When Russian authorities banned anti-war candidate Boris Nadezhdin from participating in this month’s presidential election, their message was clear: the Kremlin would no longer tolerate a competitive electoral landscape — even one in which Vladimir Putin’s victory was guaranteed.
If in past elections, the Kremlin allowed a few handpicked opposition candidates to be on the ballot, its current crackdown ahead of the March 15-17 presidential vote suggests that even unrealistic candidacies are viewed as a potential risk to the regime.
“My movement — the support that I received — completely destroyed the playbook that the Kremlin was expecting,” Nadezhdin told the Financial Times. “It turned out a lot of people were prepared to openly support a candidate who was advocating for peace and criticising Putin and his politics.”
The death of Alexei Navalny, Putin’s fiercest critic, in an Arctic prison colony last month after spending the past three years behind bars and surviving a poisoning attempt, has had a further chilling effect on the opposition.
The crackdown on any show of support for the late opposition leader, including the arrests at his funeral on Friday where people chanted anti-regime slogans, underscored the degree to which Putin was no longer willing to tolerate any sort of dissent.
A Nadezhdin campaigner was among the people detained at a Navalny memorial in the southern city of Voronezh. Members of the parliamentary opposition in Moscow and Novosibirisk were also arrested, according to Russian human rights group OVD-Info.
“He didn’t just kill him, he made a show of killing him, just before the elections so that no one would doubt Putin’s involvement,” wrote Ilya Yashin, another jailed opposition figure in a public letter.
For many of Putin’s 24 years in power, the Kremlin ran its elections by a system of so-called “managed democracy”, allowing a simulacrum of democratic tenets, if only as a means to shore up the regime and underscore the president’s own popularity.
But after two years of full-scale war in Ukraine and a brutal crackdown against any form of domestic dissent, the Putin regime has chosen to get rid of the facade altogether.
“Putin wants the headline at the end of the day on [election day] that 85 per cent of Russians are clearly rallying around the tsar,” said Vladimir Milov, a former Russian government minister turned opposition activist and former associate of Navalny.
“If you take a wide look across the board at what is happening, you see they are extremely nervous. They’re cleaning up the field completely of any sort of surprises,” he said.
In December, Russian authorities barred Ekaterina Duntsova, a former TV journalist and anti-war candidate with hundreds of thousands of Telegram followers, from even collecting the necessary signatures to appear on the ballot.
Two months later, the central election commission barred Nadezhdin, the only anti-war candidate left, citing a high number of invalid signatures. That prompted two of the five remaining Putin challengers to also drop out.
“In a difficult hour for the Motherland, this is not the time to fragment the forces of the people,” declared Sergei Baburin, a nationalist member of parliament, as he announced his exit. “All national patriotic organisations of Russia, all nationally oriented citizens of Russia need to unite around the candidacy of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, who is today the national leader.”
Of Putin’s three remaining opponents, none has challenged the president personally, or even for his job. On the campaign trail, their efforts have come off as farcical.
Leonid Slutsky, a candidate for Russia’s Liberal Democratic party, in December told journalists he had no hope of actually winning the race. “I dream of winning the special military operation. But no I don’t dream of beating Putin. What for?”
Nikolai Kharitonov, a candidate for the Communist party, spent one campaign stop under the literal shadow of Putin’s portrait, as publicised on his own social media account. Vladislav Davankov, a Duma deputy who led the body’s 2023 bill criminalising transgender surgeries, has taken pains not to criticise Putin personally and demurred on his own chances in the race.
Nadezhdin, who knows all three remaining opponents, described them as marginal figures who “aren’t even trying”.
As for Nadezhdin’s own bid for the presidency, other opposition figures have wondered why the Kremlin allowed him initially to gather signatures.
“Why was Nadezhdin necessary? Putin was hoping in that way to legitimise the vote — to show the world that there is someone in the election who’s against the war,” said Marat Guelman, a former Kremlin adviser turned regime critic in exile. “But fairly quickly it became clear that legitimisation wasn’t going to happen.”
The emaciated election field is just one of the ways the authorities are cracking down on dissent.
This month, Russia passed a new law allowing authorities to confiscate money, property and assets from anyone found to be discrediting Russia’s military.
But the repression has also targeted criticism in the pro-war camp. Leftist war apologist Sergei Udaltsov was recently arrested on alleged terrorism offences and nationalist former rebel commander Igor Girkin was sentenced to four years for inciting extremism.
“Putin understands in his relations with Russian society there is no love and there can be unpleasant surprises,” said Milov, the former official-turned-opposition leader. “He wants to send the message of fear: Don’t even try to stick your head out.”
Additional reporting by Anastasia Stognei in Riga
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