Since my last piece on Russia’s election, the regime has tightened the screws again. What was already a managed political field has narrowed further, and with the vote approaching, the past month has stripped away even more of the fiction that Russians are being offered a meaningful choice.
On September 18–20, Russia will elect the State Duma, the lower house of parliament. In theory, there exists competition between parties: candidates will be listed, votes will be cast, and those clearing 5% of the vote will be given seats. In practice, the outcome is largely predetermined: the ruling party, United Russia, has controlled the Duma for years, and the lineup of competitors on the ballot is determined less by voters than by who is allowed onto that ballot in the first place.
Yabloko, the only anti-war party still in the race, has had its federal list of candidates struck from the Duma election.
The significance of this is hard to overstate: Yabloko is one of Russia’s oldest parties, founded back in the early nineties, and the only one admitted to this election that openly calls for an immediate ceasefire with Ukraine. Every other participant either supports the war outright or avoids the subject entirely. Removing Yabloko means a vote against the war is no longer possible.
The Lawsuit
For the first time in a long while, Yabloko had a real shot at clearing the 5% threshold. An unexpected consolidation began to form around it. The entire protest electorate gravitated toward it, and the party even received an endorsement from Yulia Navalnaya.
The CEC registered Yabloko’s federal list on July 29, and by August 7, almost immediately after it became clear that the consolidation was actually happening, the Rodina party filed a claim with the Supreme Court demanding that the registration be annulled. The Prosecutor General’s Office backed the initiative. Formally, this is merely a dispute between two parties; in practice, it’s a remarkably well-timed reaction to polling numbers.
The Rodina Party was founded back in 2003, with the ambition to become a spoiler project. Instead, the party took 9% of the vote and won 29 seats. Since 2012, Rodina has been led by Duma deputy Alexei Zhuravlev, who himself was once elected on the ticket of the All-Russia People’s Front, a coalition with close ties to United Russia. The party calls itself “social-patriotic” and describes itself a “political special forces unit.”
In 2017, Rodina declined to field its own candidate in the presidential election, and instead endorsed Putin outright. Its modus operandi is not that of an independent political player but a tool switched on whenever the authorities need a specific problem removed with someone else’s hands.
The Hearing
On the day of the livestreamed hearing, watched by a vast online audience, Yabloko supporters gathered outside the Supreme Court holding “For Peace” signs, an extraordinary act of courage in today’s Russia. The case was heard by Judge Vyacheslav Kirillov, the same judge who declared Memorial an extremist organisation this spring, the country’s oldest human rights society, devoted to documenting Soviet-era repressions.
The formal grounds for disqualifying the party bordered on the absurd. First, Yabloko’s campaign fund had received donations from citizens who had themselves received money from abroad to the tune of just 16,900 rubles, or roughly $195. Second, the court found copyright violations in Yabloko’s use of AI-generated campaign images and archival photographs of Hiroshima in 1945, the latter supposedly infringing the rights of the U.S. Army. Some of Rodina’s other claims, including its attempt to equate opposition to the war and criticism of the repression of LGBTQ people with extremism, were dismissed on procedural grounds rather than rejected on their merits.
On August 10, the court upheld the challenge in full and ordered Yabloko’s removal from the ballot. While Yabloko appealed, on August 17 the Supreme Court upheld the ruling. On the day of the hearing, police detained more than 85 people outside the courthouse.
What options are left for Russians
Of the five parties I discussed in my previous publication, there is no genuine anti-war option left. The ballot will still list United Russia (the party of power), the KPRF (communists, long since reduced to a loyal decoration), the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (despite the name, a nationalist and authoritarian party), A Just Russia (nominal social democrats with a patriotic slant) and New People, the only relatively liberal force, which nonetheless has never taken an openly anti-war stance, limiting itself to vague formulations about a “return to peaceful life.”
New People are now the only option, though they are increasingly described as a clone party of United Russia, a rebranding exercise of sorts. Their rhetoric is deliberately confined to what’s permitted: the party has spoken out against internet blocks and repressions, but avoids anything that could be classified as “discrediting the army.” The choice, then, has been reduced to voting for the least pro-government of the pro-government options.
Fear of mobilization
Against this backdrop, talk of a second wave of mobilisation immediately after the election has picked up again. The first wave was announced in the autumn of 2022, affected hundreds of thousands of people, and triggered a mass exodus from the country, likely the single event of this war that genuinely frightened the ordinary citizen. “Elections first, unpopular decisions right after” strikes people as the likely scenario, one that had already happened in 2019, when a deeply unpopular pension reform was pushed through right after the election.
Officials deny the rumours consistently and insistently: Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Security Council and former president of Russia, called such talk “a lying provocation,” and on September 1, Putin himself, at a press conference in Bishkek, declared it “utter nonsense” and “an information attack on Russia.” But the very fact that the topic has to be denied at the presidential level is already a symptom, even if no formal confirmation ever surfaces.
The most absurd part is that the authorities are simultaneously denying rumours of mobilisation and clearing away the last party that offered any legal channel for expressing discontent with the war; with one hand they smother the panic, with the other they methodically remove the valve through which that panic could have escaped without consequences for the system.
At a moment like this, it’s hard to resist quoting a certain well-known politician:
“It seems to all of us that if… I won’t hide it, sometimes it seems that way to me too – that if firm order were imposed with a strong hand, all of us would live better, more comfortably and more safely. In reality, that comfort would pass very quickly, because that strong hand would begin to strangle us very quickly, and we would feel it on ourselves immediately – starting with our own families. Only under a democratic system, when the officers of the law enforcement agencies – call them what you like: the KGB, the MVD, the NKVD, whatever – when they know that tomorrow, or a year from now, the political leadership may change in the country, in the region, in the city, and they will be asked: how did you carry out the laws of the country you live in, and what did you do to the citizens over whom you held power?”
The man who said those words was Vladimir Putin.
Image: Russian Ministry of Defence / Mil.ru, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
