Russian elections expert Alexander Kynev stayed in the country to keep studying its politics. After criticizing the latest vote, he was arrested on drug charges.

On September 25, several days after the State Duma elections, Moscow’s Perovsky District Court ordered political scientist Alexander Kynev detained on drug charges. Kynev, who had criticized the Kremlin over election fraud and administrative pressure during voting, was the country’s best-known expert on Russian regional politics. Meduza examines why he may have fallen afoul of the Russian authorities.

Alexander Kynev was born in the Komi Republic in 1975. By his own account, he left the Komsomol and became involved in the “democratic movement” in Ukhta when he was just 15. He didn’t say what that involved. But in his book “Kto i kak upravlyayet regionami Rossii” (“Who Governs Russia’s Regions and How”), he described the region’s political climate as the Soviet Union collapsed, including the first relatively competitive elections to local councils.

Kynev began working with the Yabloko party in 1996, first as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student in political science at Moscow State University. He worked with its regional branches and helped assess their work. By the 1999 State Duma elections, the 24-year-old was the chief expert on regional affairs at Yabloko’s central campaign headquarters. The party cleared the 5% threshold that year and won seats in parliament through its party list.

At Yabloko, Kynev worked closely with the team of politician and political scientist Vyacheslav Igrunov, one of the party’s founders, who oversaw its election campaigns. In 2001, Igrunov announced he was leaving Yabloko over a split within the party. Kynev formally cut ties with Yabloko the same day.

Kynev went on to work on various election and research projects. In 2002, he joined SLON, a social liberal party whose name stood for the Union of People for Education and Science. Igrunov formed it with allies from Yabloko and regional opposition politicians. SLON failed to win seats in the 2003 State Duma elections and ceased to exist five years later.

In the mid-2000s, Kynev worked as an analyst and researcher with many prominent organizations that studied Russian politics or monitored elections. He headed the analysis department at Golos, an independent election monitoring movement. At the Carnegie Moscow Center, which operated in Russia until the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he studied regional politics and local elites.

A journalist at a major national media outlet who covered national and regional politics in the 1990s calls Kynev “the best expert on regional politics in all of post-Soviet history” and “someone who knew practically everything about the political systems of Russia’s regions.” Andrey Buzin, a former co-chair of Golos, agrees. “Some people will go down in history because future generations will cite their work, regardless of what else can be said about their lives or personalities,” Buzin says, alluding to Kynev’s temperament.

Kynev also taught political science at the Higher School of Economics, starting in the 2000s and continuing until 2019. In 2012, he began working with the Committee of Civil Initiatives, which former Deputy Prime Minister Alexey Kudrin founded after the Bolotnaya Square protests.

An acquaintance of Kudrin’s tells Meduza that the former deputy prime minister tried to bring “the most capable specialists” into the committee, including political scientist Dmitry Oreshkin, Novaya Gazeta journalist Andrey Kolesnikov, economist Mikhail Dmitriev, and Kynev.

At the committee, Kynev continued to track Russian regional politics. He documented pressure on the opposition and on local elites who disagreed with those in power, and tracked election fraud.

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In 2018, Kynev became an expert with the Liberal Mission research foundation, which former Russian Economy Minister Yevgeny Yasin founded in 2000 and which remains active. Speaking on the foundation’s behalf in 2021, Kynev criticized the State Duma election campaign for widespread fraud, including in remote electronic voting, and for mobilizing voters through their employers.

That year, Kynev also praised the New People party for the first time, saying it responded to a “genuine public demand for renewal of the political system.” He said, however, that he did not consider New People a full-fledged opposition party and that it had been created with the authorities’ approval. In 2023, he again praised the party’s work, calling its campaign “the most creative and eye-catching, geared more toward young people.” A year later, during Russia’s presidential election campaign, he called New People’s Vladislav Davankov “the standout” candidate.

“We need to keep some seeds of change and independent forces alive within the system so that something new might grow when a window of opportunity opens,” Kynev said of Davankov. The outlet Vestka reported that Kynev “unofficially collaborates” with New People.

Kynev stayed in Russia after the war began. An acquaintance tells Meduza that he did so on principle and to “stay in touch with the subject of his research — Russian regional politics itself.” “That mattered a lot to Sasha. He couldn’t see himself as a talking head abroad,” the acquaintance says.

Kynev nevertheless gave several interviews to journalists from opposition outlets. In a 2022 interview with Glasnaya, for example, he criticized some opposition figures for making radical statements about Russia and demoralizing Russians who had stayed in the country. He also said the mass departure of activists was weakening municipal election campaigns, which he called one of the few remaining ways for people to organize themselves.

In a 2023 interview with Radio Liberty, Kynev argued that “regional elites” no longer existed: 60% of governors came from outside the regions they governed, and major regional businesses had become branches of national companies. He said there could be “no dissenting faction” within the current system. In his view, change in the regions would come only after change in Moscow.

Kynev also regularly criticized Russian political émigrés, saying they were disconnected from the realities and concerns of life inside Russia. He likewise took aim at media outlets in exile, which he called “liberal-schizoid,” including for publishing stories about a possible new wave of mobilization after the September 2026 State Duma elections.

“Alexander’s tragedy is that his field of work [regional politics] was almost entirely destroyed, and he tried to prove otherwise,” says the journalist who covered Russian politics in the 1990s.

Kynev stayed in Russia even after Russia’s Justice Ministry added him to its “foreign agents” registry in February of this year.

Meduza has learned that Kynev was abroad shortly before the State Duma elections but returned specifically for the vote. “What does happiness look like in a Russian election? It’s when they haven’t stolen everything from you — though they could have,” he said with irony in a September 21 post. On the program “Zhivoy Gvozd” (“Live Nail”), Kynev said the authorities had “gone too far in using administrative pressure to drive turnout” during the elections — a reference to excessive employer-driven voter mobilization.

News of Kynev’s detention emerged on the afternoon of September 25. He faces a charge under a law that prohibits producing, selling, or shipping large quantities of drugs. The offense carries a prison sentence of 10 to 20 years.

Kynev’s lawyer, Mikhail Biryukov, says he is accused of attempting to sell a large quantity of drugs. Kynev denies the allegation, and the defense will appeal the detention order, Biryukov tells Meduza. He says his client is “holding up well.”

In his most recent Facebook post, on September 23, Kynev summed up his work during the election campaign:

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