During Sunday’s presidential election, Russian voters lined up in long lines outside polling stations in major cities, with many saying they heeded a call from opposition leaders to protest the rubber stamp process that is bound to maintain Vladimir Putin in power.
Before his death last month, Russian opposition leader Alexei A. Navalny urged his supporters to go to the polls at noon Sunday, the ultimate day of three days of voting, to specific dissatisfaction with Putin, who is decided to win his fifth presidential term in a vote during which there isn’t a real competition.
Mr. Navalny’s team, which continues his work, and other opposition movements repeated calls for protest within the weeks leading as much as the vote. Simply showing up at a polling station in an initiative often known as “South against Putin,” they said, was the one protected option to express discontent in a rustic that has dramatically escalated repression since a full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago.
Opposition leaders said showing solidarity with like-minded residents through mere presence was more vital than what voters selected to do with their ballots since the election lacked real selection.
“This is our protest. We haven’t any other selection,” said 61-year-old Lena, who came to a polling station in central Moscow before noon with the intention of spoiling her ballot. “All of us decent people are hostages here.” Like other voters interviewed, she declined to give her name for fear of retaliation.
Alissa (25) said she came because she was against the war. “It’s extremely important to meet people who think like you and who don’t agree with what’s going on,” she said.
Originally proposed by an exiled former regional lawmaker, Noon Against Putin became a rallying cry for Russia’s crushed opposition following Navalny’s death in an Arctic prison last month. His widow and political heir Yulia Navalnaya presented the initiative as a way to honor his legacy and protest against his death, which she blamed on the government.
“You’ve seen each other. The world has seen you” – Leonid Volkov, one of Mr. Navalny’s top advisers, – he wrote in a note on social media thanking the fans who came at noon. “Russia is not Putin. Russia is you.”
On Sunday, Volkov hosted a live broadcast of the vote on Navalny’s YouTube channel and wore a sling around his arm. He was hospitalized last week after being beaten with a hammer outside his home in Lithuania, a reminder of the dangers the opposition faces, even in exile.
The nature of the afternoon initiative makes it practically impossible to estimate how many people who came to the polls at that time came with the intention of registering a protest. However, at around 11:30 a.m. Moscow time, the street in front of the polling station on Brodnikov Lane, south of the famous Tretyakov Gallery, was relatively empty. Suddenly, a long queue formed at noon.
More broadly, the muted, purely symbolic form of civil disobedience envisaged in this initiative highlights how little the Russian opposition can do to influence events in the country in the face of pervasive repression.
The government announced that it would punish attempts to disrupt voting. Russian human rights and legal aid group OVD-Info said more than 70 people were detained across Russia on Sunday in connection with election-related activities.
Despite the risks, all five voters interviewed by The New York Times outside a polling station in Moscow said they came to express their support for Mr. Navalny. “According to the Russian constitution, the source of power is the Russian people,” said one voter, 22-year-old Kristina, as the noon bells of a nearby church rang. “We should be the ones in power here, but unfortunately in our country the person in power is a murderer. He killed our Lyosha,” she said, using the pseudonym of Mr. Navalny, for whom she once worked as a volunteer.
Kristina later sent a photo of the ballot, which she said she had corrupted before she put it in the ballot box. Next to the candidate choices, the words “Navalny, we’re with you” were written in large letters. Shortly thereafter, she was briefly detained by authorities, who she said asked her why she had spent “so long” standing near the polling station.
Long queues could also be seen outside Russian embassies in countries with a large Russian diaspora. The “South against Putin” campaign is expected to be particularly large abroad because dissident voters were less at risk outside Russia.
On Sunday afternoon, Ms Navalnaya was seen standing in a long queue outside the Russian embassy in Berlin. Around the same time, several hundred voters lined up outside the embassy in Riga, Latvia, despite a document check by local police. The Latvian government called the Russian elections a sham and tried to discourage the large ethnic Russian population from voting.
Valeria Hopkins, Tomasz Dapkus AND Antoni Trojanowski reporting contributed.
