It’s official: Meduza dissects Russia’s election results, the success of the Communists and ’New People,’ and how Navalny’s ‘Smart Vote’ fared

Voting is done in Russia's 2021 parliamentary races, and the results are now clear: United Russia maintained its supermajority, preserving its absolute control over the legislature; the Communist Party (KPRF) performed much better than it did five years ago; and the right-wing Liberal Democrats (LDPR) had one of their worst showings ever. Also, for the first time since Russia introduced party-list proportional representation, there will be a fifth faction: businessman Alexey Nechayev's New People (a group created with the Kremlin's help). As the dust settles, the biggest unresolved questions surround electronic voting -- specifically, how it affected results in and around Moscow, where online tallies catapulted the candidates endorsed by Mayor Sergey Sobyanin to victories against oppositionists who led in offline counts. Meduza's Andrey Pertsev examines what a weekend of voting says about the direction of Russia's legislative politics. Original Article: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2021/09/22/it-s-official