political activists; we are just incredibly fed up,” says Nadezhda, a 25-year-old in Rostov, a region bordering Ukraine. “That people in power are gangsters has long been clear, but the fact that they are also impotent, unable to shoot down a small buzzing drone, is a revelation,” says Evgeny, a 48-year-old programmer from Ekaterinburg, a city in the Urals.
On August 17th Lev Shlosberg, one of its most popular leaders, was sentenced to 11 years in a penal colony. The purpose of elections in a dictatorship, observes Ekaterina Schulmann of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre in Berlin, is not to find out what citizens want but to test that the system is working and able to enforce the dictator’s will. The role of voters is to demonstrate loyalty. But this time the population shows little interest in playing along. At the start of the summer two-thirds of Russians in focus groups conducted by Elena Panfilova, a political scientist, did not know the elections were happening. The standard responses were “What elections? For what? Can’t they see what’s going on in the country? Asked what event they expected in September, many replied: “Mobilisation? Yabloko , Russia’s oldest liberal party, was barred after its open anti-war stance led to a dramatic rise in polls. In June Maksim Kruglov, the party’s deputy chair, had been sentenced to seven years in jail. Several others have been arrested. In Chelyabinsk a candidate was disqualified for quoting Andrei Gromyko, a Soviet foreign minister: “Better ten years of negotiations than one day of war. But it is not just liberals. The FSB is removing anyone who could suddenly gain popularity, regardless of party affiliation. When Nikolai Bondarenko, a Communist candidate with 2m followers on YouTube, criticised the government’s internet restrictions in a televised debate, he was promptly detained on trumped-up charges. Those who dare to run in this election, with FSB approval, are conscious that winning can be more dangerous than losing. In Ryazan, a city 185km south-east of Moscow, none of the candidates turned up for television debates at all.
Its candidates are being banned for displaying “extremist” symbols such as a photograph with Alexei Navalny.
