A Collective ‘No’: Anti-Putin Russians Embrace an Unlikely Challenger
His surname comes from the Russian word for hope — and for hundreds of thousands of antiwar Russians, that is, improbably enough, what he has become.
Boris B. Nadezhdin is the only candidate running on an antiwar platform with a chance of getting on the ballot to oppose President Vladimir V. Putin in Russia’s presidential election in March. Russians who are against the war have rushed to sign his official petition inside and outside the country, hoping to supply enough signatures by a Jan. 31 deadline for him to succeed in joining the race.
They have braved subzero temperatures in the Siberian city of Yakutsk. They have snaked down the block in Yekaterinburg. They have jumped in place to stay warm in St. Petersburg and flocked to outposts in Berlin, Istanbul and Tbilisi, Georgia.
They know that election officials might bar Mr. Nadezhdin from the ballot, and if he is allowed to run, they know he will never win. They don’t care.
“Boris Nadezhdin is our collective ‘No,’” said Lyosha Popov, a 25-year-old who has been collecting signatures for Mr. Nadezhdin in Yakutsk, south of the Arctic Circle. “This is simply our protest, our form of protest, so we can somehow show we are against all this.”
The grass-roots mobilization in an authoritarian country, where national elections have long been a Potemkin affair, has injected energy into a Russian opposition movement that has been all but obliterated: Its most promising leaders have been exiled, jailed or killed in a sweeping crackdown on dissent that has escalated with the war.
With protests essentially banned in Russia and criticism of the military outlawed, the long lines to support Mr. Nadezhdin’s candidacy have offered antiwar Russians a rare public communion with kindred spirits whose voices have been drowned out in a wave of jingoism and state brutality for nearly two years.
Many of them don’t particularly know about or care for Mr. Nadezhdin, a 60-year-old physicist who was a member of Russia’s Parliament from 1999 to 2003, and who openly acknowledges lacking the charisma of anti-Kremlin crusaders like Aleksei A. Navalny, the jailed opposition leader.
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