Russians may have little reason to care about the stage-managed parliamentary election that begins on Friday. But many are worried about what might come next.
Rumors of a large, forced mobilization are rampant as the Russian military burns through troops. The economy is under strain from runaway war spending. Ukrainian strikes on oil refineries have left millions waiting for gas in snaking lines.
In Moscow, people appear torn between insisting that everything is normal and acknowledging just how much has changed since the last parliamentary election five years ago, before the all-out war with Ukraine.
At a Lukoil gas station, most of the customers I approached said it was no big deal to wait 20 minutes to fill their tanks. Russia, a major oil producer, has found itself in the unusual position of running short of fuel.
Still, one driver, Yuri, 37, acknowledged that “we are living in the war, and people are starting to understand it.” He and his friend Igor were divided on whether the situation would get better or worse, with Yuri on the pessimistic side. They, like others I spoke with, asked that their last names not be used to avoid trouble with the authorities.
The three-day election will offer little formal outlet for Russians to register discontent over the growing reverberations of a war that has no end in sight. The Kremlin has engineered the vote into a snoozefest even by Russian standards, with its results a foregone conclusion. The only antiwar party, Yabloko, was barred from the ballot. For many candidates, it hardly seems worth making any effort to campaign.
Videos announcing that planned debates were canceled because no one showed up have spread across Russia. At a forum I attended in Moscow on Saturday for young candidates and young voters, no one from the governing United Russia party bothered to attend. What campaign videos do exist are low-budget, including one portraying Viktor Bout, the notorious arms dealer known as the “Merchant of Death,” as a struggling businessman.
Still, the Kremlin sees elections as a way of legitimizing its policies, and many Russians are bracing for what the government might do on the military, economic and political fronts after the vote.
“People are living for today, because no one knows what will happen tomorrow,” said Aleksei A. Venediktov, a former editor in chief of Echo of Moscow, a radio station that was banned in the early days of the war.
“Everyone is more and more unsure of what might happen: Will the prices go up, or the taxes? Will there be mobilization? Will people need ration cards to buy fuel?” he added. “There is a pervasive sense of insecurity.”
Anna, a psychologist and professor in Samara, a city of 1.1 million people on the Volga River, said that the anxieties that Russians had repressed would at some point explode.
“They say, ‘I don’t see this, I don’t hear this, I won’t say anything about this to anyone,’” she said. “But at the same time, the intensity of these sensations is colossal.”
In a July survey by the Public Opinion Foundation, a leading state-affiliated polling organization, almost 60 percent of Russians said the people around them were experiencing anxiety, a four-year high.
That month, Russians withdrew more money from banks than in the previous six years, Taras Skvortsov, the chief financial officer of the state-owned Sberbank, told the Russian business-news outlet RBC. Many Russians are also fearful that the Kremlin will accelerate restrictions on the internet.
Outside the election campaign, the Kremlin and its public relations apparatus are updating their message. The persistent narrative of business as usual is evolving. Now, the Russian authorities acknowledge that many people are struggling and scared — and argue that the answer is to rally around President Vladimir V. Putin and his war.
Two weeks before the election, a crowd of Russians estimated by the Interior Ministry to number 100,000 paraded along the wide avenues of the capital behind the remains of Dmitri Donskoy, the Prince of Moscow from 1359 until his death in 1389. Donskoy is celebrated for leading the Russian military to a well-known victory over the Mongol Golden Horde in 1380.
His remains were dug up last month in the catacombs of a Kremlin cathedral after what Russian officials claimed was a serendipitous discovery. The symbolism was obvious: Just as Donskoy beat the odds to defeat the Mongols, so would Russia defeat the “collective West” that is backing Ukraine today.
“He is a holy warrior who led battles to victory and united Russian soldiers,” said Aleksei, 38, who said he volunteered to fight in Ukraine in 2022 before pivoting to government work the following year.
“Our enemy is trying to divide us,” he continued, defining the enemy as “those who are helping Ukraine.”
That night, the pro-Kremlin propagandist Margarita Simonyan appeared as a guest on Russia’s flagship evening news talk show and picked up the Donskoy mantle.
“When it is scary and hard, when my children, and not only mine, spent half their summer hiding in cloakrooms in Sochi, people are asking, Could we have done without this, simply not started it?” she asked rhetorically, naming the Black Sea resort city that Ukraine has repeatedly attacked.
“Of course, we had to,” she said. “If we didn’t rise up, like Dmitri Donskoy, we would be on an irreversible path to enslavement, to becoming a colony” of the West.
This narrative may not resonate with Russians who have grown weary of the war.
“It feels like there’s some constant pressure on you,” Yaroslav, a student, told me after attending an event at the headquarters of Yabloko, the party barred from the election.
“Like, basically, everything is OK: You are alive. You’re not blown up or anything. You can walk. You can go to work or to study. But it feels like something is always pressing on you,” he said, pointing to his chest.
Yaroslav, 21, said he had recently received an electronic summons to report to a draft office. As he entered the Moscow subway one recent day, he put the hood up on his sweatshirt, hoping that the facial recognition cameras would not catch him.
His father, a long-haul trucker, recently enlisted in the military after his truck broke down and he needed money. He said his father was being deployed to the front despite having no military experience.
Pavel, 33, a teacher in the Novosibirsk region in Siberia, said that the mood regarding the war had changed greatly compared with a year ago.
“The phrase ‘When will this all end?’ has cropped up in conversations quite regularly,” he said. “Even if people have completely different views on the war and varying degrees of radicalism, when they’re talking to each other and the conversation slows down, someone often utters this very phrase.”
He said that in his village, funerals had become so common that for the past two years, the annual New Year’s celebration — the biggest family holiday for most Russians — had been replaced by “mourning events.”
Vitaly, 50, who is from the Kazan region and recently began working as a driver in Moscow, said he was convinced that another wave of military mobilization was imminent, though Mr. Putin has said publicly that the government has no such plans.
Despite his age, Vitaly’s local draft office tried to persuade him to enlist several months ago, he said.
“Local businesses are all struggling,” he said. “So many people are dying. And if you ask me, I still cannot fathom what all this is even for.”
Milana Mazaeva and Alina Lobzina contributed reporting from Berlin, and Nanna Heitmann from Moscow.
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