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      Russian Election Shows Declining Support for Putin’s Party

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      With voting in the country neither free nor fair, United Russia is still expected to retain power easily even if its seats in Parliament slip.MOSCOW — Early results in Russia’s parliamentary elections showed a rise in opposition to President Vladimir V. Putin’s governing party, though it was nevertheless expected to cruise easily to victory.In partial results broadcast by state television after three days of voting ended on Sunday, the party, United Russia, carried 44 percent of the vote, 10 percentage points less than in the previous election in 2016. In second place, the Communist Party received 22 percent, compared with 13 percent in 2016.Russian elections are not free and fair, and Parliament’s role in recent years has mainly been to rubber-stamp the Kremlin’s initiatives while providing a veneer of democratic legitimacy to Mr. Putin’s rule. Over the weekend, videos of ballot stuffing and other apparent instances of fraud circulated widely on social media. But allies of the imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny had hoped to use the elections to deliver a rebuke to Mr. Putin by consolidating the opposition vote.The weekend’s elections came amid a harsh crackdown on dissent by the Kremlin and murmurings of popular discontent. Apparently fearing a rebuke at the ballot box, the authorities barred just about all well-known opposition figures from running for Parliament, while forcing many dissidents into exile and declaring popular independent media outlets to be “foreign agents.”The multiday nature of the elections — measures officially put in place to reduce the spread of the coronavirus — increased the likelihood of fraud by making the process harder to monitor, election observers and Kremlin critics said. And given the system by which the 450 seats in the lower house of Parliament, the Duma, are apportioned, United Russia could still maintain its two-thirds majority in the chamber despite getting less than half of the votes.The opposition’s uphill battle was complicated by decisions by Google and Apple to comply with Russian government demands to block access to Navalny-related content that was supposed to coordinate the protest vote. After the two tech giants on Friday removed from their stores a smartphone app connected to Mr. Navalny’s movement, Google over the weekend went further, apparently complying with a government request to block YouTube videos and Google Docs files that Mr. Navalny’s allies were using to coordinate voting across the country’s 225 electoral districts.Google did not respond on Sunday to a request for comment. Mr. Navalny’s allies, who are organizing the protest vote campaign from abroad, said they were notified by Google that their content could be blocked because of a government request.“This content is not available on this country domain due to a legal complaint from the government,” a YouTube message says when users in Russia try to open one of the blocked videos.Google’s compliance with Russia’s demands in recent days has represented a remarkable concession for a company that prides itself on enabling the open exchange of information. In Russia, Google’s products — in particular, YouTube — have helped provide avenues for free expression even as the Kremlin has rolled back democratic freedoms.Specific threats of prosecution against some of Google’s more than 100 employees inside Russia forced the company to take down the Navalny smartphone app, a person familiar with Google’s decision told The New York Times on Friday. Russian courts in recent months have outlawed Mr. Navalny’s movement as extremist and declared his “smart voting” campaign to be illegal.Nevertheless, Mr. Navalny’s allies have been pushing the tactic they call “smart voting” to pool opposition votes and elect as many challengers to United Russia as possible, no matter the challengers’ political views. Their campaign garnered support among opposition-minded voters, many of whom managed to find out which candidate the “smart voting” campaign supported in their district despite Google and Apple’s compliance with the Russian government’s demands.“This is an election without any choice, and while they can make up whatever result is necessary for them, ‘smart voting’ is a good mechanism,” said Philipp Samsonov, 32, a photographer in Moscow. “I hope that one day I can vote with my heart.”Mr. Samsonov said he planned to vote for the candidate picked by the Navalny team in his district — in his case, a Communist — as the person with the best chance of defeating the governing party’s candidate. Mr. Samsonov also said he planned to vote on Sunday evening to reduce the chances that something would happen to his ballot.It was too early to tell Sunday evening whether Mr. Navalny’s smart voting campaign had borne fruit, with the early results providing little clarity on how individual candidates were faring on a district-by-district level. But nationwide, the surge in support for the Communists and the decline for United Russia reflected an increase in Russian discontent. On a YouTube broadcast Sunday evening, a top aide to Mr. Navalny, Leonid Volkov, described the probable loss of seats by United Russia as progress in the strategy of chipping away at Mr. Putin’s hold on power.“This is, to put it lightly, a significant shift in the political landscape of the Russian Federation,” Mr. Volkov said.The “smart voting” app, used by allies of the imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, which Apple and Google removed in Russia on Friday.Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated PressA ballot box on Sunday in the village of Bolshoy Kunaley, Russia. Videos appearing to show ballot stuffing and other types of fraud during the vote have circulated online.Maxim Shemetov/ReutersGennadi A. Zyuganov, the leader of the Communist Party in Russia, said there had been a “huge amount” of violations in the elections and warned of demonstrations in the coming days — a notable statement because the Communists are typically loyal to Mr. Putin on key issues.“I can’t rule out that all this will lead to mass protests,” Mr. Zyuganov said Saturday on Twitter. “I am sure that people won’t stand for a blatant substitution of their choice.”In St. Petersburg, some independent election observers were removed from polling stations and detained by the police right before votes were counted. One observer, Ksenia Frolova, was detained after filing numerous complaints about irregularities.“We discovered that the same person cast a vote several times at different polling stations,” Ms. Frolova, 18, a biology student, said in a phone interview shortly after being released from a police station. “I feel morally exhausted. You just feel that none of your complaints mattered.”Last year, widespread fraud in the presidential election in neighboring Belarus set off huge street protests — an outcome that analysts say the Kremlin is determined to prevent from occurring in Russia. Buses of riot police officers were stationed around central Moscow throughout the weekend, but there were no significant protests.During the election, the authorities appeared to be pulling out all the stops to get the typical United Russia base to the polls: public sector workers, members of the military and security services, and pensioners. In central Moscow on Friday, groups of men in civilian clothes, all with similar, tightly cropped haircuts, lined up outside a polling station that covers the Russian Ministry of Defense.Some acknowledged that they were members of the military and that they had been “strongly advised” by their commanders to vote on Friday. Others said that they had been given time off to vote before the weekend, which they planned to spend out of town.And many Russians continue to support Mr. Putin. Outside a Moscow polling place, a teacher, Tatyana Kolosova, 46, said she had voted against United Russia to inject some “competition into the political sphere.” She said she hoped for a government shake-up after the elections that would result in more being done to reduce unemployment and support private business.But she dismissed Mr. Navalny as “an enemy of our country” and promised to vote for Mr. Putin if he ran for a fifth term as president in 2024, recalling the relative poverty and chaos of the 1990s, before he came to power.“I’m thankful that God gave us such a leader,” she said.Adam Satariano More

