How the Russian state removed the only anti-war party from its ballot without breaking a law – and what it was protecting.
On 29 July the Central Election Commission registered Yabloko, the only party on the Russian ballot calling for an end to the war in Ukraine. Support for it rose sharply over the following three weeks. On 10 August the Supreme Court struck it off, upholding a copyright complaint brought by a rival party.
None of this was illegal. That is the point, and it is the hardest thing to convey to a reader who imagines electoral fraud as a man stuffing a ballot box at midnight. Russian elections are governed by an enormous body of law, applied by courts, overseen by commissions, documented in public filings. The system does not so much break these rules as write them, and it writes them the way a tailor cuts a suit: to fit one body, while looking like a suit anyone might wear.
The rules, cut to fit
Consider a change introduced this year. Campaign materials may no longer use the images of dead people. As a principle it is unobjectionable, a matter of dignity and consent. As a political act it disarms two parties and leaves a third untouched. The Communists lose Lenin and Stalin. The Liberal Democrats lose Vladimir Zhirinovsky, their late founder, whose face was effectively the party’s logo. United Russia campaigns with a living president and loses nothing at all. No party was named. No party needed to be.
The same design runs through everything. A provision introduced in 2021 bars anyone affiliated with an organisation designated extremist from seeking office, which disqualified Alexei Navalny’s entire network in a single stroke without anyone having to be tried. A new party must collect 200,000 handwritten signatures, and if more than five percent of a sampled batch is ruled defective by a state handwriting expert, the submission fails; there is no practical way to contest a graphologist. Parties may nominate members to the commissions that count the votes, and those nominations may simply be declined: in Moscow this year Yabloko holds none of the 127 territorial commission seats it sought, for the first time in thirty-three years. The Central Election Commission itself has fifteen members, appointed in equal thirds by the president, the Duma and the Federation Council, all three of which lead to the same place.
The arithmetic is shaped too. Half the Duma’s seats are filled in single-member districts where whoever wins the most votes takes the seat, with no majority required and no second round, so a divided opposition loses to a minority. The consequences can be absurd. In St Petersburg in 2021 the liberal politician Boris Vishnevsky found himself on the ballot beside two other candidates who had legally changed their names to his and altered their appearance to match his photograph. Three near-identical men, three identical names, one real candidate. All three lost, and the seat went to United Russia. Every step of it was lawful. And since 2006 there has been no option to vote against all, and no minimum turnout below which an election fails, which means apathy stopped being a risk to the authorities and became a resource.
When the rules stop working, the rules change. Russia used a mixed system from 1993 to 2003, switched to pure party-list voting with a seven percent threshold for 2007 and 2011, and brought the districts back for 2016 after United Russia’s list vote sagged and mass protests followed. The electoral system is not a framework the government operates within; it is an instrument the government retunes. The newest addition is online voting, available this year in 33 regions, and where it has been deployed is itself an answer: those regions averaged 38 percent for United Russia in 2021 against 52 percent elsewhere, and not one of the party’s ten strongest regions is on the list. Voters authenticate through a state identity system, on infrastructure run by a state company, into a platform administered by a commission the state appoints, and no paper ballot exists afterwards to recount.
Copyright, applied downward
Which brings the story back to copyright, because the instrument used against the federal list was then replicated downward. On 11 and 12 September a court in Chelyabinsk removed all five of Yabloko’s district candidates on copyright grounds, the lead case turning on a video that used a work by the artist Banksy alongside a quotation attributed to Andrei Sakharov. The suits were filed by candidates from the Greens, another minor party. One candidate in Smolensk went the same week; in Krasnodar Krai a 74-year-old was struck off over a leaflet about peace, which the ruling described as extremist campaign material. Yabloko began the campaign with 135 district candidates. By 26 August it was about 125, by 9 September 123, and by 14 September its own summary page said 117, with enough individual removals reported since to suggest the real figure is lower. The Insider counted at least 36 opposition candidates forced out of these elections nationwide, more than half of them from one party. Set against that the Communists, who faced identical copyright claims, mostly defeated them, and filed reciprocal claims of their own. The law was the same. The outcome was not.
Why the effort was needed
All of this took effort, and the effort needs explaining. A government confident of its position does not dismantle a party polling in single figures. The explanation is the war, and what it has done to everything the authorities used to campaign on.
United Russia has nothing to offer. The old bargain at election time was stability and visible spending; this year brings a budget deficit measured in trillions of roubles, fuel shortages across many regions, and schools and clinics closing in places as different as Moscow and Krasnoyarsk. The party’s internal target reportedly fell from 55 percent to 45, and by late July pollsters were reporting 36. Having nothing to promise, the administration suppressed demand instead. Those seventeen minutes of television were not an oversight. When the parties held their formally identical nominating congresses, United Russia received roughly 1.3 times the airtime of all ten others combined. In May, two-thirds of Russians polled could not say when the election was; by late June only 53 percent could name the date. A quiet election is a safer election, because the people who stay home are disproportionately the people who are unhappy, and since 2006 no turnout is too low to be valid.
The cost of the peace platform has been paid by people rather than by the party. On 17 August, the day Yabloko’s appeal was refused, a court in Pskov sentenced Lev Shlosberg, one of its deputy chairmen, to eleven years and one month in a penal colony for discrediting the armed forces; a second deputy chairman, Maxim Kruglov, had been given seven years in June over two social media posts from April 2022. Outside the Supreme Court in Moscow on that same day, 17 August, police detained more than eighty-five people, among them a 73-year-old actor who had come as a witness. By the party’s own count, the war years have brought it 44 searches, eleven members serving administrative arrests and fines exceeding 8.5 million roubles. A final appeal was refused on 3 September, disposed of in roughly a day without stated reasoning.
Nothing seemed to happen outside the court on 10 August. Nobody was arrested on Povarskaya Street, the police kept their distance, and the crowd went home. But an absence of arrests on the day was not an absence of consequences. Over the following week officers came for some of those who had handed out leaflets there, taking them from their homes. They were charged with breaching the rules for holding a public event and jailed, and they have since described being beaten and threatened in custody by officers of the anti-extremism directorate. A crowd broken up in front of cameras produces photographs and a day of international coverage. People collected quietly from their doorsteps a week later produce neither.
The calendar
The vote is also being staged, for the first time, in occupied Ukrainian territory, where the candidate lists are headed by administrators sent from Moscow. People will vote under martial law, amid power cuts, water shortages and drone strikes, and turnout will be announced as high by the same authorities running the ballot, with nobody independent left in the country to check it.
And there is one more date that gives the calendar its shape. Several independent Russian newsrooms, citing sources close to the presidential administration and the security services, have reported that a new wave of military recruitment may be announced as early as October, once the voting is finished. One person involved in recruitment described months of preparation for something that, in his words, will never be called a mobilisation. The Kremlin denies any such plan.
Read the calendar in that order and the sequence is plain. The election comes first and the bill arrives afterwards. Russians are being asked to renew a parliament for five years without being told what it may be required to approve in its second month, and the one party that wanted to discuss the subject was taken off the ballot in August, after the government’s own pollsters found that a substantial minority of Russians agreed with it.
That is what makes this vote worth understanding. Not the outcome, which was settled long ago, but the machinery that produced it: how a system arranges an election it cannot afford to lose, what it does when a party accidentally demonstrates that the public wants something the state will not permit, and why, for a government in this position, the safest election is the one almost nobody watches.