莫斯科——在圣彼得堡本周的市政选举中，鲍里斯·维什涅夫斯基正在与自己作对。但这并不意味着他没有挑战者。事实上，远非如此。
这位反克里姆林宫的资深反对派政治家正在与两名男子竞选，这两名男子已经合法地改名为与他的名字相同。他们甚至改变了自己在选票上的形象，采用胡须来模仿他。
这是一个长期策略的更新俄语被称为“双重选举”的选举，当局试图通过提名同名候选人来吸走对手的选票，希望困惑的选民会在选票上把他们的标记放在错误的人旁边。
维斯涅夫斯基向选举委员会提出申诉，但被驳回。他说，以前也遇到过类似的策略，但没有达到如此程度。
上个月，维什涅夫斯基在接受美国广播公司新闻采访时说:“我们以前从来没有过这样的事情。“我们以前遇到过这样的情况，他们在选举中让人们使用相同的姓氏，但在此之前，我们从未有人更改他们的姓氏和名字。”
克隆人候选人策略——也在俄罗斯多场竞选中使用——只是围绕本周末举行的俄罗斯议会选举而展开的一系列所谓肮脏把戏、操纵和粗暴镇压中的一个，克里姆林宫决心为其执政党带来令人信服的结果。为期三天的投票从周五开始，决定俄罗斯议会下院以及地区和地方议会的席位。
俄罗斯的选举受到严格管理和往常一样，结果是毫无疑问的:弗拉基米尔·普京总统的执政党统一俄罗斯党将在俄罗斯450个席位的下议院保持宪法规定的多数席位。由克里姆林宫审查的少数政党组成了剩下的政党。
但这些选举发生的环境是不同的，因为俄罗斯在过去一年里迅速从威权主义滑向更接近全面独裁的状态，在这种状态下，不容忍真正的政治反对派。
当局大规模阻止反对派候选人，引入新的程序和法律障碍，或者在某些情况下，仅仅以逮捕相威胁将他们监禁或驱逐出境。
这一次，曾经在投票中被容忍的反克里姆林宫候选人没有了位置。今年6月，反对派最著名的政治家之一德米特里·古德科夫(Dmitry Gudkov)前往乌克兰流亡，称他和他的家人受到监禁的威胁。就连传统上温和的反对党也受到了攻击，尤其是共产党，该党的最高领导人之一帕维尔·格鲁丁宁被禁止参选。
19岁的候选人达里亚·阿尔塔莫诺娃(Darya Artamonova)在西伯利亚城市新西伯利亚的一个郊区参加市政选举，她是那里唯一被允许投票的反对派候选人之一。在竞选期间，她告诉美国广播公司新闻，她的父母收到了一个葬礼花圈，对她的去世表示哀悼，这是一个明显的威胁。
在过去的18个月里，克里姆林宫发起了一场比普京20年统治时期更大的镇压运动。批评人士和独立分析人士表示，这场运动旨在驱逐国内有组织的异议人士。
这包括宣布阿列克谢·纳瓦尔尼的运动为非法，普京最著名的对手是谁当局一月份入狱在他从神经毒剂中毒中生还后。一项新法律禁止任何与纳瓦尔尼组织有关联的人在五年内竞选公职。
一大批新法律赋予当局监禁或阻止批评者投票的广泛权力。防止选票填充的保障措施也被削弱了:当局迫使人们在网上投票，批评者称这种策略会助长选举舞弊。三天内举行投票本身也增加了监督的难度。俄罗斯选举委员会今年也不会从投票站直播央视。
此外，这场运动的目标是独立媒体。当局将俄罗斯大多数领先的独立新闻网站指定为“外国代理人”，这一标签施加了限制，并使记者面临被刑事起诉的风险。一个顶级的选举监督组织，Golos，也获得了同样的任命。
分析人士说，围绕选举的严格控制反映了克里姆林宫方面的担忧，即执政党统一俄罗斯党的投票率低于30%，创历史新低。
卡耐基莫斯科中心的高级研究员安德烈·科列斯尼科夫说，在俄罗斯，议会实际上是克里姆林宫的驯服延伸，选举的主要目的是为统一俄罗斯党产生一个大的结果来验证普京。
“它们与政治代表无关，”科列斯尼科夫说在本周的一篇文章中写道。“在2021年9月17日至19日的三天里，将会发生什么，更多的是对普京及其政权的信任投票。”
为了提高投票结果，当局一直在向政府雇员和军人施压，要求他们登记投票，一些政府机构告诉工作人员，他们必须说服至少另外两个人也这样做。周五，莫斯科一些投票站出现了长队，批评者称这是国家工作人员被迫去投票的迹象。在中部阿尔巴特社区的一个车站，一名排队的男子告诉美国广播公司新闻，许多等待的人是附近国防部总部大楼的士兵。莫斯科选举委员会后来证实，排队是由军事人员投票造成的。
纳瓦尔尼的团队正试图利用统一俄罗斯党的不受欢迎。他的组织发起了一场被称为“智能投票”的战术投票活动竞选活动呼吁人们投票给任何最有可能击败统一俄罗斯党的候选人，无论他们是谁。本周，纳瓦尔尼的团队公布了一份候选人名单——大多数来自俄罗斯共产党——并建议人们投票支持。
当局已采取行动阻止战术投票活动，迫使俄罗斯搜索引擎从搜索中删除“智能投票”。
周五，在俄罗斯政府的压力下，苹果和谷歌从俄罗斯的商店中删除了纳瓦尔尼的应用。在纳瓦尔尼团队发表的一封信中，苹果表示，它有义务这样做，因为纳瓦尔尼的组织被禁止作为极端分子，当局指控它非法支持“选举干涉”
Dirty tricks, clone candidates and arrests: Russia's parliamentary elections begin
MOSCOW -- In St. Petersburg’s municipal elections this week, Boris Vishnevsky is running against himself. But that does not mean he has no challengers. Far from it, in fact.
