Over the past few days, thousands have lined up across Russia, waiting in the bitter cold for the chance to sign petitions in support of an unlikely challenger to President Vladimir Putin.
Boris Nadezhdin has become a dilemma for the Kremlin as he plans to run in the March 17 presidential election. The question now is whether the Russian authorities will allow him on the ballot.
The stocky, bespectacled 60-year-old local lawmaker and academic has gained wide public appeal by openly calling for an end to the conflict in Ukraine, an end to the mobilization of Russian men for the military and the start of a dialogue with the West. He also criticized the country's suppression of LGBTQ+ activism.
“The signature collection went unexpectedly well for us,” Nadezhdin said in an interview with The Associated Press in Moscow on Wednesday. “To be honest, we didn’t expect that.”
Nadezhdin's name is a form of the Russian word for “hope,” and while it is highly unlikely that he will defeat the still-popular Putin, the lines are a rare sign of protest, defiance and optimism in a country undergoing a crackdown There have been differences of opinion against him since his troops invaded Ukraine almost two years ago.
Nadezhdin is running for the Citizens' Initiative. Because the party is not represented in parliament, he is not guaranteed a place on the ballot and must collect over 100,000 signatures, with a limit of 2,500 in each of the vast country's dozens of regions, not just the largest, more progressive cities.
Putin, who is running as an independent candidate rather than the ruling United Russia party, has raised over 3 million.
While waiting to sign a petition in St. Petersburg, Alexander Rakityansky told AP he went through a “period of apathy when I thought I couldn't do anything.” Now, however, he sees Nadezhdin's election campaign as an opportunity to exercise his civil rights.
Rakityansky is originally from Belgorod, the Russian border town that has been repeatedly hit by Ukrainian attacks. He said he supported Nadezhdin so that his hometown “wouldn’t be bombed and people wouldn’t die on the streets.”
Online videos showed lines of fans not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but also in Krasnodar in the south, Saratov and Voronezh in the southwest, and across the Ural Mountains in Yekaterinburg.
Even in the Far Eastern city of Yakutsk, 450 kilometers (280 miles) south of the Arctic Circle, up to 400 people braved temperatures of minus 40 degrees Celsius every day to sign petitions, according to Nadezhdin's team.
“Our weather conditions are not perfect and it is widely recognized that it is difficult to involve people in the north in any kind of activity, but people come every day,” said Alexei Popov, the head of Nadezhdin’s election team in Yakutsk. He said they initially expected a total of around 500 signatures for the entire region.
At a petition collection point in Moscow, 48-year-old Kirill Savenkov said he supported Nadezhdin because of his stance on Ukraine and the peace negotiations.
Others said they wanted a real alternative to Putin, who they said had led the country down a dead end.
“The economy is really going down, people are getting poorer and prices are going up,” said Anna, 21, from St. Petersburg, who declined to give her full name because she feared for her safety. Putin has done “nothing good for the country,” she said.
Nadezhdin's campaign received a boost after opposition leaders abroad, including former tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and supporters of jailed 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 Nadezhdin's candidacy, regardless of the outcome, shows: “One thing we know at the moment: conversations about civic apathy in Russia are very far from reality.” What we have is not civic apathy, but a civil famine – an enormous hidden potential.”
Some analysts say the growing support for Nadezhdin has surprised even the Kremlin, although Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday that “we do not see him as a rival.”
Analysts say the election outcome is a foregone conclusion and that Putin will remain in power for another six years. But some also point out that this is still a moment of real political risk for the Kremlin, which needs to project an aura of legitimacy for the vote to be seen as a real contest.
For Putin to win a convincing victory, he must rally his supporters and his critics must stay home without a “glimmer of hope,” said Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist and foreign scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.
“That’s why Nadezhdin is such a problem,” she said in an interview. “It gives a shadow of hope.”
Nadezhdin's supporters lining up in Moscow and St. Petersburg told the AP it gave them a rare opportunity to be with like-minded people who want a different leader than Putin, 71, who has ruled Russia for 24 years.
“I understood that these are the people who want to change the current government and I want to be a part of it,” said Margarita, a 28-year-old student who also declined to give her last name for fear of retaliation.
So far, Russia's Central Election Commission has approved three candidates nominated by parties represented in parliament that broadly support Kremlin policies: Nikolai Kharitonov of the Communist Party, Leonid Slutsky of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party and Vladislav Davankov of the New People's Party . Kharitonov ran against Putin in 2004 and came a distant second.
In December, authorities barred Yekaterina Duntsova, a former regional lawmaker who had called for peace in Ukraine, from voting. The Commission cited technical errors in its documents.
Duntsova was probably banned because the authorities “don't know her and therefore in their eyes she is unpredictable.” And most importantly, they don't like unpredictable things,” Schulmann said.
Although there are claims that Nadezhdin secretly has the Kremlin's approval to run and is considered something of a spoiler candidate, he could still be declared ineligible.
He appeared as a pundit on Russian television and even criticized the conflict in Ukraine during a talk show on the state-controlled channel NTV in September 2022 – a rare level of visibility not enjoyed by other opposition politicians such as Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza, who are now in prison.
In that appearance, Nadezhdin said Putin had been misled by intelligence services that appeared to have told him that Ukrainian resistance would be short and ineffective.
In his AP interview, Nadezhdin said he believed he was allowed to run because he was a well-known figure and had not explicitly criticized Putin.
“I know Putin personally,” he said, saying he met him before he became president in 2000 and adding that in the 1990s he was an assistant to then-Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko, now Putin's first deputy chief of staff.
Schulmann said that while authorities could allow Nadezhdin to run, it would be a “dangerous gamble.”
“I think they will cut him off in the next step if he puts in these signatures,” she said, suggesting that the Central Election Commission could invalidate some of them and disqualify him from the election. She suggested that authorities could also threaten him and his team with prison if he later urged his supporters to protest.
The election is the first since Putin's annexation of four Ukrainian regions and the first to involve online voting nationwide. Critics suspect both are opportunities to manipulate results in Putin's favor – something the Kremlin has denied.
Regardless of the actual outcome, some analysts and political opponents believe that the sight of those lining up in the cold for Nadezhdin reveals more about today's Russia than the vote itself.
Although Nadezhdin indicated that he believed Putin's team did not initially perceive him as a risk, he said: “The Kremlin administrators are now in a difficult position.”
If he were in her shoes, he said, “I would be thinking, 'Why did we let him do that?'”
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Anatoly Kozlov in Moscow contributed.