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 anti-war Russians, that is, improbably, what he has become.

Boris B. Nadezhdin is the only candidate running on an anti-war platform with a shot at appearing on the ballot to oppose President Vladimir V. Putin in Russia's presidential election in March. Anti-war Russians have rushed to sign his official petition inside and outside the country, hoping to get enough signatures by the January 31 deadline for him to join the race.

They braved sub-zero temperatures in the Siberian city of Yakutsk. They have been thrown through the bloc in Yekaterinburg. They have jumped in place to stay warm in St. Petersburg and have flocked to outposts in Berlin, Istanbul and Tbilisi, Georgia.

They know that election officials can exclude Mr. Nadezhdin from the vote, 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 is collecting signatures for Mr. Nadezhdin in Yakutsk, south of the Arctic Circle. “This is just our protest, our form of protest, so we can somehow show that we are against all of this.”

The grassroots 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 wiped out, with its most promising leaders exiled, jailed or killed in a sweeping crackdown. about the disagreements escalated by the war.

With protests effectively banned in Russia and criticism of the military banned, the long lines in support of Mr Nadezhdin's candidacy have given anti-war Russians a rare public community of like-minded spirits whose voices have been drowned out for nearly two years in a wave of chauvinism and state violence. years.

Many of them do not particularly know or care about Mr. Nadezhdin, a 60-year-old physicist who was a member of the Russian parliament from 1999 to 2003 and who openly acknowledges that he lacks the charisma of anti-Kremlin crusaders like Aleksei A. Navalny, the imprisoned opposition leader.

But with a draconian censorship law suppressing criticism of the war, his supporters see supporting him as the only legal way Russia has left to demonstrate their opposition to Putin's invasion of Ukraine. And they appreciate what Mr Nadezhdin says – about the conflict that is driving Russia from the brink; on the need to release political prisoners, bring the troops home and make peace with Ukraine; that Russia's anti-gay laws are “idiotic.”

“The purpose of my participation is to oppose Putin's approach, which is leading the country to a dead end, to a rut of authoritarianism, militarization and isolation,” Mr. Nadezhdin said in a written response to questions from The New York Times.

“The more votes a candidate gets against Putin's approach and the 'special military operation', the greater the chances for peace and change in Russia,” he added, using the Kremlin's term for the war to describe to avoid running afoul of Russian law.

He has dismissed questions about his safety, noting during a YouTube appearance last week that the “best and sweetest years of my life are already over.”

The Kremlin tightly controls the electoral process to ensure the inevitability of Putin as the victor, but allows non-threatening opponents to run for office – to provide a veneer of legitimacy, increase voter turnout and pacify Russians opposed to his rule an outlet to express their dissatisfaction. So far, eleven people, including Mr Nadezhdin and Mr Putin, have been allowed to register as potential candidates and are collecting signatures.

Many of Mr. Nadezhdin's new supporters accept that he may have initially been seen as just a useful tool for the Kremlin — a 1990s liberal with a folksy grandpa look who is willing to play the state's game.

Particularly suspect is his work in the 1990s as an aide to Sergei V. Kiriyenko, prime minister under President Boris N. Yeltsin, who is now the Kremlin's top official responsible for overseeing domestic politics.

Skeptics also point to Mr Nadezhdin's presence on state television, where he has contributed to the illusion of open debate by acting as a token liberal voice, shouted down by pro-Putin propagandists. Opposition figures considered a real threat by the Kremlin, such as Mr Navalny, have long been banned from appearing, let alone running for president.

Mr Nadezhdin has countered that if he were a puppet of the Kremlin, he would not be competing for signatures and money, nor would the main state television channel have excluded his name from the list of presidential candidates.

“He may well turn out to be a decorative candidate, but if so, there is a sense that not everything went according to plan,” said Tatjana Semyonova, a 32-year-old programmer who showed up in a busy courtyard in Berlin. to sign her name.

She said she had no particular affinity with Mr Nadezhdin, but signed in protest.

Pavel Laptev, a 37-year-old designer standing next to Ms Semyonova in the queue, said even the smallest opportunity to make a change should not be lost. “Even if he's a decorative candidate, once he has all this power, he might decide he's not that decorative,” he said.

The unexpected groundswell of support for Nadezhdin has left the Kremlin's political maestros facing a thorny question in the first presidential election since Putin launched his invasion: Will they allow an anti-war candidate of any stripe to run?

“I will be surprised, surprised but delighted when I see you at the election vote,” Ekaterina Schulmann, a Russian political scientist based in Berlin, told Mr Nadezhdin last week at a YouTube show. “I am not convinced that our political management at this stage of its development, of its evolution, can afford to take such risks.”

Mr. Nadezhdin's campaign says it has far exceeded the required 100,000 signatures, but a candidate can only submit a maximum of 2,500 signatures from a single Russian region. On Friday, his campaign said it is on track to collect enough signatures from regions in Russia and that no signatures from abroad are needed.

But even if Mr. Nadezhdin collects enough signatures, Russian authorities could find a way to disqualify him. The long, visible support lines, he has said, will make that more difficult.

Many anti-war Russians initially coalesced around Ekaterina S. Duntsova, a little-known former television journalist and local politician who launched a campaign in November and quickly rose to prominence. But the Central Electoral Commission rejected her application to become a candidate due to what it called trivial errors in her paperwork.

She has been supporting Mr Nadezhdin ever since.

Members of Mr. Navalny's team, including his wife, have also publicly supported the former lawmaker. That includes one of Russia's most famous rock stars, Yuri Shevchuk, and another influential exiled opposition activist, Maxim Katz.

In Yakutsk, a frigid city in eastern Siberia, it was minus 45 degrees Fahrenheit when Mr. Popov, the head of the campaign there, began collecting signatures. Eventually the weather warmed up and the crowd increased.

There are few places downtown where Popov could take a stand in support of an anti-Putin candidate. But he convinced a shopping center to place the operation in a hallway, where people can write their names near a school desk and folding table.

“If people don't know Boris Nadezhdin, I can tell them who he is,” Mr Popov said. But he insists he is not there because of Mr Nadezhdin. “I'm collecting signatures against Putin here,” he tells those who pass by. “We are collecting signatures against Putin, yes, against military action.”

Signatories are required to provide their full names and passport details – essentially a ready-made list of Russians opposed to the war – fueling fears of reprisals.

But that hasn't deterred Karen Danielyan, a 20-year-old from Tver, about 100 miles northwest of Moscow, whose entire adult life so far has been spent with Russia at war. “The fear that this will continue is much stronger and heavier than the fear that they will do something to me because I work as a signature collector,” he said.

Mr. Nadezhdin portrays himself as an unremarkable politician who decided to run for office as an “act of desperation” and accidentally found himself at the forefront of a movement.

“But comrades, I have one quality: I love my family and my country endlessly,” he said in a YouTube appearance last week alongside Ms. Schulmann, the political analyst. “I endlessly believe that Russia is no worse than any other country and can achieve great results with the help of democracy, elections and the will of the people.”

Ms. Schulmann told him he would be judged based on what happens to the people who signed his petition.

“I will not betray anyone,” he said. “I will fight.”