MOSCOW — Before Russians go to the polls on March 18 to vote for their next president, everyone will already know who will be crowned king: the essentially unchallenged incumbent, Vladimir Putin. With victory all-but-ensured, one might expect the Kremlin to be sitting easy awaiting the moment Sunday evening when they can safely pop the champagne.
Despite Putin’s image abroad as a lawless authoritarian, at home the nature of his reign is much more complex. His regime obsesses over appearances. Putin himself constantly stresses adherence to law and seemingly democratic norms. There are elections, but they exist mainly to reaffirm public support for Putin. Even in this limited form, elections must appear legitimate.
“This is a psychological problem, it is all about a feeling of legitimacy,” says Andrei Kolesnikov, a Russian political scientist at the Carnegie Moscow Center. “Why is legitimacy so meaningful? It is problem typical of any authoritarian regime. An autocrat wants to keep himself in power for a long time, so he needs the support and love of the people.”
But after 18 years of Putin being in power, the Kremlin is facing a serious dilemma: The people, whether they support Putin or oppose him, are getting bored. Why should Putin’s base waste a Sunday when they’ll get what they want anyway? And why should the opposition, scattered and fractured, even try? After all, their leading figure — Alexey Navalny — was barred from taking part.
The Kremlin, hyper aware of voter sentiment, is paying attention. The past several months have seen an unprecedented, ad-hoc, and at times strange get-out-the-vote effort directed from various sources — though some believe it all leads back to the Kremlin. What is most surprising is that the campaigns lack any common message, and few explicitly encourage voting for Putin.
“There really isn’t much of a strategy,” says Alexey Kovalev, an independent Russian journalist who specializes in tracking state-run information campaigns. “There’s never been anything on this scale, it is just unprecedented. They just need numbers to turn out and vote. Often, the onus is on local authorities to do whatever they can to convince or coerce people to go out and vote.”
In Russia, this is known as leveraging administrative resources. The state can reliably pressure employees and their families to go out and vote. But there is a limit to this source of voters. The bigger task has focused on taking the message to the general public. The majority of efforts are innocuous enough, but some have been rather invasive.
The primary campaign is the one orchestrated by Russia’s Central Election Commission. Under their charge, Russia has been plastered with billboards, stickers, radio and television advertisements, all pushing the same, mundane slogans such as, “Our Country, Our President, Our Choice.” Information stands stocked with similar materials have been erected at airports.
There has also been a major outreach campaign conducted by mail and, more recently, unsolicited mass text messages. Over the past several weeks, the Central Election Commission has been spamming phones encouraging everyone — including, apparently, American reporters — to go register with their local polling station ahead of March 18th.
One small-business owner in Moscow, Dmitri, whose name has been altered to protect his identity, says some of the efforts have been quite intrusive. His business account with Sberbank, a leading state-backed bank in Russia, feature calls to vote. So too does his frequent flyer account with state airline Aeroflot.
In Kamchatka, where Dmitri has business interests, local outlets and social networks are offering prizes for voting. “There are contests in the vein of ‘take a picture at a polling station and get a cool prize,’ as well as a contest to submit the first vote in Kamchatka,” the businessman says.
Dmitri adds that he has received a letter from the Moscow Chamber of Commerce and Industry requesting he explain to his employees the importance of the vote. “I, of course, didn’t comply. They don’t realize these efforts cause a rejection and unwillingness to vote. These elections are a farce.”
To complement the government’s efforts, several public relations firms in Moscow have been contracted to run their own get-out-the-vote campaigns — with some contracts reportedly going for more than half a million dollars. This has resulted in some truly bizarre viral marketing campaigns, and they too lack any central message.
In one video, pensioners mock voter apathy by singing, “They say screw it, but I say yippee!” Another video, posted anonymously on social networks, features a man waking up after not voting to a nightmare plagued by some very specific Russian stereotypes: Africans in uniform delivering draft orders, his son wearing a Soviet youth group scarf, and forced homosexuality.
It is difficult to precisely define the scope of the problem these efforts are meant to combat. The Levada Center, an independent pollster, has been banned from conducting pre-election studies after being labeled by the state as a foreign agent. Meanwhile, the state-owned VTsIOM pollster in February charted a 12 point drop in Putin’s support in Russia’s largest cities.
“The problem is largely an imagined one,” says Carnegie’s Kolesnikov. “Regardless of the outcome, there will not be any doubt of Putin’s legitimacy. If there ends up being low voter turnout in the big cities, the administration will find the desired results in distant territories and in the North Caucasus. This should be enough to produce normal average figures.”
Despite suggestions that Putin’s support may be dropping in the major cities, recent polling by VTsIOM shows continued broad support among the Russian public. In response to a question of which politicians they trust, respondents in an ongoing poll answered 58.9 percent in favor of Putin. Another poll showed that 70 percent of likely voters would cast their vote for Putin on Sunday.
But the problem in the cities is an instructive one. The biggest question of the 2018 election is what will happen in the 2024 election when, presumably, Putin will be too old to run again. The task of his next term will be to find a designated successor. That will be easier said than done. Putin has ensured that the political landscape has been sterilized of meaningful competitors.
Voters outside the Kremlin base in Moscow and St. Petersburg are on alert for efforts to direct their angst toward approved candidates. After the most prominent opposition figure in Russia, Alexey Navalny, was barred from taking part in this election cycle, another rose to stand in as the “against all” candidate: socialite and opposition journalist Ksenia Sobchak.
But some see Sobchak as Kremlin candidate, and refuse to even give her a protest vote. One such voter is Anna Danishek, a 24-year-old from Siberia now living in Moscow. Initially enthusiastic that Sobchak was running, Danishek says that Sobchak’s campaign revealed itself to be little more than political theater. “Sobchak appears to just be making a show,” she says.
“So I decided not to participate in this election at all,” Danishek says, “because it is just a freak show and I am just sad that our political system is so completely dead.”
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