Vladimir Kara-Murza
“SPECIAL REGIME” PRISON COLONY No. 7, OMSK, Russia — If you listen to Vladimir Putin’s propaganda, things couldn’t be going better for him. The Russian president is winning the war in Ukraine, his hold on power is as strong as ever and — most importantly and underpinning all of this — the Russian people are fully united in support of their national leader and his “special military operation,” as the official media invariably refers to the war. Surprisingly, there are even people in the West who take this at face value.
But actions speak louder than words. The Kremlin’s propaganda narrative was shown up last week when the Central Election Commission barred Boris Nadezhdin, the sole antiwar candidate running in Russia’s presidential election, from the March ballot.
The formal pretext was the usual one offered in such circumstances: “technical irregularities” in the small percentage of the voter signatures submitted in support of his nomination (misprints in passport numbers, some of the collectors’ signatures not notarized and so on). The real reason was given by an unnamed Kremlin source, who told Meduza (an independent online media organization) that the Putin administration had underestimated how many Russians are actually opposed to the war in Ukraine — and that Nadezhdin was polling in the double-digits. It was an “unpleasant surprise,” the source candidly admitted.
For many Russians, on the contrary, the sudden takeoff of Nadezhdin’s campaign was not just a pleasant surprise, it was a much-needed morale boost in a society disoriented, demoralized and increasingly repressed since the start of Putin’s full-blown war on Ukraine almost two years ago. The goal of the combined efforts of propaganda and crackdown (there are hundreds of political prisoners in Russia, with a growing number arrested for speaking out against the war) was to make antiwar Russians feel not only afraid but also isolated and shunned by their own countrymen. To a large extent, these efforts have worked. I receive dozens of letters in my prison mail every week from all over Russia, and the prevailing mood in them about the situation in the country was gloom and despair.
I say “was,” because this suddenly changed last month.
To be clear, Nadezhdin is not a firebrand national protest leader. He is no Boris Nemtsov or Alexei Navalny. Nadezhdin, a lawyer and former member of the Russian parliament and of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, is a cautious critic of the Putin regime who was, until recently, a regular guest on state TV talk shows and who always stays within the red lines imposed by the Kremlin for public discourse. For example, he refers to the war in Ukraine as the “special military operation.” But in his manifesto he also called the war a “fatal mistake” and made its immediate cessation his main campaign promise.
The public reaction was not foreseen by anyone, least of all by Nadezhdin himself. In cities and towns across Russia — not just large metropolises but also faraway provincial centers such as Novorossiysk and Gorno-Altaysk — people formed long lines at Nadezhdin’s campaign offices to sign the petitions required for his nomination. The wait was often several hours; the majority of those who came were young people. It was about these lines — the largest antiwar demonstration in Russia since Putin’s attack on Ukraine — that most people wrote to me through the prison mail in January. The mood change was as marked as it was sudden. “It was unbelievable to see that there are so many of us,” one young woman, a single mother, wrote me from Eastern Siberia. “For the first time in two years I felt at home in my own country.”
In four weeks, more than 200,000 people have signed their names, home addresses and passport details in support of Nadezhdin’s nomination (an act of courage in itself, given the realities of Putin’s Russia), while tens of thousands have sent donations to his campaign totaling more than 100 million rubles ($1,091,000). A survey released by Russian Field, a private polling company, showed that Nadezhdin shot to second place behind Putin and far ahead of the pro-war candidates from the official “opposition” parties — all this despite a total blackout of his campaign on national television.
Even more telling, state pollsters simply stopped publishing any survey results relating to the presidential election. The Kremlin doesn’t like surprises in general. But this one must have brought unpleasant memories from the 2020 presidential election in neighboring Belarus, where fellow dictator Alexander Lukashenko faced the largest protests of his rule after the unexpectedly strong campaign by opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who was initially dismissed by the regime as a little-known provincial “housewife.” History often makes unorthodox choices for its agents of change.
The formal results of Russia’s March election (it feels wrong to write this word without quotation marks) are, of course, not in doubt. With Nadezhdin out of the running, Russians who oppose the war will be left to spoil their ballots or boycott the vote altogether. Meanwhile, the Kremlin has more than enough tools in its toolbox — from traditional coercion of state employees to uncontrolled mass online voting — to produce the required numbers.
Putin’s official vote tally on March 17 will likely be the highest in all his 24 years in power. But it will also be the furthest removed from reality. A small upstart campaign by a cautious critic has exposed the lie behind the Kremlin claims of solid public support for Putin and for his war. “Few people believed this could happen, but Russian citizens now feel that change is actually possible in our country,” Nadezhdin told journalists after the meeting of the election commission.
This doesn’t mean that change will happen tomorrow or next month. But a society that feels more empowered and more confident about itself is suddenly a force to be reckoned with. And that is bad news for any dictator.
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