The farce began last December when Artyom Zhoga, a highly decorated ‘colonel’ suddenly pleaded with Vladimir Putin in front of the TV cameras to run again for the presidency.
Today is a unique day in the history of Russia. As you read this, people will be going to the polls across the country to elect a new president. Unlike any other presidential polls in Russia’s history, this year’s is over three days and today is the third and final day. Initial results are expected to be announced on Tuesday, with the final outcome to be revealed on 29th March. Another first is that in this election, voters in 29 regions can vote online. In all, some 112 million people over the age of 18 are eligible to vote, not only across Russia’s eleven time zones, but also in places such as annexed Crimea and the occupied eastern regions of Ukraine, all declared part of Russia by the Kremlin. Even those Russians living in California can vote over three days, along with millions of fellow compatriots living abroad. So, today’s election is historic. It’s also a sham.
The farce began last December when, during a ceremony in one of the Kremlin’s lavishly decorated halls, Artyom Zhoga, a highly decorated “colonel” from the separatist Donbas eastern region of Ukraine, suddenly pleaded with Vladimir Putin in front of the TV cameras to run again for the presidency. “On behalf of all our people, our Donbas, the lands reunited with Russia, I wanted to ask you to take part in this election”, said Zhoga. The cameras then turned to face the president, who initially looked shocked and surprised, giving the impression that he had never thought of such an idea. “I’m not going to hide it”, replied a poker-faced Vladimir after a few seconds of intense drama during which the whole nation held its collective breath, ‘I’ve had different thoughts at different times, but now is the time to make a decision, and I will run”. Big sigh of relief all round.
The path to today’s election was actually laid four years ago when Russia’s parliament passed a resolution to change the country’s constitution. Until then, a president could only serve two six-year terms. The resolution effectively “nullified” Putin’s period in power from 2012-2018 and 2018-2024, so that he could now start all over again. So this, constitutionally, is his first term. Get it?
In his first period in power starting in 2000, Putin decided not to change the constitution in order to stay in the job. Having served as president for two four-year periods 2000-2008, the maximum allowed under the constitution at the time, he did a job-swap with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. The joke going around Moscow at the time was that Vlad was content with Dmitry being president as he was the only senior politician who was shorter than him. Putin has always been very conscious of his lack of physical stature. In 2012 a second job swap happened and again Putin became president. In order to remove the inconvenience of having to be re-elected so frequently, one of the first things he did was to change the constitution to increase the period of tenure to six years. The constitution was amended yet again in 2020 to reset the number of terms Putin has served. So now, Vladimir Putin can serve as president until 2030 and then be re-elected until 2036, when he will be 83 years old. Almost as old as Joe Biden at the end of his second term if he wins November’s election.
All these shenanigans to stay in power, although dodgy, were perfectly legal. So why do so many around the world consider the current election a sham? The simple reason is there is no realistic alternative to Vladimir Putin on the ballot paper. All the genuine candidates who could provide real competition to Putin have either been disqualified from taking part, have left Russia for their own safety, or have been murdered. OK, there are a few names on the list, but they are simply there for choice in order to present an illusion of democracy. For example, Nikolay Kharitonov aged 75 and for 30 years a member of the State Duma, is an old timer having taken part in the 2004 vote when he finished a distant second to Putin with 13% of the vote. Another is Leonid Slutsky, a 56-year-old member of the far-right ultranationalist LDPR party, the central figure of a sexual assault scandal in parliament. The third registered candidate, Vladislav Davankov of the New People’s party, is obscure and barely known outside Moscow. All three back the war in Ukraine and generally support Putin’s policies, so the campaign will not be controversial.
Popular politicians such as Boris Nemtsov, former Deputy Prime Minister under Boris Yeltsin, and Alexey Navalny, the popular outspoken opponent of Putin, both of whom would have introduced genuine democracy into Russia, have been murdered. Navalny was denied registration in the last presidential election in 2018 that Putin won with almost 78% of the vote. The popular opposition politician and former leader of the People’s Freedom party, 40-year-old Ilya Yashin, a close ally of Navalny and potential candidate, was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison in 2022 for spreading “false information” after reporting the facts on the Russian military’s war crimes in Bucha soon after Putin’s full scale invasion of Ukraine. Along with Navalny, Yashin would have provided genuine opposition to Putin had he been on the ballot paper.
Perhaps the most blatant piece of recent gerrymandering by the Kremlin involved the prospective candidature of the liberal politician Boris Nadezhdin, who planned to be an “anti-war” candidate. Election rules require any potential candidate to collect at least 100,000 signatures of support across more than 40 regions in order to stand in this month’s presidential election. Vladimir Putin, who has chosen to run as an independent candidate rather than as a candidate of the ruling United Russia party, has collected more than 4 million, according to his supporters. The 60-year-old Nadezhdin claims that he collected far more than the minimum: “I collected more than 200,000 signatures across Russia”, he said last month. “We conducted the collection openly and honestly – the queues at our headquarters and collection points were watched by the whole world”. Nevertheless, Russia’s Central Election Commission barred Nadezhdin from being on the polling list as they claim that it had “found flaws” in the signatures and that some of them were those of dead people. Because of this, Nadezhdin failed to collect the minimum 100,000 signatures needed to become a candidate and was therefore declared ineligible. The CEC didn’t provide evidence of the huge number of disqualified signatures, but last week the Appeal Board of the Russian Supreme Court rejected Nadezhdin’s appeal and so his name is not on the ballot paper.
Nobody, of course, expected Nadezhdin to win the presidential election, so why was the Kremlin so determined to prevent him from being a candidate? After all, Putin’s victory is a foregone conclusion. Nadezhdin had surprised many analysts with his trenchant criticism of what the Kremlin calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine, something Nadezhdin calls “a fatal mistake”.
As an anti-war candidate on the ballot paper, Nadezhdin would have revealed the extent to which Russians are against the invasion of Ukraine, and this is something the Kremlin fears most of all. His popular support would also have diluted Putin’s winning margin by as much as 20% from that planned by the Kremlin. A survey carried out in February by VTsIOM, a Kremlin-controlled pollster, revealed that some 79% of Russians intend to vote for Putin, so expect this figure to be the official outcome of the election.
In reality, many everyday Russians await the vote with apathy and hopelessness after wearily and reluctantly adapting to the wartime reality around them, afraid to say anything. After all, they all know the election’s a sham.
John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently Visiting Fellow at the University of Plymouth.