They have almost no chance of winning. His party, Yabloko, was formally eliminated from the national vote in this weekend’s election. His party colleagues have been sentenced to years in prison for their pacifist positions. None of that stops them. The fact that Yabloko, Russia’s oldest liberal opposition party, is fielding 98 candidates in 42 regions seems like a minor miracle to pacifist Russians who have been prevented by restrictive laws from openly expressing their opinions. As wartime repression deepens, the country may not see such candidates on the ballot again. “There were times in Russian history that were worse,” said Grigory Grishin, Yabloko’s candidate for the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament, in Moscow. “So, as the saying goes, ‘The eyes are afraid, but the hands do the work,’ we are participating. What else can we do?” Russia’s Supreme Court banned the match at the last minute, citing minor copyright violations and indirect foreign financing that it said violated the law. Still, the decision left open an avenue for Yabloko candidates to run. At the polls, Russians choose a party and then a candidate from their district. Half of the State Duma seats are filled by party votes (parties must exceed a 5 percent threshold) and the other half by candidate votes in districts, as in elections for the United States Congress. While the Supreme Court banned Yabloko from party list voting, many of the party’s candidates in individual districts remained on the ballot. Authorities later disqualified them in many regions, but when voting began on Friday, nearly 100 were still standing. It is not clear why they were allowed. There may not have been enough time to bring cases against each of them, analysts said. Or the authorities may feel confident that they have disqualified all candidates in the Yabloko district with a good chance of winning and that any unexpected victory could be fixed with falsified ballots. Recent data from ExtremeScan, a Russian pollster, suggested that authorities may have had reason to fear growing support for Yabloko, the only party running on a pacifist platform. It was a surprising figure for a party that has not passed the threshold to enter the Duma since 1999. The idea that any Yabloko candidate would be allowed to take a seat in the legislature and use the platform to openly question the war is considered unthinkable in today’s Russia. Aleksei Minyailo, an opposition activist in Moscow and founder of the independent pollster Chronicles, said one of the most important measures autocratic authorities took to shape election results was to limit the field of candidates. “This is the essential thing,” he said. “It’s more essential than who gets what result.” Ultimately, the Kremlin could try to use Yabloko’s remaining candidates to its advantage, Minyailo said, presenting their poor performance as evidence that pacifist Russians are a marginal minority. In recent polls, the share of Russians who say they do not support the war has ranged from about 20 to 35 percent. While the mere presence of Yabloko’s candidates on the ballot may be a victory for them, Grishin, the district candidate in Moscow, said it was always going to be an uphill battle. The candidate running against him from the ruling pro-Kremlin party, United Russia, had a budget that Grishin estimated at 40 million rubles, or $500,000. Its own budget, raised through donations, was about one-tenth of 1 percent of that total. “We were only able to print 5,000 brochures,” he said, offering us one with his portrait and a dove carrying an olive branch. It carried the party’s campaign slogan: “For peace and freedom! For a life without fear!” Financial problems were just one of Mr. Grishin’s concerns. This month, a day after his newborn daughter arrived home from the hospital, Grishin was detained and taken to a police station. He was later accused of “displaying extremist symbols,” a common pretext for removing candidates from the polls. In Mr. Grishin’s case, the allegation concerned a reference he had made on Telegram to the late opposition politician Aleksei A. Navalny, whom Russian authorities branded an extremist. If the accusation had occurred three months earlier, Mr. Grishin would have been automatically disqualified from running for office. But because it happened so late in the election cycle, officials couldn’t get it off the ballot. Some candidates have been disqualified after parties loyal to the Kremlin filed lawsuits against them. Iya Boronina, who heads Yabloko’s regional branch in the central Russian republic of Udmurtia, was disbarred after being accused of copyright infringement, echoing the case the party itself faced in the Supreme Court. His campaign video featured the 1982 rock anthem “Bad to the Bone.” Representatives of the nationalist Just Russia party maintained that Ms. Boronina, due to sanctions against Russia, could not have paid in US dollars for the legal right to use the song. Eight members of Yabloko are currently in prison for their pacifist stances. A vice president, Maxim Kruglov, is serving a seven-year sentence, and another deputy, Lev Shlosberg, is serving 11 years. Yabloko leader Nikolai I. Rybakov said that despite the harsh penalties facing its leaders, the party had become a beacon for Russia’s younger voters, who dislike growing government restrictions on the Internet, expression and culture. More than 13,000 people applied to become party members during the election cycle, he said. “They removed us from the electoral list because the real support belongs to Yabloko, and they can’t defeat us in an election,” Rybakov said in an interview in his party library as his shelter dog, Morty, sat calmly next to him. Rybakov took out a book from the piles around him. They were Roberto Carnero’s essays on the Italian gay filmmaker and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini. About 15 percent of his words were crossed out. On some pages, only a few words were visible. “The young people who come here are absolutely free people,” said Rybakov, who was disqualified from the election because of a post he wrote after Navalny died in prison in what five European countries said was poisoning. “They want no one to tell them what color their hair should be, what clothes to wear, what to say, what to think, who to love, where to work or what teacher to study with,” he added. Yabloko’s meetings spoke of the psychological comfort of talking to other people who opposed the war. Many of the questions Rybakov answered addressed a growing rift between opposition forces inside Russia centered around Yabloko and those forced into exile, including Navalny’s team. They have disagreed over the best strategy for voters to try to express their discontent in the elections. As Rybakov spoke one recent evening, it emerged that another Yabloko candidate, Aleksandr Muravyov, had been excluded from the election. Another party had filed a complaint alleging that Mr. Muravyov’s use of the slogan “For a free and unblocked Internet” created a negative image of other candidates and parties.
