The charade takes place amid murder and repression
, the country’s longest-serving dictator since Stalin. In a land where opposition politicians are dead, in prison or in exile, where speaking truth to power is a criminal offence and where a paranoid autocrat is happy to kill hundreds of thousands of his own people and his neighbours in order to assert and maintain his power, an election seems entirely unnecessary; a strange charade or a quaint anachronism.
The Soviet leaders who also held fake “elections”, sometimes with only one candidate on the ballot, could still rely on the legacy of the Bolshevik revolution and victory in the second world war. Mr Putin’s tyranny is both more personal and less ideological. It derives its legitimacy from its use of violence and the carefully maintained appearance of popular support. The spectres of external enemies—the West and Ukraine—and internal ones are invoked to buttress it.
One person who understood the essence of this ritual acclamation, and who tried to break it and reclaim elections as true political expressions was, Russia’s slain opposition leader. Though he knew that power in Russia could not be changed through the ballot box, he saw elections as a way of registering dissent.
By murdering Navalny a month before his “election” Mr Putin wanted to show that there was no alternative to himself and his older, imperialist version of Russia. Unable to contest them at the ballot box, Navalny continues to do so from his grave. His funeral on March 1st became a visible act of defiance.
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