Photo of Vladimir Putin courtesy of Flickr.
By Madhavi Rao ’24
Staff Writer
Hundreds of people joined together on Sept. 25 to protest the outcome of the Russian parliamentary election, in which Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party won a 324 out of 450 seat majority in the parliamentary Duma — the Russian legislative assembly. The protests were organized by the leading opposition party, the Communist Party of Russia, which secured 19 percent of the vote, a notable increase from 13 percent in 2016. This apparent decline in the United Russia party’s influence, coupled with allegations against the government of voter fraud, led to the protests at Pushkin Square on Saturday.
The Russian parliamentary elections were held over three days, from Sept. 17 to 19. As reported by The Moscow Times, the United Russia party received around half of the votes, with around 51 percent of the eligible population voting.
According to The New York Times, the two-day length of the elections facilitated the ability of the State to commit fraud. Furthermore, videos surfaced on the internet during the elections which show fraudulent practices such as “ballot stuffing, disappearing ink and ballot boxes with secret doors,” The Moscow Times reported.
According to Reuters, Leonid Volkov, chief of oppositionist Aleksei Navaly’s campaign, stated that, “Millions of people in Russia hate United Russia.” United Russia was founded in 2001 as a pro-Putin centrist party. President Putin, who played a part in the founding of the party, has been supported by United Russia since its inception. The party has held the majority of seats in the state Duma since 2007. However, in recent years, the party’s popularity has decreased. Reuters reported that surveys conducted before the election suggesting poor living conditions and corruption led to the drop in United Russia’s popularity.
Stephen Jones, Professor of Russian studies at Mount Holyoke, explained, “It’s always very hard in Russia to know how people are really thinking. So even with opinion polls, you can’t be sure that the respondent is going to give a truthful answer because they might be a little afraid that this information will get out.”
“What the opinion polls do reflect is increasing disillusionment with the United Russia Party, because it’s been in power so long and the situation is getting worse for most ordinary people economically,” Jones explained. “The economy seems to be stagnating. There’s a lot of corruption, which affects people in their daily lives. So when they look at the United Russia party, I’m sure that they are not very enthusiastic about its sincerity or its ability to help citizens improve their lives.”
The repression of opposition candidates played a large role in the United Russia party’s victory. Aleksei Navalny, the country’s main opposition candidate, has been banned from running for parliament. Moreover, the Russian government strong-armed companies such as Google and Apple into removing all Navalny-related content from their platforms.
“People in Russia have rallied around Navalny, so much so that during this election several apps and YouTube videos have been banned in Russia by Google and Apple which prevented Putin’s opposition from being able to organize effectively this weekend,” Allyssa Dallacqua ’23, who is currently studying Russian politics, said.
“If something surprised me in the latest elections, it was not how Putin forged the results, but how obediently the almighty Big Tech turned into his accomplices,” Navalny tweeted on Sept. 23. Navalny continued the fight against the United Russia party through a strategy known as “smart voting.” This strategy involved oppositionists voting for any party other than the United Russia party in order to reduce their majority.
“While voting in Russia is, unfortunately, neither a fair nor an accurate reflection of the people’s will, we can still see that the people are still opposed to the current power and will vote any way they can to reflect that despite the consequences,” Dallacqua stated. “[Smart voting] is one of the only effective mechanisms, since the voting system is so skewed to the party currently in power. It serves only to chip away at Putin’s support and to visibly show the people’s discontent, until one day it hits a turning point and ideally elections can be made fair by a new power.”
The country still has a large voter base that supports Putin. According to The New York Times, people are motivated to vote for a strong figure like Putin out of fear of the chaos surrounding the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.
Jones echoed this thought, saying, “We in the west make assumptions that there’s a natural tendency among people to want democracy, participation and so on, but that’s not necessarily the case.” To Jones, the voter base in Russia may have different priorities. “I would say in Russia right now, the primary concerns are about inflation, about the economy, about corruption,” he continued. “There would be disillusionment with the United Russian party, but not necessarily with Putin. He doesn’t head the party, though he’s associated with it. But people might arguably separate … Putin from the party.”
Jones emphasized that though it may have a strong hold on the Russian Parliament at the moment, United Russia is not invincible. “Nothing lasts forever, even Putin isn’t going to last forever. It’s difficult for a genuine opposition party to make a headway because of the level of control that the State has. But things could change,” Jones said. “The United Russia party is facing many challenges and it’s in place essentially because it has a constitutional majority in the legislature which gives it great power, and it’s supported by Putin and it’s protected by the media. Those are important supports. But I think they’re much more tenuous than we think.”