At the start of the week, the Central Election Commission announced the official results of the State Duma election: United Russia supposedly won 58% of the vote on 60% turnout. The Communists came second with 13.67%, followed by the Liberal Democratic Party with 9% and New People with 8%. A Just Russia crossed the 5% threshold at the last moment of the count, when an unexpected 60,000 votes appeared in its tally. The Kremlin’s domestic policy team and regional administrations set new records for the figures produced by election commissions—figures that diverge from public sentiment perhaps more sharply than ever. In May, the state pollster VTsIOM recorded United Russia’s lowest rating in years at 27% after which it changed its polling methodology. By the eve of the election, it put the party at 37%. A week before voting, the Public Opinion Foundation estimated United Russia’s support at 33%—almost half the figure eventually announced by the Central Election Commission.
The formula behind these records is simple: intensive mobilization through employers and public-sector institutions, backed by comprehensive monitoring, combined with the return of familiar methods of electoral fraud—ballot stuffing, “carousel” voting and the rewriting of vote tallies by commissions at various levels. This combination makes it impossible to establish the real turnout, United Russia’s actual share of the vote or how much support the other parties lost. Any estimates can only be approximate. Mobilization through employers also seriously distorts the result, particularly when it involves monitoring how people vote for pro-government candidates. That, too, can be considered a form of electoral manipulation. Under normal circumstances, these voters might have voted differently or stayed home. Dependent voters are pushed to cast their ballots on the first day, which helps explain why 30% had voted by Friday. Such a distribution looks unnatural to statistical models and will probably be classified as evidence of inflated turnout, even though people formally did turn up at polling stations and put ballots in the boxes.
Neither the official turnout nor United Russia’s result, then, tells us anything about what the public really thinks. They tell us something else: the reach of mobilization through employers and public-sector institutions—30−40% of voters—and the administrative system’s willingness to resort to outright fraud, including ballot stuffing and rewritten tallies.
Both the official turnout and United Russia’s share of the vote look excessive and implausible. The Kremlin’s domestic policy team had initially planned to bring dependent voters to the polls while keeping voluntary turnout low. It lowered the party’s performance targets twice: in regions with weaker administrative resources, the target fell as low as 45% before edging back toward 50%. The targets were then raised again. Once Vladimir Putin joined United Russia’s campaign, the emphasis shifted to record-breaking results, and every available means was deployed to deliver them. The Kremlin’s domestic policy team and regional authorities were working for a single client, one long accustomed to receiving impressive-looking figures purporting to show popular support.
Unlike a conventional plebiscite, Russia’s electoral procedures are not designed to discover what people think or secure their approval. The results are known in advance and expressed as performance targets announced by Kremlin domestic policy officials. The Kremlin is not asking anyone anything. At most, it demands support from dependent voters through pressure and threats. Officials, above all Putin himself, can invoke these figures to justify decisions made long ago. In reality, those decisions were—and continue to be—prepared independently of any electoral process. They include possible mobilization (regions have long been taking steps to prepare for it), tax increases and the continuation of the war.
Voting affects only the timing of unpopular measures: they are generally postponed until after the election. The logic is clear. Decisions the public opposes damage the authorities’ ratings. Introducing them before a vote would make the work of the Kremlin’s political managers harder and increase the risk of protests — a risk the Kremlin remains mindful of.
Unpopular measures
The unpopular measures mentioned above were not long in coming. A few days before the election, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov assured Russians that no tax increases were planned after the vote. By the middle of this week, the government and senators had begun announcing just such measures. The Federation Council returned to the question of raising taxes on the self-employed, a move senators and officials have been hinting at for some time. The Transport Ministry and the Industry and Trade Ministry are preparing additional levies that would be included in airfares, ostensibly to support the aviation industry. The Industry and Trade Ministry also reminded the public that the recycling fee on imported cars will soon rise. The Finance Ministry has proposed increasing VAT on “foreign” goods sold through online marketplaces.
And those are only the tax measures. Russians also face higher utility bills. The terms of the subsidized “family mortgage” program, whose low rates have enabled some Russians to buy homes, will change substantially. In the regions with the strongest demand—Moscow, Moscow Region, St. Petersburg and Leningrad Region—the rate for families with one child will double from 6% to 12%. Elsewhere, it will rise to 10%. Families with five or more children will be able to borrow at 2%. Publicly, the authorities present the changes as an incentive to have more children. More likely, the strained budget simply cannot sustain the old family mortgage program. For many Russians, home ownership will therefore remain out of reach for a long time.
This is not the first time the authorities have postponed unpopular measures until after an election. In 2018, two months after the presidential election, the government—with Putin’s approval, of course, proposed raising the retirement age. The measure had not appeared in Putin’s election platform. On the contrary, he had repeatedly promised that the retirement age would not rise while he was in power. People felt deceived. The authorities’ ratings fell, and United Russia’s standing has never recovered. Pro-government candidates lost gubernatorial races in four regions.
These unpopular measures have nothing to do with a “mandate” won at the ballot box, although United Russia, the Kremlin and the government may well present them that way. Another wave of public anger over this latest deception is almost inevitable. The authorities did not even wait before reversing course: they openly misled citizens by insisting there would be no tax increases. The effects of these decisions should become visible in opinion polls within a week or two.
Volodin again
United Russia has nominated Vyacheslav Volodin for a third term as speaker of the State Duma. Unless Putin makes a different decision at the last minute—as he did in 2016 with the then speaker, Sergei Naryshkin, who now heads the Foreign Intelligence Service—Volodin will set a record for time spent in the post. Once United Russia leader, former president and deputy Security Council chairman Dmitry Medvedev failed to secure the top spot on the party list—a prerequisite for becoming speaker—Volodin had effectively no serious rivals left. One could imagine Putin offering the job, under certain circumstances, to one of the leading figures on United Russia’s list: Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov or Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin. But running the Duma entails a daily grind of political and bureaucratic work unlikely to suit the 76-year-old Lavrov. Sobyanin is a technocrat and an adept bureaucratic operator who has little taste for the limelight, though he has served as speaker of the legislature in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug. Putin himself once described the Moscow mayor succinctly: “Not Robespierre”—in other words, not an orator or a public politician. There were rumors that Yury Trutnev, the president’s envoy to the Far Eastern Federal District and a deputy prime minister, might become speaker, but these looked more like a maneuver in an internal power struggle.
Volodin really can be called the ideal Duma speaker for the late Putin era. He knows how to read the president’s mood — now the key to survival within the system — and is happy to flatter him crudely while attacking dissenters with equal force. If the Duma is the public façade of Russian power, Volodin is its most prominent ornament: the face of that façade. He also knows how to manage the institution and does so well. Given Putin’s deep reluctance to change personnel, Volodin’s staying on was the most predictable outcome.
His reappointment can confidently be called a victory within the system: there is simply no equivalent post elsewhere in the hierarchy that could compensate him for losing the speakership. Yet in winning this tactical battle, he also suffers a serious defeat. He will have to preside over parliament as it passes a wave of unpopular measures, from tax rises and budget cuts to a potential new round of mobilization. Deputies will have to support and vote for these decisions, and the speaker will personify that support. For a populist — and Volodin tries to play that role — it is political ruin. Nor can one rule out the possibility that, in a serious social crisis, the country’s leadership will sacrifice the Duma and make its members and their leader the scapegoats.
