As we approach the Russian elections, this is what’s happening on the inside

In 1787, so the story goes, Grigory Potemkin, keen to impress the Russian Empress Catherine The Great, built a portable picturesque village on the banks of the River Dnieper. As the Empress cruised down the river, the village would be dismantled overnight and reassembled further along the route, to charm Catherine again the next day.

There is dispute to this day about the veracity of the “Potemkin Village” tale, but this week there’s little doubt Russia is heading into what we can describe as a Potemkin election – a thin facade of democracy in which there can only be one winner: Vladimir Putin.

After this election, Putin will be approaching a term as effective leader of Russia longer than Leonid Brezhnev. And much like the Brezhnev era, Putin’s regime relies on enemies in order to keep some sort of momentum and avoid stagnation.

Putinism, such as it is, now has a take-on-all-comers approach, and is almost entirely driven by a vindictive streak. This is obvious in foreign policy, but equally so in Putin’s domestic assaults on dissent.

The President’s recent state of the nation address had a touch of the Bond villain about it, as the Putin outlined what he claimed were new Russian super weapons, capable of circumventing and penetrating any defence mechanism. The presentation came with a leitmotif: “You haven’t listened to us before; you will have to now.”

According to Putin, after the USSR collapsed Russia lost 23.8 per cent of its territory, 48 per cent of its population, 39.4 per cent of its industry, and 44.6 per cent of its military. He added: “It was not by chance that abroad, they said not USSR but Soviet Russia.”

Two days later, meeting his supporters at the huge Luzhniki arena to sing the national anthem with them, Putin dedicated a speech to his plans to “make Russia brighter”, and make the next decade “full of bright victories”. That’s pretty chilling if you think he believes that 14 now-independent states were actually part of Russia, not the USSR.

No, Russia is not really having an election on 18 March. While there are no real opposition candidates, Putin is not campaigning either. But his regime is busy, internally no less than externally.

A series of petty new laws have been enacted with the sole aim of making genuine, grassroots democratic action almost impossible. We at FIDH have counted 50 since Putin resumed his position as President in 2012.

Internally, Russians are discouraged from engaging with the outside world. As recently as 6 March, a Russian senate committee presented a report on “the negative influence of the West on Russian youth”. All of the West, in its totality, on all the youth.

Meanwhile, civil servants from army officers to firemen have essentially been told they are unable to travel outside the country, cutting off millions of people from contact with the outside.

Back in autumn, Russia issued a travel warning recommending that its citizens think twice before travelling abroad, saying the US was hunting for Russians to arrest around the world.

The Foreign Ministry statement warned Russian citizens that when abroad, they face a serious threat of arrest by other countries at Washington’s request, after which they could be extradited to the United States.

“Considering these circumstances, we strongly insist that Russian citizens carefully weigh up all the risks when planning trips abroad,” the Foreign Ministry said.

But it is civil society activists and human rights defenders – a section of society many democratic societies would be proud of – who face the most pressure at home.

State TV produces bizarre “documentaries” that present human rights defenders and independent media as corrupt and degenerate perverts and sell outs.

At the same time, NGOs and civil society groups find it almost impossible to receive independent funding, and fight for their existence through dozens of specially designed laws to make their life impossible.

In extreme cases, their headquarters are firebombed, or their leader arrested on ridiculous charges, as happened to the head office of Memorial in Chechnya recently.

In the more absurd cases, the Russian authorities develop a sudden interest in workplace health and safety – small NGOs have been known to be persecuted for having their wall not sufficiently fire-protected, or letting staff sit too close to computer screens.

Putin is not an anachronism; he’s a trendsetter. However flawed it might have been, post-Soviet Russia did have democratic functions. Those have now been effectively destroyed.

What’s more, the view that the independent rule of law and democratic institutions will triumph is now increasingly unfashionable, as demagogues from Trump to Duterte seek to bypass the state or bend it to their will. It’s no surprise their supporters look to Russia for inspiration.

The worst thing the rest of the world can do is accept Putin’s stranglehold on Russia as normal, or as less dangerous than what Russia does outside its borders.

The Kremlin knows this, which is why it spends so much money on propaganda that is not simply concerned with promoting the Russian view of the world, but also undermining the ideas of human rights and civil liberties; a world in which, when democracy is essentially meaningless, a Potemkin election is even better as the real thing.

Don’t fall for it.

Sacha Koulaeva is director of the Eastern Europe and Central Asia Desk at the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH)