6 months ago
27
This weekend, 100 million Russians and a further six million living in occupied Ukrainian territory got a taste of what democracy, Vladimir Putin-style, looks like – which is, as the droll Russian saying has it, “an election without a choice”.
The sense of inevitability of the result, alongside the near-total concentration of power in the Kremlin, meant that the opposition has already been dealt a death blow before the polls even opened. Literally so, in the case of Alexei Navalny, the charismatic dissident who died of mysterious causes in an Arctic prison camp last month.
The intimidation is spreading: Navalny’s close ally Leonid Volkov was attacked last week with a hammer in Lithuania, in what he termed a “gangster greeting from the Kremlin” who “wanted to make a schnitzel out of me”.
