Meduza’s latest daily newsletter: Monday, September 9, 2024 Regional ‘election’ results set stage for 2026 State Duma voting, annulling Soviet political prisoners’ rehabilitations, and mandating family therapy before granting divorces

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Yours newsily, Kevin Rothrock, Meduza in English managing editor

Let’s talk about the ‘elections’ that just went down in Russia

A stress test: Over the past weekend, Russians cast ballots in 21 gubernatorial races and elections for 13 regional parliaments. As Meduza reported at the outset of the voting, the contests were less a democratic undertaking than a trial run for the Kremlin’s latest spin on managed politics. The “elections” tested a handful of acting governors who have struggled in office or previous posts, but the Putin administration’s main goal, according to various sources who spoke to Meduza, was to stress-test Russia’s neutered party system to ensure that the public accepts the scripted results of voting two years from now in federal parliamentary elections.

More or less on target: Most of the weekend’s voting results show that the presidential administration’s political orchestration is running smoothly. In seven of the 21 regions that held gubernatorial elections, regime-backed candidates won more than 80 percent of the vote (though no one dared tally above the 87-percent mark Vladimir Putin set in his most recent reelection). In another eight regions, the Kremlin’s candidates won with 78–79 percent. 

Some stand-out races: Even in the Altai Republic, former United Russia General Council secretary Andrey Turchak came away with 74 percent of the vote — outperforming his predecessors, who won 58.8 percent in 2019 and 50.6 percent in 2014. St. Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov walked away with the lowest victory threshold with 59 percent of the vote, despite election officials deliberately packing the ballot with opponents who endorsed unambiguously unpopular platforms that included banning foreign music and closing the city to gasoline-powered cars. Meduza’s Andrey Pertsev notes that a mayoral race in Bratsk, in the Irkutsk region, came closest to competitive politics because the two leading candidates were both United Russia members (though one ran as an independent). In the end, Alexander Dubrovin defeated incumbent Sergey Serebrennikov with 70 percent of the vote, declaring it a win first and foremost for the party.

Taking down KPRF: In regional parliaments, United Russia won more than half the votes, though the Kremlin’s reported plan to oust the Community Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) from the number-two opposition spot was successful in only half the voting regions. (Notably, KPRF fell to fourth place in occupied Sevastopol.) The Communists continue to perform better in the national republics, where non-Russian ethnicities are the majority and where the nationalist rhetoric of LDPR and its late founder, Vladimir Zhrinovsky, continues to alienate the local populations. 

Setting the stage and readying the room: Two sources close to the presidential administration told Meduza that the Kremlin has instructed regional officials and the state media to focus where possible on the weekend’s high turnout and record results for United Russia. The regime’s political strategists reportedly want to cultivate the idea that the past weekend’s managed numbers — even the record-breaking victories — are “predictable and natural.” Familiarizing the public with such voting outcomes will reduce the potential for controversy when the authorities orchestrate Russia’s 2026 State Duma elections.

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Meduza’s feature reporting

• 🪖 Ukraine holds its ground in Russia’s Kursk region as defense crisis in Donbas grows
• 👰‍♀️ Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian children’s rights commissioner wanted for war crimes, reportedly marries monarchist media billionaire

The news in brief

• 🛢️ Hungarian energy company will take over Lukoil crude oil supplies at the Belarus-Ukraine border
• ⚖️ Court in Omsk sentences former Wagner Group mercenary (who was freed from prison for fighting in Ukraine) to 19 years for brutally murdering his pregnant teenage common-law wife
• ⚖️ Russia’s Prosecutor General proposes campaign to identify and annul certain Soviet political prisoners’ rehabilitations, and officials revise state regulations to obfuscate nature and scale of Stalinist repressions
• 🛂 Neo-Nazi group Rusich announces ‘peer learning’ project to help Federal Security Service with reconnaissance at Russia’s Finnish border (the FSB hasn’t confirmed or denied)
• 🇱🇻🇷🇴 Ukrainian presidential adviser says muted response to Russian military drones violating Latvian and Romanian airspace signals Moscow’s impunity in West
• 🪖 Kursk mayor reprimands city’s chief architect for ‘gross negligence’ in using Ukrainian soldier’s image in Russian military recruitment banner
• 💒 State Duma lawmakers draft legislation requiring divorcing couples to meet with family psychologist for three months before marriage can be dissolved legally

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