The outcome of Russia’s parliamentary elections is predetermined. Yet the Kremlin cares about much more than the figures announced once the ballots are (mis)counted.
Vladimir Putin’s regime can of course falsify almost any result. Independent election monitoring has been largely destroyed, voting has been extended over three days, and electronic ballots are difficult to verify. But an entirely fictional election would cease to perform its most important function. It would tell the Kremlin nothing about the discipline of its officials, the resilience of regional elites, or the state’s ability to mobilize the population.
Russian elections are therefore more than a falsified vote count. They are a nationwide examination of the Putin system. Citizens play a secondary role. The real examinees are governors, bureaucrats, directors of state institutions, and party functionaries.
From September 18 to 20, Russians elect a new State Duma. At the same time, more than 2,200 regional and municipal elections will take place across the country, distributing approximately 20,700 elected offices and legislative seats.
The main question is not who will sit in parliament. There is no doubt that United Russia will finish first or, more importantly, that the Kremlin will retain control of the legislature through all the parties belonging to Russia’s managed political system. Every party allowed to contest the elections accepts Putin’s rule and opposes an immediate end to the war.
The last opportunity to cast a legal vote explicitly against the war disappeared in August. That was when the Supreme Court removed Yabloko from the ballot. The liberal party had called for a ceasefire and peace negotiations. Officially, it was disqualified for violating campaign finance and intellectual property rules. But the ruling came after Yabloko’s support among decided voters had, by some estimates, risen to about 6% within just a few weeks, compared with the 1.2% it received in the 2021 election. In addition, Nikolai Bondarenko, a popular Communist politician from Saratov and frequent critic of United Russia, had already been barred from standing.
This raises an obvious question: why hold elections at all if the Kremlin determines both the winner and the boundaries of permissible debate in advance?
The primary answer is the regime’s belief that it confers legitimacy. Even modern dictatorships can rarely afford to abandon elections altogether. A government based solely on coercion looks not only brutal but vulnerable. Putin prefers to claim that he acts on behalf of most Russians. Elections convert that claim into official percentages, televised maps, and millions of ballot papers.
After four and a half years of war, this demonstration has become particularly important. Putin has failed to achieve a decisive victory, but he cannot end the war without explaining what the enormous sacrifices were for. The Kremlin therefore needs periodic (and heavily staged) confirmation that the country endorses its chosen course.
United Russia is consequently running a two-track campaign. Its platform focuses primarily on wages, outpatient clinics, kindergartens, student accommodation, and technological development. The war has almost disappeared from its list of promises – the authorities understand how tired Russians are of both the conflict and the deterioration of everyday life. At the party congress, however, the rhetoric was entirely different: pledges to do everything necessary for victory, rejection of compromise with the West, and declarations of universal support for the war.
The same contradiction is reflected at the top of the party list. It includes Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, who embodies the technocratic normality of the pre-war era, as well as Vladislav Golovin, a veteran of the battle for Mariupol, and war correspondent Yevgeny Poddubny. They are joined by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova (who, like Putin, faces ICC accusations of the mass kidnapping of Ukrainian children). The party promises a return to normal life while simultaneously asking voters to endorse the war and a new military elite.
Legitimacy, however, is only one function of elections. No less importantly, the campaign tests whether the entire Putin system is still functioning.
Russia is not governed by one man personally supervising every polling station. Between Putin’s orders and the officially announced result stand governors, mayors, civil servants, state-owned company executives, university rectors, school principals, electoral commissions, and regional branches of United Russia. Each must mobilize voters who depend on the state, deliver the required turnout, prevent surprises, and present Moscow with a convincing result.
This machinery has already undergone a rehearsal during United Russia’s primaries. The party claimed that more than 12 million people took part. Independent observers, however, reported pressure on public-sector employees and students: state institutions first required them to register on the online voting platform and then instructed them to vote, sometimes for specific candidates.
The primaries simultaneously tested the Kremlin’s ability to bring war veterans – whom Putin has called Russia’s “new elite” – into politics. To make this easier, United Russia automatically added 25% to the tally of all participating veterans. Yet even with this advantage, only 58 war participants won their primaries – fewer than 10% of those seeking State Duma nominations. The largest concentrations of successful veteran candidates were found in Moscow, Chechnya, the Novosibirsk region, and the occupied part of the Donetsk region.
This outcome demonstrates why simply inventing the final figures is insufficient for the Kremlin. Elections reveal resistance within the system itself. Regional elites do not want to surrender safe seats to newcomers, even when Putin demands their promotion. Nor are voters necessarily willing to support a candidate merely because he participated in the war. Turning the president’s promise into a new parliamentary cohort required changing the rules of internal party competition.
Mobilizing ordinary voters presents another test. For years, Russian businesses and state institutions have compiled lists of people dependent on them. Human resources departments send messages to employees, order them to visit polling stations, and require them to report that they had voted. District and municipal leaders across the country are given strict key performance indicators for turnout and support for the ruling party. When they fail to meet their targets, the regime has long had a means of punishing them – the allocation of government funding and subsidies.
But this system has begun to break down. Businesses are cutting jobs and wages, meaning that employers’ voting instructions are no longer offset by past economic stability. The elimination of the lowest tier of local government has deprived the authorities of municipal intermediaries who personally knew local shopkeepers, farmers, and public-sector workers. Internet shutdowns in response to Ukrainian attacks impede both electronic voting and real-time monitoring of turnout. Meanwhile, the state-controlled MAX messaging app cannot yet fully replace WhatsApp and Telegram, which are familiar to ordinary Russians and regional officials alike.
This is why the final figures matter to the Kremlin only when accompanied by information about how they were produced. How many employees had to be coerced? Where could managers meet their targets with a single message, and where were threats required? In which regions do governors still control the administrative machinery, and where are local elites sabotaging candidates imposed from above? Where can discontent be safely channeled toward the loyal Communist opposition, and where does it turn into support for an anti-war party that must be removed from the ballot?
Elections also distribute positions within the regime. A State Duma seat offers little opportunity to influence policy, but it provides status, protection, and access to resources. At least a quarter of United Russia’s parliamentary faction may be replaced after this campaign, while turnover in regional and municipal legislatures could reach 40%. This allows the Kremlin to reward loyal officials, admit some of Putin’s favored “special military operation veterans” into the system, and determine which governors are capable of protecting the interests of their patronage networks.
The Kremlin will win these elections. The real question is not how many seats its party will be awarded, but how much coercion, administrative pressure, and outright fraud will be required to produce that victory – and how many cogs in the political machine remain willing and able to serve Putin’s interests. That is what the September elections are designed to tell the Kremlin.
Vsevolod Bederson is an independent researcher.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
