A Fake Vote for Putin, a Win for the Protesters
Navalny write-ins, a dead grasshopper, and other scenes from a sham election.
“HELL VOTES FOR THE DEVIL” was how Alexander Nevzorov, the sharp-tongued former Russian TV journalist turned émigré podcaster, characterized the “presidential election” that took place in Russia over the weekend. But no metaphor for the ritual vote that crowned Vladimir Putin for a sixth term could be more scathing than a piece of election agitprop shown in an actual Russian TV news segment—a microminiature sculpture in which a 5-millimeter ballot with microscopic print is held between the front legs of a preserved grasshopper and then dropped into a tiny glass ballot box:
Dead, fake, insectoid, and obedient—“that’s a very powerful image of the Russian voter,” commented another exiled Russian TV journalist, Viktor Shenderovich, acidly noting that even his satirical mind could not have come up with something as damning.
About the actual “vote,” there were only two real questions. The first was whether the official (fake) result would give Vladimir Putin more than the 77 percent he got six years ago. The other was whether the “Noon Against Putin” protest would materialize in sufficient numbers to make an impression. (Shortly before his death in an Arctic penal colony, opposition leader Alexei Navalny endorsed a call from some exiled opposition activists for Putin opponents to converge on polling stations at noon on March 17, the last day of the voting.) The answer to both questions turned out to be yes—but the sham election turned out to have some other surprises as well.
In a field of faux candidates from which even the tame liberal opposition represented by lawyer and pundit Boris Nadezhdin had been scrubbed, Putin officially received more than 87 percent of the vote, with 75 percent turnout. Of course, no one knows how real those numbers are. (The independent magazine Novaya Gazeta Europe estimates, using a statistical analysis method developed by mathematician Sergei Shpilkin, that about half of Putin’s votes—some 31 million—were fake. If so, then the true percentage of actual votes cast for Putin might have been closer to 77 percent, or even lower, and the real turnout was close to 42 percent.)
That kind of fakery is nothing new for Russian elections. But the protests around the election are—they’re the most significant election protests since at least 2012, when Navalny emerged as an opposition leader and tens of thousands of Russians marched to protest Putin’s return to a new presidential term in circumvention of the Russian constitution.
The “Noon Against Putin” collective action could be seen as Navalny’s last protest—and his widow’s first, since Yulia Navalnaya made a video earlier this month urging people to join it. (She also joined in it herself at the Russian consulate in Berlin.) Some Putin foes skeptical of or hostile toward the Russian liberal opposition have criticized the project as worse than useless, since it supposedly legitimized Putin’s sham election by encouraging people to participate. This, despite the fact that in her video, Navalnaya stressed that “these are not elections” and “Putin will not be a legitimate president”—a point she also made in a Washington Post column.
It’s worth noting, too, that the protest participants didn’t have to vote at all: The idea was to show up at a voting precinct in solidarity with other Putin opponents—in Navalnaya’s words, “See that there are many of us and we are strong”—and then do anything except vote for Putin. Voting for one of the other candidates whom Navalnaya herself openly characterized as “Putin’s puppets” was one option. Spoiling the ballot was another, and so was writing Navalny’s name on it in big letters. You didn’t even have to drop the paper in the box—some voters in Moscow absconded with their ballots and brought them to Navalny’s grave, putting them atop the still-fresh pile of flowers.
No one knows what the overall turnout was for the protest, but there is evidence that it wasn’t a flop. Reuters reported only a “slight increase in the flow of voters, especially younger people, at noon at some polling stations in Moscow and Yekaterinburg.” But the Washington Post noted that at “many polling stations” in Moscow, things were “deathly quiet on Sunday morning, but long lines appeared at exactly 12 p.m.” The independent Russian news site Meduza posted reader-submitted photos and videos of noontime lines at polling stations in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, and other cities. (Granted, some people in those lines may have been regular folks who randomly decided that noon on Sunday was a good time to vote.)
Many participants posted visual evidence of their dissent online: photos of ballots with “Alexei Navalny” or even “Yulia Navalnaya” written in; or with “Usurper, thief and murderer,” “Bastard,” “Where is my democracy?”, “Shame,” “Be a human being and leave,” “Serial killer,” etc. written across Putin’s name; or with antiwar slogans written across the entire ballot. Interestingly, expatriate Russian journalist Renat Davletgildeev has mentioned reports, uncorroborated so far, of some voting precincts using various excuses to deny people paper ballots and force them to vote electronically—presumably with the intent of neutralizing such forms of protest. Some voters also reported attempts by law enforcement to inspect their filled-out ballots, and in one case to open the box and remove a ballot already cast.
