Hope or mirage? 60-year-old Boris Nadezhdine, a discreet veteran of Russian politics, surprised by managing to mobilize masses of Russians for peace in Ukraine and challenge Vladimir Putin in the presidential election.
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In a country where criticism of the Kremlin is punishable by prison, his candidacy is a breath of fresh air for anonymous critics of the Russian regime looking for a way to express themselves without endangering their freedom.
Mr. Nadejdine submitted the signatures of more than 100,000 voters supporting him to the electoral commission on Wednesday, a necessary step to confirm his candidacy.
“Thank you to those who believed in us,” he told the press. “Nobody believed it until a month ago, and some still doubted it two weeks ago.”
“Millions of people support (me),” he added.
In an interview with AFP at the end of January, he called the offensive against Ukraine a “nightmare” and denounced Vladimir Putin's authoritarian tendencies for a quarter of a century. A rare thing in Russia today.
“My candidacy gives people a unique opportunity to legally protest against current policies,” said this robust man with a short gray beard and close-cropped hair, whose name refers to the word “hope” (nadejda).
His election promises: end the fighting, put an end to the “militarization” of Russia and release “all political prisoners” such as opponent Alexei Navalny.
Others before him went to prison for such comments. So why is he spared? “I don’t know,” he said. But perhaps “Putin doesn’t think I’m a terrible threat,” the opponent admits.
The Kremlin does not hide its contempt. “We do not consider him a competitor,” Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for the Russian president, told the press.
However, Muscovites who came to sign their support this week are wondering whether the Kremlin is using this candidacy to provide an outlet for the disaffected.
Little known outside the tiny liberal circle, the person said he launched it in October because no better-known anti-Putin figure had taken the plunge, citing former Yekaterinburg mayor Evgeni Roïzman or the Nobel Peace Prize winner and head of the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta Dmitry Muratov.
“Honestly, I thought someone would take the plunge,” he told AFP.
Until this election campaign, Mr. Nadezhdine has been limited to the role of whipping boy for the attack-on-Ukraine fanatics who populate the television channels.
“I know it will be difficult to beat Putin,” the opponent readily admits. However, he hopes for a good result, which could mean the “beginning of the end” of the Russian presidential era.
Confidential Career
Over the past thirty years, Boris Nadejdine has had a somewhat private public career while also playing an advisory role to better-known figures.
Apart from a brief stint as a member of the Lower House of Parliament (2000–2003), his electoral functions remained local. Today he is still a community representative in Dolgoprudny, a town about twenty kilometers from Moscow, where he arrived in the late 1960s and still lives in a modest building from the 1980s.
He was born in 1963 in Soviet Uzbekistan as the son of a music teacher of Jewish origin and a Russian physicist and initially followed in his father's footsteps.
“Fortunately or unfortunately, I sang like a glitch (…) so I wanted to be a physicist from the start,” he said in December.
After graduating in physics and then studying law, he received his first municipal council mandate in Dolgoproudny in 1990. Between 1997 and 1999, according to his official biography, he worked with Boris Nemtsov, who would become a leading opponent of Vladimir Putin until his assassination in 2015.
Mr. Nadezhdine also worked with Sergei Kirienko, then a liberal prime minister who has since become a key figure in the Kremlin.
He says he worked with the Russian president during his first term in office, but says he broke it off in 2003 with the arrest of opponent and head of the Yukos oil company, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
“I have been criticizing Vladimir Putin for decades,” Mr. Nadejdine recalled, accusing him of “concentrating too much power in his hands.”