Krasnodar, Russia: With parliamentary elections in Russia approaching, campaigners in the southern city of Krasnodar are asking passersby to write letters to their candidate, who has no way of meeting him.
That’s because Kremlin critic Andreik Pivovarov He is behind bars right down the road.
Arrested in late May, Pivovarov’s supporters say he fell into a trap that decimated Russia’s opposition ahead of state Duma elections later this week.
With household names like Alexei Navalny in prison, his colleagues in exile and lesser-known activists like Pivovarov barred from escaping or jailed, the Kremlin is poised to keep its grip on the legislature.
In a handwritten letter to AFP from detention center number 1 – surrounded by concrete walls lined with barbed wire – Pivovarov acknowledged his chances of being elected were slim.
He said his campaign – managed by mail through one of his lawyers and run by several dozen volunteers from Krasnodar, Moscow and his hometown of St. Petersburg – was a platform for his message.
“I want people who know about my campaign to understand that the moment has come when those who tell the truth are imprisoned just for their words,” Pivovarov wrote.
The 39-year-old announced last year that he planned to run in Moscow.
But when Navalny returned from Germany to Russia in January after recovering from poisoning he blamed the Kremlin for, authorities launched a crackdown.
Pivovarov was a target. He had worked with organizations founded by exiled Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, including the pro-democracy group Open Russia, which was outlawed in 2017.
Descended from a Warsaw-bound aircraft in St Petersburg in May, Pivovarov was flown 2,000 kilometers (1,200 mi) south of Krasnodar and accused of being involved with an “undesirable” organization.
He is facing six years in prison for resting on a Facebook post from Krasnodar in 2019 voicing his support for the Khodorkovsky-aligned activist running for local elections.
In his letter, which he signed “candidate in handcuffs”, Pivovarov said that the officers wanted to “shut my mouth”.
“That is why the case was started in Krasnodar, not far from Moscow and St. Petersburg,” he wrote from prison.
Pivovarov is the only opposition candidate still running out of at least seven who had planned to vote but were arrested.
The liberal Yablochko party included Pivovarov in its Krasnodar list in a “humanitarian” gesture, it said.
But analyst Alexander Kaynev says he has “no chance” of being elected.
Yabloko, Kaynev noted, never won more than two percent of the vote in Krasnodar – a city of some one million people and a presidential stronghold. Vladimir PutinUnited Russia Party.
United Russia seemed so confident of victory that its local office told AFP it was not running any campaign events in Krasnodar for two weeks before the vote.
Kaynev said the authorities had allowed Yabloko to support Pivovarov so that the party could pick up “some protest votes”.
Yabloko is seen as part of a symbolic opposition to Russia that serves to attract liberal dissent. But, Kaynev says, officials are relying more on blunt tactics to clinch victory this weekend.
“The authorities have brutally placed the final bet on legitimacy,” he told AFP.
In their repression, officials have targeted dissenting voices across the board, designating all major independent media as “foreign agents” and slapping labels with Soviet-era echoes on a top election monitor.
Pivovarov’s expedition members have not been able to escape the pressure.
22-year-old, a volunteer in Moscow and a citizen of former Soviet Tajikistan who lived in Russia for most of his life Saidanvar Suleimonov He said he left the country earlier this month after learning he faced an entry ban.
He said it was a 40-year ban and showed AFP a screenshot of the interior ministry’s response, which it said were “grounds” for stopping his return, although it did not give a reason.
The interior ministry did not respond to AFP’s request for comment.
Roman Pilipenko, a 27-year-old lawyer in Krasnodar, said he joined Pivovarov’s campaign because he wanted to expose “injustice” and warn Russians that his county was “slipping into harsh autocracy.”
He was standing near a supermarket about 100 meters down the street from Detention Center No. 1, talking to pensioners and teenagers who stopped to ask who was depicted in the cardboard cutout of Pivovarov. Nobody had heard about him.
Pilipenko told AFP the team’s priority during the election would be vote monitoring, calling it the only way to prevent officials from falsifying ballots.
Not everyone is sure that the opposition will be successful.
