Why was Boris Nadezhdin permitted to be a candidate in the Russian presidential election?

Question

Boris Nadezhdin appears to have strong anti-war views, something that is usually seen as punishable in Russia. He was aiming for the post of president and looks like collected the required number of signatures.

How is it possible that he was aiming for the post of President, openly handing out collected 100 000 signatures, rather than sitting in a Siberian prison cell next to Navalny? Why he was permitted to run?

P.S. Boris Nadezhdin was not allowed to the elections claiming that 9147 signatures of the 104 734 provided were invalid but in total about 200 000 were collected (source).

Answer 1

Reportedly, even Nadezhdin himself doesn't know:

“I don’t know why I’m not arrested.”

The linked article goes on to state,

The Kremlin says it doesn’t see him as a rival, but the speculation is that they are allowing Nadezhdin to continue, either so that Putin can win against an anti-war candidate, thereby affording himself a mandate to keep the war going, or to provide a release valve for an undercurrent of anti-war sentiment, to prevent it descending into mass protests.

Of course, the given reasons are speculative, but the BBC backs up the central point that he's being allowed to compete:

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that Mr Nadezhdin was not seen as a rival but would be allowed to stand if he met the necessary conditions.

My understanding of "the Kremlin [...] doesn't see him as a rival" is that, essentially, they don't see him as a serious contender and don't think he'll win.

Answer 2

The likely explanation that he is a political "background actor" - he is supposed to represent "choice" on the presedential elections, perhaps draw some people to the booths who otherwise will not bother going there.

So it would be possible to create a "picture" of competitive, engaging elections. Kremlin likes creating pictures.

There was a previous iteration a month ago, in the form of Duntsova, who will not be in the ballot but did nevertheless draw attention to the election. Now there is Nadezhdin, and if he is deemed to be safe enough he would even appear in actual ballots to lose. If not, he will be kicked off ballot via some legalistic procedure.

And it's kind of obvious why he will lose: Russian elections are extremely non-transparent; then, Russia is a big country with big inertia; and the main one is that he's a nobody. He doesn't represent anybody nor is he a known politician.

It is not known whether Nadezhdin understands that and participates willingly. I cannot claim this is prearranged directly with him, however it is not improbable. Perhaps he hopes to grow his political capital to be used later.

Answer 3

Keeps the populace' spirits up, since надежда (nadezhda) = hope. It might sound like a Chekhov novel, if not real (take for example the short story by Chekhov Смерть чиновника, where the main character is Ivan Chervyakov, and червяк (chervyak) = worm).

On a related note, was told by a keen observer that Dmitry Medvedev was chosen to power also because of his resemblance to the last Czar ( see for instance here).

In conclusion, their modus operandi is a bit strange, but relatable. One hopes this candidate won't make a splash.

There seems to be no reason to worry about this candidate's fate. On this page we read that the above Nadezhdin was an adjoint to Sergey Kirienko. So, we could probably bet that he is a decoy candidate. Whether he is allowed to be on the ballot or not (he is on the official list) remains to be seen. Should Putin die sooner or later, he would become a vetted one. Peace for some of the Putin's opponents simply means winning the war faster, or easier, while people in power still get the benefits. They are debating the means, not the aims. For the vanquished, it means peace of the dead. Read his official page, one of his slogans is "Ведущая страна Европы". He conveniently omits "Rossya", while Putin wouldn't. So much for "nadezhda"...

A recent interview here. Full immunity to Putin and his people, who will go into retirement. Excerpt - Q: Germany in WW2 occupied countries, some people were judged and punished, how can you let them off the hook? A: Yeah, because Germany lost. Rossya will never loose.

Maybe his message is this: Putin, don't stop the war yet, do what you have to do, then retire, and I come and sue for peace, when the moment is right. Now that's hope for some.

Answer 4

On 2024-02-05, he was banned.

See e.g. Financial Times, "Russia moves to ban presidential candidate from running against Vladimir Putin" (2024-02-05).

