One of the curiosities of the Soviet Union was the serious weight its leaders attached to holding elections. In a dictatorship, why bother? Academic studies concluded that ensuring a 99% vote share for the only candidate on the ballot was a useful tool for civic mobilisation, and a way of isolating and intimidating anyone who aspired to a real democratic choice.
Under the repressive, paranoid leadership of Vladimir Putin, Russians are going back to the future. Mr Putin’s 87% landslide in Russia’s presidential election – the highest percentage in any post-Soviet poll – confirms that, almost a quarter of a century after he first entered the Kremlin, the resumption of a form of totalitarian control is all but complete. Having changed the constitution to ensure he can continue to rule, a further victory in 2030 would see him surpass Stalin’s 31 years of dictatorial power.
In a less shamelessly rigged contest, Mr Putin would probably have come out on top regardless. But this laughable margin of victory sends its own menacing message. The limited space for dissent and political competition that existed in the first years of his rule has disappeared. The three Kremlin-approved “rival” candidates in the race made no attempt to win it. Two popular anti-war figures who could have hurt Mr Putin at the polls were excluded on technicalities. Alexei Navalny, the charismatic opposition leader who caused him trouble in 2018, died last month in mysterious circumstances in a brutal penal colony.
In this dismal transition from authoritarianism to outright autocracy, Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine is playing a vital catalytic role. Mr Putin originally envisaged his “special military operation” as a short and triumphant walkover. But the grinding attrition that has actually transpired, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, has left him steeped in blood. Internal repression and the promise of eventual victory in a forever war with the west are being deployed to keep any backlash at bay.
Ignoring his own advisers, Mr Putin made the war the central theme of the campaign. Attacks on civil society organisations, journalists and academics are portrayed as patriotic necessities in the midst of an existential struggle with the west. Protest has been effectively criminalised, and legislation introduced allowing dissenting Russian citizens to be designated as “foreign agents”. Plans to recruit veterans into government, and ominous warnings directed at supposedly parasitic urban elites, point to the aggressive militarisation of a society being placed on a permanent war footing.
As the Kremlin’s belief that it can “outlast” the west’s support for Ukraine grows, the situation of Russia’s democratic opposition is undeniably bleak. But Sunday’s defiant “Noon against Putin” protests – at which long midday queues of voters formed in an attempt to overload some polling stations – at least allowed opponents of the war and a murderous regime to feel less isolated and powerless. In the medium term, organisers must hope similar actions can keep the flame of resistance alive, and that the west will offer what assistance it can to their cause.
The dissident sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky, who was recently sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in a penal colony, wrote last year: “The people to whom this regime poses the most terrible threat is (aside from the Ukrainians, who are bombarded daily by shells and missiles) the Russians themselves, their people and culture, their future.” This mockery of an election has grimly underlined his point.
