They have lined up by the thousands across Russia in recent days, standing in the bitter cold for a chance to sign petitions to support an unlikely challenger to President Vladimir Putin.
Boris Nadezhdin has become a dilemma for the Kremlin as he seeks to run in the March 17 presidential election. The question now is whether Russian authorities will allow him on the ballot.
The stocky, bespectacled 60-year-old local legislator and academic has struck a chord with the public, openly calling for a halt to the conflict in Ukraine, the end of mobilizing Russian men for the military, and starting a dialogue with the West. He also has criticized the country’s repression of LGBTQ+ activism.
“The collection of signatures has gone unexpectedly well for us,” Nadezhdin told media in an interview Wednesday in Moscow. “We didn’t expect this, to be honest.”
Nadezhdin’s name is a form of the Russian word for “hope,” and although he is highly unlikely to defeat the still-popular Putin, the lines are a rare sign of protest, defiance and optimism in a country that has seen a harsh crackdown on dissent since its troops rolled into Ukraine nearly two years ago.
Nadezhdin is running as a candidate for the Civic Initiative Party. Because the party is not represented in parliament, he’s not guaranteed a spot on the ballot and must collect over 100,000 signatures, with a limit of 2,500 from each of the dozens of the vast country’s regions, not just the biggest, more progressive cities.
Putin, who is running as an independent candidate rather than as the candidate of the United Russia ruling party, has collected over 3 million.
Waiting to sign a petition in St. Petersburg, Alexander Rakityansky told news agencies he went through a “period of apathy when I thought I couldn’t do anything.” Now, however, he sees Nadezhdin’s campaign as a chance to exercise his civil rights.
Originally from Belgorod, the Russian border city hit by repeated Ukrainian attacks, Rakityansky said he backed Nadezhdin so his hometown “doesn’t get bombed and people don’t die on the streets.”
Online videos have shown queues of supporters not just in Moscow and St. Petersburg but also in Krasnodar in the south, Saratov and Voronezh in the southwest and beyond the Ural Mountains in Yekaterinburg.
Even in the Far East city of Yakutsk, 450 kilometers (280 miles) south of the Arctic Circle, Nadezhdin’s team said up to 400 people a day braved temperatures that plunged to minus 40 Celsius (minus 40 Fahrenheit) to sign petitions.
“Our weather conditions are not perfect and it’s generally accepted that it’s difficult to involve people in the north in some kind of activity, but people are coming every day,” said Alexei Popov, the head of Nadezhdin’s election team in Yakutsk. He said they had initially expected about 500 signatures in total for the entire region.
At a petition collection site in Moscow, Kirill Savenkov, 48, said he supported Nadezhdin because of his stand on Ukraine and peace negotiations.
Others said they wanted a real alternative to Putin, who they suggested had led the country into a dead end.
“The economy is really falling, people are getting poorer and prices are rising,” said Anna, 21, of St. Petersburg, who refused to give her full name because she feared for her security. Putin, she said, has not done “anything good for the country.”
Nadezhdin’s campaign got a boost after opposition leaders abroad, including former tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and supporters of imprisoned opposition politician Alexei Navalny, urged Russians to support any candidate who could deny Putin a share of the vote.
Exiled opposition activist Maxim Katz said on YouTube that whatever the outcome, Nadezhdin’s candidacy shows “there is one thing we know right now: Conversations about civic apathy in Russia are very far from reality. What we have is not civic apathy but a civic famine — an enormous hidden potential.”
Some analysts say the surge of support for Nadezhdin has surprised even the Kremlin, although Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday that “we don’t see him as a rival.”
Analysts say the election’s outcome is a foregone conclusion and that Putin will stay in power for another six years, but some also suggest it’s still a moment of genuine political risk for the Kremlin, which must project an aura of legitimacy for the balloting to be seen as a genuine contest.
For Putin to win a convincing victory, he needs his supporters to turn out and his critics must stay home with no “glimmer of hope,” said Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist and nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.
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