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      How Putin’s Propaganda System Keeps Him in Power

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      Elections in Russia are always tricky for the Kremlin. Offer too much choice, and citizens may pick the wrong candidates. Offer too little, and the underlying authoritarianism of the regime becomes grimly apparent.This year, for the parliamentary elections that began on Friday and end on Sunday, President Vladimir Putin is not taking any chances. From the moment Aleksei Navalny, the opposition leader and the Kremlin’s best-known critic, returned to the country in January, the president has overseen a wave of repression.Scores of independent media outlets have been labeled foreign agents, hobbling their activities, and opposition figures have either been banned from political activity or intimidated into exile. Mr. Navalny is in jail, most of his closest associates have left the country and his organization has been disbanded. The opposition is in tatters.There has been no sustained outcry within the country against these moves. Mr. Putin’s approval ratings remain solid, and the election is likely to return a majority for his party, United Russia. The system grinds on.At the heart of the Kremlin’s continued social and political control sits the Russian media. A sprawling network of television stations and newspapers, often lurid in style and spurious in content, the Kremlin’s propaganda system is a central pillar of Mr. Putin’s power. Against all the dissent and discontent with his regime, inside and outside the country, it acts as an impermeable shield. Combined with repression, it is how he wins.Nearly all of Russia’s television stations and newspapers are under state control. Some, like REN TV, are owned by private companies with links to the Kremlin. Others, like Rossiya and Channel One, are state-owned and often deliver outright propaganda as the news.Behind the scenes, Mr. Putin’s accomplices — like Alexei Gromov, who as deputy chief of staff in the presidential administration oversees the media — carefully manage the message. Failures are downplayed, criticism avoided and, at every turn, praise heaped on the president, who is cast as a sensible and wise leader.This machine doesn’t need coercion. An army of reporters, editors and producers, happy to toe any political line in return for promotion and payment, churns out an endless stream of fawning accounts of Mr. Putin, the prime minister and influential regional governors. Conformists and careerists, these journalists are not blind to the realities of contemporary Russia. But they choose to work on the side of the winners.Funded to the tune of billions of dollars by those close to Mr. Putin, the media preys on the population’s worst fears. The threats of economic disaster and territorial disintegration, in a country that suffered both in the 1990s, are constantly invoked: Only loyalty to the Kremlin can keep the monsters at bay. The European Union, Britain and the United States are portrayed as sites of moral decay, rife with political instability and impoverishment.In a country where 72 percent of the population doesn’t have a passport and where the financial means to travel abroad remain generally out of reach, such messages find a receptive audience.This wall-to-wall coverage has profound effects on public opinion. In 2008, as conflict between Russia and neighboring Georgia escalated, the media went into overdrive, depicting Georgia as a haven of anti-Russian activity intent on violence. The results were stunning: A year later, after the war ended, 62 percent of Russians considered Georgia, a small republic in the south Caucasus, to be Russia’s main enemy.Now ruled by a government more friendly to Russia, Georgia has largely disappeared from state television. The view of it as the main enemy has steadily dropped and is now held by just 15 percent of Russians.Both broadcast and print are comprehensively under the Kremlin’s control. So too, nearly, is the internet. Ten years ago, social networks helped bring people to the streets in protest against rigged parliamentary elections. Since then, a set of technological and legislative measures — tapping users’ phones and computers, introducing criminal charges for content labeled “extremist” and curtailing the independence of Russia’s biggest tech company, Yandex — have turned the internet into heavily policed terrain. A social media post can cost a few years in prison.But that’s not the whole story. The great success of Mr. Navalny’s film about Mr. Putin’s alleged mansion by the Black Sea, which has been watched by at least 118 million people since it was released in January, shows that the state’s domination over the media is not enough to prevent undesired content from reaching ordinary Russians. No matter how extensively the Kremlin intervenes in internet platforms — through bots, paid trolls and law enforcement — it remains possible to spread information injurious to the regime.There are still a few independent local and nationwide media outlets in Russia. Though they can hardly compete with state-funded television channels and newspapers, they are able to reach a sizable slice of the population.Meduza, for example, one of Russia’s most respected independent news outlets, draws millions of readers to its website a year, and MediaZona, an independent outlet that focuses on corruption and the misuse of law enforcement powers, added more than two million readers earlier this year through its coverage of Mr. Navalny’s trial. TV Rain, an independent television channel, manages to command the attention of 2.3 million viewers.This success, however small and circumscribed, proved too much for Mr. Putin — and he turned to repression. Through the “foreign agent law,” introduced in 2012 and initially aimed at foreign-funded media such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, the Kremlin has been able to decimate the ranks of independent media. Six outlets were given the designation this year, along with 19 journalists. For the smaller publications, it was the end. Bigger outlets, including Meduza, are scrapping for survival.The situation, though bleak, is not lost. Independent journalists and outlets continue to find a way to operate, inventively sidestepping the constraints cast on them by the Kremlin through canny crowdfunding and humor. In this, they offer an example to other independent journalists around the world fighting to keep authoritarian politicians accountable.Even so, Mr. Putin’s media method — propaganda on one hand, repression on the other — continues to bear fruit. Faced with a stagnant economy, an aging population and simmering discontent, it surely can’t go on forever. But, for now, it’s working.Ilya Yablokov is a lecturer in journalism and digital media at Sheffield University, England, the author of “Fortress Russia: Conspiracy Theories in the Post-Soviet World,” and co-author of “Russia Today and Conspiracy Theories: People, Power, Politics on RT.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      How Russian Officials 'Manage' Elections With Deceitful Tactics

