A collective “no”: anti-Putin Russians embrace an unusual opponent

BERLIN – His last name comes from the Russian word for hope, and for hundreds of thousands of anti-war Russians, that is what he has become, unlikely as it may seem.

Boris Nadezhdin He is the only candidate who stands with a pacifist platform and who has the possibility of participating in the run-off to oppose the president. Vladimir Putin in the Russian presidential elections in March.

Anti-war Russians rushed to sign his official petition at home and abroad, hoping to gather enough signatures before the Jan. 31 deadline to get him into the running.

They braved sub-zero temperatures in the Siberian city of Yakutsk.

They went around the block in Yekaterinburg.

They hopped to stay warm in St. Petersburg and flocked to outposts in Berlin, Istanbul and Tbilisi, Georgia.

They know that election officials could ban Nadezhdin from voting, and if he is allowed to run, they know he will never win.

But they don’t care.

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“Boris Nadezhdin is ours”no collective” says Lyosha Popov, a 25-year-old who has been collecting signatures for Nadezhdin in Yakutsk, about 500 kilometers from the Arctic Circle.

“This is simply our protest, our way of protesting, to somehow demonstrate that we are against from all this.”

Popular mobilization in an authoritarian country, where national elections have long been a problem Potemkin, injected energy into a Russian opposition movement that was virtually annihilated; Its most promising leaders have been exiled, imprisoned or killed in a crackdown on dissent that has intensified with the war.

With protests virtually banned in Russia and criticism of the outlawed military, the long lines to support Nadezhdin’s candidacy offered anti-war Russians a rare public communion with kindred spirits whose voices have been drowned out by a wave of jingoism and state brutality for almost two years. years.

Many of them do not know or particularly care about Nadezhdin, a 60-year-old physicist who was a member of the Russian parliament from 1999 to 2003 and who openly admits that he does not have the charisma of anti-Kremlin crusaders like Alexei Navalny, the leader of the opposition incarcerated.

But with a draconian censorship law stifling criticism of the war, Nadezhdin’s supporters see his support as the only legal avenue left in Russia to demonstrate their opposition to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

And they like what the candidate says: that the conflict is leading Russia towards a precipice; that it is necessary to release political prisoners, bring the troops home and sign peace with Ukraine; that Russia’s anti-gay laws are “idiocy.”

“The purpose of my participation is to oppose Putin’s approach, which is leading the country into a dead end, into a quagmire of authoritarianism, militarization and isolation,” Nadezhdin said in a written response to questions from The New York Times.

“The more votes a candidate receives who opposes Putin’s approach and the special military operation, the greater the chances for peace and change in Russia,” he added, using the term Kremlin war to avoid conflict with the Russian legislation.

He dismissed questions about his safety, stressing in a YouTube appearance last week that, in any case, “the tastiest, sweetest years of my life are now behind me.”

Mechanism

The Kremlin check strictly electoral process to ensure Putin’s inevitable victory, but allows opponents who pose no threat to run, in order to provide a veneer of legitimacy, increase voter turnout and give Russians opposed to their government an outlet to express their discontent.

Until now, 11 peopleincluding Nadezhdin and Putin, have been allowed to register as possible candidates and are collecting signatures.

Many of Nadezhdin’s new supporters accept that he was originally considered a useful tool for the Kremlin, a liberal from the nineties with the air of a popular grandfather willing to play the state’s game.

Particularly suspect is his work in the 1990s as an assistant to Sergei KirijenkoPrime Minister of the President Boris Yeltsin and the current top Kremlin official charged with overseeing domestic policy.

Skeptics also point to Nadezhdin’s presence on state television, where he helped create the illusion of open debate by serving as a token liberal voice while pro-Putin propagandists berated him.

For opposition figures considered a real threat, as Navalny, They have long been prohibited from standing, much less running, in presidential elections.

Nadezhdin countered that if he were a Kremlin puppet he would not fight for signatures and money, nor would the main state television network have excluded his name from the list of presidential candidates.

Despite everything, his supporters carry on.

“It could turn out to be a decorative candidate, but if so, there is a feeling that not everything went according to plan,” said Tatyana Semyonova, a 32-year-old programmer who showed up in a crowded Berlin courtyard to sign the his name.

He said he had no particular affinity with Nadezhdin, but that he signed as an act of protest.

Pavel Laptev, a 37-year-old designer who was in line next to Semyonova, said not even the slightest opportunity to change something should be wasted.

“Even if he is a decorative candidate, when he has all this power, he may decide not to be so decorative,” he said.

The unexpected surge of support for Nadezhdin has presented the Kremlin’s political masters with a thorny question in the first presidential vote since Putin launched his invasion:

Will they allow any pacifist candidates to run for office?

“I will be surprised, surprised but happy, if I see him on the ballot,” Ekaterina Schulmann, a Berlin-based Russian political scientist, told Nadezhdin last week during a YouTube show.

“I am not convinced that our political leadership, at this stage of its development, of its evolution, can afford to take such risks.”

Nadezhdin’s campaign claims to have far exceeded the required 100,000 total signatures, but a candidate can only submit a maximum of 2,500 from a single Russian region.

Nadezhdin’s campaign said on Friday that it would collect enough signatures from Russian regions and would not need signatures from abroad.

But even if Nadezhdin collects enough signatures, Russian authorities may find a way to disqualify him.

The long, visible support lines, he said, will make it more difficult.

Processes

Many anti-war Russians initially rallied around Ekaterina Duntsova, a little-known former television journalist and local politician who launched a campaign in November and quickly gained notoriety.

But the Central Election Commission rejected your candidacy because of what you described trivial errors in your documentation

He has supported Nadezhdin ever since.

Members of Navalny’s team, including his wife, have also publicly supported the former MP.

So did one of Russia’s most famous rock stars, Yuri Shevchuk, and another influential opposition activist in exile, Maxim Katz.

In Yakutsk, a freezing city in eastern Siberia, it was 45 degrees below zero when Popov, head of the campaign, began collecting signatures.

Over time the weather improved and the crowds increased.

A few places in the city center allowed Popov to set up a stand in support of an anti-Putin candidate.

But he persuaded a shopping center to give the operation space in a hallway, where people could sign at a desk and folding table.

“If people don’t know Boris Nadezhdin, I can tell them who he is,” Popov says.

But he stresses that he is not there for Nadezhdin.

“I’m here collecting signatures against Putin,” he tells people.

“We are collecting signatures against Putin, yes, against military action.”

Signatories must provide their full name and passport details, including a list of Russians who oppose the war in the petition, raising fears of retaliation.

But that hasn’t deterred Karen Danielyan, a 20-year-old from Tver, about 100 miles northwest of Moscow, whose adult life so far has been spent with Russia at war.

“The fear that all this will continue like this is much stronger and heavier than the fear that they will do something to me for having worked on collecting signatures,” he said.

Nadezhdin is presented as an anonymous politician who decided to run in an “act of desperation” and accidentally found himself at the head of a movement.

“But comrades, I have one quality: I love my family and my country infinitely,” he said last week in a YouTube appearance together with political scientist Schulmann.

“I believe infinitely that Russia is no worse than any other country and that it can achieve, with the help of democracy, elections and popular will, extraordinary results.”

Schulmann told him that he would be judged on what happened to the people who signed his petition.

“I will not betray anyone,” he said. “I will fight.”

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