Russia 2026: the Potemkin Elections

Those familiar with Russian history will know of the so-called “Potemkin village.” Under the reign of Catherine II (1762–1796), the general Grigori Potemkin — whose campaigns led to the conquest of Crimea and much of today’s southern Ukraine from the Muslim khanates — was also one of the empress’s numerous lovers. In 1787, he accompanied her on a six-month journey through the newly annexed lands of Novorossiya, or “New Russia.” To hide the poverty of the Russian provinces, Potemkin allegedly had fake pasteboard facades erected along the riverbanks and roads Catherine traveled; peasants were displaced from central Russia and herds of livestock brought in to complete the idyllic scene, with fireworks staged in her honor. The sovereign was entertained and felt the greatness and industriousness of her empire.

Historians are now skeptical that this actually happened and treat the “Potemkin village” as at least an exaggeration, if not an outright myth [1]. Yet ideas work on their own logic, and elections in contemporary Russia — a country that has been ruled by Vladimir Putin for nearly three decades — are reminiscent of the Potemkin village all the same. They seem staged to conceal autocracy, to tell a different story about Russia. As with the Potemkin village, the elite need to show the sovereign that “everything is fine,” and that the system from which they benefit will endure.

Yet the upcoming popular vote, unfolding in a fully authoritarian regime, raises real questions about why elections persist under authoritarianism. Why do autocracies need elections at all? Why not dispense with the farce and govern as an open autocracy, rather than undertake the methodical — at times violent — elimination of political opponents who might threaten both the regime’s popular consensus and its international image? What does this paradox tell us about Russia specifically? According to scholars, autocracies that hold (fake) elections tend, in fact, to last longer than pure autocracies do [2].

It is thus interesting to watch the run-up to Russia’s parliamentary elections of September 18–20, 2026: which parties are permitted to compete, which are excluded, and what this says about the current Russian regime and its statehood. It then turns to the broader question of why elections persist under authoritarian rule.

The upcoming elections

Elections to Russia’s State Duma, the lower house of the Federal Assembly, are scheduled for September 18–20, 2026, renewing all 450 seats for a five-year term. It is the first nationwide parliamentary vote since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Eleven parties submitted federal party lists and were exempt from signature collection. Every party that met the registration threshold was, in the end, allowed to run, with one prominent exception — Yabloko — as we will see.

The Parties Registered for the Elections

Table 1. Parties registered for the 2026 State Duma election. Sources: Wikipedia (2026 Russian legislative election); Izvestia; Riddle Russia; The Moscow Times; ElectioMap.

The only anti-war party could not register: Yabloko

Yabloko, meaning “apple” and standing as Russia’s oldest liberal party, was the only registered party campaigning on an explicit anti-war platform, under the slogan “For peace and freedom! For a life without fear!” Yabloko worries the Kremlin because around 60% of Russians want the Ukraine war to end. An anti-war party might be able to gather unprecedented consensus.

Independent polling by the Levada Center — Russia’s last major non-state pollster, designated a “foreign agent” by the authorities — points to a steady erosion of appetite for continuing the war. Asked repeatedly since 2024 whether Russia should pursue peace negotiations or continue military action, the share favoring negotiations climbed from 54% in September 2024 to a record 67.2% in February 2026, while support for continuing the fighting fell over the same period from 38% to a record-low 24.3%.

To eliminate dissent ahead of the vote, Russia’s Supreme Court canceled the registration of Yabloko’s federal candidate list in August 2026, acting on a lawsuit filed by the small nationalist party Rodina. The court’s stated grounds were:

• Alleged copyright violations in campaign materials (e.g., unauthorized use of a photograph and a dove image);

• Allegations that the party received donations from Russian citizens who had themselves received funds from abroad, in violation of campaign-finance law;

• Distribution of campaign material on platforms restricted in Russia (Instagram, Facebook).

Yabloko’s appeal was rejected on August 17, 2026, making the ban final for the federal party-list ballot; its candidates could still contest individual single-member districts, though winning a seat that way is far harder. The party separately faces a longer-term risk of losing its official registration for failing to meet minimum candidate-fielding thresholds. But that seemed not enough. A Pskov court sentenced Lev Shlosberg, the party’s deputy chair, to more than 11 years in a penal colony for calling for a ceasefire with Ukraine.

