In Russia’s Election, Nothing Happened, but Things Got Worse

The stability of Putin’s rule has always rested on the systematic depoliticization of Russian society: a lasting detachment of citizens from political life and its rituals.

This detachment has a history. In the Soviet Union, political life and participation were organized from above, and there was little room for bottom-up engagement. When that scaffolding collapsed, nothing took its place. The economic and political crisis of the 1990s, Boris Yeltsin’s coup against parliament in 1993, and the rapid consolidation of an oligarchic order meant that the transition to a working participatory democracy never happened. Mechanisms of democratic participation from below never took root, either in terms of free and open electoral competition or the everyday infrastructure of collective organizing.

This does not mean that Russia lacks grassroots organizations, activists, and movements. It has them, and they have paid dearly for their existence under mounting repression. It means that this kind of social dynamic never became the norm. Putin’s system found fertile ground in that vacuum, building an authoritarian order that starts from economic elites and extends through the military and security apparatus down to the courts and local administration. Over the last twenty years, the structural gap in resources between the state and those who tried, or wished, to build a genuinely participatory democracy could never be bridged.

Depoliticization, then, works on two levels. It operates through formal channels of participation such as elections, but also at a cognitive level. An important manifestation of structural depoliticization, as researchers at the Public Sociology Laboratory have shown in a series of studies, is the alienation of Russian citizens from the very act of articulating their own political positions.

Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, however, something within the regime has been shifting, not as a change of direction but as an exponential increase. Putin’s system was authoritarian; it is increasingly taking on the features of a totalitarian order, closing down remaining spaces for expression, participation, and dissent.

In this sense, depoliticization is now paired with mobilization encouraged from above. For most of Putin’s rule, the goal was to keep people away from politics, including the polling booth. A low, predictable turnout suited a system that asked nothing of its citizens but acquiescence. Now Russia is shifting toward potential disorder, with Ukraine reacting to the invasion and drones bombing infrastructure and houses in western Russia, shortages at gas stations, a looming economic crisis, internet restrictions, rising death tolls at the front lines, and the prospect of a new military mobilization. In this context, consensus and unity are more needed than passivity. Voting is actively encouraged — with employees in factories and firms being formally obliged to vote and even taken to the polling booths — not for the sake of democracy but to mobilize the population in support of the further concentration of power and the consolidation of the political system itself. Local administrations, state agencies, and state-linked institutions are all put to work bringing people to the ballot box.

The role of elections has thus been inverted. They are no longer a moment of (managed) democratic participation that the Kremlin prefers citizens to sit out but a mechanism for mobilizing consent to the centralization of power. Although internet voting and the involvement of the occupied territories of Crimea, Sevastopol, and parts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson surely play a role, the rise in turnout, from 51.7 to 59.8 percent, should be read also in this light.

In that sense, these elections tell us little that is new in electoral terms. And yet, at a delicate moment, marked by growing economic difficulties driven by the war and Ukrainian missile strikes and by a risk of social unrest, Putin’s answer is once again repression but this time accompanied by a demand for active participation and performative consent, in the manner of the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s.

This discursive effort is accompanied by classic techniques from the Putinist repertoire. The first is the figure of the necessary leader. Putin presents himself as the only one who can defend the country from external attack: in this case, “the West’s war on Russia.” Many Russians now perceive this confrontation as , almost messianic, something from which only a great leader can save them.inevitable

The second is passing the buck to the regions. The costs of the war, as so often, are made to fall on regional administrations. The management of the fuel crisis, for instance, has been offloaded onto governors. This is not new: the Kremlin did the same during the pandemic, shifting the responsibility for COVID-19-related restrictive measures onto regional governors. This mechanism protects the image of the center, which must continue to be seen as the guarantor of stability, and spares it direct responsibility for unpopular measures.

This is part of what makes the system so resilient. Putin personally still hovers above the fray. His authority is real, but the responsibility for what the state actually does, its merits and its shortcomings, is spread widely across institutions and levels of government. Combined with the heavy security theater on display, especially in Moscow, this diffusion of responsibility helps explain why the system appears so immovable.

The regions have also borne the human cost of the war most unevenly, and military recruitment has doubled as an instrument for managing (to put it mildly) those with the least political and economic power or those the authorities find most .inconvenient

There is also a more mundane, logistical side to these elections. Elections and the reshuffling of posts that follows allow careers and responsibilities within the state and legislative apparatus to be redistributed without anyone having to be fired. The war itself “works” in this sense as a continuous transfer of public money to military elites and as an occasion to redraw relations among institutions. The forty-one veterans now sitting in the Duma for United Russia are one visible sign of this.

