The State Duma elections have taken place and it is already clear that United Russia is on track to win a record number of seats. How did that happen?

For anyone with even the slightest understanding of the situation in Russia, it was obvious that the result of these elections would favor United Russia. The Russian state today has a powerful electoral system designed not to honestly record the will of the people, but to produce the required results.

Where could the idea have come from that these elections, which are completely controlled by the authorities, could somehow be broken or, as one opposition leader who urged people more than anyone else to take part in the vote put it, that it was possible to topple United Russia?

How? The Russian authorities are not some feeble European democracy. These are people who will not give up power under any circumstances: they will have to be torn away from power by force, leaving bloody shreds behind. That is how it works.

The Russian opposition presents protest voting as a very simple and comfortable solution that is also maximally safe. I cannot bring myself to judge anyone who believed them. People genuinely want to express how they feel about what is happening. But wanting change and hoping that such an action can actually bring about that change are completely different things.

But for years, the opposition has been pulling the wool over people’s eyes, sustaining the illusion that a bloody and brutal dictatorship can be dealt with easily and simply. All available experience shows the opposite, but opposition figures ignore it.

We can look back to 2024 to see how this strategy worked out last time. The same people who wanted United Russia to be toppled this year were then calling for people to vote symbolically for the supposedly anti-war candidate Vladislav Davankov. Everyone knew he had no chance of becoming president. But if enough people voted for him, perhaps it would demonstrate how many people opposed Putin and the war.

Nothing came of it. Davankov won 3.85% of the vote to Putin’s official 87% and the opposition had no way to verify whether that pitiful showing for their preferred candidate sent a signal to anyone. What brilliant planning!

Nothing has changed since then. Once again, people turned out to vote at noon and the opposition had no way to tell if their action of choice had any impact.

The approach used by the Russian opposition is infallible by definition. It was no coincidence that Vladimir Kara-Murza, commenting on Yabloko’s removal from the federal list, wrote that it was a victory because it demonstrated that Putin was afraid. A United Russia victory, whether fabricated or not, will likewise be declared a victory for the opposition. The authorities falsify elections because they are very afraid.

They are so afraid that they wage war, put people in prison, remove parties from elections and encounter no serious resistance while doing so.

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Calls for protest voting, and protest voting itself, make sense only when people have a clear understanding of what they are going to do after the election. What are they supposed to do with their outrage? Salt it and preserve it in jars?

If people genuinely value their vote, they have plenty of ways to show it: protests, demonstrations, strikes, acts of disobedience. Nobody expects anything like this to happen. Not because of fears of the........

© The Moscow Times