‘Thousands of Russians Complicit’ in Kremlin’s Electoral Fraud, Sokolov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 5 – As the Putin regime has tightened its control, not only have elections become ever more fraudulent but ever more Russians have become complicit in this fraud,  making it less likely that this fraud will be exposed and certain that it will cast a dark shadow on Russia even after Putin leaves the scene, Egor Sokolov says.

            In the first years of Putin’s rule, the regime did not have the control it does now. Journalists were freer to cover what was going on, and election observers were numerous and active, the Russian historian who just competed his studies at the University of Oxford. As a result, fraud was both easier to expose and less common (themoscowtimes.com/2026/10/05/the-kremlins-election-fraud-works-because-thousands-are-complicit-a93869).

            Now, however, Sokolov says, the press has been gelded; the observers have been blocked from doing their work; and genuine opposition parties like Yabloko have been prevented from running. And at the same time, the state has mobilized ever more people to work in election commissions which are tightly controlled.

            According to the Russian historian, this last move is especially disturbing in its consequences. Not only does it make electoral fraud “easier, it also corrupts tens if not hundreds of thousands of their members who either participate in the fraud or, at the very least, turn a blind eye to it.”

            The number of people involved is so large because “Russia has almost 50,000 election commissions, each of which consists of between three and 16 members.” Moreover, Sokolov continues, many of those now working on these commissions are teachers given that voting takes place most often in schools.

            That in turn means that the impact of fraud will spread to their pupils as well as having an impact on their future behavior, something that those concerned about creating an honest electoral system should be worried about given how difficult it will be to remove these twin nefarious influences from Russian life. 

Putin Regime Keeps Itself in Place Not Just by Carrots and Sticks but by Using Those to Define Social Relations among People, Rudkovsky Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 6 – Many assume that Putin keeps himself in power by a combination of carrots and sticks, Stanislav Rudkovsky says; but it is not by those alone. Rather, it is the way he uses such incentives and disincentives to regulate the way Russians interact with reality, a factor that by inertia keeps the situation under his control

            In Wschody, the émigré Russian libertarian politician and commentator argues that Putin remains in power “not only by fear and material dependence but also by daily life itself” that is so structured to preclude challenges (wschody.net/sem-stolpov-putinskoj-soczialnosti-kak-rezhim-stal-universalnym-posrednikom-mezhdu-rossiyanami-i-realnostyu/).

            According to Rudkovsky, “the key resource of this order is not only money, administrative vertical, security forces or control over information. Instead, it involves  manipulation of emotions, and control over identity, memory and language. He says that this involves seven “key pillars:”

            The first of these is “the vertical of mistrust,” the libertarian says. Russians “do not “trust anyone beyond a narrow circle of family and friends. All other are potential threats.” Of course, Putin didn’t invent this distrust but he has “instrumentalized it for his own purposes.”

            The second of these “pillars” is “loyalty in exchange for stability.” According to Rudkovsky, “Putin’s regime offers the population a very simple social contract: you do not get into politics,” show loyalty or at least don’t dissent, and “in exchange you are guaranteed ‘stability.’”

            The third such “pillar” is “an imperial identity and the colonial logic of mobilization: You are not a resident of a particular city or region; you are ‘part of a great country.’ Local identity is suppressed, and in its place stands an extremely generalized ‘pride in the country.”

            The fourth is “a culture of fear and cynicism. People don’t believe that it is possible to change anything at the global level and that collective action is suspicious” and inevitably fails. This attitude has its roots in Soviet times and is not despite what some thing an inherent quality of Russians.

            The fifth is the control of language. The regime “seeks not only to restrict access to information but also to determine what words people in Russia can use to describe the most transgressive states,” one that refers but does not name what is going on and thus euphemizes reality.

            The sixth pillar is the state’s monopolization of the past: “it assigns itself the right to interpret history alone, and primarily the highly traumatic experience of World War II.” As a result, the historical past of the country ceases to be a common space of discussion and becomes state property, issued to citizens in a dosed and consistent fashion.”

            And the seventh pillar of Putin’s organization of social interaction involves the cultivation of “a specific temporality: life is now because the future is unpredictable and does not belong to you: it belongs to a state that can rewrite it at any moment.”

            Taken together, Rudkovsky observes, there is “a common denominator: each pill has the effect of destroying some horizontal connection and replacing it with a vertical dependence on the state as the only source of meaning, stability and legitimate discourse.” Consequently, “Putin’s sociality involves the total monopolization of connectivity.”