Across the street from volunteers, a watermelon vendor noticed the wind blowing on cardboard cutouts.
“It’s a bad omen,” he said.
That’s because Kremlin critic Andreik Pivovarov He is behind bars right down the road.
Arrested in late May, Pivovarov’s supporters say he fell into a trap that decimated Russia’s opposition ahead of state Duma elections later this week.
With household names like Alexei Navalny in prison, his colleagues in exile and lesser-known activists like Pivovarov barred from escaping or jailed, the Kremlin is poised to keep its grip on the legislature.
In a handwritten letter to AFP from detention center number 1 – surrounded by concrete walls lined with barbed wire – Pivovarov acknowledged his chances of being elected were slim.
He said his campaign – managed by mail through one of his lawyers and run by several dozen volunteers from Krasnodar, Moscow and his hometown of St. Petersburg – was a platform for his message.
“I want people who know about my campaign to understand that the moment has come when those who tell the truth are imprisoned just for their words,” Pivovarov wrote.
The 39-year-old announced last year that he planned to run in Moscow.
But when Navalny returned from Germany to Russia in January after recovering from poisoning he blamed the Kremlin for, authorities launched a crackdown.
Pivovarov was a target. He had worked with organizations founded by exiled Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, including the pro-democracy group Open Russia, which was outlawed in 2017.
Descended from a Warsaw-bound aircraft in St Petersburg in May, Pivovarov was flown 2,000 kilometers (1,200 mi) south of Krasnodar and accused of being involved with an “undesirable” organization.
He is facing six years in prison for resting on a Facebook post from Krasnodar in 2019 voicing his support for the Khodorkovsky-aligned activist running for local elections.
In his letter, which he signed “candidate in handcuffs”, Pivovarov said that the officers wanted to “shut my mouth”.
“That is why the case was started in Krasnodar, not far from Moscow and St. Petersburg,” he wrote from prison.
Pivovarov is the only opposition candidate still running out of at least seven who had planned to vote but were arrested.
The liberal Yablochko party included Pivovarov in its Krasnodar list in a “humanitarian” gesture, it said.
But analyst Alexander Kaynev says he has “no chance” of being elected.
Yabloko, Kaynev noted, never won more than two percent of the vote in Krasnodar – a city of some one million people and a presidential stronghold. Vladimir PutinUnited Russia Party.
United Russia seemed so confident of victory that its local office told AFP it was not running any campaign events in Krasnodar for two weeks before the vote.
Kaynev said the authorities had allowed Yabloko to support Pivovarov so that the party could pick up “some protest votes”.
Yabloko is seen as part of a symbolic opposition to Russia that serves to attract liberal dissent. But, Kaynev says, officials are relying more on blunt tactics to clinch victory this weekend.
“The authorities have brutally placed the final bet on legitimacy,” he told AFP.
In their repression, officials have targeted dissenting voices across the board, designating all major independent media as “foreign agents” and slapping labels with Soviet-era echoes on a top election monitor.
Pivovarov’s expedition members have not been able to escape the pressure.
22-year-old, a volunteer in Moscow and a citizen of former Soviet Tajikistan who lived in Russia for most of his life Saidanvar Suleimonov He said he left the country earlier this month after learning he faced an entry ban.
He said it was a 40-year ban and showed AFP a screenshot of the interior ministry’s response, which it said were “grounds” for stopping his return, although it did not give a reason.
The interior ministry did not respond to AFP’s request for comment.
Roman Pilipenko, a 27-year-old lawyer in Krasnodar, said he joined Pivovarov’s campaign because he wanted to expose “injustice” and warn Russians that his county was “slipping into harsh autocracy.”
He was standing near a supermarket about 100 meters down the street from Detention Center No. 1, talking to pensioners and teenagers who stopped to ask who was depicted in the cardboard cutout of Pivovarov. Nobody had heard about him.
Pilipenko told AFP the team’s priority during the election would be vote monitoring, calling it the only way to prevent officials from falsifying ballots.
Not everyone is sure that the opposition will be successful.
Across the street from volunteers, a watermelon vendor noticed the wind blowing on cardboard cutouts.
“It’s a bad omen,” he said.
.