Russia’s ruling political party has a campaign ‘brand book’ for September. What it doesn’t have is a platform.

Meduza has obtained the ”brand book” governing how United Russia’s regional branches design campaign materials for local candidates. The document also shows the design intended for the party’s federal-level campaigns.

According to the brand book, United Russia will campaign under three main slogans: “Strength in Unity,” “Let’s Choose the Worthy,” and “United Russia Is the President’s Team.”

All three must appear on federal-level posters, brochures, and leaflets; regional campaigns may use only the second and third. The brand book doesn’t say why.

Meduza reported in mid-June that United Russia planned to run in the election as “Putin’s party” and was waiting for that framing to be approved. The framing apparently wasn’t approved, so the party settled — for now — on calling itself simply the president’s “team.” The slogans could still be revised in the coming month.

During the first stage of the party congress, held on June 28 at the Megasport Palace on Khodynka Field, organizers displayed posters with the slogan “Being Za Putin Is the Bare Minimum” — a play on the “Z” symbol of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That slogan does not appear in the brand book.

Party branches must use photographs of the top five candidates on United Russia’s parliamentary list on the covers of federal brochures and leaflets. At the center of the collage must be the list’s leader, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, with Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin to his left and “military correspondent” Yevgeny Poddubny to his right. At the edges are Vladislav Golovin — head of the central staff of the pro-government children’s movement Yunarmiya, who took part in the invasion of Ukraine — and Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova, who is wanted internationally on charges of deporting Ukrainian children to Russia.

In the collage, Golovin wears a military uniform with decorations, while Poddubny — who often appears in public in khaki — wears a sober suit jacket and tie. Lvova-Belova, who often favors outlandish, faux-Russian outfits, appears in a modest dark-blue turtleneck.

That shade — United Russia’s signature color — will dominate the party’s campaign design, with red and white as accents, so that its branding reads as the Russian flag.

Along with the slogans and design instructions, the brand book includes an address from the top five candidates, which branches must include in the brochure for United Russia’s “people’s program.” The party bills that program as “a strategic document formed on the basis of proposals from citizens across the country.”

In this year’s address, the candidates assert that the plan of the previous “people’s program” has been fulfilled: across the country, “more than 1,700 schools have been built, and thousands of modern rural health posts and clinics have been opened.”

“Together we overcome difficulties, together we achieve our goals. Together we write the story of our Motherland’s success. New horizons lie ahead of us through 2031. We have results, we have a plan, we have a future!” So ends the address from the leaders of United Russia’s list.

It is the only coherent block of text the brand book’s authors offered the party’s branches.

In place of every other piece of text — including the five main reasons to vote for United Russia — the authors, for some reason, inserted the words “text text text text very long text” or a passage from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace:

Regional campaign materials must include maps of the region’s cities and districts marked with the number of social facilities the party has built or renovated over the past five years. Next to the maps, the brand book asks branches to list how many requests the region’s State Duma deputies have received, along with the number of “resolved issues.”

What the brand book doesn’t contain is the party’s program itself — the core around which the campaign’s message is supposed to be built. The brand book gives only the design requirements for the program brochure, again using the passage about “Uncle.” A source in United Russia’s central office told Meduza that the program will be adopted at the second stage of the party congress on August 22.

Meduza has reported that the war in Ukraine, the fuel crisis, and economic difficulties have left United Russia — and the Presidential Administration political bloc that oversees its campaign — in a difficult position. The situation in the country keeps shifting, and there is little point in approving the program months before the vote, set for September 18–20: some of the program’s provisions could be outdated by then.

So the program won’t be made public until a month before the election, a source in the ruling party explained to Meduza:

Talk among security officials about “postponing the election, but in reality canceling it in the near future” began as early as this spring, according to a Meduza source close to the presidential administration. At the start of the full-scale war, they had already proposed that Putin cancel elections for governor because of the difficult situation in the country, but at the time the head of the administration’s political bloc, Sergey Kiriyenko, persuaded the president against it. “If elections are canceled, it means something in the country is going wrong — that the authorities are afraid of the results.”