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Russia’s State Duma election delivered record turnout and a landslide for United Russia. Kremlin insiders say the results were achieved ‘through very dirty means.’

Source: Meduza

With 93% of precinct returns processed, United Russia, the country’s ruling party, had won about 58% of the vote in the election to the State Duma. Russia’s Communist Party (KPRF) placed second with about 14%, according to the Central Election Commission. LDPR came in third with 9%, followed by New People with 8%. As of the morning of September 21, A Just Russia had not cleared the 5% threshold needed to enter the State Duma — but by midday, the Central Election Commission announced that the party had in fact received the required 5% of the vote.

According to the Central Election Commission’s official data, turnout reached 59.32% — the highest since 2011, when it hit 60.21%.

As Meduza reported ahead of the election, the political bloc within Russia’s Presidential Administration was counting on turnout exceeding 50% by the second of the three voting days. A deputy governor for political affairs in one region said Kremlin officials had told him to aim for turnout of “50%, plus a decent margin.”

During the campaign, sources told Meduza that the Presidential Administration’s political bloc had instructed the leadership of state corporations, budget-funded institutions, and other organizations loyal to the authorities to step up so-called “corporate mobilization.” Managers designated so-called “mobilizers,” or “brigade leaders,” from among mid-level staff to monitor turnout within small groups of their “charges.”

At one Moscow state-funded institution, where managers strongly encouraged staff to vote through remote electronic voting, an employee told Meduza that names of people who supposedly hadn’t voted began appearing in a group chat that included both colleagues and management. The source said managers addressed employees directly in the chat, demanding they report whether they had voted.

“I don’t know how [the managers] got this information, but there really were people among the names who hadn’t voted,” the Meduza source added.

This wasn’t an isolated case. On the first day of voting, September 18, teachers in Yakutsk were forced to report both their own turnout and their students’ parents’ turnout, with homeroom teachers required to update superiors every two hours on which parents had voted. That same day, the Altai Krai committee of the KPRF reported that regional authorities had not only compelled state-funded employees to vote “under threat of dismissal” but had also sent specific names that should be marked on the ballots.

Political scientist Alexander Kynev’s calculations found that 19 of Russia’s regions — a count that includes occupied Crimea and Sevastopol, along with the occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions of Ukraine — recorded turnout of at least 70%. Turnout ranged from 60 to 70% in 11 regions, from 50 to 60% in 22 regions, and from 40 to 50% in 33 regions. Only four Russian regions saw turnout fall below 40%: Irkutsk region, with the lowest turnout overall at 36%, along with Karelia, Novosibirsk region, and Zabaykalsky Krai.

A political strategist who works with the Presidential Administration’s political bloc told Meduza that the bloc’s head, Sergey Kiriyenko, “can now report a new turnout record”: “These numbers will be in the president’s folder.”

He says media outlets the authorities control have played up the record heavily in their headlines. ”[The political bloc] asked us to draw attention to it,” he explains. At the same time, the strategist says the record was “secured through very dirty means.” “A turnout figure just over 50% wouldn’t have hurt anyone, and there would have been fewer complaints [from the public],” the Meduza source believes.

United Russia’s result — about 58% of the vote — also could have been made “prettier and more believable,” the strategist continues. Meduza has reported that after Vladimir Putin got personally involved in campaigning for the ruling party, the Presidential Administration’s political bloc raised United Russia’s KPI target again, reversing an earlier reduction made amid a drop in the party’s ratings caused by internet blackouts, rising prices, and a fuel crisis. After raising the target, the bloc told regional authorities to secure more than 50% of the vote for United Russia.

The ruling party not only exceeded that target but, according to official data, also won at least 208 of the 225 single-member districts, with the count still ongoing. The Kremlin had set aside another 16 districts for representatives of the systemic opposition.

The political strategist working with the Presidential Administration puts the ruling party’s results this way:

The strategist believes that, just as with turnout, Sergey Kiriyenko needs a strong result for United Russia so he can “report an excellent outcome to the president.” “And if the United Russia faction ends up with 350 deputies, that’ll be another nice number,” he says with a smirk.

A deputy governor for political affairs in one region who spoke with Meduza agrees. But he gripes that “at the pharmacy” (meaning the Presidential Administration), whenever the conversation turns to overreach in the results, everyone blames the regions. “They say the regions overdid it. But what else are you supposed to do if you’ve been told to hit at least 50%?” he complains.

Official results show every United Russia candidate running for governor in the regional elections won. The party also won every regional legislative election.

The Kremlin had another goal for this election: getting candidates who fought in the war against Ukraine into the State Duma. After voting concluded, Vladimir Yakushev, head of United Russia’s general council, announced that 86 “SVO veterans” among the party’s candidates had won State Duma seats. But at least 21 of them are tied to the current elite — mostly deputies, officials, and regional lawmakers — as Meduza found back in June.

The systemic opposition’s results in this election turned out to be predictable. Official data show the KPRF placed second with about 14% of the vote — 5 percentage points below its 2021 showing. But as Meduza has reported, the Kremlin pressured the KPRF into withdrawing popular politicians who had won their districts in 2021. The party did decline to nominate Maria Prusakova (Altai Krai) and Pyotr Ammosov (Yakutia). Well-known regional politicians Mikhail Matveyev (Samara region) and Oleg Mikhailov (Komi), however, did run in their districts. Both lost.

LDPR and New People finished separated by a minimal margin — the Liberal Democrats got about 9%, New People about 8%. The Presidential Administration tried to push LDPR into second place, a strategy that worked in the 2025 regional elections. But “at some point [the Kremlin] came to terms with the Communists’ second-place finish” in the Duma election, a Meduza source close to the Presidential Administration says. “That was clear both from the ratings and from the discipline of [the Communists’] core electorate. Besides, [KPRF leader Gennady] Zyuganov specifically discussed second place with the president,” he said.

A source close to LDPR’s leadership and a Meduza source within New People both say the results are generally satisfactory to their parties’ leadership. “The gap [with LDPR] is nominal, 1 percentage point,” the New People source says. The source close to LDPR’s leadership says LDPR leader Leonid Slutsky has made peace with third place, though he had previously hoped for second.

A Just Russia cleared the 5% threshold only at the last moment. Ahead of the election, officials in the Presidential Administration understood that the party’s ratings (4.5%) meant it might fall short of parliament. The only thing A Just Russia’s members could hope for was a signal from Vladimir Putin to the Central Election Commission and the Presidential Administration. Putin wanted the party of his old acquaintance from St. Petersburg, Sergei Mironov, to make it into parliament after all. The illness of A Just Russia’s leader, who was unable to campaign during the final weeks of the race, also stood in the party’s way.

The political strategist working with the Presidential Administration says the “signal from the president” did come through on September 21. “Which factions end up in the State Duma is decided personally by Putin. This issue never gets resolved without him,” the Meduza source explains.

None of the antiwar candidates backed by the “Smart Voting” strategy will get a seat in parliament as a result of the election.

Yabloko, the Russian liberal party whose list was pulled from the State Duma race and from elections in regions where it had strong branches, won seats in the Novgorod region’s legislative assembly. That win let the party keep its “Duma privilege,” which allows it to field federal parliament candidates without collecting signatures. “They didn’t interfere in that region,” a source close to the Presidential Administration tells Meduza. “Call it a consolation prize, if you want.”