How I learnt to trust other Russians

What running an exit poll in Lisbon taught us about ourselves during the Russian Parliamentary Elections in September 2021

Trusting another Russian

Trusting one another is what Russians most struggle with. Staying healthily suspicious of the people around you is a survival strategy: if in the 50s lowering your guard could send you into a gulag, today disobeying social hygiene may turn you into a foreign agent by a policeman trying to get a promotion.

Leaving apart the phantasmagoric — and entirely real — cases of common citizens having their doors drilled out by the state security forces, everyday interactions between two Russian strangers are tense, no smiles intended.

Even if these two hypothetical Russian strangers meet in the safety of the democratic abroad, their mutual suspicions reign on. One never knows if the other is secretly receiving state espionage money (which is unpleasant, but at least understandable: real estate is expensive these days) or if they wholeheartedly support the president (RIP hope).

September 2021 Parliamentary Elections

In September 2021, for the first time in my life, I helped organise an exit poll — an anonymous survey asking people to state how they voted — in front of the Russian embassy in Lisbon. For the first time the Russians living abroad self-organised to check how we vote. This allowed me to touch both trust and hope with my own hands.

Maria, Lara and I — the three volunteers — spent 12 hours trying to outshout the 100 meter distance that separated us from the doors of the embassy. With the Lisbon police in the middle, we had to dance and jump around quite a bit to get the voters to notice us and participate in the survey.

We counted 177 people coming in and out — fewer than half of the 500 that voted in 2016 — far from impressive.

To their credit, many could have used the new electronic vote — an opaque system tested for the first time and which, as we now see, could have helped to pharaonically rig the results in Moscow in favour of United Russia.

So in Lisbon 177 souls came to vote, 126 of them (70% of the total) agreed to receive a piece of paper from us and mark their political choice. Now how did they vote?

The four-letter word

At twilight, when the last voter had left the embassy, the nearby cafe could overhear me read out the same four-letter word to Lara, who was writing down the results of the exit poll, time and again: KPRF, KPRF, KPRF.

KPRF stands for “Communist Party of the Russian Federation”. Our final count confirmed that I had repeated those letters exactly 61.1% of the time.

I must immediately disappoint the local Portuguese communists, a particularly zealous group still worshiping marxism-leninism and even running a music festival which convinces unaware and objectively great musicians to perform under the communist flag (my only guess is that the musicians are so busy writing good music they have never bothered to read a page of Solzhenitsyn or Dovlatov).

To make it unequivocal: 61.1% of us are not communists. Oh hail to the no.

Navalny’s Smart Vote

Voting for the communists was part of a collective action called Smart Vote, fiercely encouraged by the Navalny team. The idea is simple: you do not vote for, you vote against, and for example Canada’s Justin Trudeau used such tactics to win the 2015 elections. In Russia, everyone who wanted to see the ruling United Russia party out was asked to vote for a single opposition candidate in their electoral region, even if that meant agreeing to some seriously unpleasant characters.

This strategy had already been used by the Navalny team in 2019 during the Moscow Duma elections, successfully helping strip United Russia of 13 out of the 20 seats.

A few days before the elections, when the law does not allow the candidates to withdraw from the race, the Navalny team announced the names of smart vote candidates for 225 electoral regions. The channels for delivering this list became a huge deal, with fears of the entire internet getting suspended for a few days. The list with the smart vote candidates was posted on the Navalny website (banned from search results in Russia by Yandex, the all-powerful local browser), in a google doc (which Google blocked for Russian users), in the Navalny app (blocked by Google and Apple for Russian users), on a Telegram channel (blocked by Pavel Durov, its founder) and through a newsletter.

For those who have not been vaccinated against Russian levels of absurdism: the reason why Navalny supports the candidates from other parties through the Smart Vote is because no one from his team or his many supporters has been allowed to participate in either the Moscow Duma elections of 2019 or in the 2021 parliamentary elections. If the Central Election Committee suspects you have ties with the opposition, it will label you an “extremist” and amen to your registration papers.

Lisbon, famously part of Western Siberia

Let’s go back to the Lisbon cafe, my voice coarsely repeating KPRF to tired Lara writing it all down.

Why did the “Portuguese” Russians vote for the communists? There is an important detail I need to explain: we had to vote twice. The first time for a political party, and the second time for a specific local candidate, and this is where things get amazingly bizarre.

1. Voting for a political party is quite intuitive. There were four large political parties represented in the Russian parliament in 2021: an uninspiring mix of corruption, populism, stalinism, chauvinism and incompetence. The only party that has kept some weight through the last decades is, oddly enough, the Communist Party, the old school pensioners still supporting it staunchly. By a cruel twist of history the Communist Party has become the only choice for protest voters determined to create forced opposition within the parliament. Russian elections, however, would not be true to their record of extreme absurdity if they had not offered the voters a list of smaller parties not represented in the parliament (such as the Greens)…as well as their spoiler copies (such as the Green Alternative)sponsored by the Kremlin to split and steal the vote from the potentially successful original. You won’t believe it, but even the Communist Party has a spoiler party aimed at confusing the voters called The Communists of Russia!
2. Voting for a specific local candidate from your region is where one needs to prepare for an extra serving of absurdity. No matter where our Russian citizen is registered — Moscow or Vladivostok — in Lisbon you vote for … the Western Siberian Region of Altai! No one has an explanation for this random allocation, and no, you can not vote for your region. Translated to a Portuguese reality: if you are from Fafe you might as well be asked to decide the political fate of Tavira, just because reasons.

So, in the West Siberian Region of Altai, which, as we have learnt, includes Lisbon, the Smart Vote supported some Mr. Krivov, who happened to be from KPRF, the Communist Party. The communist mystery in Lisbon explained!

Practical democrats

We calculated that at least 61.1% of Russians who had participated in our exit poll are “Communists from Altai”, our local metaphor for opposition. For the first time I could touch the evidence. For the first time I saw that I can start trusting other Russians.

Before the exit poll I could hope, but not know.

Now I have hard evidence that we have evolved, recovering from apathy and starting to act. The elections were rigged and stolen, yet we have met each other through collective action. We have practiced democracy: by agreeing for whom to vote, by observing the elections, by attempting to talk to every voter at the exit poll.

This was impossible ten years ago: we did not believe we could change anything, but today it has become a practical reality. I have never seen Russians acting with so much solidarity, and this shift from theory to practice is the beginning of breaking the vicious circle of injustice and disbelief in our own meaningfulness. I say it because I have finally seen it. With small numbers here in Lisbon, but repeated many times and again across other world capitals and across Russia.