Russia’s Election Without Choice

By Matthew Parish

Thursday 3 September 2026

There is a temptation, when contemplating contemporary Russia, to ask why the Russian people do not oppose the war in Ukraine more vigorously. The war has now lasted more than four and a half years. It has killed or wounded extraordinary numbers of Russians and Ukrainians, consumed immense quantities of national wealth, distorted the Russian economy towards military production and left the country increasingly isolated from Europe. Yet there have been no demonstrations comparable with those that brought down Communist governments across Eastern Europe in 1989, no sustained anti-war movement of the sort that shook the United States during Vietnam and no electoral rebellion against the government responsible for the catastrophe.

The temptation is therefore to conclude that Russians support the war. That conclusion is much too easy. The more important fact about contemporary Russia is that the machinery through which public disagreement might become political action has been systematically dismantled. Russia is not merely an authoritarian country in which elections are unfair. She has developed something more sophisticated: an interlocking system of criminal law, administrative regulation, censorship, surveillance, economic intimidation, controlled media, political exclusion and exemplary punishment designed to ensure that dissatisfaction remains private.

The forthcoming State Duma elections, scheduled for September 2026, provide an unusually stark illustration. Russia will go through the physical motions of democracy. Ballot papers will be printed. Polling stations will open. Television stations will report turnout. Candidates will make speeches and the Central Election Commission will eventually announce percentages. But the essential democratic event that ought to precede all these things — the free formation and expression of political choice — has already been prevented.

The criminalisation of disagreement

The most important achievement of Vladimir Putin’s system has been to make political repression appear juridical. The modern Russian dissident is seldom arrested simply because the government announces that he is an opponent of the President. He violates a statute. He has “discredited” the armed forces. He has disseminated “false information”. He has displayed an “extremist symbol”. He has cooperated with an “undesirable organisation”. He has failed to comply with the elaborate obligations imposed upon a “foreign agent”. More serious cases may become prosecutions for extremism, terrorism or treason. The effect is cumulative.

Since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, criticism of the conduct of the Russian armed forces has effectively been criminalised. OVD-Info describes the laws against military “fake news” and “discrediting” the armed forces as having prohibited substantive criticism of the war, while documenting an evolution towards increasingly severe sentences and greater use of terrorism and extremism legislation against political targets.

The numbers reveal the scale of what has happened. Human Rights Watch reported last month that Memorial’s political-prisoners project counted 1,715 political prisoners in Russia as of July 2026, compared with 997 a year earlier, together with another 2,777 people classified as victims of political repression.

One of the latest cases illustrates the breadth of the net. On 2 September, Russian investigators detained Lida Moniava, the founder of a children’s hospice, accusing her of deliberately spreading false information about the Russian military after she criticised the war on Telegram. Reuters reports that OVD-Info counts more than 1,380 people subjected to criminal prosecution for anti-war expression since February 2022, around 350 of whom are currently imprisoned or in pre-trial detention.

This is how repression becomes socially effective. It is unnecessary to imprison millions of people. It is necessary only to convince millions that imprisonment is a plausible consequence of speaking.

The exemplary prisoner

Authoritarian systems depend upon examples.

The fate of Alexei Navalny supplied the greatest one. But repression works most efficiently when it reaches beyond famous revolutionary figures to ordinary politicians, journalists, academics, activists and citizens whose lives resemble those of the people observing them. Lev Shlosberg provides a particularly revealing example.

Shlosberg was a deputy chairman of Yabloko, an old liberal party whose electoral prospects were modest even before the latest repression. He advocated a ceasefire. He participated in an anti-war debate. He shared anti-war material online. On 17 August he was sentenced to 11 years and one month in prison. Amnesty International describes the prosecution as punishment for peaceful political expression. Eleven years is not principally a punishment imposed upon one man. It is a message delivered to millions.

Say what he said and contemplate what happened to him.

The effectiveness of such intimidation explains something otherwise puzzling about Russian politics. The decline in street demonstrations cannot sensibly be interpreted as straightforward evidence that discontent has disappeared. OVD-Info recorded dramatically fewer protest arrests in 2025 than earlier in the war, but simultaneously recorded substantially harsher punishments and far more politically motivated convictions than before the invasion. Repression succeeds when arrests become unnecessary because people have learned not to assemble.

The destruction of the information market

Democracy requires more than the theoretical possibility of voting. Citizens must be able to discover facts, debate them and organise around alternative interpretations of those facts.

