The absurd theatre of Russia’s choice-free election

Russia’s parliamentary elections were held from 18 to 20 September. Predictably, the ruling United Russia party won a majority of seats for the fifth time, receiving nearly 58 per cent of the votes. Four other parties also entered the Duma: the Communist Party received just under 14 per cent; the Liberal Democratic Party – nine per cent (the name is completely misleading; it is, in fact, a far-right nationalist party); New People – eight per cent; and Just Russia – five per cent. The presentation of the results is deceptive. It makes it sound familiar, as if in Russia, like in Western democracies, parties compete for voters, who in turn make their decisions based on pragmatic or ideological considerations, and then the distribution of votes determines the composition of parliament and the balance of power. In reality, things work differently in Russia.

In the past, the Soviet electoral system did not try to mimic Western models. Vladimir Lenin believed that communists should participate in parliamentary politics only until they became strong enough to dissolve parliament. And this is precisely what was done soon after the Bolsheviks came to power. Soviet ‘people’s democracy’ differed from Western ‘bourgeois democracy’ in that all parties except the Communist Party were banned, and all candidates (even formally independent ones) had to be approved by the Party.

While that was an explicitly choice-free system, the Putinist regime built an implicitly choice-free one. That is, a system that mimics the Western model, imitating the façade of democratic institutions. Economist Sergei Guriev and political scientist Daniel Treisman call such political regimes, which pretend to be democracies, ‘spin dictatorships’. But since the invasion of Ukraine, Putinism has been rapidly moving back to the future, towards the 20th-century ‘fear dictatorships’ that rely more on violence than on manipulation. Yet, the Russian electoral machine, fine-tuned during the 2010s, continues to operate according to the logic of ‘spin’ – at least for now.

There was no real choice in this ‘election’. Political competition has been destroyed systematically over more than a quarter of a century under Putin’s rule. His principal and most dangerous opponent, Alexei Navalny, never even managed to officially register his party, despite nine attempts between 2013 and 2019. Thus, Navalny’s political allies, as well as many others from Russia’s so-called ‘non-systemic’ opposition, were simply not allowed to participate in the elections.

Yabloko, Russia’s oldest democratic party, founded in 1993, was removed before the vote. Since 2003, Yabloko had failed to cross the electoral threshold for entering parliament, receiving between two and four per cent of the vote and remaining a very convenient sparring partner for Putin’s regime, which could always point to it and say: well, what did you expect? This is the real popularity of Western-oriented liberal democratic forces in Russia…

This is why, apparently, Yabloko was initially allowed to participate in the election. It very quickly became clear, however, that it would be the only party on the ballot openly, albeit in cautious terms, calling for an end to the war with Ukraine. This not only changed its electoral prospects dramatically (according to independent sociologists, it could have come second with around 20 per cent of the vote), but, even more importantly, would have legitimised calls for peace – for which one can actually be sent to prison in contemporary Russia. Two weeks after registration, the party was removed from the election by a court decision. The legal grounds for this decision were ridiculous: copyright violations involving the phrases ‘Let There Always Be Sunshine’ and ‘If Only There Were No War’ (much as if a British courts removed a party because one of its members had said in an interview, ‘Teacher, leave them kids alone’) and ‘foreign funding’ – the princely sum of around £140 sent by Russians living abroad.

After Yabloko was removed, only parties supporting Putin and the war in Ukraine remained on the ballot. This means that the choice between them shifted towards aesthetic preferences: an elderly person nostalgic for the Soviet past might prefer the Communist Party, while a young resident of a large city might choose New People, which is occasionally allowed to question the benefits of internet blocking. What people in democratic countries might find almost impossible to imagine is a situation in which candidates try to convince voters that they are not worth voting for. In the Samara region, for example, candidates did not turn up for debates on a local TV channel, leaving the presenter who was supposed to moderate them alone in the studio. Many of those who did turn up seemed to do everything but campaign: some sang songs, while others simply refused to speak.

There is a certain logic at play: most participants in this staged election understand what it is worth, so they do not bother trying very hard. Putin’s bureaucracy and police fully control the electoral process. The election-monitoring movement – that is, the network of representatives of political parties, media, and civil society who observe voting and report violations – has been almost destroyed in recent years.

In 2020, elections were extended from one day to three, meaning that no observer can physically remain near the ballot boxes throughout the entire procedure. Monitoring organisations have also been subjected to repression: the best known of them, Golos (‘Voice’), was declared a ‘foreign agent’, and one of its co-chairmen, Grigory Melkonyants, was imprisoned. The handful of independent observers who still remained at the 2026 election faced tragicomic obstacles. Before the election, officials recommended that they ‘refrain from public statements that could be regarded as undermining confidence in the electoral system’, which simply made their work meaningless. In the city of Ufa, in the Volga district, observers were persistently offered vodka during the election, so that they could later be removed from the polling station for drunkenness. In St Petersburg, the authorities did not even try to create a pretext; one observer was detained with such force that he lost consciousness, only to be fined for his activities the following day.

Finally, as a sign of the times, online voting was used in this election in 33 of Russia’s 89 regions. The authorities advertised it as a safe and simple way to vote at any convenient time. The problem is that the process cannot be monitored at all. The system is a black box that only produces a result, and that result is (who would have thought?) a stonking victory for United Russia. The best-known example of this is online voting in Moscow during the previous parliamentary elections in 2021. In eight of the 15 electoral districts, opposition candidates were winning after the paper ballots had been counted; however, online voting changed the result in every case and secured a victory for United Russia. The phrase often attributed to Stalin – ‘It does not matter how people vote; what matters is how the votes are counted’ –perfectly captures how this system works. Thanks to new technologies, it is impossible to catch someone red-handed adding votes to the ballot box – electoral fraud can only be revealed through statistical methods. The Putinist regime, however, is aware of this as well: officials declared in advance that the soul of the Russian voter cannot be calculated mathematically.

The results of this election were as predictable as it gets. Several days before the election, a video went viral in the Russian corner of the internet: a man asks a Russian AI assistant called Alice who had won the 2026 election. The AI confidently answered that United Russia had won, receiving 324 seats in parliament. Well, we all know that AI sometimes makes mistakes. In the case of the Russian election, it underestimated United Russia’s result by an impressive 31 seats.

United Russia’s victory demonstrates not the popularity of Putin and his policies, but rather the ability of the Russian bureaucracy to achieve the required result and still maintain the bare minimum of electoral formalities. Running the elections signals to the population that the regime keeps the situation under control, even at the cost of eliminating genuine political competition. The only glimpse of hope in this bleak picture is that, if conditions for democratic politics ever emerge in Russia again, any heirs to Putinism will be thoroughly discredited – not only by the regime’s crimes, but also by its absurdity.