Five years after municipal elections sparked mass protests in Moscow, the Kremlin is laying the groundwork for a United Russia landslide

Having secured a fifth presidential term for Vladimir Putin, Russian officials are turning their attention to another vote: the Moscow City Duma elections set for September 2024. Sources close to Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin’s office, the leadership of United Russia, and the Putin administration’s political bloc say that the Mayor’s Office has already selected “government candidates” who will not only run on the ruling party’s ticket but also publicly position themselves as part of “Team Sobyanin.” Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev reports.

Sergey Sobyanin, the current mayor of Moscow, ran as a United Russia candidate during the last mayoral election in 2023, though he previously ran as a self-nominated candidate in 2013 and 2018.

Similarly, during the last Moscow City Duma election in 2019, some Kremlin-aligned candidates ran as “independents” after United Russia nixed plans to put them on its ticket. The decision came in response to large-scale protests in Moscow over election officials refusing to register the candidacy of opposition politicians like Ilya Yashin, Lyubov Sobol, and Dmitry Gudkov, among others. The security forces violently dispersed the protesters, who were persecuted and put on trial. Nevertheless, candidates endorsed by Alexey Navalny’s Smart Vote initiative won 20 of the City Duma’s 45 seats.

“Such a situation is basically impossible now; times have changed. Back then, there was no electronic or multi-day voting,” a source from United Russia’s Moscow branch told Meduza. According to this person, United Russia no longer has any concerns that nominating candidates might hurt their chances of winning — not even in districts traditionally considered “opposition territories.”

Meduza’s sources say that the authorities are gunning for United Russia to win between 80 and 90 percent of the seats in the Moscow City Duma. (Meduza previously reported that after Vladimir Putin’s landslide “victory” in the 2024 presidential vote, local elections will also be expected to generate similarly sky-high results.) Sources in the Mayor’s Office and the Putin administration expect most Kremlin-aligned deputies to keep their seats. However, potential “new faces” include Moscow Zoo CEO Svetlana Akulova (whose possible nomination was previously reported by the Telegram channel BRIEF), Moscow State University of Sports Rector Natalya Masyagina, and Maxim Rudnev, who heads the executive committee of United Russia’s Moscow branch.

According to Meduza’s sources, the Mayor’s Office will have political strategist Denis Ogay head up its informal campaign. (Ogay worked with the city administration during the State Duma elections in 2021.) However, these sources also specified that the role of political strategists has become less important due to electronic voting, which, as Meduza has reported repeatedly, makes election results even easier to falsify and almost impossible to verify.

These days, political strategists are working for “their hostel bill and Dosirac [instant ramen], plus 2,000 rubles per month, maximum,” quipped a source close to United Russia’s leadership. (2,000 rubles is equivalent to less than $22.)

The five to 10 remaining seats in the City Duma will be distributed among the nominal opposition parties represented in the State Duma. Sources in both the Mayor’s Office and United Russia expect “sane” politicians to win seats in accordance with “quotas.” In these districts, the ruling party will either nominate glaringly weak candidates or refrain from nominating anyone at all.

According to one informed source, the authorities have yet to decide what to do about the Yabloko party, which currently holds four seats in the Moscow City Duma. Officials in the Mayor’s Office consider Yabloko a “systemic representative of the urban political landscape” but officials in the Putin administration believe that in wartime, “it’s possible to do without Yabloko’s members.” A source close to the Mayor’s Office said that even if the authorities were to allocate a “quota” for Yabloko, candidates who openly oppose Russia’s war against Ukraine wouldn’t win seats. In turn, the Yabloko party assured Meduza that it “does not and will not” have the Mayor’s Office approve its nominees.

The authorities are not anticipating having any problems with independent candidates either. Several people blacklisted as “foreign agents” have already announced plans to run for the Moscow City Duma, including TV presenter Tatyana Lazareva, journalist Sergey Markelov, and politician Elvira Vikhareva. But all of Meduza’s sources said they won’t be allowed to run in the elections.

One source close to the Kremlin said that the 2024 political landscape in Moscow will be a “cozy little bubble” in which the Mayor’s Office controls everything. “In theory, a candidate could run on an actual opposition platform and win: On [the city’s] outskirts, with anti-migrant slogans, and in the center, with criticism of the Special Military Operation,” he said, using the Kremlin’s official euphemism for Russia’s war against Ukraine. “But you can go straight [to jail] for several years for such slogans.”

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At the same time, another source close to the Kremlin said that after last month’s presidential vote, “Russian elites” renewed discussions about the possibility of transferring Sobyanin to the “federal level” — this, he added, could theoretically throw off the plans for the Moscow City Duma vote. “Reshuffles can’t be ruled out until the last moment,” the source said.

According to this person, the possibility of making Sobyanin prime minister still “hasn’t been ruled out.” (According to Meduza’s sources, Putin previously offered Sobyanin the premiership after Dmitry Medvedev stepped down in 2020.) Though finding a worthy replacement for the Moscow mayor would be an obstacle, there’s a “non-zero” chance of Sobyanin becoming prime minister, the source said.

Another source close to the Mayor’s Office claimed that political strategists are holding off on widespread campaigning until there’s clarity on Sobyanin’s fate: “If the mayor’s suddenly gone, what becomes of ‘Team Sobyanin’ in the elections then?”

Russia’s parliamentary parties, the Moscow Mayor’s Office, and the potential Moscow City Duma candidates named in this story did not respond to Meduza’s questions in time for publication.

Story by Andrei Pertsev