A popular Soviet joke featured a panicked aide who ran into the general secretary’s office shouting, “Comrade Brezhnev, I have terrible news! Someone broke into the Kremlin vault and stole next year’s election results!” After a brief interlude in the 1990s, when elections in Russia were free and competitive, the old joke has once again become relevant under Vladimir Putin.
But while not a single national vote during Putin’s 26-year rule has been assessed by international observers as free and fair, the sham parliamentary “election” that took place this past weekend has set the record not only as the most unfree but also as the most illegitimate in the modern history of Russia.
Even without considering state-driven persecution (the country now holds thousands of political prisoners) and government control over the media, the election was illegitimate on three purely formal grounds. First, the only real opposition party, Yabloko, which campaigned for an immediate end to the war in Ukraine, was hastily barred from the ballot after the Kremlin realized it would get too many votes, leaving several puppet parties trying to outcompete each other in their support for Putin and the war. Second, the election was organized in the illegally occupied territories of Ukraine, making it invalid by definition. Finally, in a flagrant breach of its commitments as a member of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Russia refused to invite international poll monitors.
The first Western reactions to Russia’s sham election were unequivocal. Petra Bayr, president of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly, which represents lawmakers from 46 European countries, stated that “fake elections produce a fake parliament,” calling Russia’s incoming legislature a “Potemkin Duma.” Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, referred to the poll as “the so-called Duma elections,” pledging sanctions against their organizers. Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna dismissed the vote as “a political spectacle designed to entrench Vladimir Putin’s rule.”
The free world must not stop at strongly worded statements. What’s needed now is a clear, official and public policy of nonrecognition of Russia’s fake parliament by democratic nations. They should cease all interactions with these impostor lawmakers from Moscow.
Readers may ask, “But isn’t that already the case?” They could well be surprised by the response.
Just last year, Valentina Matviyenko, the speaker of Russia’s upper house that voted to authorize the invasion of Ukraine, was welcomed with flowers as she arrived in Geneva for a meeting of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Accompanying her in the Russian delegation were Pyotr Tolstoy and Leonid Slutsky, two of the most outspoken supporters of the war in Ukraine. Earlier this year, a Russian delegation headed, symbolically, by Vyacheslav Nikonov — a member of Putin’s United Russia party and a grandson of Joseph Stalin’s foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov — visited Washington and received a bipartisan welcome on Capitol Hill. The delegation’s American hosts even discussed the formation of a dedicated House Russia Caucus to institutionalize contacts with official Moscow.
The OSCE Parliamentary Assembly continues to list Russian “lawmakers” among its members on its official website. And though, for now, Russian delegates are not attending by their own choice, nothing would stop them from paying outstanding dues and participating in the upcoming annual meeting in Belgrade, Serbia, where Russian citizens don’t even need a visa to enter.
Proponents of continued engagement with Putin’s puppet lawmakers usually point to the need for “dialogue with Russia.” But with whom do they suggest holding it? In any authoritarian system, parliamentarians do not represent their societies. But in the case of Russia, the disconnect between public opinion and official election results is truly spectacular. According to one recent opinion poll — with all the necessary caveats about polling in unfree countries — the majority of Russian citizens want to end the war in Ukraine, yet this position is shared by none of the 450 newly “elected” members of the Duma. A poll conducted shortly before voting day showed that Yabloko would have received 25 percent of the vote to United Russia’s 32 percent had it been on the ballot.
If lawmakers in democratic nations want to have a real dialogue with Russian society, there is a better way than cozying up to Kremlin lapdogs. Over the past year, Europe’s main parliamentary bodies — the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly and the European Parliament — have established institutional formats for cooperation with representatives of Russian civil society and pro-democracy opposition. Last week, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, addressed a conference of Russian democracy advocates pledging her solidarity and support. It’s long past time that a similar platform for dialogue with the non-Putin Russia — a Free Russia Caucus in opposition to Nikonov’s proposed Russia Caucus — is established in the U.S. Congress, as well as in other democratic parliaments around the world.
Next month, Putin turns 74, well past the average male life expectancy in Russia, and the median age of his inner circle approaches that of Leonid Brezhnev’s geriatric Politburo in the early 1980s. Political change in Russia is not only inevitable, it is a matter of the foreseeable future. It is important for the West to build bridges with those who may become the agents and the leaders of that change.
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