Could Russia’s sham election provoke popular unrest?

Russia’s March 17 presidential election is almost certain to go off without a hitch, but given the crazy nature of politics in President Vladimir Putin’s fragile territory, it may come with a surprise or two.

What is clearly not surprising is that the dictator was re-elected with an overwhelming majority of the vote. President Putin is smart enough to know that fair and free elections can have unexpected and undesirable consequences.He remembers that the Polish Communist Party tried to stage 1989 real election And, very unfortunately, it was defeated by the trade union solidarity movement, which signaled the end of communism in that country.

President Putin does not need to be embarrassed by losing. A strong performance by his opponents could be enough to deprive Putin of the tattered legitimacy he still has. Therefore, election fraud is Putin’s favorite method, as are all dictators, fascists, and totalitarians.

But too much election rigging can be dangerous. Viktor Yanukovych tried this in Ukraine in 2004, sparking the Orange Revolution. In 2011 and 2012, hundreds of thousands of Russians staged a series of large-scale protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg against fraudulent parliamentary and presidential elections. In the latter, then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his sidekick, then-President Dmitry Medvedev, agreed to switch positions in a transparent amendment that was hidden from the Russian public. In 2020, it was Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko’s turn to tamper with elections and create fraud. Massive march over several months It almost made him topple.

Is it possible that Russians, learning of President Putin’s election victory, will stage mass protests in March? He has two elements to military action against such protests. Putin’s government has repeatedly shown its readiness to nip protests in the bud by beheading, killing, arresting and imprisoning critics. At the same time, the Russian people are not only frightened by the prospect of repression, but have also come to accept things as they are, living in a maximally apolitical and atomized world of their own.

But the outlook for the protests is not entirely bleak.President Putin’s repression apparatus has been unable to stop recent developments. protests Republic of Bashkortostan, central Russia. Russian women regularly gather in public to demand the return of their men from the war with Ukraine. attack Since July 2023, the number of recruitment centers has reached 113, doubling in the last six months. Clearly, Putin’s police state is not strong enough and could be opposed if there were risks.

Similarly, Russians may be frightened today, but there is reason to think they can do what they have done in even less fortunate situations in the past: show civic courage. Back in the late 1980s, Russians took part in mass protests across the Soviet Union, at a time when the level of ignorance and ignorance about what was happening in the Soviet Union was significantly higher than it is now. Indeed, the protests in the Baltic States and Ukraine have shown that protests are possible and have paved the way, but the Russians have nevertheless proven that they are not lazy.

Therefore, the possibility of protests should not be ruled out. Although that possibility may be low, “black swans” and “intervening variables” occur regularly in autocratic regimes, and the Russians are justified in being suspicious.

Naturally, the likelihood of protests depends largely on whether Putin has opponents.Looks about 60 years old at this point Boris Nadezhdin fulfill its role. Nadezhdin is well qualified, having served as a comrade-in-arms to the murdered reformer Boris Nemtsov, and has served in various positions with the reformers to a greater or lesser extent over the past two decades.

That said, as Taras Kuzio, a Ukraine expert at the Henry Jackson Institute, said in a personal message to me, “Boris Nadezhdin, the Democratic Opposition’s presumptive candidate for president of Russia, A technical candidate, a Russian chauvinist and an imperialist.” In fact, Nadezhdin was denied The existence of Ukrainians as an independent nation and the ilk of some of Putin’s most scandalous propagandists. In other words, he’s a mixture at best. He also pointed to the sad fact that even Russian dissidents (such as the currently imprisoned Alexei Navalny) have widespread imperialist and racist tendencies within them. It is also a testimony.

Whether Nadezhdin is a genuine opposition candidate or a Putin supporter may be more important than whether Russians see him as a genuine alternative. Imagine if he actually ran and a significant number of Russians voted for him thinking, rightly or wrongly, that they were voting for change. Imagine that President Putin had won by a larger margin than Nadezhdin’s supporters believe was justified.

Will they protest and start a mini-orange revolution? Probably not, but then again, who would have thought that the Russian people would rally behind Boris Yeltsin after the war? Hardline coup failed In 1991? Who would have thought that they would volunteer to die in the slaughterhouses of Ukraine? They may also surprise us, in a good way.

Alexander J. Motil He is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. He is an expert on Ukraine, Russia, the Soviet Union, and nationalism, revolution, empire, and theory, and is the author of ten nonfiction books.imperial end“The Decline, Collapse, and Resurrection of Empires” and “Why the Empire is rising again: Compare the collapse of an empire and the revival of an empire. ”