In our mini-series on the main Russian parties’ preparations for the 2026 State Duma elections, we have already reviewed the current state of the CPRF, United Russia, the LDPR, A Just Russia, and New People. This instalment focuses on the parties that are almost certain to take part, thanks to the «parliamentary privilege» that allows them to nominate candidates without collecting signatures.
How the party system has changed in five years
The current State Duma was elected five years ago, in 2021. In the intervening period Russia has entered the era of full-scale war — a conflict that itself has passed through several distinct phases: the failed blitzkrieg, mass mobilization, the Prigozhin mutiny, the shift to protracted positional warfare, and a sharp tightening of repression and internet controls.
All of these developments have profoundly altered the domestic political landscape, and the party system could not remain untouched. The internal processes unfolding inside Russia’s parties over the past five years merit close attention. Some trends, however, become clearer when the focus shifts from the «parliamentary five» to the second- and third-tier parties.
A number of these smaller outfits were created from the outset as overt spoilers, designed to siphon votes from the CPRF (the most obvious examples being Communists of Russia and the CPSU, later rebranded as the Russian Party of Freedom and Justice). Others were personal vehicles for regional politicians (such as the Party of Social Protection). Still others existed in name only. Yet even these marginal players expanded the avenues for political participation — including for figures who had been squeezed out of larger organizations for one reason or another.
A striking case is the story of the Rodina party in Tambov. In 2020 it won the Tambov city duma elections, taking 44.18% on the party list and victory in 17 of 18 single-mandate districts. The party was then led by former Tambov mayor and ex-vice-governor Maxim Kosenkov, who had been expelled from United Russia. Kosenkov later became city administration head and, in 2025, returned to the «party of power» at the governor’s invitation.
In 2021, 32 political parties were formally eligible to contest the State Duma elections. Under the law, however, most were required to collect at least 200,000 voter signatures (no more than 7,000 in any single region). Without the backing of the Presidential Administration, this was virtually impossible. The four parliamentary parties were exempt, as were those whose lists had cleared the 5% threshold in at least one regional election. At the time of the 2021 vote there were 14 such parties.
Today only 19 political parties are officially registered in Russia. Roughly 40% of the electoral associations that existed five years ago have disappeared, including Civic Initiative — the party that nominated Boris Nadezhdin as its presidential candidate in 2024. No new parties have been registered in the past six years.
In most cases the formal grounds for liquidation was failure to participate in elections for seven years. The law requires a party to meet at least one of the following conditions within that period: nominate a presidential candidate, register a list for the State Duma, contest gubernatorial elections in at least 10% of regions, or take part in local elections in at least half of Russia’s federal subjects. «Participation» means the candidate must be officially registered. This creates a vicious circle: without the Presidential Administration’s consent it is almost impossible to collect the necessary signatures, yet without participating in elections a party can be dissolved.
In the case of Civic Initiative the Justice Ministry exploited a legal grey area. The law does not specify exactly how the seven-year period is calculated — whether checks must be conducted every seven years from the date of registration or whether the ministry may choose an arbitrary date. Until the Civic Initiative case the first approach was used; in its case the second was suddenly applied. The party’s destruction was driven not by established enforcement practice but by political expediency. It was not forgiven even the cautious and ultimately unsuccessful (the candidate was never registered) participation of Boris Nadezhdin in the 2024 presidential election. By contrast, the party’s nomination of Ksenia Sobchak in 2018 carried no repercussions.
The number of «privileged» parties exempt from signature collection for federal elections has also shrunk. Only 12 remain. The Russian Party of Freedom and Justice (RPSS) and the Green Alternative have dropped off the list.
The Green Alternative is expected to cease independent existence shortly and merge with the Greens — a logical end for an openly spoiler project. To secure its parliamentary privilege, the authorities had to rig results in the 2020 Chelyabinsk regional election so blatantly that they literally swapped the tallies of the Green Alternative and United Russia at one polling station. Despite active participation in regional campaigns and even the successful registration of gubernatorial candidates, over the past five years the party managed to win only a handful of municipal seats.
In 2025 the Party of Social Protection had a realistic chance of obtaining the privilege. Almost unknown outside Kostroma Region, it is essentially the personal vehicle of popular local businessman and former regional duma deputy Vladimir Mikhailov, who has switched parties repeatedly — from United Russia to Yabloko and beyond. The party was denied registration for the elections just three days before voting began.
