The Potemkin Duma

The Kremlin doesn't rig elections; it engineers them. This is something everyone in Russia, no matter what their rhetoric or political persuasion, knows and accepts. So when recent local elections returned some unusual results, the only surprise was the intensity of the backlash.

On Sunday, Oct. 11, 76 of Russia's 83 regions went to the polls in some 7,000 regional and municipal elections. In the weeks leading up to the event, the government pushed and pushed Russians to register to vote. But because these were local elections in a country where everything is centered on the so-called Kremlin "power vertical," and because Russians, long shut out of the process, don't much believe in participatory democracy anymore, only about 30 million (out of 140 million) registered. And when the day came, even fewer showed up to vote. On Election Day in Moscow, which was holding elections for the Moscow Duma, turnout was a meager 29 percent. If government employees and their families hadn't been forced to vote, the figure would have been much, much lower.

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All of which is to say: No one cares. Russian elections are a known and tightly choreographed quantity. The joke making the rounds in Moscow when Dmitry Medvedev was up for election in the spring of 2008 was Medvedev's mom calling on election night, frantically asking if he'd won. "Mom," he says, "don't you fuck with me, too." Even the opposition parties -- the "loyal opposition" successfully co-opted and neutered by the Kremlin -- don't mind the fraud as long as they still get to play ball.

Because no one cares, it's the same every time: An election is held, a few dedicated pensioners vote, and United Russia -- the party of power, the party of the Kremlin, the party of Putin -- reasserts its overwhelming primacy.

And this time, at least at first, it seemed like everything would unfold as planned. On Oct. 11, United Russia swept back into control of political offices up and down the country's command chain by huge, double-digit margins. In the Moscow Duma elections, for instance, United Russia took 32 of the 35 seats (that is, 91 percent), leaving three seats to the Communists, and forcing out the Kremlin-engineered A Just Russia Party (SR) and the liberal Yabloko Party entirely. The number of parties in the chamber was cut in half. (A United Russia deputy told me, somewhat disingenuously, that his party colleagues in the Moscow Duma were dismayed to be stuck with just the Communists. "Before, Yabloko just sat there and criticized us. But so what? It was food for thought," he said. "Now we have to listen to three Communists. And their criticism isn't usually constructive.")

The fact that two parties were forced out of the Moscow Duma was suspicious, as was the fact that the results trickling in on Oct. 11 so obviously diverged with exit polls. Several elections across the country also smelled a little funny. From Derbent, in Dagestan, came tales of a third of polling stations never opening, while others closed early. In Astrakhan, observers were beaten and forced from the stations while whole ballot boxes were tossed out. Moscow was, as always, the epicenter. A video of a young man emerged detailing how he facilitated "carouseling" voters around town to vote multiple times, using the Moscow mayor's name as a password. (A few days later, he reappeared and claimed he had been drunk when he made the statement. Someone had clearly gotten to him.)

Most egregious was the result in the Khamovniki neighborhood of Moscow, where Yabloko chairman Sergei Mitrokhin and his family went to vote -- and where not a single vote was registered for Yabloko. (Yesterday, a local court annulled the results in Khamovniki and ruled for a recount.)

It was a bit much even for those used to such Kremlin antics. But still, it all could have passed without remark, because, still, no one cares. And absolutely no one expected the plot twist: On October 14, three days after the elections, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the nationalist right-wing LDPR party, stood up before the federal Duma and declared the election results unacceptable. He and his party, he said, were leaving, and they wouldn't come back until the Central Election Committee chairman was fired and until they could secure a face-to-face with Medvedev. Then the leader of A Just Russia (SR), a center-left party engineered by the Kremlin to serve as an opposition magnet, got up and said her people were out of there, too. Then the Communists followed, and all of a sudden, only United Russia was left in the chamber.

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