As the summer of 2020 came to a close, Nikolai Loktev found himself in an odd position. He was the mayor of a collection of 30 or so tiny villages in Russia, the largest named Povalikhino (here's a map), home to just under 250 people. And he was up for re-election. It shouldn't have been much of a contest; Loktev was supported by the pro-Putin United Russia party, and any efforts to oppose the ruling party in Russia are done at peril. In fact, as the weeks to election day ticked by, Loktev found himself running unopposed.

And that was the problem. Russian elections are famously illegitimate, and the ruling party knows it. So they don't allow for uncontested elections. The appearance of a choice, even if mostly false, lends credence to the lie that the people are actually in charge, as the New York Times explains:

That’s why Russia, a number of other former Soviet states and a growing number of countries practice so-called managed democracy, where elections take place on schedule, like clockwork, but the incumbent virtually never loses.

To achieve this, the police squelch real political opposition, and election commissions bump promising candidates off the ballot with technicalities — such as an electoral ban in Russia against the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, who was also incapacitated with poison before this year’s local elections.

These repressive measures have proven to be effective — sometimes too effective. The problem then becomes finding supposed opponents to play the role of losers, to keep up the facade of democratic process.