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      The Russian authorities have used a variety of deceitful tactics to try to manufacture a big victory in parliamentary elections this weekend. Here’s how they do it.MOSCOW — Russia stages local and national elections like clockwork in accordance with its post-Soviet Constitution, but the results are nearly always the same: sweeping victories for President Vladimir V. Putin and the politicians and parties loyal to him.In the parliamentary elections that begin on Friday and run through Sunday, there is little question that his governing United Russia party will win. For the Kremlin, which hopes to mobilize support for government policies and reinforce its legitimacy, the trick is to win handily while maintaining the plausibility of a contested outcome.Here are several ways that the Kremlin tries to create the illusion of democratic choice while making sure it comes out on top.Duplicate CandidatesAmong the candidates voters will choose from in one St. Petersburg district are three men named Boris Vishnevsky, only one of whom is the real opposition politician.Registering multiple candidates with the same or similar names as an opposition candidate is a tried-and-true Russian electoral tactic. Candidates with identical or similar names are registered in 24 of the 225 single-district races in this week’s election — about 10 percent of all races, the newspaper Kommersant reported.Russia by no means has a monopoly on this ploy: It was used in a Florida State Senate race in 2020 — successfully, at least until the scam was uncovered.In the case of the multiple Boris Vishnevskys, the doubles also assumed the appearance of the real opposition candidate, with the same salt-and-pepper beards, thinning hair and plain, button-down shirts.“This is political manipulation,” the real Mr. Vishnevsky, a career politician and member of the Yabloko political party, said in a telephone interview. He said the others had legally changed their names this year and had probably mimicked his appearance with makeup or digitally altered photographs.An election poster with three similarly styled candidates, shown on the cellphone of the real Boris Vishnevsky, a politician running for St Petersburg’s Legislative Assembly.Anton Vaganov/ReutersFake Political PartiesUnlike other authoritarian countries like Saudi Arabia and China, Russia has a multiparty political system that was entrenched when Mr. Putin came to power in 1999.To deal with this, the Kremlin has hit on two strategies: fake political parties and several quasi-independent parties that it calls the “systemic opposition.”After the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny was poisoned in an assassination attempt a year ago, a party popped up that aimed to appeal to the discontented young professionals who form his base of support. The party, called New People, mimics many of his anticorruption messages but supports the continuation of Mr. Putin’s rule.Parties making up the systemic opposition are more established and enduring than the out-and-out fakes. This grouping, which emerged in the mid-2000s under what was called “managed democracy,” includes the Communist Party and the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party. They participate in elections ostensibly as opposition groups, but once elected they vote in lock step with the United Russia party, creating a rubber-stamp Parliament.Until last year, these parties coexisted with the “non-systemic” opposition that Mr. Navalny leads, and called for Mr. Putin’s removal from power. But over the past year, in anticipation of the coming elections, the government has cracked down sharply on the legitimate opposition, sending most of its leaders, including Mr. Navalny, to jail or into exile.Supporters of the Liberal Democratic Party at a meeting in Moscow on Monday.Valery SharifulinTASS, via Getty ImagesCrossing Off NamesIf more subtle methods aren’t enough, there is the blunt instrument of knocking candidates off the ballot.This summer, the authorities barred the vast majority of candidates — 163 out of 174 — who had applied to run for Parliament as independents. They accused them of things like keeping foreign bank accounts or faking signatures needed to get on the ballot.Laws permitting such abusive practices have expanded over the years, beginning with Mr. Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 after a four-year hiatus as prime minister.A law allowing the designation of nongovernmental groups as “performing the function of a foreign agent” was passed in 2012 and then expanded in 2017 to cover news media organizations. Its application this summer squelched independent news outlets like Meduza, Proyekt and Dozhd television. A 2015 amendment to the law had allowed groups to be designated “undesirable organizations,” with additional restrictions.This year, Mr. Putin expanded Russia’s strict anti-extremism legislation, first enacted as counterterrorism measures, to apply to opposition political figures in Mr. Navalny’s organization.Aleksey A. Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, at a court hearing in January. He has since been sent to a penal colony.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times‘Walking-Around Money’Following a practice once widespread in the United States of buying voters’ loyalty by offering “walking-around money,” the Russian government typically offers one-off payments to soldiers, public sector workers and retirees a few weeks before the election.This year, members of the security services received 15,000 rubles, about $205, and retirees and parents of school-age children 10,000 rubles. The series of presidential orders behind them, signed in July and August, specified payments in September — on the eve of the vote.The payouts have been glorified in pro-government campaign advertising. One ad, narrated by the girlfriend of a soldier, says that, “After our president signed a decree on one-time payments to soldiers, cadets and police officers, I feel confident about my future.”In Moscow in June. The Kremlin provides “walking-around money” to many voters — one-time payments aimed at buying allegiance.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesNot-so-secret BallotsRussia allows online voting, and numerous companies have arranged for employees to vote on computers set up by the human resources departments.Critics say this intimidates voters by potentially making their choices known to their bosses.Regulating the InternetThis summer, the authorities banned about four dozen websites affiliated with Mr. Navalny’s movement that were promoting his voting guide for the elections. The strategy, which he calls smart voting, essentially involves having opposition voters coalesce around the strongest anti-Kremin candidate in each race.On Friday, those plans were derailed as the remaining app the Navalny forces planned to use was deleted from the Google and Apple app stores after the Kremlin threatened their employees in Russia with arrest.Earlier, the Russian authorities had tried subtler approaches. Recently, for example, a company in southern Russia that sells wool registered “smart voting” as a commercial trademark.It then sued Google and Yandex, a Russian search engine, charging that they had violated its trademark rights and demanding that they block sites showing Mr. Navalny’s voting guides. A Russian court quickly ruled in the company’s favor.Opposition CountermovesA high-stakes cat-and-mouse game has sprung up as the “non-systemic” opposition has sought to subvert the government’s tactics.Opposition candidates who are in jail or prohibited by court rulings from attending public events have appeared instead as life-size cardboard cutouts. One jailed candidate, Andrei Pivovarov, has run entirely as a cardboard cutout propped up in his campaign office in the southern city of Krasnodar.Barred from attending public events, Andrei Pivovarov is campaigning as a cardboard cutout in Krasnodar.Kirill Kudryavtsev/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Navalny’s group had said that it expected its “smart voting” strategy to win a seat in Parliament for at least one opposition politician, and possibly as many as 20.Now, with the deletion of the app from the Google and Apple stores, that goal would seem to be unattainable, keeping alive the Kremlin’s dubious record in elections: Since 2016, no members of the “non-systemic” opposition have served in the 450-seat body.Alina Lobzina contributed reporting. More

