Disenchanted Russians Seek Vote ‘Against All Candidates’

MOSCOW — Russians, legendary for their stoicism, have suffered quietly under their share of venal and unscrupulous rulers over the centuries. But a political movement has sprung up that argues the time has come to say nyet to politicians.

One wing of the movement clambered onto Lenin’s mausoleum in Red Square in December and hoisted aloft a banner with the simple slogan “Against everyone.”

Another faction, the Nyet Campaign, hopes to recruit former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to urge voters to turn out in force for the March 26 presidential election and exercise their right to mark ballots “against all candidates.”

Others are campaigning to boycott the elections entirely.

Acting President Vladimir V. Putin is expected to hold on to power in the election. But the Nyet Campaign is urging Russians to register a strong protest vote against an electoral process that it argues was manipulated to maneuver him to victory. Putin was elevated to his post by the Dec. 31 resignation of his predecessor, President Boris N. Yeltsin, and the election was moved up three months.

Advocates of a protest vote run the gamut from anarchists to ex-socialists, but they have in common an endearing eccentricity and an idealistic refusal to grapple with political reality that seems to symbolize much about the nature of politics done the Russian way.

They make up just one small thread in Russia’s political web, but they are intensely factionalized and tangled in complex theoretical debate about the correct way forward. They are no less divided than are the nation’s liberal democratic or Communist factions.

Nearly 2 million Russians checked the “against all candidates” box in the December parliamentary elections. The category drew more votes than 20 of the 26 parties in the race and topped the ballot in some constituencies--which, under election rules, forced a new poll in those areas.

Given these numbers, it seems that the various advocates of a protest vote could win support--if only they could run a united and well-managed campaign.

But wading against a tide of public apathy in an election in which the result is not in doubt, their message seems doomed to be lost in the confusion of the competing protests.

Vladimir V. Pribylovsky, coordinator of the Nyet Campaign, looks down on the boykotisty, as he calls them--the groups pushing for an election boycott--and laughs at the artistic anarchists who climbed onto the Lenin mausoleum with their banner.

The Nyet Campaign hopes to persuade a majority of voters to cast their ballots “against all candidates,” which would invalidate the presidential poll and force new elections--a process that, in theory, could go on until a candidate wins a majority.

But even as he spells out the goals, Pribylovsky, a veteran of small opposition splinter groups, admits that the plan is hopeless.

“I think Putin will win,” he says, “and if he doesn’t, the ballot will be rigged” to make him appear the victor.

Pribylovsky contends that an election boycott would only make it easy for the authorities to falsify the results by giving them piles of unused ballot papers to cast.

“If the election results are to be rigged, then let them toil over it,” he says.

Claiming to represent the intellectual cream, the Nyet Campaign also distances itself from people who check the “against all candidates” box out of apathy.

“For me and my group, an ethical consideration is important,” Pribylovsky says. “We don’t want to join up with people who just don’t care.”

The anarchist Nongovernmental Control Group, responsible for the mausoleum banner, sees protest as bordering on a form of living art. It stages vivid and often crude acts: Members once gathered in Red Square to spell out an indecent Russian three-letter word with their bodies.

Its most recent protest effort, in mid-December, foiled by the FSB, the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB, was an attempt to post signs reading “polling booth” on public toilets.

The group, which plans another stunt before the presidential poll, says it will consider itself successful if 10% to 15% of voters opt to oppose all candidates.

“All we want to do is to send the authorities a clear message,” says Anatoly F. Osmolovsky, “chairman” of the group, “that something is seriously wrong with our state if several million people took the trouble to come to the polls and express their mistrust and contempt by voting against all candidates.”