You might think that a regime led by a despot and surrounded by forests of armed men with an absolute indifference to the rule of law would shrug off a mere election as a tiresome piece of risk-free theater where the people do as they’re told, and return their ruler to the Kremlin. You’d be wrong.
The presidential vote of March 15-17 will certainly deliver the result that Vladimir Putin desires — not hard when you remove all serious contenders to prison camps, cemeteries, or irrelevance — but that does not mean the Kremlin is relaxed about the outcome.
All presidential elections, however heavily rigged, dramatically increase the Kremlin’s paranoia. This explains the security services’ decision to raid the homes of contemporary artists in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Samara, and other Russian cities.
The FSB campaign began with the targeting of Petr Verzilov, a member of Pussy Riot art group, who was reportedly accused of high treason. Several months ago, Verzilov was sentenced to eight years in prison in absentia for spreading “fake news” about the Russian military in his posts on Instagram. He was convicted for referring to the 2022 massacre in Bucha, the Kyiv suburb, but the verdict was overturned by a Moscow court.
In Putin’s Russia, such setbacks for the regime merely spur another case, and so it proved. According to Russian human rights activists, the FSB opened a new criminal case against Verzilov on suspicion of high treason, based on an interview where he stated he had joined the Ukrainian army to fight Russian troops in the East Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.
Verzilov left Russia in 2020, and there is no direct connection between his fight in Ukraine and artists working in Russia, most of whom don’t know him and have no contact with him.
The only explanation for the crackdown is that the FSB is organizing a Stalinist-style campaign against contemporary artists who did not support Putin’s war. And in truly Stalinist fashion, Putin’s security service is building a case by uniting the artists in an imaginary, non-existent treacherous organization.
The accusations may be transparently absurd but the consequences are not. The aim is to instigate fear among artists, musicians, and the rest of the politically minded intelligentsia to prevent them from causing trouble during the election, according to our sources in the Russian security services.
That the Kremlin and the FSB could seriously believe that a group of artists could cause a problem for Putin’s re-election in a heavily policed and tightly controlled country shouldn’t come as a surprise, given Putin’s obsession with Russia’s tumultuous history, an obsession shared by his cronies on the Security Council and the security services.
This is what explains the Kremlin’s attitude to Ukraine and the Soviet Union’s legacy, but it also has a dark core of paranoia fueled by a belief that the state is inherently fragile, whether it is the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, or Putin’s Russia.
This concept was born out of two historical traumas — the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In both cases, the country had the largest secret police force in the world at its disposal to suppress dissent, and yet on both occasions, it failed.
The KGB and its successor organizations explained those failures by blaming interference by the omni-powerful and ominous outside force — the West. The West stood accused of helping Lenin, and the same West helped Gorbachev to destroy the Soviet Union.
Quite why the KGB stood by and did nothing during this epoch-defining moment, apart from a 1991 coup attempt so ill-conceived that it failed to secure support from its own rank and file, was never discussed.
Putin is adamant that there can be no repetition of those disasters, thus his obsession with history. But a problem arises here — the only means he and his elite have to understand the historical events is the Marxist-Leninist theory drilled into them in Soviet schools and universities.
Thus it is engraved on their hearts that a combination of war and political crisis is an elemental and explosive combination — just look at how the Russo-Japanese War sparked the revolution of 1905, and World War I caused the February revolution of 1917 that toppled the tsar.
The first component — the war — is already there, and the second — potential political crisis — is the election since secret service officials treat every election as a political crisis. This, they believe, is when an ever-deceitful West, always plotting against Russia, might seek to undermine political stability.
The continuing incursions of three Ukrainian military intelligence-sponsored units — The Freedom of Russia Legion, the Siberian Battalion, and the Russian Volunteer Corps or RDK — in the Belgorod and Kursk regions in March, while irrelevant from the military point of view, play right into this paranoia, fueling Kremlin’s fears on the eve of the election.
Once accepted, this dark picture of the imminent political crisis allows believers to justify anything to protect the status quo — the killing of the regime’s main political opponent in jail, the March 12 attack on his chief of staff (“a gangster greeting from Putin,” as the victim put it), removing anti-war candidates from the ballot and of course further repression. In this way, the security elite believes is averts another revolution and national collapse.
Security officials believe in their revelation of the true way the world works, and so feel it’s natural to narrow down the room for political change to as small a space as possible. Ultimately they have reduced this to nothing and thus ensure the leader’s irreplaceability.
This is what Putin aims for in these elections. It makes him the keystone to the present Russian state; without him, it collapses. But of course, that also means that when the regime tumbles into rubble, as all regimes do, his legacy will fall with it.
Any reader of history books, good or bad, should know that.
Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) They are Russian investigative journalists, and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.