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      Apple and Google Remove ‘Navalny’ Voting App in Russia

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      The app, from the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, vanished from online stores as polls opened in the parliamentary election it was designed to sway.MOSCOW — An app designed by Russian activists to coordinate protest voting in this weekend’s elections disappeared from the Google and Apple app stores in the country on Friday, a major blow to the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny and allies who hoped to subvert the commanding position of President Vladimir V. Putin’s governing party.Google removed the app Friday morning after the Russian authorities issued a direct threat of criminal prosecution against the company’s staff in the country, naming specific individuals, according to a person familiar with the company’s decision. The move comes one day after a Russian lawmaker raised the prospect of retribution against employees of the two technology companies, saying they would be “punished.”The person declined to be identified for fear of angering the Russian government.On Friday Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said, “That app is illegal” when asked about it on his regular call with journalists. “Both platforms have been notified and in accordance with the law they made these decisions, as it seems,’’ he said.Apple did not respond to requests for comment about the availability of the Navalny app in its store.The app disappeared just as voting got underway in the three-day parliamentary election, in which Mr. Navalny’s team was hoping to use its app — called “Navalny” — to consolidate the opposition vote in each of Russia’s 225 electoral districts.“Removing the Navalny app from stores is a shameful act of political censorship,” an aide to Mr. Navalny, Ivan Zhdanov, said on Twitter. “Russia’s authoritarian government and propaganda will be thrilled.”A polling station in Vladivostok, in eastern Russia, on Friday as voting in the parliamentary election began.Pavel Korolyov/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMaintaining open, uncensored access to their services, especially in authoritarian countries, is becoming one of the most vexing challenges for American tech companies like Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter. In countries such as India, Myanmar and Turkey, the authorities are increasingly pressuring the companies to censor certain political speech, or ordering internet outages to block access to the web.Civil society groups have warned that forcing the companies to conform to a patchwork of laws and regulations risks creating a more fractured internet, where the products and services available to people will depend on where they are.The threat to prosecute local employees is an escalation by the Kremlin as it seeks to induce Western tech giants to fall in line with a broader internet crackdown. The country’s internet regulator, Roskomnadzor, has repeatedly demanded that the companies remove certain content, on pain of fines or restrictions on access to their products. The government says that American internet companies are meddling in Russia’s domestic affairs by allowing anti-Kremlin activists to use their platforms freely; Mr. Navalny’s movement was outlawed as extremist this summer.The Russian government had been increasingly blunt in recent days about its willingness to use threats to prevent the use of the app. “With the participation of Apple and Google, specific crimes are being committed, the scale of which may only increase in the coming days,” Vladimir Dzhabarov, a member of Russia’s upper house of Parliament, said on Thursday. “Individuals contributing to their parent companies’ evasion of responsibility on the territory of the Russian Federation will be punished.”Bailiffs visited Google’s offices earlier this week seeking to enforce court-ordered measures against the protest voting campaign, state media reported.Russian authorities have been pressuring Apple and Google for weeks to remove the Navalny team’s voting app. With Mr. Navalny’s websites blocked inside Russia, the app became a loophole allowing exiled allies of the imprisoned politician to continue to reach a wide audience. Nearly every smartphone runs Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android operating system, making their app stores the key artery for getting any product to the public.The Russian Foreign Ministry summoned the American ambassador to Moscow, John J. Sullivan, last week and announced that “American ‘digital giants’” had broken Russian law “in the context of the preparation and conduct of the elections.”“The patience of the Russian side, which for now has refrained from putting up barriers to American business in Russia, is not unlimited,” the Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, Maria V. Zakharova, warned on Thursday.Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, at a court hearing in January.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesThe “Navalny” app is central to a protest-vote strategy that the opposition leader calls “smart voting.” Elections in Russia are not free and fair, but the Kremlin still seeks the sheen of popular legitimacy by holding elections in which a stable of dull parties typically splits the opposition vote.The Navalny strategy, first deployed regionally in 2019, seeks to turn that system of “managed democracy” against Mr. Putin. The goal is to defeat as many candidates representing the governing United Russia party as possible by having all opposition-minded voters in each district pick the same challenger — whether or not they agree with their views. The “Navalny” app coordinates the process, requesting a user’s address and responding with the name of the candidate they should vote for.The Navalny team on Friday said they would seek to get the names of their “smart voting” picks out by alternate methods, such as automated responses in the messaging app Telegram. But they voiced anger at Apple and Google for apparently folding to Kremlin pressure.“This shameful day will long remain in history,” Leonid Volkov, Mr. Navalny’s longtime chief of staff, wrote on his Telegram account.Anton Troianovski More

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      As Russian Election Nears, Voters Voice Resignation, Anger and Fear

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      Many in Russia say they are fed up with corruption, stagnant wages and rising prices. But they worry, as one man said, that “if things start to change, there will be blood.”She walked into the cafe wearing a face mask that read, “I’m not afraid, and don’t you be afraid.” A man in a leather jacket followed her in, looked at her as she sat down next to me, then disappeared. Another man, in a vest and gray cap, waited outside.He trailed us as we walked out.I was interviewing Violetta Grudina, an activist in the Russian Arctic city of Murmansk who is allied with the imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny. She was still recovering from a hunger strike. Now under relentless surveillance, she confessed to a creeping, numbing desperation.“We are all in a trap — trapped by one tyrant,” Ms. Grudina said. “This stupor that comes from giving everything you possibly can, but nothing changes — it is hard.”Russia is a country in which nothing changes until everything changes. Ahead of the national parliamentary elections this weekend, President Vladimir V. Putin’s rule has reached a new apogee of authoritarianism, coated in a patina of comfortable stability. To many, Mr. Putin remains a hero, especially for his assertive foreign policy, while those who oppose him are retreating, as they put it, into their own oases or parallel worlds. More

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      Could Navalny’s ‘Smart Voting’ Strategy Shake Up Russia’s Election?

