The true purpose of Russia’s fake election Putin's campaign is barraging the young

This year’s get-out-the-vote campaign — always important in Russia, where citizens are notoriously uninterested in directly engaging with political life, and as late as November 2023 only around half of the country was aware a presidential election was even in the offing — has therefore centred on the purported benefits of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Propagandists have spread photographs and videos of frontline troops taking advantage of early voting, declaring that turnout has (of course) been “close to 100%”. Residents in occupied territories — which Russia has declared to be a part of its own territory — are revealed to be voting with gusto, thus displaying their fealty to the state. One elderly lady in occupied Zaporizhzhia almost cried with joy as she fills out her early ballot, exclaiming “thank God for the chance to vote for the President of Russia!” For Moscow, the election is a chance to show off a newer, bigger, and bolder Russia — a Russia created through war.

In typical Kremlin style, every positive narrative is accompanied by the reminder that disaster is never far off. As the election nears, the state’s propagandists have summoned up the phantom spectre of foreign interference to rally Russians in opposition to a purported threat from the West. Earlier this week, Russia’s SVR spy agency publicly accused the USA — a country that Russians have overwhelmingly negative views about — of planning to interfere in the election by hacking the new electronic voting system.

At least some users on social media took the bait. Followers of one large pro-government Telegram channel, for instance, responded to the news with enthusiasm: “I wasn’t going to bother voting but now I definitely will!”; “Now I’ll show those Yankee fuckers and go vote… for Putin.” Voting becomes a symbolic act that bonds citizens in their opposition to Russia’s enemies. Choosing anyone but Putin is unthinkable. Participating in and talking about the election gives ordinary civilians a means to imagine themselves locked in a war with the West.

The state is not just reaching out to its traditional voter base with this loudhailer messaging. It’s also barraging the young and the disenchanted with visions of a future that is at once alluringly modern and dangerously militaristic. At the World Youth Festival, a state-run event that took place near Krasnodar in early March, thousands of young people — chiefly from Russia, with some delegates from friendly countries in the Global South — were treated to a glamorous and immaculately branded multi-day carnival of concerts, games, panel discussions, and celebrity talks. A special panel was dedicated to explaining the importance and fairness of the Russian electoral system.

The festival’s star was Vladimir Putin, who spoke on the nature of elections for his audience: “A politician,” he went on to explain, “thinks about the next election, while a statesman” — Putin has himself in mind — “thinks about the next generation”. In between platitudes about equality, justice, and the future, he urged the young to participate in political life, but only if they do so through the lens of war and militarism: “Even in the most difficult of times, at the turning points of Russia’s history, the hardest times, there were always a lot of volunteers, including during the Great Patriotic War.” Here, Putin’s message was clear: young people have a choice of engaging in social activity such as voting, waging war and fighting or, by rejecting the “statesman” that Putin is, making themselves the enemy of the next generation.

Despite this urgency, the 2024 election has been perhaps the most subdued in Russia’s recent history. There have been none of the usual flag-waving, immaculately choreographed stadium rallies in support of Putin in Moscow — perhaps out of fear of Ukrainian drone attacks, which caused the cancellation of Victory Day celebrations in 2023, or perhaps because the regime feels so secure it no longer sees the need to stage such lavish events.

Regardless, there is no opposition movement to challenge Putin. A brief tilt at the election by Boris Nadezhdin, an anti-war candidate, was quashed by the authorities before it made any serious headway. Nadezhdin’s 20-year career as a moderate politician in an increasingly extreme political landscape made him a palatable alternative for many Russians, who took immense personal risks to help him gather more than 100,000 nomination signatures and join the presidential race. Even though Nadezhdin hardly presented a real challenge to the Putinist order, the state was still unwilling to allow even moderate discontent to coalesce, and promptly used the electoral commission to assert that the candidate’s nomination list contained “irregularities” that disqualified him. Anti-Putin Russians might have hoped the death of Alexei Navalny would prove a catalyst for protests, but those hopes rapidly fizzled out as moderate numbers attended the leader’s funeral then went back to their homes. Now, the regime is cracking down on both Navalny and Nadezhdin’s supporters through judicial and violent means.

The result is that, this week, Russians will open their ballots and make a choice between Putin and three candidates who broadly support the Kremlin. As usual in Russia’s presidential elections, the alternatives are bit-part players with little name recognition and little to differentiate their vision of the future from the status quo. The expected runner-up, Leonid Slutsky, is an ultranationalist, long-time Duma deputy and Putin ally who has claimed that captured Ukrainian troops should be executed. The communist candidate, Nikolay Kharitonov, doesn’t even pretend to challenge the incumbent: Putin “is responsible for his own work, so why would I criticise him?”

After the polls close, the state will rapidly name Putin the winner. The president will declare victory and claim that the nation has once more chosen not just its leader but its identity as a warring power. He will claim that, in engaging in this process, Russians have engaged in a vital act of defence against a cabal of Western nations that seek to destroy it. And he will suggest that Russia’s future is bolder, brighter, and more united as a result. Even after two years of a disastrous war, Putin remains firmly in charge of Russia — and Russia remains firmly in support of the president’s vision of an increasingly militaristic future.

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Ian Garner is a historian and analyst of Russian culture and war propaganda. His latest book is Z Generation: Russia’s Fascist Youth (Hurst).

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