What do we really know about popular support for Putin and the war? carried out inside Russia suggests that most people do not hold a clear, consistent political opinion about the war, which is one reason why conventional opinion polling tells us so little. People move back and forth between supporting and criticizing it, depending on personal and situational factors rather than any coherent ideology.Ethnographic work

Opinions on Russia’s war can be influenced by personal ties with relatives and friends from and in Ukraine, the mobilization of a family member to the front and the tragic implications that this often carries, personal economic impact, fear of drone attacks, and other factors that strongly affect one’s personal life. In fact, it is also important to remember that Putin has always strived to keep his war far from Russia’s civilian population and instead to push a romanticized, heroic, and epic image of the “special military operation” and its “patriots.” Over the last months, this has become increasingly difficult to sustain.

However, thanks also to a far-reaching propaganda effort, many see the war less as a political event they could influence than as something more like a natural disaster arriving from the outside. Without a settled view of the war or a broader political outlook to anchor it, people tend to slide into a kind of relativism.

Opinion about the war, in other words, is scattered and situational rather than systematic. This is partly a product of depoliticization. It is also because people do not reason the way sociologists do in their work: they do not necessarily organize their views into positions that can be neatly measured and aggregated.

For years, much of the debate on Russia turned on a recurrent question: Was support for Putin genuine or merely passive? It was a reasonable thing to ask, and it once seemed to hold the key to the regime’s future. Today it has become a matter mostly for specialists. The Putin system has sealed itself off and narrowed the space for participation so far that the quality of consent, whether sincere or alienated, no longer has much bearing on the course of events. What shapes the situation now is simpler and starker: there is no longer any opening through which that consent, or its absence, could make itself felt.

This also goes for parliamentary debate, such as KPRF leader Gennady Zyuganov’s postelectoral criticism of the Kremlin’s war efforts in Ukraine and his forecast of a gloomy defeat if Putin maintains his line. However, the KPRF has historically supported the annexation of Donetsk and Luhansk, as well as the invasion of Ukraine. The KPRF’s 2026 election program never names Ukraine, yet it takes the war for granted: it speaks of securing victory at the front, uses standard Kremlin language about “neofascists” and “Banderites” in Kyiv, and promises more for the army and veterans. It offers no position on the war’s aims, an end to it, or peace talks. It sounds more like performative criticism of domestic policies amid a situation — the war — that is already taken for granted.

These elections were a problem for the Russian opposition, too. The opposition in exile is increasingly disconnected from dissent inside the country, which is small and mutilated, and the networks of organization and collective action that once existed have been cut and harshly repressed. So, what options did people have if they did not want to support United Russia or wanted to vote against the war? With Yabloko gone, four remained, and none of them offered much.

The first was a boycott. Staying home would lower official turnout but not change the result: Russia abolished the minimum turnout requirement for Duma elections back in 2007. Nor does a boycott send a clear message, since there is no way to tell someone abstaining in protest apart from someone who simply stayed home.

The second was tactical voting, in the tradition of Alexei Navalny’s “Smart Voting” now upheld by his widow and heir of his movement, Yulia Navalnaya. Its impact on the party lists is minimal, but it can matter somewhat more in single-member districts, which elect half the Duma. There are no runoffs: whoever gets the most votes wins the seat. The logic is to back the strongest challenger to the Putinist candidate rather than splitting protest votes among several names, whether by reading the polls or following the recommendations published by Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK). The challenger in question is almost always a candidate of the tolerated “systemic” opposition. The tactic had its biggest successes in the 2019 Moscow City Duma election, where the supported candidates took twenty of forty-five seats, and in the 2020 local elections in Tomsk and Novosibirsk. By the 2021 Duma vote, the blocking of FBK’s app and website and the rollout of electronic voting had strongly blunted its impact.

The third was to take one’s ballot home. Duma election law does not forbid it, and while it changes nothing about the distribution of seats, it can expose fraud. Precinct commissions must record the number of ballots issued but not returned in their final protocols. If a voter took a ballot home and the relevant line in the protocol reads zero, the commission most likely filled the gap with an extra vote for someone.

The fourth was to spoil the ballot. This too leaves the result untouched, but a mass protest is easier to see this way than through abstention. It is also risky. In previous elections, some voters were arrested after writing antiwar or anti-Putin messages on theirs (although theoretically, votes are anonymous). A ballot left blank, however, is easy to fill in during a fraudulent count.

None of these strategies amounts to a real opening for opposition, not even a symbolic one, or the kind of small-scale guerrilla activism that dissidents relied on in the first years of the war. The choices were few, and each of them could at best leave a trace in a precinct protocol.

This is what distinguishes the 2026 elections from those that came before. For two decades, Russian elections were managed events that the regime preferred citizens to watch from a distance. Now they have become a mere rally reminiscent of a totalitarian regime, in which the opposition cannot even score symbolic wins.