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      Five of the opposition leader’s exiled allies are engineering an election campaign that they hope will put dozens of Kremlin opponents into Parliament.MOSCOW — In an undisclosed location outside Russia, five people have been meeting regularly for months to plot out how to deliver an improbable blow to President Vladimir V. Putin in this weekend’s Russian election.The five are allies of the imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, all of them exiled because of the threat of lengthy jail sentences. Their strategy is to use the parliamentary election that runs from Friday to Sunday to undermine Mr. Putin’s ruling United Russia party — even though the authorities have barred just about all Navalny backers and other well-known opposition figures from getting on the ballot.The idea, which Mr. Navalny calls smart voting, is to coalesce opposition-minded voters around one particular candidate running against United Russia in each of the country’s 225 electoral districts. That candidate could be a liberal, a nationalist or a Stalinist. Before Russians go to the polls, they can punch their address into the “Navalny” smartphone app, which then responds with the names of the candidates they should vote for — whether or not voters agree with those persons’ views.“We want as many non-Kremlin-approved politicians as possible to end up in Parliaments, including regional ones,” Ruslan Shaveddinov, one of the Navalny allies working on the “smart voting” push, said in a telephone interview. “This, at any rate, creates turbulence in the system, which is very, very important to us.”The smart voting strategy shows how an opposition movement that the Kremlin has managed to crush inside Russia in recent months is still able to influence political events from the outside. It is also a reason this weekend’s elections will come with a degree of suspense, even though an overall victory for United Russia is assured.“If you get the name of a candidate through smart voting and go to the polls, you will become 1,000 percent more influential and powerful than that version of you that complains and does nothing,” Mr. Navalny wrote in a letter from prison published Wednesday, imploring his supporters to vote. “Don’t you want to try?” he asked. “And also become a better version of yourself?”A similar tactical voting strategy has been tried before, not always with success. Brexit opponents employed it in Britain’s 2019 parliamentary elections but failed, as the Labour Party suffered the worst defeat in decades at the hands of the Conservatives.However, Russia is a far different case. Its nominal democracy is not free and fair, but the Kremlin still seeks the sheen of popular legitimacy by holding elections in which a stable of dull parties typically splits the opposition vote. The Navalny strategy, first deployed regionally in 2019, seeks to turn that system of “managed democracy” against Mr. Putin. While Mr. Navalny’s personal approval rating remains low in Russia — the independent pollster Levada put it at 14 percent in June — the authorities appear spooked by his team’s push.Face masks depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, left, among others are displayed for sale at a street souvenir shop last week in St. Petersburg, Russia.Dmitri Lovetsky/Associated PressThe Russian internet regulator has blocked access to the smart voting website and demanded that Google and Apple remove “Navalny” from their app stores. The companies have not done so, prompting fresh allegations of American interference in Russian elections. Maria V. Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, claimed without offering evidence that smart voting was affiliated with the Pentagon.Last week, the Foreign Ministry summoned the American ambassador in Moscow, John J. Sullivan, to present what it described as “incontrovertible proof of violation of Russian law by American ‘digital giants’ in the context of the preparation and conduct of the elections.”Grigorii Golosov, a political scientist at the European University at St. Petersburg who has studied smart voting, says the Kremlin has good reason to be nervous. Even a state-run pollster, VTsIOM, puts United Russia’s current level of support at 29 percent — down from about 40 percent ahead of the last election, in 2016. Given that Russia’s single-mandate districts require only a simple majority to win, he said, a few additional percentage points generated by smart voting could be enough to push a challenger past United Russia in a competitive field.To be sure, the notion of success is relative. United Russia is almost certain to retain its majority in the lower house of Parliament, the Duma, because half of the 450 seats are apportioned by party list. The ruling party is sure to get the most votes, and Russian elections are rife with fraud.But Mr. Navalny’s allies say that even electing a few dozen new members of Parliament who oppose United Russia would be significant, because it would complicate the Kremlin’s dealings with what in recent years has been little but a rubber-stamp legislature. And they insist that in much of the country, the vote-counting process is transparent enough to make an attempt to unseat United Russia lawmakers by democratic means worthwhile. For now, the main opposition parties in Parliament, the Communists and nationalists, have been mostly loyal to Mr. Putin. But that could change.“If more serious political complications were to begin in Russia for some reason, then control of Parliament becomes critical,” Mr. Golosov said. “If the Kremlin weakens in the eyes of the opposition parties, they will start acting in their own interests.”Mr. Navalny’s staff members say they spent months analyzing every federal electoral district, as well as regional and city elections that are also being held this weekend. The team of five analysts spearheading the project — Mr. Shaveddinov; Mr. Navalny’s longtime chief of staff, Leonid Volkov; and three others — have been gathering for hourslong meetings multiple times a week. Mr. Shaveddinov said they consulted polling data, dozens of regional experts and reports from the ground to determine the person best positioned to defeat the United Russia candidate in each contest.They also point to the 2019 elections to the Moscow City Duma, in which 20 candidates picked by Mr. Navalny’s team won, diluting the number of United Russia members in the legislature from 38 to 25, out of 45 seats.“The Kremlin is trying to roll over all of politics with concrete,” Mr. Shaveddinov said. “And still, various flowers bloom.”Mr. Shaveddinov, who is 25, fled Russia earlier this year. He spent 2020 in what he describes as modern-day exile, detained and sent to a year of mandatory military service at a remote outpost on an island in the Arctic Ocean. Now he is abroad, hosting weekly YouTube shows with Mr. Volkov that seek to mobilize support for the smart voting strategy. Russian law enforcement officers attempting to detain Ruslan Shaveddinov in 2017, during a rally in Moscow. Evgeny Feldman/ReutersMr. Navalny, Russia’s best-known opposition figure, was poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent last year and arrested in January upon returning to Moscow from treatment in Germany. Nationwide protests followed his return, and Russia outlawed his movement and forced his top allies to flee. On Wednesday, the Navalny team published its 1,234 federal and regional voting recommendations, waiting until two days before the start of the election in order to prevent its picks from being removed from the ballot. For those who installed “Navalny” on their smartphones, the news arrived by push notification: “Your candidates are already in the app. Open it, look and vote!”More than half the Duma candidates the team endorsed were Communists — even though the party’s leader, Gennadi A. Zyuganov, this year called Mr. Navalny “a traitor who arrived to set the country on fire.”The strategy has stirred some discontent among Kremlin critics, especially in places like Moscow and St. Petersburg where several opposition candidates are running in the same district. The risk is that the Navalny team could misjudge which candidate has the most support, and end up splitting rather than consolidating the opposition vote.In District 198, in Moscow, the Navalny team chose Anastasiya Bryukhanova, a 28-year-old manager who works on urban improvement projects. Another opposition candidate running in the same district, Marina Litvinovich, took to Twitter and Facebook to call the decision “a big mistake” and stopped short of endorsing Ms. Bryukhanova.Marina Litvinovich speaking to her potential voters last month in Moscow.Daniel Kozin/Associated PressIn an interview, Ms. Bryukhanova estimated that the smart voting endorsement could add at least seven percentage points to her result.