Tighten the screw, Russia will hold. Scenarios for after the “election”

The example of Russia makes it perfectly clear that a consolidated authoritarian regime can manage elections like a gigantic event that serves to self-confirm its shape.

If it is known from the beginning who will win the election and that it will be Vladimir Putin, why hold it at all? This is one of the questions that political scientists, experts and columnists regularly hear as the big vote approaches in Russia. Authoritarianisms and dictatorships do not shy away from the procedure considered an attribute of democracy.

The Russian elections are a test of the system. From the very tip of the stars adorning the Kremlin towers to the bottom of the deepest puddle in front of a polling place in the captive city of N., all the cogs have to work properly to confirm a predetermined outcome, referred to in the language of international capitalism as KPIs (key performance indicators). This year, the birds chirped that the targeted KPI was 80 percent. Support for the eternal president, with a minimum of 70 percent. attendance.

Directors from the Russian presidential administration, propagandists of various sorts, the entire apparatus of force, which prosecutes any attempt at political transgression and even looks over the shoulder of voters, work for this result, the state electoral commission, on whose whim it depends who will be allowed to run in the elections and who will not. A Russian bureaucracy is at work, in which anyone deeded higher makes sure that lower deeds do their jobs, coerced to vote as instructed.

All state-owned companies are working for a predetermined result, whose employees obediently line up at the polls in gratitude for good and stable work, employees of clinics and hospitals, teachers and lecturers line up, and the latter line up their students. The private sector also does not shy away from opportunities to demonstrate its loyalty to the state, ensuring that its cadres, too, throw their electoral card into the Leviathan’s maw. The pressure is sweeping through society like a huge steamroller, but the feeling of tightness in the throat is supposed to be offset by the festival attractions that organizers have provided during the election period – concerts, raffles, small gifts.

And here’s the result. Only a quarter of the protocols from the election commissions have been received by Russia’s central commission, and it is already clear that a record will be set – 88 percent. The votes are known for whom. The juxtaposition of the numbers quickly drew attention, after all, two eights are one of the symbols used by Nazi enthusiasts. Maybe that’s why, by morning, as the “vote counting” continued, one percent had disappeared. For dictatorships like modern Russia, the very fact of ostentatiously falsifying the results becomes a demonstration of the system’s effectiveness. We could, so we faked it.

There was no intrigue in this year’s presidential election, not even for a split second did anyone doubt what the outcome would be. Maybe only pressing the assumed 80 percent. “support” to 90 percent. is a slight exaggeration that shows that even Putin still has room for more peeling away from reality. He even surpassed Lukashenko’s painted 2020 score.

More war

Putin himself addressed a press conference at his election headquarters shortly after the preliminary results were announced. To one of the first questions – about the challenges in the new term – he replied that “first and foremost, issues related to the special military operationmust be dealt with.” At another he added: “Not much will change in our political life.” The fifth term hasn’t even started yet, and the system is already falling into stasis. But the fact that nothing will change might as well mean that everything will be as before, only more so. More war, more repression, more isolation and more taxes to keep it all going.

One of the key issues, just within the framework of the “spec op,” is a new round of mobilization for Russia. Some experts are betting that it will start soon. This one, which was announced in September 2022, is formally still underway, just needing to activate the military commissions and procedures that have been refined in the meantime. Military summonses can now come digitally, to an account on Gosus Services, and the very fact that they appear on a user’s profile will be considered effective delivery. But there are also claims that the Kremlin is doing well recruiting contract soldiers and will do without mobilization. However, everything depends on what Moscow’s plan for the war effort is. If a major offensive is planned, with Kharkiv, Odesa and Nikolaev as targets, the current contingent may not be enough. In any case, Putin, after the elections, has a “social mandate” to make the mobilization decision. After all, 87 percent. voters apparently agree that the absolute priority is the war against Ukraine.

More certain than mobilization is the intensification of repression. Three new “hybrid penal colonies” are just being established in Russia. The scale of the investment may be puzzling, as Russian prisons have begun to shine empty in recent years, if only due to mass recruitment for war, and the number of inmates is at a record low. So why build new ones? It is hardly surprising that Russians fear that repression will become massive and the gulag system will return. Because war also means big job losses, and a war economy needs hands. Using prison labor can be a way to fill gaps, exactly where the regime needs it.

The attack on Leonid Volkov in Vilnius was also a bad sign of days gone by. Volkov was one of Navalny‘s top associates, serving for years as chairman of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, founded by the late oppositionist. The ruthless assault on a prominent political expatriate on European Union territory is not only a wake-up call for all critics of the regime. It’s also proof that host countries of Russian emigration have a choice of either increasing investment in counterintelligence protection of this environment, or accepting that Kremlin agencies freely penetrate their territory.

“Cheburnet” and “digital gulag”.

In the next six years of Putin’s presidency, based on illegal constitutional amendments, he will not change his course to isolate the country, especially from the West. For years, the specter of the “Cheburnet” and “digital gulag” has loomed over Russia. The first term means “sovereign Internet,” meaning a network effectively cut off from foreign sites, where content is meticulously filtered and controlled. Discussions about the need to defend the Internet against hostile inclinations have been ongoing in Russia since at least 2014.

