In many ways, the recent presidential shenanigans in Russia, officially dignified with the word ‘elections’, have become a strange ritual. They’re both utterly predictable in terms of their result and, at the same time a source of anxiety for all concerned. Putin has been in power now for 25 years, and no elections under his rule have corresponded even minimally to internationally recognised standards. Their main violation has been the extensive use of public sector workers, both to run the elections and vote the way the Kremlin tells them to. Thus the electoral machine is technically always ready to provide any result required of it.

Yet this was also the first election since the start of Putin’s ‘special military operation’ which has, by modest estimates, already caused at least 70,000 casualties. For Putin, needing to spread responsibility for the war as widely as possible among the Russian people, the turnout this time was critical.

In Russia right now it is far less risky to declare obviously rigged results than to appear weak before the populace

For the Russian opposition too, whose leader Alexei Navalny was recently murdered in jail, it was also probably the last chance to express their protest in relative safety. In Navalny’s much-reported ‘Noon Against Putin’ initiative, supporters were encouraged to show up at exactly 12 p.m. on Sunday 17 March to prove how many anti-Putin Russians there are. The Kremlin clearly considered this a direct threat: the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office issued three consecutive statements warning that showing up at the polling stations ‘at a particular time’ would be considered ‘disrupting the election commissions’ work’ and ‘participating in an unauthorised rally’ (which, taken together, can tot up to 12 years of jail time). Unfortunately, anti-Putin sentiment, bravely expressed though it was, could not be converted into political capital: presidential opponents on the ballot were hand-picked by the Kremlin, and all supported the war.

There was little doubt in any case that Putin would get more than 76 per cent, the official figure he won at the last elections in 2018; to prove support for his invasion, the percentage this year had to surpass it. As a colleague said to me, the only real point of interest was whether he got over 80 per cent or not. In Russia’s current framework of power – and this is the crucial point – it is far less risky to declare obviously rigged results than to appear weak before the populace. Even his supporters might think he was ailing if he declared a lower result than last time round. Like a heroin addict, Putin was bound to up the dose.

In Soviet times, the routine result for the Communists was 99 per cent, so this 87.97 per cent not only leaves room for growth next time round but is also queasily nostalgic for some citizens. Yet, though the mentality of the regime is a Soviet one, its only real tenet is the rule of force, the elections being a demonstration of this. It was an exercise in loyalty for millions of public sector workers either supervising the electoral process or giving in to coercion to vote ‘as they should’.

Hard as it may be to get inside Putin’s head, it’s a truism that, sooner or later, all autocrats start to believe the lies they spew out to manipulate the masses. One can see the appeal of the delusion that nearly 88 per cent of your citizens are, in a time of war, solidly behind you.

More importantly, Putin dare not appear weak, or else his magic – allowing him to reign longer than any Russian ruler since Stalin – will instantly evaporate. For any tsar (or the Russian power vertical in general) to go on ruling unchallenged, three attributes in Russian history stand out: the readiness to kill your enemies, to enrich yourself, and a willingness to lie to the people. If, over the years, a ruler can get away with these acts, power is effectively asserted, and whether people believe his official pronouncements or not is by the by.

So when Putin claims the election results ‘showed the people of Donbass and Novorossiya are grateful to Russia for its protection,’ he’s quite aware that the majority of Russians know full well the Donbass is lying in rubble and Russia’s ‘protection’ amounts to little more than the region’s total ruin. But given that stating this obvious fact is a criminal offence (and that 58 per cent of Russians, according to a recent survey, want to be ‘like everyone else’), Putin won’t lose much sleep. It’s not important whether Russians believe such a lie, merely that they don’t step out of line and expose it. This obedience, alas, in Russia, indicates that the country is ruled by a credible ‘tsar.’

Meanwhile, this principle of ‘you know we’re lying, and we know you know, and you know we know you know, but you don’t dare do anything about it’ prevents many from taking an anti-Putin line even in their heads. Such lies become something you must accept automatically (and instantly) in order to survive. Reality fast becomes distorted, with an official media that routinely offers a dozen absurd takes on particular events. People accustom themselves to the idea, as the ex-minister of culture Vladimir Medinsky put it, that ‘facts are not important, it’s their interpretation that matters’.

Again and again, it’s the safest interpretation of reality (i.e. the least anti-Kremlin one) that wins out, as in the short term this suits both people and government. Any conformist citizen can cling to a reality which exonerates them and allows them a modicum of dignity, while Putin and his mob have carte blanche to do as they please.

As such, the phrase ‘we’ll never know the truth’ has become a Russian vice under Putin, suggesting not some deep, dark conspiracy a work (a reasonable conclusion, perhaps) but that ‘we don’t care about the truth any more – truth is whatever is safest to believe at this exact moment’. It’s also a way of announcing that a conversation must delve no further, and it’s time for a change of subject.

This ‘doublethink’ affects Russians in different ways. Some stay in their comfort zone of befuddlement and are fine with it, others become more aggressive if challenged on the version of reality they hold most advisable. But for all of them it corrupts the basic habit of being able to tell lies from falsehood, right from wrong, and makes people compliant instruments of someone else’s will. Between citizen and ruler is a demoralising buffer zone of confusion and helplessness. On all these counts, for an ageing leader trying to hang onto power, lying on a state level is a very safe bet.

Was Putin’s return as president such a falsehood? According to a poll from the Levada Centre in February 2024, 52 per cent of Russians view him as someone they trust. Perhaps he could have won even without ‘the most large scale ballot-stuffing in Russia’s history’, where ’35 per cent of all the votes were forged in favour of the incumbent’.

But in this case his victory would appear legitimate, and therefore not so total and terrorising. And Putin himself, waving out from his Kremlin window, would be just an ordinary mortal, a run-of-the-mill politician, and not the Almighty Tsar of Russia.