“This significantly increases our chances of victory,” she said.The goal of smart voting is to motivate people like Azalia Idrisova, a 33-year-old entrepreneur in the mental health field in Moscow who said she was overwhelmed by the number of candidates and political parties on the ballot. She said she would follow the smart voting recommendations, even though she expected the election results to be falsified.“All I can do is to go vote,” she said.Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting. More

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      Your Monday Briefing

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Aleksei NavalnyNavalny’s Life in OppositionKremlin AnxietyCourt DecisionWhat Will Yulia Navalnaya Do?Putin’s ‘Palace’AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyYour Monday BriefingThe Schengen Area closes up.Feb. 21, 2021, 10:13 p.m. ETGood morning.We’re covering travel restrictions within the E.U., the worst day of violence in Myanmar since the coup and the coming U.S. milestone of 500,000 deaths from Covid-19.[embedded content]A police officer addressing a driver at a checkpoint at the German-Czech border near Bad Gottleuba, Germany. Credit…Filip Singer/EPA, via ShutterstockA fresh blow to Europe’s open bordersAs new variants of the coronavirus are spreading rapidly, European countries such as Germany and Belgium have introduced new border restrictions, flying in the face of the free movement that has long been seen as a fundamental pillar of the European Union.The European Commission, the E.U. executive, has tried to pull countries back from limiting free movement since March, on the grounds that it had disrupted the bloc’s single market. The result has been an ever-shifting patchwork of border rules that has sown chaos and not always successfully limited the virus’s spread.But many countries cannot seem to resist taking back control of their borders. A suggestion by the commission that new restrictions be reversed induced a swift pushback from Germany, even as the new rules triggered supply chain disruptions and long lines of commuters from Austria and the Czech Republic.Background: Countries within the Schengen Area have the explicit right to reintroduce checks at their borders, but they need to clear a few legal hurdles to do so, and they are not meant to retain them over the long term.Here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.In other developments:As the American death toll nears 500,000, more Americans have now died of Covid-19 than on the battlefields of World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined. No other country has counted as many deaths in the pandemic.To secure the release of an Israeli civilian held in Syria, Israel secretly — and contentiously — agreed to finance a supply of Russian-made Covid-19 vaccines for Damascus.Australia began vaccinating its population against the coronavirus on Sunday, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison and 19 others getting their shots. The first to be vaccinated was an 84-year-old woman who lives in a nursing home.Dozens of protesters were injured in Mandalay, Myanmar, on Saturday.Credit…Aso/Associated PressMyanmar security forces open fire on protestersWitnesses said two people were killed and dozens wounded when security forces on Saturday opened fire on protesters in the city of Mandalay, Myanmar. It was the bloodiest day of protests so far against the military’s Feb. 1 coup.The shootings occurred as the authorities were trying to force workers back to their jobs at a local shipyard. The work stoppage there in protest of the ouster of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s civilian leader, has paralyzed river transport on the Irrawaddy, the country’s most important commercial waterway, according to Radio Free Asia.Details: The authorities used water cannons, rubber bullets, tear gas, slingshots and live ammunition to break up the crowd. At least 40 people were wounded, according to medics.Mansour Abbas, center, an Islamist leader hoping to join the next Israeli government, campaigning in Daburiyya, an Arab village in northern Israel.Credit…Dan Balilty for The New York TimesIn the Israeli election, an opportunity for ArabsAccelerated by Israel’s election campaign, two trends are converging: On the one hand, Arab politicians and voters increasingly believe that to improve the lives of Arabs in Israel, they need to seek power within the system instead of exerting pressure from the outside.Separately, mainstream Israeli parties are realizing they need to attract Arab voters to win a very close election — and some are willing to work with Arab parties as potential coalition partners.Both trends are born more of political pragmatism than dogma. But while the moment has the potential to give Arab voters real power, it could backfire and split the Arab vote, ultimately lowering the numbers of Arab lawmakers in the next Parliament.Context: Arab politicians and voters have not shed all their discomfort with Zionism and Israeli policies in the occupied territories. But there is a growing realization that problems the Arab community in Israel faces — gang violence, poverty and discrimination in access to housing and land — will not be solved without Arab politicians shaping policy at the highest level.If you have 7 minutes, this is worth itLibraries to honor women lost to violenceCredit…Kiana Hayeri for The New York TimesNajiba Hussaini, who died in a Taliban suicide bombing in Kabul in 2017, was a determined, highly accomplished scholar, who landed a prestigious job in Afghanistan’s Ministry of Mines and Petroleum.Today, her memory lives on at the Najiba Hussaini Memorial Library, in the Afghan city of Nili, as a symbol of the progress made toward gender equality and access to education in Afghanistan. As of 2018, as many as 3.5 million girls were enrolled in school in the nation and one-third of its teachers were women.But amid negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban, many worry that a peace deal could mean that the progress Afghan women have made over the past two decades will be lost.Here’s what else is happeningAleksei Navalny: A Russian court has cleared the way for the possible transfer of the opposition leader to a penal colony, the latest step by the authorities to silence the country’s most vocal critic of President Vladimir Putin.Libya weapons: Erik Prince, the former head of the security firm Blackwater Worldwide and a supporter of former President Donald Trump, violated a United Nations arms embargo on Libya by sending weapons to a militia commander who was trying to overthrow the government in Tripoli, according to U.N. investigators. He has denied any wrongdoing.Venezuela: Millions of women in the troubled South American country are no longer able to find or afford birth control. The situation has pushed many into unplanned pregnancies or illegal abortions at a time when they can