Answer 5

A viable explanation offers Maxim Katz (Russian politician in exile) in his recent video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XewD7Qifnck - in Russian, human-made EN subtitles)

In essence, the whole reelection machine at some point switched from "do whatever it takes to get Putin overwhelmingly reelected or face a new president unfriendly to all ex-president appointees" to "He will be reelected, this is a stupid formality anyway, do whatever it takes to impress Him because this is what determines your personal success afterwards".

This explains a lot of less than logical decisions - e.g. using signature collection to back Putin's nomination instead of other, less impressive options.

Collecting 100k signatures in order to nominate a president candidate is bound by prohibitively complex and likely to fail procedure (at most 2500 of them are counted from each region, the timeframe is rather restrictive and a great deal of personal data are recorded in the process, the signatures are counted and verified by the president administration, etc, etc...). It is expected that no one would really try.

On the other hand, a pretty much unexpected result of this procedure is a great deal of visibility, should one really tries - e.g. long (spanning few buildings worth of sidewalk), slow moving queues of pretty much determined people and the process going well into the night, for ~2 weeks.

This is nothing like a sane reelection campaign planner would allow in the first place.

And once the big, visible number of people queued on the streets of multiple cities, the system is pretty much unable to react by its usual toolset. In IT security, this is called a "distributed denial of service attack".

The police in a Russia is pretty much able to deal with a big protest (even tens of thousand people) in a single city. Or even in Moscow and St. Petersbourg at once. Or deal with small number of known organizers well before the event materializes.

100 groups of previously unrelated people all over the country is well above their administrative bandwidth. A less clever manager, of course, can always order the police to beat the hell out of these people wherever they are, but the status quo is rather fragile and a forceful attempt is highly likely to backfire.

This is why the signature collection will be allowed to go on and "solutions" will be looked for later.

Answer 6

Why is Boris Nadezhdin permitted to be a candidate in the Russian presidential election?

He is not:

Russia's election commission has rejected anti-war challenger Boris Nadezhdin as a candidate in next month's presidential vote. [...]

The Central Election Commission said that of the 105,000 signatures submitted by Mr Nadezhdin, more than 9,000 were invalid and they cited a variety of violations.

That left 95,587 names, meaning he was just short of the 100,000 required signatures to register as a candidate, commission member Andrei Shutov said.

"The decision has been made," declared commission chairwoman Ella Pamfilova. "If Nadezhdin wants, he can go to court," Tass news agency quoted her as saying.

I suppose, from the perspective of Putin, the whole exercise was meant to show Nadezhdin can't even muster 100,000 supporters, so he's a negligible thing, and that [also] "democracy works as intended" in Russia. (For a double-entente meaning of "intended", of course. Like the bad guy's grenades going off on a plane.)

The decision of the Commission appears to have been a wee bit telegraphed by the Kremlin too, last week:

Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov told CNBC Thursday [Feb 1] that “we are not inclined to exaggerate the level of support for Mr. Nadezhdin.”

And this appears to bring full circle Nadezhdin's role a as a "whipping boy", if you believe BBC's analysis:

Boris Nadezhdin is one of the few government critics whose voices have been heard on the ubiquitous talk shows on state-run TV since the invasion on 24 February 2022. He has appeared as a type of anti-war "whipping boy" that other guests would target for criticism.

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rather than sitting in a Siberian prison cell next to Navalny?

I didn't exactly follow his each and every speech (understatement), but suppose he might have been careful not to cross the letter of the law, like you know "discrediting the Russian armed forces", although there may be quite a degree of interpretation to that notion, and if Nadezhdin somehow turns out to be more problematic than what can be seen from the above... who knows what might happen.

CNBC's analysis of last week seems to confirm that:

analysts note that [Nadezhdin] has been careful to stay within recent legislation that has made “discrediting” the armed forces a criminal offense that can lead to imprisonment.

And otherwise also echoes my own opinion thought the voice of some expert as to why Nadezhdin was allowed to collect signatures...

“Many have speculated, and I think this is true, that the original idea to let him stand as a candidate and collect signatures, and to express the mildly anti war message in his campaign, was to showcase how little support this position enjoys in today’s Russia,” [fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute] Tóth-Czifra said.