Independent journalists say campaign workers for Boris Nadezhdin, Russia’s only anti-war candidate, may have sabotaged his ballot registration, but supporters say the report is a hired hit job

A secret team of campaign workers for Russia’s only anti-war politician, Boris Nadezhdin, may have torpedoed their own candidate’s hopes of making the ballot, according to a new investigation by Novaya Gazeta Europe, though the story has led to bitter mutual recriminations in the Russian opposition. Sources told Novaya Gazeta that multiple factions within the Nadezhdin campaign clashed at the last minute over which signatures to verify and submit to Russia’s Central Election Commission, potentially leading to the inclusion of the thousands of “bad” signatures that now imperil Nadezhdin’s presidential candidacy. Meduza reviews the investigation’s findings and summarizes the furious reactions from Nadezhdin’s supporters.

The incident at the center of Novaya Gazeta’s story reportedly occurred outside Moscow on the night of January 30 at a private residence the “non-public” campaign was using as a secret headquarters. Known to insiders as “the cabin,” this is where staffers from the Civic Initiative Party (which nominated Nadezhdin) and a handful of “political technologists” assembled to finalize the campaign’s submission of signatures. Sources told Novaya Gazeta that this secret team within the campaign may have deliberately added roughly 20,000 bogus, unverified signatures to the 105,000 given to officials. 

Volunteers for Nadezhdin’s public campaign told Novaya Gazeta that they were supposed to come to the cabin on January 30 and photograph each signature sheet individually as part of a quality check for the paperwork being prepared for the election commission. When they arrived, however, they allegedly learned that large numbers of signatures collected in Russia’s more remote regions by campaign workers from Civic Initiative were falsified. When this revelation led to a disagreement about using unverified signatures, Alexander Nazarenko (one of the “political technologists” whom Nadezhdin personally hired to the campaign, sources told Novaya Gazeta) forced the volunteer workers out of the cabin and into the street, shouting that he would “bury them in the woods.” 

This is reportedly how the public side of Nadezhdin’s campaign was sidelined from the final process of verifying and selecting the signatures given to Russia’s Central Election Commission.

Speculation about motives

Novaya Gazeta’s sources offered different explanations for the conflict at the cabin. According to more charitable speculation, Nazarenko may have resorted to a violent threat merely because of miscommunication and his suspicion that the suddenly arrived volunteers were, in fact, provocateurs trying to sabotage the campaign. The same source said that Civic Initiative was simply less interested in quality signatures than it was in “matching everything to the protocols submitted to officials.” Another person claimed that the Civic Initiative team didn’t really believe that Nadezhdin’s public campaign had collected enough signatures and was merely doing all it could, acting without malicious intent.

Nazarenko wasn’t the only political spin doctor helping Nadezhdin’s secret campaign that night: Novaya’s sources identified Konstantin Vlasov and Rodion Adikaev. Both men are also reportedly Nadezhdin’s old friends, despite the fact that Vlasov supports the Russian military and promotes pro-invasion Telegram content, while Adikaev has a history of working with pro-Kremlin politicians and Kremlin-engineered “spoiler” groups. 

Reactions from the campaign and supporters

Representatives for Civic Initiative and the Nadezhdin campaign have denied the allegations in Novaya’s story, arguing that it misrepresents the campaign’s work and fabricates a plot to undermine Nadezhdin’s candidacy prospects. Party leader Andrey Nechaev suggested that the newspaper only ran the story to please the Russian authorities, supposedly hoping to shed its “undesirable organization” status. The Nadezhdin campaign acknowledged that many staffers were upset to learn that “other divisions” existed and would ultimately verify their signatures, but spokespeople stress that volunteers collected more than 211,000 signatures and only “the very best” were submitted to officials. 

Echoing concerns about “provocateurs,” opposition politician Maxim Katz (one of Nadezhdin’s most vocal public supporters) has accused Novaya Gazeta of “disgracefully” reprinting “the fantasies of the angry activists” who were barred access to the Nadezhdin campaign’s January 30 meeting. Katz also argues that the investigation’s release was timed to legitimize the Central Election Commission’s allegations against the Nadezhdin campaign. Andrey Serafimov, who co-authored the Novaya Gazeta report, told Katz on Twitter that the publication’s timing was coincidental and that he personally would have held the story if officials hadn’t flagged thousands of signatures. In response, Katz accused Serafimov of writing the article about Nadezhdin’s campaign for money. Katz did not disclose how he knows this information or how much money Serafimov allegedly received.

Where Nadezhdin goes from here

Whatever transpired on the night of January 30, the Nadezhdin campaign likely faces an insurmountable challenge in convincing election officials to uphold at least 4,500 of the 9,209 “bad signatures” flagged by officials. The alleged problems with the signatures are the same errors that have plagued aspiring candidates for years: dates entered on forms by persons other than the signatories, passport data entered on pages not notarized, names entered by persons other than the signatories, and otherwise incorrect, edited, and missing information about the signatories and the people who collected the signatures.

Nadezdhin has until February 7 to persuade the Central Election Commission to reconsider. If denied, he has the right to file an appeal with Russia’s Supreme Court. Voting in Russia’s presidential election will be held next month, between March 15 and March 17.