After two years of war, during which most independent media have been outlawed and Russia is abandoning relations with the West, further deepening of the isolation of the information sphere seems more than certain. This can be seen, for example, in the hacking attack, unprecedented in scale, on the infrastructure of Medusa, perhaps the most popular Russian opposition media outlet, operating from Latvia for a decade. Medusa’s editors struggled to maintain the service in the week leading up to the election, and advised readers to sign up for a special newsletter, as there was concern that during the election period the regime could effectively block iniquitous services or temporarily disconnect the Internet altogether.

A “digital gulag,” on the other hand, is more than just the Internet kept isolated from the world behind barbed wire entanglements. The use of cameras with facial recognition is spreading in Russia. At the moment, the centralized system works best in Moscow, with coverage of 74 percent. Public places and 90 percent. housing developments. It operates on a smaller scale in St. Petersburg and Tatarstan, and is still residual in other regions. But the regime seeks to include more and more cities and areas, including monitoring of non-state entities, including private ones. According to data cited by The Moscow Times, the budget for this purpose has been increased by 2.5 times between 2019 and 2022. Russia’s digitization ministry says it will improve security and raise crime detection rates by 30 percent. The opposition is rightly concerned that the mass facial recognition system is merely a tool of surveillance and repression. No one even mentions such a luxury as the right to privacy anymore.

The “digital gulag” also consists of intensified control and the ability to control citizens’ actions through tools such as the aforementioned Gosus Services, which will deliver calls to the military. In case of failure to appear at the commission, a person who has received a digital summons will automatically be subject to sanctions, such as a ban on traveling abroad, inability to buy and register means of transportation, real estate, and a ban on starting a business.

Closed society and Putin’s NEP in reverse

In the winter of 2023, when top Russian celebrities gathered for the now-famous “naked party,” it became clear that a moral transformation was taking place in the country. Its harbinger was already the wave of denunciations set in motion by the full-scale aggression against Ukraine. What far-reaching public scrutiny can look like was demonstrated by the participants of the event, whose outlandish outfits outraged the public, especially “Z-patriots” and even Putin himself. When “out there at the front our boys are sitting in the trenches” or perishing in meaty assaults, even in the capital of hedonism, which Moscow could boldly call itself until recently, there is no place for “colored birds” anymore. As a result, the celebrities had to bow out publicly, and the price for returning to the TV schedules was tours for Russian soldiers at the front. The regime has thus sent a clear signal that everyone is to march equally in line, any deviation is not welcome. These same celebrities obediently reported on their social networks that they had fulfilled their civic duty and cast their vote, again – you know for whom.

War costs money, so it requires sacrifices. A few days before the elections, the portal Vyzhnye Istorii reached information that Russians will face a tax increase, including personal income tax, following Putin’s certain victory. The new tax progression rules will cover some 20 million people, mainly the metropolitan middle class. But higher taxes are still an unaffordable price for them in the new reality, especially compared to going to the front.

There has been a lot of talk lately about Russia increasing its production of weapons and munitions, shifting its economy into war mode. Less often mentioned is the fact that an intensified deprivatization, also known as a “review of privatization results,” is currently underway in Putin’s state. The issue is the privatization of assets in the 1990s, which, with the help of the prosecutor’s office, have been returning en masse from private hands to state control over the past two years. In this way, Putin and his people are “deprivatizing” areas of the economy that are strategic from their point of view. At the same time, they call into question private property and its protection, which in a few years may entail a radical overhaul of the economic system.

Nemtsov and Navalny smile

On election days – since voting was stretched over three days, making it easier to rig and control the process – memorial photos circulated on Russian social media of Boris Nemtsov, who was killed back in 2015, and Alexei Navalny, who was recently led to his death, from previous years’ elections. Smiling, they posed with their ballots. They demonstrated them openly, showing that the elections are not fair anyway. Last weekend, some Russians managed to carry ballots out of polling places, although this was to be severely punished, and carried them to Navalny’s still fresh grave. On the cards, people wrote, for example: “Navalny – my president.” Probably no one was smiling while committing this peculiar act of political necromancy. Rebellion against falsification and the hypocritical system has ceased to be a cheerful performance.

Political opposition in Russia does not exist. Any possibility of influencing political reality inside the country has been exhausted. Out of several ideas on how to show their opposition to the regime through elections, it was impossible to choose one that could in any way threaten the regime. Eventually, figures such as Yulia Navalny decided to call for a “Noon against Putin” action. And indeed, crowds of Russians turned out at noon on Sunday at polling stations, at home and abroad. However, this can hardly be called a success, since the images were part of the propaganda narrative of a great turnout, showing the unity of citizens.

The Kremlin wanted a large turnout to legitimize the electoral spectacle. The opposition agreed to be extras in this production. That’s why it’s hard to deny the right of Ukrainians to watch these efforts with embarrassment, while in Russian-occupied areas, volatile election commissions collected votes for Putin accompanied by armed and masked soldiers. According to Ukrainian columnists, the real Russian opposition is not the one that decided on Sunday, March 17, to come to the polling stations for a while and stand there, but the one that fights in volunteer formations on the side of the Ukrainian army and with its rallies, intensified in recent days, harasses Russian border towns.

The elections in Russia were a sham, the war in Ukraine is real.