The Guardian: How Kremlin’s "puppets" help to dupe Russia’s voters?

The Guardian carries an article about puppet candidates and pocket opposition parties playing a role in Russia’s elections, Caliber.Az reprints the article.

As Russians prepare to give the president another six-year term this week, an ex-rival has gone from protest candidate to grotesque war hawk.

Two election cycles ago, in 2012, Sergei Mironov was loudly playing the role of opposition to Russia’s ruling party, wearing the white ribbon of the protest movement in the State Duma and claiming his run against Vladimir Putin was “serious”.

If made president, he said, he would even appoint the now deceased opposition leader Alexei Navalny as the head of Russia’s accounts chamber as an anti-corruption measure.

Today, Mironov is a loud – almost desperately loud – booster of the war in Ukraine. Since the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion two years ago, he has toured the occupied territories, posed with a sledgehammer from the Wagner paramilitary group and reportedly taken a two-year-old missing child from Ukraine for adoption and changed her name. (He has disputed the report.)

Puppet candidates and pocket opposition parties have long played a role in Russia’s elections, part of a fake democracy that will put on its greatest show this week as the country goes to the polls to elect Putin for another six-year term.

But Mironov’s transformation into one of the country’s most grotesque war hawks has surprised even some of his former friends and associates – a difficult feat in Russian politics, where cynicism is widespread.

“I considered him a decent person before the war,” said Alexey Lushnikov, a publicist and TV host, who interviewed Mironov regularly and met him for the last time in 2021.

“But this monstrous degradation that has taken place to the current day – it’s just an insane horror. I have no words to understand Mironov today. I don’t accept it, I don’t understand it, I reject it.

“He could have sat somewhere quietly, given away control of his [A Just Russia – For Truth] party, become an ambassador somewhere,” Lushnikov said. “He didn’t do that.”

As Putin seeks a new presidential term that will lead into his third decade in power, his electoral system is propped up by a political elite adept at managing the shifting political winds. Those who know Mironov describe him as a consummate political survivor who has sought to “catch” political trends to his own benefit.

“He’s always been a bit of a player in life,” said Yaroslav, his son from his first marriage (Mironov remarried for a fourth time in 2022). “He’s a person who doesn’t think any rules exist and whatever advantage he manages to obtain for himself is correct.”

Yaroslav added: “He’s an opportunist,” comparing his father to other prominent associates of Putin such as ex-president Dmitry Medvedev or the Rosneft energy company’s head, Igor Sechin. “It’s the team that formed [around Putin] in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when everything was unclear and there were big risks – anyone who wasn’t willing to risk wouldn’t have ended up among them.”

Putin’s competition in the stage-managed elections, which he always wins, either fade out of politics or go back to supporting him. Ksenia Sobchak, the daughter of Putin’s political mentor Anatoly Sobchak, ran against Putin in 2018 in what was broadly seen as a spoiler campaign meant to attract liberal voters.

But last week she, along with other popular bloggers, praised Putin’s “economic reforms” to Russia’s tax code in a recent speech, saying that she “understood that positive changes are awaiting us”.

The oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, who challenged Putin in 2012 in what was also seen as a spoiler campaign and won nearly eight per cent of the vote, has also disappeared from politics since.

The Kremlin this year has weeded out anti-war candidates such as Boris Nadezhdin, leaving only those approved by the team of domestic politics curator Sergei Kiriyenko.

Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, and other opposition figures have called for a protest against Putin by voting en masse for any other candidate at noon local time in the March 17 election, forming large crowds and overwhelming polling stations.

Mironov’s evolution helps show how far the country’s political centre has shifted under Putin in the last decade and particularly since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Others have also adopted enthusiasm for the war. Medvedev – once seen as a liberal figure in government, – this year threatened nuclear war against the west and recently said: “Ukraine is definitely Russia.”

“[Mironov] is a typical opportunist – today he will be against the war, tomorrow for it,” said Andrei Zakharov, a Russian journalist who has regularly criticised and needled the politician on X (Mironov occasionally replies). He will follow “whatever Putin says, as long as he has a position, women to love him, a nice car, a salary and a sofa”.

Mironov met Putin in St Petersburg in the 1990s and was a member of his election campaign in the city in 2000. He was made speaker of the Federation council and later founded A Just Russia, one of several parties that seek to mimic pluralism and co-opt political dissatisfaction in Russia. However, he has “always been one of Putin’s people”, Zakharov said.

By 2011, when tens of thousands of Russians protested against falsifications in the elections, Mironov offered careful support for the opposition, as it was “permitted to protest against United Russia, but not against Putin, even though he was balancing on the edge at the time because of the street protests”, Zakharov said.

Dmitry Gudkov, an opposition leader who had been a member of A Just Russia under Mironov, said that the politician had been hedging his bets in case the street protests against Putin were successful.

“He was always an opportunist,” he said. “In 2011, everyone believed in the coming victory of the revolution. [Mironov] tried to go to the other side. But when he realised that nobody there wanted him and didn’t believe him, he went back.”

Gudkov said that Mironov was returned to the fold by the Kremlin’s top policy experts using a “stick and carrot” approach. He was punished with dismissal from his role as the head of the Federation council. At the same time, federal funding for his party was boosted fivefold, Gudkov said, providing a lucrative incentive to remain loyal.

By late 2012, after the presidential elections, Mironov had declared the opposition a “political sect” and called on his other party members to stop wearing the white ribbons. And his already muted criticism of Putin’s system disappeared entirely.

“Mironov, it turned out over time, was a completely insignificant figure of the Putin period,” said Lushnikov.

Yaroslav Mironov, who was three when his parents divorced, said that he saw his father rarely – either at birthday parties or occasionally, he noted with a laugh, when Mironov wanted to introduce a family member to one of his new love interests.

When they did discuss politics, Mironov would speak with reverence about Putin, Yaroslav said, and would drop his voice when he discussed the Russian leader. Mironov also told a story that Putin had once saved his life by warning him of an attempt on his life being planned by criminals in St Petersburg.

Yaroslav said that he was not sure whether the attempt had been real, or if Putin could have fabricated the threat to ensure Mironov’s loyalty.

“I have this feeling that nearly every person in his team thinks he would give his life for Putin,” said Yaroslav.

“My father never said he was not in agreement with Putin. Even if [my father] had some objections, he definitely felt he shouldn’t voice them, because this is a person to whom he is personally indebted.”