The functions of elections under autocracy

Elections in autocratic regimes do not exist to produce alternative political elites and bring about change. A substantial body of comparative-politics scholarship explains why authoritarian regimes bother holding elections they do not intend, and will not allow themselves, to lose.

The classic reference here remains Jennifer Gandhi and Ellen Lust-Okar, whose 2009 article “Elections Under Authoritarianism” in the Annual Review of Political Science remains the standard citation on the subject. Their core insight is that such elections are not purely cosmetic: they serve to prolong the autocrat’s hold on power by performing real governance functions for the regime — co-opting elites through the distribution of spoils and office, gathering information about local support and dissent, legitimating the regime, and channeling a measured, permitted form of opposition that the incumbent party controls at every turn. Drawing on a wide literature, Gandhi and Lust-Okar summarize these functions along five lines:

• A) For dictators, elections may be the most expedient way to spread the spoils of office broadly among members of the elite. Elections help incumbents maintain ties with elites by deterring defection from the ruling coalition: overwhelming, engineered electoral victories signal to the regime elite that opposition is futile.

• B) Elections also serve to co-opt the opposition. By allowing non-regime-sponsored candidates and parties to compete in local and legislative races, dictators provide a limited channel of advancement into offices that confer some spoils and decision-making capacity in exchange for loyalty. Every party competing in the 2026 Duma election has, in this sense, been approved by the Kremlin: all have effectively sworn loyalty to the party in power and to the current regime. In Russian, this staged dissent is called karmannaya oppozitsiya, or “pocket opposition,” as if the ruling elite could pull it right out of their pocket when needed.

• C) Elections serve an informational function, providing national-level rulers with data on the loyalty and competence of their own party cadres, and on where local discontent is concentrated.

• D) Managing elite coalitions and the opposition through elections may also be motivated by a desire to reduce the risk of violent removal from office: allowing controlled competition, including channels through which the less powerful can gain limited access to power, helps avert the threat of revolution.

• E) Elections help autocrats establish legitimacy, at home and abroad, by signaling — even where the vote is unfair — that the regime formally includes the popular will in its structures and policies.

In the Russian case, one might add a further point. Members of the elite are also those who pay the price if something goes wrong. This is one reason Putin is so intent on having every major decision formally “approved” by the ruling elite: it distributes not only the spoils of power, but the liability for its failures. One might recall the February 2022 cinematic scene of the Russian ruling elite, one by one, expressing support for the military operation. Putin humiliated a terrified and stuttering head of the secret services, Nikolai Patrushev, forcing him to correct his sentence: “You said you will support, or that you support? Speak clearly!” “I support,” replied Patrushev in a faint voice.

To conclude, Russia’s elections should not be read as a contradiction of its authoritarianism, but as one of its instruments. Like the pasteboard facades said to have lined Empress Catherine’s trip through Novorossiya, the 2026 Duma election is built to be looked at rather than looked into — a staged consensus, with the only dissenting voice removed from the stage before the curtain rises.

Russians who do not agree with the party line must once again voice their dissent outside the ballot box: protests or exile? Both are very painful choices. Will ordinary Russians have the energy for that?

Footnotes

[1] Georg von Helbig (1757–1813) was a Saxon diplomat serving in Russia. He wrote a biography of Potemkin and is the one who coined the expression “Potemkin village” as we know it. For its rhetorical effectiveness, the idea was reused by other intellectuals, such as Marquis de Custine (1843). Simon Sebag Montefiore, the most prominent English-language biographer of Potemkin, dismisses the Potemkin village as a myth. See Sebag Montefiore, Simon. Catherine the Great and Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016.

[2] See Geddes, B. (1999). Authoritarian breakdown: Empirical test of a game-theoretic argument. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Atlanta, GA.

[3] See: Euronews report on Yabloko ban and Lev Shlosberg sentence.

[4] Jennifer Gandhi and Ellen Lust-Okar, “Elections Under Authoritarianism,” Annual Review of Political Science 12 (2009): 411.