barely feed the children they have.ISIS: Frenchwomen who joined the Islamic State and are now held in squalid detention camps in Syria have gone on a hunger strike to protest France’s refusal to bring them back.Credit…Alana Holmberg for The New York TimesSnapshot: Above, Novak Djokovic won his third straight Australian Open title. His victory over the fourth-ranked Daniil Medvedev gave him his 18th career Grand Slam title. Naomi Osaka beat Jennifer Brady for her fourth Grand Slam title.Cephalopod sensing: An octopus’s arms can sense and respond to light — even when the octopus cannot see it with the eyes on its head, according to a study published this month in The Journal of Experimental Biology.Bollywood: Increasingly, new Hindi productions are showing mothers, and women over all, as full and complex human beings — not melodramatic side characters, but outspoken, independent leads who are in charge of their own fates.What we’re reading: The U.S. may experience a wonderful summer this year — even if the pandemic is not yet behind us, writes the health journalist James Hamblin in this long read from The Atlantic.Now, a break from the newsCredit…Con Poulos for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Jerrie-Joy Redman-Lloyd.Cook: This shrimp étouffée draws inspiration from Cajun and Creole cuisines.Listen: Radio drama, especially from its golden age in the 1930s through the ’50s, is now freely available, thanks to the internet. Here are six shows to enjoy.Do: Many mothers have felt obliged to put themselves last during the pandemic. But making time for self-care may give you what you need to keep on going.Restore your sense of self. At Home has our full collection of ideas on what to read, cook, watch, and do while staying safe at home. And now for the Back Story on …Taking stock of 500,000 deathsA graphic on Sunday’s front page of The New York Times depicts the totality of Covid’s devastation in the United States. From afar, the graphic looks like a blur of gray, but up close it shows something much darker: close to 500,000 individual dots, each representing a single life lost to the coronavirus.Credit…The New York TimesThis is not the first time The Times’s designers have used the front page to represent the scale of the pandemic’s toll. When Covid-19 deaths in the United States reached 100,000 last May, the page was filled with names of those lost — nearly a thousand of them, just 1 percent of the country’s deaths then.And as that number approached 200,000, the lead photograph on the page showed the yard of an artist in Texas who had filled his lawn with a small flag for every life lost to the virus in his state.But this is the first time the front page has depicted all the U.S. fatalities. “I think part of this technique, which is good, is that it overwhelms you — because it should,” said Lazaro Gamio, a graphics editor at The Times.That’s it for this briefing. See you on Tuesday.— NatashaThank youTo Theodore Kim and Jahaan Singh for the break from the news. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com.P.S.• We’re listening to “The Daily.” Our latest episode is on children and Covid.• Here’s our Mini Crossword, and a clue: What light travels in (five letters). You can find all our puzzles here.• Claire Cain Miller, a reporter who worked on our series on working mothers, “The Primal Scream,” spoke to NPR about the toll of the pandemic on women.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How Investigative Journalism Flourished in Hostile Russia

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Aleksei NavalnyNavalny’s Life in OppositionKremlin AnxietyCourt DecisionWhat Will Yulia Navalnaya Do?Putin’s ‘Palace’AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storythe media equationHow Investigative Journalism Flourished in Hostile RussiaA new wave of news outlets has used conventional, and unconventional, methods to pierce the veil of Putin’s power.Roman Dobrokhotov, the founder of The Insider, one of a wave of new investigative news outlets in Russia, said that Russia “is possibly the most transparent country in the world.”Credit…Pierre Crom/Getty ImagesFeb. 21, 2021Updated 5:25 p.m. ETThe Russian language has introduced a few words that in recent years have been widely used and misused in English: disinformation, kompromat, Novichok.But the one that blows my mind is “probiv.” It’s drawn from the word that means “to pierce” — or to enter something into a search bar. Today, it refers to the practice by which anyone can buy, for a couple of dollars on the social media app Telegram or hundreds on a dark web marketplace, the call records, cellphone geolocation or air travel records of anyone in Russia you want to track. Probiv is purchased by jealous spouses or curious business partners, and criminals of various sorts. But it has also been used recently, and explosively, by journalists and political activists, overlapping categories in Russia, where the chief opposition leader, Aleksei A. Navalny, often makes use of the tools of investigative journalism.Probiv is only one of the factors that have made Russia, of all places, the most exciting place in the world for investigative journalism. There is a new wave of outlets, many using more conventional sourcing to pierce the veil of President Vladimir V. Putin’s power. And there is a growing online audience for their work in a country where the state controls, directly or indirectly, all of the major television networks.The boom in independent journalism and criticism of the government has reached a level “unseen in our country since the end of the 1990s,” Denis Volkov, the deputy director of the Levada Center, a Russian public opinion research group, wrote recently.Probiv has been a crucial part of that revival. The practice was at the heart of a stunning revelation late last year by the international investigative collective Bellingcat, working with the Russian site The Insider and other partners, identifying the agents from a secret Russian spy unit who poisoned Mr. Navalny. A reporter spent “a few hundred euros worth of cryptocurrency” for a trove of data. Then, in a riveting piece of theater, Mr. Navalny, working with Bellingcat, called one of those agents, pretending to be a senior government official, and tricked him into a confession. When Mr. Navalny returned to Russia after his treatment in Germany, he was promptly jailed for a parole violation in a case he has called fabricated, and now faces transport to a penal colony.The irony is delicious, of Mr. Putin seeing his own tools of corruption and surveillance turned against him by the underpaid police and intelligence officials who put the secrets up for sale. “Whatever Putin does keeps backfiring,” said Maria Pevchikh, who runs the investigative unit at Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.Aleksei Navalny, the chief opposition leader to President Vladimir Putin, at a court hearing in Moscow this month. He faces transport to a penal colony.Credit…Babushkinsky District CourtProbiv is almost exclusively a Russian phenomenon. When Roman Dobrokhotov, who founded The Insider in 2013, was in Kyiv a couple of years ago, he said he asked a local journalist where he could find the phone records for someone he was researching and was surprised to learn that wasn’t a common practice. He said he realized that “Russia is possibly the most transparent country in the world,” adding, “If you have 10 bucks, you can find any information on anyone.”The New York Times and some other major Western outlets don’t use probiv, on the principle that you shouldn’t pay for stolen information. Many Russian journalists debate the ethics and legality of it as well. Bellingcat’s probiv maestro, Christo Grozev, has said he spent his own money — the independent news site Meduza estimated it at more than $13,000 — unmasking murderous Russian spies. (He told The Washington Post that his vendor assumed he was a criminal, and was horrified to learn he was a journalist.) Mr. Dobrokhotov said he wouldn’t buy probiv himself, but had analyzed the data Mr. Grozev purchased. (CNN and Der Spiegel also collaborated on the investigation of Mr. Navalny’s poisoning.) Other reporters said it’s routine to use for research, but not to cite in a finished article. But for some, those norms are shifting, too.