Russia has progressively destroyed this informational infrastructure. Reporters Without Borders ranks Russia 172nd of 180 countries in its 2026 World Press Freedom Index. It observes that since February 2022 almost all independent media have been banned, blocked or designated as foreign agents or undesirable organisations, while remaining outlets operate under military censorship.

Freedom House records that Roskomnadzor instructed media to rely upon Defence Ministry information concerning Ukraine and discouraged even describing the conflict using such elementary words as “war” and “invasion”. Hundreds of media organisations have suspended operations and more than 300 outlets and individual journalists have been designated foreign agents. The internet, once imagined as the technology that would make censorship impossible, has instead become another battlefield.

Human Rights Watch reported in August that more than 1.8 million websites were blocked in Russia, while the authorities had also attacked circumvention technologies, including hundreds of VPN services. Russia has experienced extensive restrictions upon messaging applications and periods of mobile internet shutdowns, together with systems in which only government-approved websites remain accessible. Hence the Russian citizen contemplating the war encounters an informational environment radically different from that experienced by somebody sitting in Warsaw, London or New York.

Television explains why Russia is fighting. Independent media are difficult or dangerous to obtain. Sharing material from an organisation designated “undesirable” can itself create legal jeopardy. Discussing alleged Russian atrocities may amount to dissemination of false information about the armed forces. Repeating inconvenient reporting may therefore become not merely socially awkward but legally dangerous. Propaganda and censorship work together. The former supplies the approved reality. The latter increases the price of discovering alternatives.

The foreign agent

The phrase “foreign agent” deserves particular attention because it represents one of the cleverest instruments in the Russian authoritarian repertoire. The expression evokes espionage without requiring proof of espionage. Individuals and organisations placed upon the register acquire burdensome obligations and an official stigma suggesting that their political activity represents foreign interference rather than Russian disagreement. The designation can interfere with employment, organisation, publication and political participation.

The category has expanded enormously from its original application to foreign-funded NGOs. It has become a means of marking people outside the legitimate political community.

This matters because tyranny works most effectively when opposition is transformed conceptually into treason. The government does not then confront Russians who disagree with it. Russia confronts foreign influence operating through Russians. The distinction is psychologically powerful, particularly in wartime.

The undesirable

The related category of the “undesirable organisation” goes further. Cooperation with such bodies can expose Russian citizens themselves to prosecution. In August the Russian authorities designated the Human Rights Foundation, chaired by Yulia Navalnaya, undesirable. Hundreds of organisations have acquired the same status since the legislation was introduced, including human-rights organisations, universities and media institutions.

The effect is to construct a sanitary cordon around Russian civil society.

Foreign organisations cannot safely support domestic organisations. Domestic organisations cannot safely cooperate with foreign organisations. Journalists cannot necessarily circulate their material. Citizens must consider whether clicking, reposting, donating or participating might attract official attention. Civil society dies not necessarily through one spectacular prohibition but through thousands of small calculations of personal risk.

The police officer who need not arrive

Behind all this lies surveillance. Freedom House describes an extensive apparatus monitoring both online and offline expression, alongside requirements that businesses retain Russian users’ personal information on servers inside Russia. It also records the use of surveillance to identify demonstrators.

The significance of surveillance is psychological as much as technological. A population does not need to know precisely what the state can see. Indeed uncertainty may be more effective. If Russians cannot know whether Telegram messages, social-media posts, donations, searches, acquaintances or attendance at demonstrations might later appear in an investigator’s file, prudent people begin censoring themselves.

Then something politically devastating happens. People stop discovering how many other people agree with them. Every authoritarian society contains this paradox. Ten people privately opposed to the government may each imagine themselves surrounded by nine loyalists because nobody dares speak first. Fear destroys not only opposition but knowledge of opposition.

And then there is the ballot paper

This brings us to September’s elections. The most devastating fact about them is wonderfully simple. Russia has removed the anti-war choice from the ballot. Yabloko was the only registered political party contesting the election that openly called for peace. The Central Election Commission initially registered it. Then, on 10 August, the Russian Supreme Court cancelled its registration. Human Rights Watch concluded that there was “no realistic prospect” that the forthcoming Duma elections could be free and fair.

Reuters similarly described Yabloko as the only officially registered party opposing the war. Its exclusion leaves United Russia and parties broadly accommodating the Kremlin’s fundamental political programme to contest the election among themselves. The absurdity is almost philosophical.