The veteran anti-Kremlin opposition politician is running against two men who have legally changed their names to be the same as his. They have even altered their appearances on the ballots, adopting beards to resemble him.
It is an update on a long-running tactic inRussianelections, known as “a double,” where authorities try to siphon votes away from an opponent by putting up candidates with the same name in the hope confused voters will put their mark next to the wrong person on their ballot paper.
Vishnevsky filed a complaint to the elections commission but it was rejected. He said had faced similar tactics before, but not at such lengths.
“We’ve simply never had such a thing before,” Vishnevsky told ABC News in an interview last month. “We’ve had situations before where they’ve put up people with the same last names in elections, but before this we’ve never had someone changing their last name and first name.”
The clone candidate ploy—which is being used in multiple races in Moscow too—is just one of a torrent of alleged dirty tricks, manipulation and crude repression being deployed around Russia’s parliamentary elections that are taking place this weekend and that the Kremlin is determined will produce a convincing result for its ruling party. The three-day vote, which starts Friday, decides seats in Russia’s lower house of parliament, as well as in regional and local councils.
Russia’s elections are heavily managedand as usual the outcome is not in doubt: President Vladimir Putin’s ruling party, United Russia, will keep its constitutional majority in Russia’s 450-seat lower house, known as the Duma. A handful of parties, vetted by the Kremlin, make up the rest.
But the environment these elections are happening in is different, coming as Russia has rapidly slid over the past year from authoritarianism to something far closer to a full-fledged dictatorship, where no real political opposition is tolerated.
Authorities have blocked opposition candidates on a broad scale, introducing new procedural and legal barriers or, in some cases, simply jailing or driving them out of the country with the threat of arrest.
This time, anti-Kremlin candidates who once would have been tolerated on the ballot have no place. In June, Dmitry Gudkov, one of the opposition’s best-known politicians, left for exile in Ukraine, saying he and his family had been threatened with jail. Even the traditionally tame opposition parties have come under attack, in particular the Communist Party, which saw one of its top leaders, Pavel Grudinin, barred from running.
“Faster and faster democratic progress is devolving into dictatorship,” said Darya Artamonova, a 19 year-old candidate running in municipal elections in a suburb in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, one of the only opposition candidates permitted on the ballot there. During the campaign she told ABC News her parents were sent a funeral wreath expressing condolences for her death, an obvious threat.
In the past 18 months, the Kremlin has launched a broad campaign of repression larger than anything in Putin’s 20-year rule. Critics and independent analysts say the campaign is aimed at squeezing out organized dissent in the country.
That has includedoutlawing the movement of Alexey Navalny,Putin’s best-known opponent who authoritiesjailed in Januaryafter he survived a nerve agent poisoning. A new law bans anyone associated with Navalny’s organizations from running for office for five years.
An arsenal of new laws has given authorities broad capabilities to jail or block critics from the vote. Safeguards to prevent ballot stuffing have also been weakened: Authorities have pushed people to vote online, a tactic critics say will facilitate rigging. Holding the vote itself over three days also makes monitoring more difficult. Russia’s election commission this year will also not live-stream CCTV from voting stations.
Moreover, the campaign has targeted independent media. Authorities have designated most of Russia’s leading independent news sites as "foreign agents," a label that imposes restrictions and opens reporters up to risk of criminal prosecution. A top election monitoring group, Golos, has also received the same designation.
The intense control around the elections, analysts said, reflects the Kremlin’s concerns that the ruling party United Russia is polling at below 30%, a historic low.
In Russia, where the parliament is effectively a tame extension of the Kremlin, the main purpose of elections is about producing a big result for United Russia to validate Putin, according to Andrey Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
“They are not about political representation,” Kolesnikovwrote in an article this week. “What will happen over the three days of September 17–19, 2021, is more of a confidence vote on Putin and his regime."
To boost the result, authorities have been pressing state employees and military personnel to register to vote, with some state organizations telling staff they must persuade at least two others to do so too. On Friday, long lines appeared at some polling stations in Moscow, a sign critics said of state workers being obliged to go vote. At one station in the central Arbat neighborhood, a man in a line told ABC News many of those waiting were soldiers from a nearby defense ministry headquarters building. Moscow's elections commission later confirmed the queue was being caused by military personnel voting.
Navalny’s team is seeking to exploit United Russia's unpopularity. His group has launched a tactical voting campaign known as "Smart Voting." The campaign calls for people to vote for any candidate with the best chance of beating United Russia’s, regardless of who they are. This week Navalny’s team published a list of candidates—the majority from Russia’s Communist Party—it recommends people should vote for.
The authorities have moved to block the tactical voting campaign, forcing Russian search engines to remove "Smart Voting" from their searches.
On Friday, Apple and Google deleted Navalny’s app from their stores in Russia, under pressure from Russia’s government. In a letter published by Navalny’s team, Apple said it was obliged to because Navalny’s organization is banned as extremist and that authorities allege it illegally enables “election interference.”