            That in turn means, he concludes, that “Putin’s Russia is not just a bad form of rule. Rather it is a special and specific way of organizing social ties” so as to ensure that those in power cannot be effectively challenged and thus remain there.

Putin’s Much-Ballyhooed Power Vertical in Fact Consists of a Multitude of ‘Subverticals’ that Render the State Far Weaker than It Appears, Gallyamov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 6 – The Russian sate is “much weaker in reality than it appears to the outside” because it consists not of the single power vertical many like to talk about but rather of a plethora of “subverticals” which means officials must determine who is the critical figure in any particular situation, according to Abbas Gallyamov.

            Instead of applying laws and decisions equally regardless of who is involved, the former Putin speechwriter and now Putin critic says, officials act on the basis of their views about who is the most important and powerful figure in the case and thus undermine the power of the state, leaving it ever weaker (pointmedia.io/story/6ac3831875d0d3346a25cbc6).

            That may not be obvious to everyone all the time because the state’s coercive powers remain enormous, he continues; but it means that the state as an institutional whole is ever weaker since this coercion is used not so much to advance state interests as to promote those of leaders of one or another of “the subverticals” that form the regime.

            The former Putin speechwriter and now Putin critic says that a series of recent cases shows how this prevents officials from acting in the interests of the state and means that they will instead act in the their own interests or those to whom they are in fact rather than in law subordinate (pointmedia.io/story/6ac3831875d0d3346a25cbc6).

            That makes the state as a whole weak, something that is obscured much of the time because of the state’s enormous coercive power but that becomes critical when the state is subject to ever greater internal and external influences and thus acts not as a strong and integral state but as a congeries of groups, Gallyamov argues.

            A state is strong when “an official does not need to know who is behind the person applying to him: there is a single common procedure that must be used,” he continues. But in Russia, that is seldom the case; and the official’s “most important skill is to find out quickly who is behind whom” in each case.

            The more frequently that happens, Gallyamov says, “the stronger the state may appear to outsiders but the looser it is inside” and thus in fact the more at risk its survival in its current form becomes if it is buffeted as all states are by internal and external pressures.

Russia’s Birthrate will Continue to Fall Unless State Planners Return to Soviet Arrangement where Apartment Blocks were Surrounded by Common Yards, Experts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 2 – Many believe that Moscow can boost birthrates by increasing the size of apartments or building individual houses, but experts at a meeting in Yekaterinburg suggest that neither will do the job because they fail to provide state support for children growing up and thus shift that burden almost entirely to potential parents, Elena Rychkova says.

            In Soviet times, the Nakanune journalist says, the government kept the birthrate higher than it would otherwise be by creating yards around apartment blocks so that the community would bear the cost of supervising children rather than that burden being shifted to parents alone (nakanune.ru/articles/125115/).

            As land prices have increased, banks have favored construction of buildings closer together, a move that has destroyed parks and means that parents by themselves must bear all the costs of supervising children. Consequently, demographers say, larger apartments or separate ho        mes will do little to change that part of their calculation.

            For parks to return and thus for birthrates to rise, the experts continued, the state must take a larger role in urban planning and insist on parks around buildings rather than using up all the available land because of its rising costs. That way young people can have children confident that the community will bear much of the cost of supervising them.

            This judgment is critically important because it highlights the reality that larger apartments aren’t the real solution and that banks and builders will remain in opposition to almost any policies that might reverse the accelerating decline of the birthrate in the Russian Federation.

More than Half of Internet Cables in Russia Aging and Must Be Replaced, ‘Izvestiya’ Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 2 – More than 50 percent of the internet cables linking computers together in the Russian Federation are older than their guaranteed life of 25 years and need to be replaced if the system is not going to be subject to repeated breakdowns, according to Russian government documents examined by Izvestiya.

            That finding (iz.ru/2176122/valerii-kodachigov/v-rf-mozhet-potrebovatsya-zamena-poloviny-linij-svyazi) not only because it suggests that the Russian internet system is at risk not just from Kremlin efforts to restrict access but for three larger reasons that call attention to problems a much larger problem.

            And that is this: Moscow has not been maintaining even those infrastructure investments it has made and thus is now seeing them begin to fail as well as those which the Soviet system had made earlier and on which the Putin regime and its immediate Russian predecessor has been living most of the time.

            That is because most internet cable in the Russian Federation as in other countries was laid not 40 or 50 years ago but less than 30. That means that the Kremlin, to ensure it has enough money to fight wars abroad, has not invested in infrastructure that it or its immediate Russian predecessors installed.

