The Kremlin managed Russia's presidential vote behind the scenes to send a message at home and abroad: that support for President Vladimir V. Putin is overwhelming and unwavering. Putin, the authorities announced on March 17, he received more than 87 percent of the vote, and his closest competitor only 4 percent.
The Kremlin may have felt more comfortable orchestrating such a large margin of victory because Putin's approval rating has risen in independent polls, due to a “patriotic” effect since the invasion of Ukraine and optimism about the Russian economy. . The Levada Center, an independent pollster, reported last month that 86 percent of Russians approved of Putin, his highest rating in more than seven years.
But “the numbers we get in Russian polls don't mean what people think they mean,” said Aleksei Minyailo, a Moscow-based Opposition activist and co-founder of Chronicles, which has been polling Russians. “Because Russia is not an electoral democracy, but a wartime dictatorship.”
In late January, Chronicles asked a group of Russians what they wanted in key policy areas and another group what they hoped to see from Putin. More than half said they supported restoring relations with Western countries, but only 28 percent expected Putin to do so. Some 58 percent expressed support for a truce with Ukraine, but only 29 percent expected Putin to agree to one.
“We see that Russians want different things than they expect from Putin,” Minyailo said. “Probably if they had some kind of alternative, they could make a different decision.”
However, compelling Opposition figures have been exiled, imprisoned or murdered, such as Aleksei A. Navalny, who died under mysterious circumstances in a Siberian prison last month. Independent media outlets have been expelled from the country. And a wave of repression has led to long prison sentences for simple acts of dissent, such as critical social media posts. The war has only further closed the little space that existed for alternatives to Putin's agenda.
By portraying those against the war as saboteurs, said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, the Putin regime has managed to make “the Opposition something that is really unattractive — more to outsiders, not to the majority people.”
Yekaterina S. Duntsova, a relatively unknown journalist and former municipal deputy of a Russian city, attempted to run for President on a pacifist platform, but was quickly disqualified. The same thing happened with Boris B. Nadezhdin, another unnoticed politician who had gathered the more than 100,000 signatures necessary to participate in the race.
“They considered both of them dangerous enough not to put them on the ballot,” Minyailo said. “In my opinion, that says a lot about the nature of the regime and how unconditional Putin's position is.”
Opinion polls regularly show that a relatively small segment of the Russian population is ardent Putin supporter, and a similarly sized group are aggressive opponents, many of whom are now abroad. The majority, rather, are relatively apathetic and passively support Putin. They are particularly influenced by television, controlled by the State.
“Deep wells of social inertia, apathy and atomization are the true source of Putin's power,” Gabuev said. Many Russians, he said, don't have a sophisticated framework for thinking about certain issues, because there is no public discussion.
And those Russians who oppose Putin are not necessarily willing to fight for what they want, Minyailo noted.
Still, the growing support for Putin since he ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine is unequivocal in the polls. He has convinced millions of Russians that he is bravely defending them against an antagonistic Western world determined to destroy their nation and their way of life.
And Gabuev noted that even though the war tarnished much of Putin's legacy, his first two terms in particular brought the greatest combination of material prosperity and relative freedom that Russians had ever seen.
“That is the paradox, they really have the happiest life in the history of the country,” he said.
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