The New Yorker: Russia's Election: Every Choice Was a Bad One

Suppose you had to choose between eating nothing at all and eating something that would immediately make you throw up. Or, say, between walking on hot coals and standing naked in an icy rain. Or between sleeping on a bed of nails and under a blanket of wood screws. The Russian language, honed over centuries of impossible choices, has a colloquial expression for that: oba khuzhe, meaning “both are worse.” [...]

There is also the issue of the country itself. The number of electoral districts has grown by two since the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Some people—most notably Garry Kasparov, the chess champion turned political activist in exile—have argued that the illegal annexation rendered the elections and the parliament itself illegitimate, and participation in them immoral. Others—most notably Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oil tycoon and political prisoner turned political activist in exile—argued that any opening in the political system, no matter how illusory, can and should be used against the Kremlin. Khodorkovsky funded a small slate of candidates for parliament and local legislatures—not, he told me, with an eye to winning but with an eye to helping activists gain political experience that they will be able to use in an eventual age after Vladimir Putin.

Some of Khodorkovsky’s candidates ran as independents, and others joined an opposition party called parnas—an acronym for the Party of People’s Freedom—which was allowed on the ballot for the first time, as was a quasi-opposition party called Yabloko, which has been around for nearly a quarter century. Its leader, Grigory Yavlinsky, who served as an economic adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev in the late nineteen-eighties, has been a mild critic of Putinism. Two parties that criticize the party line seemed like an embarrassment of riches. This caused endless debates on strategy, oba khuzhe-style. True, some reformers argued, Yabloko has never in its existence taken a brave stand, but its chances of getting into parliament seemed marginally better than those of parnas, so give your vote to Yabloko. In the same vein, several opposition activists campaigned for an elderly historian who supports the ban on “propaganda of homosexuality” and would like to ban abortion, because at least he opposed the annexation of Crimea.

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