Stanislav Kucher is Editor-in-Chief of the Samizdat Online anti-censorship platform and a former Russian TV presenter. He left Russia in 2019. These are his thoughts on the Kremlin’s banning of opposition candidates and the impact that has on Russian elections.
SUBSCRIBER+EXCLUSIVE POINT OF VIEW – For months, Boris Nadezhdin was doing the unthinkable, running a campaign for the Russian presidency based on blunt criticism of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
The war, he said, was a “fatal mistake” and thousands of people lined up in different parts of the country to give Nadezhdin the signatures he needed - 100,000 in total - to qualify for the ballot.
One could ask whether those who gave their signatures were putting themselves at risk along with Nadezhdin himself, given that anti-war demonstrations of any kind are a crime in Putin’s Russia. But Nazezhdin presented the signatures he needed. And then the Kremlin banned him from the race.
On Thursday, Russia’s Central Electoral Commission ruled that there were too many “mistakes” in Nadezhdin’s submission, and that he had collected only 95,587 legitimate signatures. With the election just five weeks away, Nadezhdin said he plans to appeal.
“No one has any doubt that hundreds of thousands of people really signed for me,” Nadezhdin said after the ruling. “There are tens of millions of people who were going to vote for me. There is no doubt about it.”
In Vladimir Putin’s nearly quarter-century reign, Russia has regularly opened the door to opposition candidates who - either because they garner little support or are beaten down by the regime’s propaganda machine - pose no threat to Putin and his power. Analysts say these people have offered a veneer of fairness to elections in which the outcome is preordained.
That’s what the Kremlin figured they had in Boris Nadezhdin; a useful foil, a man who had tacked between support and gentle criticism of Putin. Certainly, he posed no threat.
Until suddenly, over the last several weeks, he did. In the wake of Thursday’s ruling, there’s no doubt that Putin will win a fifth term as president. But the question now is whether the Nadezhdin ban will spark more anger against the Kremlin and the man in charge.
From Little-Known Politician to Anti-War Symbol
Boris Nadezhdin is 60 years old. He was born in Uzbekistan, when that Central Asian nation was still a republic of the Soviet Union. When he was a child, his family moved to Dolgoprudny, a city near Moscow, where he has lived ever since.
Nadezhdin is both a physicist and a lawyer. In the late 1980s, he made good money tutoring and publishing scientific literature, and after the Soviet Union’s collapse he decided on a political career.
For 30 years, Nadezhdin drifted between political parties, never rising high in the ranks, and working with people on different sides of the political spectrum. Nadezhdin was an adviser to First Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, a Putin opponent who was killed in 2015 near the Kremlin walls. He was also an assistant to Russian Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko, who is today the first deputy head of the Presidential Administration, and an architect of Putin’s war in Ukraine.
But Nadezhdin had never been a particularly popular politician, either in the Putin establishment or the opposition. Certainly, he never stood out as a brave example of dissent or opposition. The invasion of Ukraine changed that.
The war was flawed in concept and execution, he said repeatedly, and it needed to end. “Russia must complete the ‘special military operation’ (the Kremlin’s term for the war) and start peace negotiations with Ukraine and the West,” Nadezhdin said. He went so far as to acknowledge the war crimes charges against Putin, though he promised not to send him to a post-war tribunal. Under a President Nadezhdin, he said, Putin would receive “a pension and government protection.”
Many Russians have gone to jail for saying lesser things - or even supporting others who do so. Nadezhdin told CNN in January that he had begun to fear for his family’s safety but had determined “after a very big discussion with my family” that the anti-war stand was worth taking, so that “Russia will be peaceful and a free country.”
“Anyone but Putin”
From the start, it was clear that all those Russians braving the cold - and possible retribution - were offering their signatures not as a vote of confidence in Nadezhdin but as a statement of dissent. In short order, Nadezhdin went from nominee of the little-known Civil Initiative party nominee to the hottest candidate not named Putin, thanks to his one-note platform: he was against Putin’s war.
Well-known Russians joined the bandwagon. Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of Russia’s best known opposition figure Alexei Navalny - now languishing in a prison in the Russian Arctic - openly supported Nadezhdin. So did Yuri Shevtchuk, a legendary Russian rock star (he's been called "Russia’s Springsteen"). The former oligarch and Kremlin arch enemy Mikhail Khodorkovsky was in his camp, along with the popular politician and blogger Maxim Kats. Both men have left the country and were calling on their fellow Russians to vote for Nadezhdin.
It’s safe to say that virtually none of these people are huge Boris Nadezhdin fans. But he was their “Anyone but Putin” candidate, the man who would end the war - and for that they would back him to the hilt.
The Crackdown - and What Comes Next
Watching Russian media is a good way to get a sense of what the Kremlin is thinking, or a hint at what may lie ahead. Certainly, that was the case for Nadezhdin and his campaign.
For years, he had been a frequent guest on popular TV talk shows in the role of the puppet liberal, against whom the pro-Kremlin participants would unleash their dogs. After the invasion of Ukraine, he kept coming on these shows, and he kept calling the war Putin’s “fatal mistake.” Then he said on the air that Putin needed to be replaced; after that, he didn’t appear on those shows again.
Over the last several weeks, Russia’s top propagandists ridiculed Nadezhdin, appearing on state-run channels, accusing him of working for the West, collaborating with Ukraine, and even accusing him of treason. Nadezhdin the candidate became a kind of pinata for the hardliners; they called him “stupid” and “unhappy”, and created stories that supposedly revealed his “dirty” secrets.
Earlier this week, when he submitted his signatures of support to the state election commission, Russian media pounced, “reporting” almost immediately what they called “obvious violations.” Sure enough, two days later, the commission said essentially the same thing.
In his response to the ruling on Wednesday, Nadezhdin called the decision to run against Putin "the most important political decision of my life, and vowed to “keep fighting for the votes of his supporters.”
It’s not clear how much of a “fight” the Kremlin will tolerate, nor what those supporters will do. 100,000 Russians is a small number in the scheme of things, but it’s a safe assumption that there are many more who feel the way they do - again, caring less about Boris Nadezhdin than about Putin and his war in Ukraine.
Russians may stay home in large numbers in the March vote. They might back other candidates - there are 11 of them - but none have called for an end to the war. At least one has criticized the Kremlin for not being harsh enough in its assault on Ukraine; that kind of opposition has been tolerated.
On the one hand, “One should not treat it as a classic election under democratic standards,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “Still, this is a serious procedure that represents a stress to the system.”
Russians have supported the war to varying degrees from the beginning. But a growing number tell pollsters that they would like the conflict to end in negotiations.
It’s possible some will find ways to protest the Nadezhdin ban - though that’s an obviously dangerous exercise, and in the month leading to the vote the hunt for any forms of dissent will no doubt intensify. What is clear is that, nearly two years into a war that has seen an estimated 300,000 Russians killed or wounded, and which shows no sign of ending anytime soon, “Anyone but Putin” is a candidate who - under normal circumstances – would likely do well in a real election in Russia.
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