But actions speak louder than words. The Kremlin’s propaganda rhetoric was exposed last week when the Central Election Commission excluded Boris Nadezhdin, the only anti-war candidate running for Russia’s presidential election, from the March vote.
The formal pretext was the usual pretext offered in such situations. It was that there were “technical irregularities” in a small number of voter signatures submitted in support of his nomination (misprinted passport numbers, missing collector’s signatures that were not notarized). department, etc.). The real reason was stated by an anonymous Kremlin official, who told Meduza (an independent online media organization) that the Putin regime underestimated the number of Russians who were actually opposed to the war in Ukraine. He said Nadejdin’s polls were in double digits. It was an “unpleasant surprise,” a source candidly admitted.
On the contrary, for many Russians, the sudden development of Mr. Nadezhdin’s campaign was not just a pleasant surprise, but a feeling of disorientation, demoralization and increasingly repression since the start of Putin’s full-fledged war against Ukraine. It was also a much-needed moral uplift in a society in the midst of poverty. Two years ago. The combined effort of propaganda and repression (Russia has hundreds of political prisoners, and more and more are being arrested for speaking out against the war) aims not only to intimidate anti-war Russians; , making them feel isolated and shunned from their fellow citizens. . These efforts were largely successful. I receive dozens of letters every week from all over Russia in the prison mail, and the atmosphere prevailing in the letters about the situation in the country was gloom and despair.
I say “was” because it suddenly changed last month.
To be clear, Nadejdin is not the leader of the incendiary nationwide protests. He is not Boris Nemtsov or Alexei Navalny. Mr. Nadezhdin is a lawyer and former member of the Russian parliament and the Council of Europe. Until recently, he appeared regularly on state TV talk shows and regularly criticized the Putin regime. Red lines imposed by the Kremlin for public discussion. For example, he calls the Ukraine war a “special military operation.” but, his manifesto He also called the war a “fatal mistake” and made an immediate end to it a key campaign promise.
The public reaction was not expected by anyone, least of all Nadezhdin himself. In cities and towns across Russia, not only in the big cities, but also in far-flung regional centers such as Novorossiysk and Gorno-Altaisk, people came to Nadezhdin’s election office to sign the petitions needed for his nomination. There were long lines. Wait times were often several hours. Most of those who came were young people. It was about these lines – Russia’s biggest anti-war demonstration since Putin’s attack on Ukraine – that most people wrote to me in the prison mail in January. The change in mood was both sudden and noticeable. “I couldn’t believe we had so many people,” a young single mother from Eastern Siberia wrote to me. She said, “For the first time in two years, I felt like I was in my own country.”
In four weeks, more than 200,000 people signed their names, home addresses and passport details to support Nadezhdin’s nomination (an act of courage in itself, given the realities of Putin’s Russia), and In total, tens of thousands of people sent donations to his campaign. More than 100 million rubles ($1,091,000). A survey published by the private polling firm Russian Field placed Nadezhdin in second place after President Putin and significantly ahead of the pro-war candidates of the official “opposition.” All this despite the complete absence of his campaign from national television. .
More importantly, state polling agencies have stopped publishing their presidential election results altogether. The Kremlin generally doesn’t like surprises. But the election must have brought back unpleasant memories of the 2020 presidential election in neighboring Belarus. There, fellow dictator Alexander Lukashenko faced the largest protests in his government’s history after an unexpectedly strong campaign by opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, which was initially described by the regime as “a small matter”. was excluded. – Famous local “housewife”. History often makes unconventional choices as agents of change.
The official results of Russia’s March elections (it feels wrong to write this word without quotation marks) are, of course, beyond doubt. With Nadezhdin out of the race, Russians opposed to the war will have no choice but to spoil their ballots or boycott the vote altogether. Meanwhile, the Kremlin has enough tools in its toolbox to generate the numbers it needs, from traditional coercion of state officials to massive uncontrolled online voting.
Putin’s official vote count on March 17 is likely to be the highest in Putin’s 24 years of rule. But it is also the furthest thing from reality. A small upstart campaign by cautious critics has exposed the lies behind the Kremlin’s claims of solid public support for Putin and his war. “Few people believed that something like this could happen, but the Russian people now feel that change is actually possible in our country,” Nadezhdin told reporters after an election commission meeting. “There is,” he said.
This doesn’t mean that changes will happen tomorrow or next month. But a society that feels more empowered and confident in itself suddenly becomes a force to be reckoned with. And that’s bad news for dictators.