            Consequently, the Putin regime at least in this area but likely in many others as well is living off its own past as well as off the Soviet one, an approach for which the bill is certainly coming true, a bill that if the Kremlin doesn’t change course, is going to hurt ever more Russians and the prospect for the development of that country. 

If Russians Really Supported Repression, Kremlin Wouldn’t Be Restricting Release of Data about Such Policies, Gallyamov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 3 – It is an article of faith among many that Russians on the whole support the repressive policies of their government; but if that were so, Abbas Gallyamov says, the Kremlin would be less likely than it is to block the release of data about repression and might even be hyping it.

            To be sure, the decision to restrict such data also reflects a desire not to spark more criticism from its opponents abroad or to offend potential allies there, the Putin speechwriter turned Putin critic says; but that isn’t the whole story (t.me/abbasgallyamovpolitics/11225 reposted at echofm.online/opinions/esli-rossiyane-odobryayut-repressii-zachem-skryvat-ih-statistiku).

            Many people, especially liberals, believe that Russians “approve of repression,” Gallyamov says. “I have repeatedly said that this is not exactly the case and even rather not so at all. That the authorities have decided to hide relevant statistics” and block movies about siloviki misbehavior “confirms this once again.”

            According to the commentator, “the myth of approval for repression was born from the high ratings of early Putin and positive attitude towards Stalin. But in fact, a large part of the fans of both respect them not for repression, but rather the relationship of repression and other things.”

Russians in many cases believe that the achievements of the two leaders outweigh the costs of their use of repression, something that leads them to downplay or ignore repression but does not mean they actively support it. If a leader achieves a victory, Russians will forgive repression; if not, then not

That attitude does not represent unqualified support for repression but rather a contingent calculation, Gallyamov says. Consequently, a Russian regime not sure that it is achieving victory will try to hide its repressive moves lest information about them exacerbate popular anger about the failure to achieve some goal or another.

De-Colonization Broader and More Important than Other Terms Used to Discuss Russia’s Future, Orlova Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 2 – De-Colonization subsumes de-imperialization, sovereignization, federalization, and decentralization and allows for addressing all the questions they raise at one and the same time, Vasilina Orlova says. It is thus the most useful term to employ in discussing the future of the peoples now within the borders of the Russian Federation.

            “De-imperialization,” an anthropologist from Vladivostok now in the US says, “is about the abandonment of empire and imperial domination. Sovereignization concerns the acquisition of political subjectivity. Federalization focuses on a certain way of distributing power within a common state; and de-centralization is about the emergence of new centers of power” (wschody.net/federalizacziya-ili-dekolonizacziya-kto-reshaet-gde-periferiya/).

            According to her, de-colonization involves not only all of these issues but “also calls into question why a number of meanings have a culturally established and unquestioned primacy, one that can be explained only by established traditions, norms and values as dictated by colonial history.” As a result, de-colonization is the best framework to think about the Russian Federation.

            “De-imperialization,” Orlova continues, “is probably closest to the concept of de-colonization” given that as Russia arose as an empire, “it is natural to assume that the dismantling of the empire and its imperial implications should take place” to allow for all the peoples of the region, including Russians, to find a new place in the sun.

            She argues that it involves “the state’s rejection of imperial claims from the right to establish the boundaries of foreign subjectivity, from the idea of neighboring countries being within a sphere of its special interests, and from viewing some peoples as parts of a single historical whole which as a result of misunderstandings were split apart by state borders.

            De-imperialization is thus “a necessary part of de-colonization;” but it is far from all that is covered by the later term. That is because “the empire may disappear as a political struggle but the relations and perceptions it created will continue to exist.” That has certainly happened in Russia since 1991.

              Sovereignization is also close to de-colonization, Orlova writes; but it too is not the same thing. It is about who has the right to make decisions and thus may or may not involve the pursuit of independence by a group but also consider possibilities of federation or confederation.

              Those two concepts are also involved in such discussions especially as the Russian state is “already called ‘the Russian Federation.’” But most of those who advocate this do not challenge Moscow as the center of that state that will make the decisions for all other centers.

              Instead, she says, “federalization usually begins within the context of an already pre-existing map, one that says here is the Russian Federation and its subjects. Now, it is necessary to distribute power more fairly among them. The de-colonial view allows us to see that this map itself is the result of colonial history.”

              “Federalization can give the periphery more power,” Orlova continues; but “declonization calls into question the very right of the center to determine who is the periphery” and insists that “the center does not have some natural right to decide the fate of the territories because it has been able to govern them historically.”