Suppose a Russian citizen believes that the invasion of Ukraine was a mistake, that the war should end, that Russia should seek accommodation with Europe and that the country’s resources should cease being consumed by military expenditure. For whom precisely is that citizen supposed to vote? The state has criminalised much of the language through which his opinion might be articulated, dismantled much of the media through which it might be disseminated, imprisoned politicians who express it and finally removed the only registered party explicitly representing it from the national ballot. Then the government invites him to vote.

The unknowable Russian

There is therefore a profound problem with claims about Russian public opinion. Some Russians undoubtedly support the war. Some support it passionately. Russian nationalism is real. Resentment towards the West is real. Imperial nostalgia is real. Many Russians genuinely accept the Kremlin’s account that NATO expansion and Western hostility made confrontation unavoidable. It would be intellectually dishonest to imagine that Vladimir Putin governs 140 million secret liberals yearning for Scandinavian social democracy.

But the opposite proposition is equally unsustainable. We simply cannot know with democratic confidence what Russians collectively think about the war because the mechanisms through which preferences become visible have been systematically corrupted.

Polling conducted inside an authoritarian state must be interpreted carefully when expressing the wrong opinion can carry consequences. Elections reveal little when candidates are excluded. Demonstrations reveal little when demonstrators face imprisonment. Public debate reveals little when media are censored. Silence reveals little when speech is dangerous.

Indeed even under these conditions there are indications of substantial war fatigue. Reuters reported last month that Levada’s measure of support for the actions of the Russian armed forces had fallen to 66 per cent in July, its lowest level since February 2022. What the remaining Russians think privately is one of the great unknowables of the war. And the Kremlin plainly prefers it that way.

The architecture of modern tyranny

Russia is therefore instructive because its authoritarianism is not principally Stalinist.

There are no nightly arrests of millions. There is no Great Terror. Most Russians go to work, visit restaurants, take holidays, watch television, complain about prices and raise their children. Private life continues. That normality is part of the system’s strength.

Contemporary Russian repression is selective rather than universal. A hospice director here. A provincial politician there. A journalist imprisoned. A website blocked. A candidate disqualified. A foreign-agent designation announced on Friday afternoon. An organisation declared undesirable. A demonstrator prosecuted. An academic frightened into emigration.

Each event appears small compared with the horrors of twentieth-century totalitarianism. Together they create an extraordinarily powerful architecture of obedience. The citizen understands the bargain. You may dislike the government. You may complain privately about corruption. You may grumble about inflation. You may even dislike the war.

But there are lines you should not cross. Do not organise. Do not become prominent. Do not build a movement. Do not distribute prohibited information. Do not cooperate with prohibited organisations. Do not challenge the fundamental legitimacy of the war. Above all, do not transform private dissatisfaction into collective political power. That is the essence of Putinism.

An election after democracy

The September election will therefore tell us something about Russia, but not what elections are ordinarily supposed to tell us. It will measure the administrative capacity of the Russian state. It may reveal factional arrangements within the political elite. Regional results may provide clues about economic dissatisfaction. Turnout may tell us something, although even that must be interpreted cautiously. What it cannot credibly establish is whether Russians want the war to continue. That question has been removed from the election before the first vote is cast. And this distinction matters beyond Russia.

One day the war will end. Vladimir Putin will not rule forever. Russia will eventually confront the immense historical question of responsibility for what has happened since February 2022. When that moment comes, outsiders should resist two equally comforting myths.

The first is that the Russian people were merely innocent prisoners of one man’s war. Many Russians participated enthusiastically in it, profited from it, celebrated it and committed terrible crimes in its prosecution.

But the second myth is that an election victory for United Russia demonstrates that the Russian nation freely endorsed everything done in its name. There can be no meaningful democratic consent where opposition is criminalised before it reaches the polling station. A ballot paper is not democracy.

Democracy exists in everything that happens before the ballot paper: the argument in the newspaper, the inconvenient television interview, the opposition meeting, the embarrassing investigation, the demonstration outside parliament, the candidate who calls the government criminal, the citizen who says the war is wrong and the possibility that enough such citizens might organise themselves to remove their rulers. Russia has systematically extinguished those things. She will nevertheless hold an election. And that is precisely why the result will tell us so little about the democratic will of the Russian people.