Did the protest work as far as disrupting the image of a national Putin lovefest? Almost certainly, judging by the fact that the Russian authorities felt it necessary to urge people not to participate in “Noon against Putin” and classed the gatherings as an “extremist” action—and that some eighty people were detained. Expatriate Russian attorney and political scientist Vladimir Pastukhov, a visiting fellow at University College London, asserted in an interview that the protest had been “a complete success” as far as making the state nervous.
Meanwhile, dozens of Russians registered their objections in more dramatic ways, pouring ink, dye, or bright green antiseptic into ballot boxes, or even setting them on fire or setting off incendiary devices at the precincts. None of these acts seemed to have any relation to “Noon Against Putin.” Pastukhov noted that no one had advocated or promoted polling-station vandalism—it was spontaneous action “out of nowhere,” showing that “a certain portion of the populace is in a far more radical mood than it was expected to be.”
UNUSUALLY, PUTIN HIMSELF took note of the protests in his post-victory news conference. Technically, it was in response to a question from a “journalist” with the Novosti news agency. But if you think that such a question was not pre-approved and choreographed, I’ve got a bridge to Crimea to sell you. (The question also mentioned the vandalism in the same breath as the opposition-endorsed noon protest, a conflation that was certainly not an accident.) Putin claimed with a straight face that if the idea was for more people to come out to vote, for whichever candidate they wanted, “then I approve”; destroying or damaging other people’s ballots, on the other hand, was deplorably “undemocratic.” Responding to a question from NBC News’s Keir Simmons, he also commented on Navalny’s death after years of refusing to say his name, claiming that he had already agreed to a prisoner swap but, unfortunately, “what happened, happened,” and “such is life.”
Did Putin’s sudden willingness to engage with unpleasant topics signal confidence, or did he feel forced to acknowledge the frustrations of (at least part of) his population? The Kremlin dictator likely feels empowered now, both by his brazenly fake election and by the perception that he is winning the war in Ukraine. It’s no accident that his sidekick and former puppet “successor,” Dmitry Medvedev, who seems to have been given the role of channeling the Kremlin id, has recently articulated an insane “soft Russian formula for peace” in Ukraine, which entails a recognition of full Russian sovereignty over all of “former Ukraine” and an international condemnation of the current “Kiev (sic) regime” as “Nazi.”
But for all of Ukraine’s difficulties, Putin’s confidence may prove ill founded. After the capture of Avdiivka in mid-February at huge cost, the Russian offensive in the east seems stalled, with Ukrainian forces holding back and sometimes pushing back Russian troops even without the benefit of new deliveries of weapons and ammunition from the United States. Europe continues to send materiel, and even House Speaker Mike Johnson, held hostage by the MAGA faction in the House, may finally move ahead with a bill that would unblock American aid. Meanwhile in Russia, Ukrainian drones keep striking oil refineries, and mobilized soldiers’ wives have grown restive.
One apparent goal of the sham election is to buttress Putin’s political dominance at home, enabling him to wage war more effectively in Ukraine—possibly with another round of mobilization. But even as the voting limped along, the war had once again jumped the border into the Russian region of Belgorod, which came under attack from units that official Russian sources describe as Ukrainian, but that the Ukrainian armed forces—and the combatants in question—insist are Ukrainian-aided Russian rebels fighting the Putin regime with bullets rather than ballots.
The truth about these groups, which are indeed predominantly Russian (and include some unsavory far-right Russian nationalists) is complicated and murky. What’s not in doubt is that they are currently making things difficult for the Russian side. The Russian Ministry of Defense has claimed that Russian forces have not only stopped the incursions but inflicted shockingly high casualties—some 2,500 dead and wounded, numbers that suggest a massive and ferocious battle—with absolutely no evidence to confirm it. Putin has repeated those claims as well, most recently in his election-victory press conference. Meanwhile, the supposedly eliminated commando units continue to fight and post videos from the area; they now claim to have captured 25 Russian soldiers, with at least one of those captures confirmed.
Soon enough, Putin’s victories in Ukraine may look as hollow and fake as his victory in the Russian election.