“The audience doesn’t care whether you bought data or got it from a source,” said Roman Anin, the founder of iStories, a nonprofit Russian investigative site with a staff of 15. He said he had concluded that “since we live in a country where authorities are killing opposition leaders, let’s forget about these rules, because these stories are more important than our ethical rules.”A bot on Telegram that offers to identify the owner of any car.Credit…The New York TimesThat portal into Vladimir Putin’s world has opened even as some American journalists covering Russian interference in the 2016 election produced overheated essays and viral Twitter threads. They cast Mr. Putin, in the American imagination, as an all-powerful puppet master and everyone whose name ends in the letter “v” as his agent. But it was actual Russians, running their websites on the margins of legality or from abroad, who opened windows into Mr. Putin’s real Russia. And what they’ve uncovered is unbelievable personal corruption, shadowy figures behind international political interference and murderous but sometimes inept security services.Here are a few examples of these revelations:The investigative nonprofit outlet Proekt identified Mr. Putin’s “secret family,” and found that the woman it linked to the president had acquired some $100 million in wealth from sources tied to the Russian state.IStories used a trove of hacked emails to document how Mr. Putin’s former son-in-law built a huge fortune out of state connections.Bellingcat, which was founded in London, and the Russia-based Insider identified, by name and photograph, the Russian agents who poisoned the defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England in 2018.The media group RBC delved into the political machinery behind the troll farm interfering in U.S. elections.Meduza exposed deep corruption in all corners of the Moscow city government, down to the funeral business.Mr. Navalny’s foundation flew drones over Mr. Putin’s palace, a vast estate on the Black Sea that Mr. Navalny labeled “the World’s Biggest Bribe” in a scathing, mocking nearly two-hour video he released on his return to Russia last month. The video has been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube.There’s a tendency in parts of the American media right now to reflexively decry the rise of alternative voices and open platforms on social media, seeing them solely as vectors for misinformation or tools of Donald J. Trump. Russia is a potent reminder of the other side of that story, the power of these new platforms to challenge one of the world’s most corrupt governments. That’s why, for instance, Mr. Navalny was a vocal critic of Twitter’s decision to ban Mr. Trump, calling it an “unacceptable act of censorship.”The new Russian investigative media is also resolutely of the internet. And much of it began with Mr. Navalny, a lawyer and blogger who created a style of YouTube investigation that draws more from the lightweight, meme-y formats of that platform than from heavily produced documentaries or newsmagazine investigations.Mr. Navalny doesn’t cast himself as a journalist. “We are using investigative reporting as a tool to achieve our political ends,” his aide, Ms. Pevchikh, said. (One convention they don’t follow: getting comment from the target of an investigation.) Indeed, his relationship with the independent journalists can be complicated. Most are careful to maintain their identity as independent actors, not activists. They criticize him, but also message him their stories, hoping he’ll promote them to his own vast audience, and he publicly criticizes them, in turn, for being too soft on the Kremlin.The new news outlets learned from Mr. Navalny as well. Many of them have imitated his style on YouTube. And he proved that certain lines could be crossed. What’s more, they all undoubtedly benefit from the homogeneity of the television networks. Imagine how much YouTube you would watch if the only news channels available were Fox News, Newsmax and OAN.The traffic they see online also tells them they’re connecting.For Roman Badanin, the founder of Proekt, reporting on Mr. Putin’s hidden life has been a career-long obsession.Credit…James Hill for The New York Times“I see the numbers and I think that all this is not in vain,” said Roman Badanin, the founder of Proekt, for whom Mr. Putin’s hidden life has been a career-long obsession. (A confusingly high percentage of the founders of these new outlets are named Roman.) In a particularly surreal moment this month, the young woman who Proekt suggested was Mr. Putin’s daughter said — in a conversation on the social audio app Clubhouse with the reporter who wrote the article — that she was “grateful” for all the attention his reporting had brought … to her Instagram account.Mr. Badanin, who modeled Proekt on the American nonprofit news organization ProPublica, said he had begun to see another sign of intense interest: financial support from his audience. About a third of the budget that supports a staff of 12, he said, now comes from donations averaging $8, mirroring the global trend toward news organizations relying on their readers. In Russia, some of this is still nascent. For instance, a colleague in Russia, Anton Troianovski, tells me that there’s a cafe near the Kurskaya Metro station where you can add to your bill a donation to MediaZona, which was founded by two members of the protest group Pussy Riot to hold the Russian justice system to account. But the protests against Mr. Navalny’s imprisonment also seem to be driving support for independent media, a phenomenon that The Bell, another of the new independent websites, christened “the Navalny Effect.”That might help these outlets navigate a narrowing legal window in Mr. Putin’s decades-long game of cat-and-mouse with independent journalism. (The government is also struggling to balance its citizens’ love of the open internet with the threat it can pose to government power.)Many of the new outlets, along with BBC Russia, have drawn talent from a previous wave of independent voices that the government effectively put out of the investigations business. Some of the new outlets, like the Latvia-based Meduza, have their operations abroad. But many are incorporated overseas, even as their journalists live and work in Moscow. Some subsist on grants whose sources they keep confidential — a vulnerability the Russian government appears likely to exploit under a new law broadening restrictions on what it considers “foreign agents.”MediaZona’s editor, Sergei Smirnov, center, at a hearing at the Moscow City Court this month. He was arrested for retweeting a joke with an image that included the date and time of a protest.Credit…Moscow City Court Press OfficeIndeed, the sense of possibility is rivaled only by the sense of menace. Virtually every journalist I spoke to in Russia said they expected this period to end at any moment. In a particularly ominous sign, police arrested the editor of MediaZona, Sergei Smirnov, on Jan. 30 for retweeting a joke with an image that included the date and time of a protest. He was sentenced to 15 days in jail for violating the rules on holding public events, and journalists debated whether it was an incompetent mistake or a deliberate warning to his peers.“To be an independent journalist in Russia is like being a lobster in a pot,” said Meduza’s editor in chief, Ivan Kolpakov. “They are boiling you, but you don’t know exactly when you will die.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More