Why did no one seem to care when Vladimir Putin stole Russia’s election last year? Garry Kasparov on how one former Soviet intelligence officer has dominated the world’s largest country.

As soon as Russia’s parliamentary election results were announced on September 20, 2021, opposition parties, independent observers, and Western countries decried blatant ballot-stuffing to favor President Vladimir Putin’s party, United Russia. Election authorities credited the party with about 50 percent of the national vote, despite preliminary results and pre-election polling projecting a far lower tally. The distribution of votes allowed United Russia to maintain a constitutional majority in the Duma, Russia’s legislature. Protests against the vote-rigging were nearly nonexistent, as the only party to organize a demonstration defending free and fair elections was, in a historical irony, the Communist Party. And despite criticism of the tainted vote from the United States and the European Union, democratic countries spared Putin any repercussions from stealing the election. Why didn’t he face any international consequences—or even any significant opposition in Russia—for falsifying election results?

Garry Kasparov, one of the greatest chess players in history, is a longtime Putin critic who fled Russia in 2013 and now serves as the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation. In Kasparov’s view, Putin’s power in Russia has been almost untouchable, regardless of the level of public support he might have. He controls an enormous financial arsenal, including the country’s entire budget, filled with revenue from gas and oil exports, and he has the obedience of the country’s oligarchs. Western European democracies have shied away from confronting Putin, Kasparov explains, because they depend on Russia for natural gas, a dependence reinforced by the recently completed Nord Stream 2 pipelines—which were set to transport gas directly from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea, until Germany froze the project two weeks ago. As Kasparov sees it, the years leading up to the invasion of Ukraine were a phase of retreat from U.S. global engagement, which has helped leave autocrats like Putin secure.

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Michael Bluhm: What happened in the elections?

Garry Kasparov: When you use the word elections in Russia, you have to put it in quotation marks, because it’s not elections. It’s a charade. It’s a decoration.

Fifteen years ago, the organization I founded there—the United Civil Front—declared that the regime would never change through the ballot. People pointed at us and said, Radicals! They want revolution. We were pragmatists. We knew that, once KGB, always KGB.

With the worsening economic situation, growing dissatisfaction and apathy, and a rejection of the regime’s policies, they have to add more and more fraudulent votes to their tally. The latest report I saw from experts said that United Russia got an extra 14 million votes. That’s 50 percent of what they got overall. It shows that there’s no bottom.

As Joseph Stalin used to say, It doesn’t matter how you vote. What’s important is who counts. It’s very important for the free world to understand that it’s a charade, and it has nothing to do with the will of the Russian people. Russia is a one-man dictatorship, and the dictator finds it convenient to use this procedure to keep some democratic decorations to cover his dictatorial powers.

More from Garry Kasparov at The Signal:

“The main source of his power is the money he controls. We can say with certainty that Putin controls more money than any other individual in human history. The funds that he could move probably reach over $1 trillion. When you start looking at the Russian budget, and all the funds that are under the control of the Russian government, and some of the oligarchs’ fortunes that naturally will follow Putin’s orders, it’s an insane amount of money.”

“Putin knows that he can buy almost anyone. He is not shy to use this enormous financial power to buy favors, politicians, and businesspeople. Look at the influence that Putin exercises outside of Russia—if you told me 20 years ago that the KGB would be able to control so many layers of political, economic, and social life in the free world, I would have laughed in your face.”

“The regime is getting more repressive. Anyone expressing his or her opinion about it, even with a tweet—or a retweet—can be prosecuted. You can spend two years in jail for a tweet if a local party boss or local KGB chief decides that it hurts him.”

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How did a gas pipeline from Russia to Germany become central to the fate of Ukraine? Anatol Lieven on the intense game of diplomacy going on with Moscow, Berlin, Washington, and Kyiv.

Why are elected authoritarians losing public support? Steven Levitsky on how voter frustration is turning against them.

Is China in danger of financial collapse? Victor Shih on the huge structural risks underlying the economy of the People’s Republic.