As a result, in addition to the «parliamentary five,» seven parties now enjoy the right to nominate candidates for federal elections without collecting signatures: the Party of Pensioners, Communists of Russia, Rodina, Yabloko, the Greens, Civic Platform, and the Party of Direct Democracy. In practice this means a noticeable reduction in options for would-be candidates who could not reach agreement with the big five.
None of these seven parties cleared even the 3% threshold required for state funding at the previous federal elections. Yet, as Riddle Russia noted at the time, several performed respectably at the regional level. The Party of Pensioners entered 16 regional legislatures, posting an especially strong result in Murmansk Region (nearly 11%). Communists of Russia cleared the barrier in three regions, Yabloko in three. Rodina, the Greens, and the Party of Direct Democracy each succeeded in only one.
On the eve of the war, regional parliaments displayed a noticeable degree of political diversity. In Karelia and Amur Region seven parties entered the legislatures on party lists; in ten regions (Chuvashia, Kamchatka and Krasnoyarsk territories, Kirov, Kursk, Lipetsk, Novgorod, Omsk, Oryol and Pskov regions) plus St Petersburg, six parties did so. Both voters and the Kremlin’s political managers were clearly looking for new channels to articulate public interests.
In the final year before the full-scale invasion the party system was visibly out of balance, and many expected qualitative change. The war changed everything.
The state of the minor parties
The most recent major elections took place in September 2025, when deputies were chosen in 11 regions (the previous vote there had been held in 2020, so some comparisons are made with that year rather than 2021). These elections set an anti-record for the average number of party lists fielded since 2012 — just 6.3 per region. For comparison, the figure was 11.4 in 2020 — almost twice as high.
After the «Crimean consensus» of 2014 finally ran out of steam, the pre-war years saw a surge in political engagement: protest voting in the 2018 regional elections, the Moscow street protests of 2019, and the months-long rallies in Khabarovsk against the arrest of Governor Furgal in 2020. By the mid-2020s, however, the political sphere had been almost completely frozen. Parties that still needed to collect signatures had, by 2025, virtually stopped contesting elections.
This trend has also affected the «privileged» parties. Even the once-successful Party of Pensioners sharply curtailed its activity. In 2020 it entered seven regional legislatures; in 2025 it managed only five. In 2020 its lists cleared the threshold in all six administrative-centre city councils where it ran; in 2025 it succeeded in only four. The party has almost ceased nominating candidates in regions where signatures are required. Its remaining successes were achieved with minimal — and often non-existent — campaigning.
The Green Alternative, which entered two regional legislatures in 2020, failed to repeat the feat anywhere in 2025. In Chelyabinsk Region it did not even field candidates; in the Komi Republic it received less than 4%.
Communists of Russia were registered in only four regions and cleared the threshold in none. Rodina lost its seats in the Komi State Council. Its 2020 campaign had been linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin; without his support and money the party scored under 1% in 2025.
The Greens failed to enter a single regional or city parliament where they ran: 0.89% in Novosibirsk Region, 2.4% in Cheboksary, 2.7% in Kaluga.
RPSS and Civic Platform have been almost invisible in recent years. In 2025 RPSS scored under 2% in its only contest (Komi), while Civic Platform received under 1% in Cheboksary.
Pressure on Yabloko
On the eve of the federal elections Yabloko has come under heavy administrative and law-enforcement pressure. On the morning of 21 April 2026 police detained Emilia Slabunova, deputy of the Karelian Legislative Assembly and long-time leader of the party’s regional branch. A court found her guilty of displaying extremist symbols and fined her 1,000 rubles. According to investigators, six years earlier Slabunova had posted a joint photograph with Alexei Navalny on social media and wished him good health. The post had long since been deleted. Having been convicted under an administrative article, Slabunova is barred from standing in this year’s elections.
In December 2025 party chairman Nikolai Rybakov was fined under the same «extremist» article and is now also ineligible to run. The same fate almost certainly awaits Alexander Shishlov, former St Petersburg human-rights ombudsman. Yabloko’s Kamchatka leader Vladimir Efimov has already been stripped of electoral rights; he faces three criminal cases — two for «discrediting the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation» and one for «displaying extremist symbols.»
On 23 April police detained Grigory Gribenko, leader of the Irkutsk branch. A court convicted him of disobeying police officers. Earlier, the leaders of the Yakut and Vologda branches — Anatoly Nogovitsyn and Nikolai Egorov — were convicted under the «discrediting the army» article.
The most intense pressure is concentrated in the North-West, the region where Yabloko retains its strongest positions and still holds seats in regional and city legislatures.
Deputy chairman Lev Shlosberg faces two criminal cases — for «repeated discrediting of the Armed Forces» and for «fakes about the army.» Since 5 December 2025 he has been held in SIZO-1 in Pskov. He was earlier convicted, on 5 November 2025, for failing to fulfil the obligations of a «foreign agent.»
Of the 11 party members placed by the Justice Ministry on the «foreign agents» register, five are politicians whose media profile extends beyond the North-Western Federal District: Boris Vishnevsky and Sergei Troshin (St Petersburg), Lev Shlosberg and Nikolai Kuzmin (Pskov), and Ksenia Cherepanova (Veliky Novgorod).
Given the volume of «extremist» and «foreign-agent» cases, there is a real risk that Yabloko itself could at any moment be declared an extremist organization, banned, and barred from the elections.
At the same time the party has in recent years effectively curtailed its political activity. In 2025 it did not field a single regional list. It attempted to contest four city duma elections in regional capitals but was registered only in Tomsk — where, unlike in 2020, it failed to clear the threshold. Its sole success was the election of one deputy to the Kaluga city duma in a single-mandate district; according to sources, he was an «agreed» administrative candidate.
Such harsh pressure stems primarily from Yabloko’s continued public calls for peace and an end to the war. The official participation of a party campaigning under the slogan «For Peace!» clearly irritates the Presidential Administration. The 2024 presidential campaign showed that even a relatively unknown federal figure such as Boris Nadezhdin could consolidate a significant part of the anti-war electorate. He managed to collect more than 100,000 signatures, and the long queues of people wanting to sign became one of the defining images of that campaign. It demonstrated that the protest and anti-war electorate can rally even around a relatively neutral candidate.
Pre–emptive counter–revolution
It is when one looks at the smaller and non-parliamentary parties that the extent of the difference between the «war-time» elections of 2026 and the pre-war period becomes especially clear. In 2018−2021 there was an evident demand for new political forces and for the authorities to take public opinion into account. In 2019 the Levada Centre asked Russians about their main fears. The top ten included «world war» (second place), «arbitrariness of the authorities» (third), and «return to repression» and «tightening of the regime» (sixth and seventh). The political course chosen by the regime directly contradicted these concerns.
The party system tried, at least partially, to respond to this demand. The Kremlin created New People for this purpose; the non-systemic opposition offered itself in the same role. Demand also existed for smaller parties — as the examples above illustrate.
In this sense the 2020 constitutional reform, followed by the full-scale war, functioned as a form of «pre-emptive counter-revolution» (in the terminology of historian Arno Mayer, a pre-emptive counter-revolution erupts to preserve the status quo before the idea of revolution can materialize). For the Kremlin the status quo in the electoral sphere means total control over access to the political market and over any form of domestic political activity. To achieve this it is necessary to strengthen United Russia to the maximum, weaken the CPRF as the most independent opposition force, and minimize all other risks. A large number of small parties is perceived as a potential threat to the existing order — especially since such parties have already shown they can create problems.
The relatively rapid erosion of the 2014 «Crimean consensus» has clearly been noted by the authorities. They understand that a protracted war — which from the outset generated far less enthusiasm than the 2014 annexation of Crimea — may also lose support over time. Public expressions of discontent show that the demand for the authorities to heed public opinion is gradually returning.
In this situation the Kremlin prefers to play it safe. All the more so because the 2026 federal elections will coincide with large-scale regional and local campaigns in nearly half of Russia’s federal subjects. There will be far more candidates, each of whom will send their own observers to the polling stations. Ensuring the same level of opacity achieved in the 2024 presidential election will be impossible under these conditions. One of the Kremlin’s goals is therefore to reduce to a minimum the number of potential election participants — thereby limiting opportunities for public oversight on voting day.
