IN ONE SENSE the result of Russia’s “presidential election”, held between March 15th and 17th, has been known for weeks. Targets set by the Kremlin for regional authorities, which were leaked to Russian independent media, specified that the turnout should between 70% and 80% and that 75-85% of the votes should go to Vladimir Putin. The final figure by which Mr Putin is officially purported to have been reaffirmed as president will have little to do with the actual number of people who voted for him.

No room has been left for accidents. None of the candidates who had spoken against Russia’s war in Ukraine was allowed to stand. Threats and coercion were the main instruments of Mr Putin’s campaign. Electronic voting allows plenty of scope for manipulation. In Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia, residents were in effect forced to cast ballots at gunpoint. This will help ensure the “special electoral procedure”, as Russian wags have dubbed it, goes as planned. In the far east, where the polls closed eight hours before those in Moscow, zealous officials exceeded expectations: some polling stations reported turnout of 100%.

In another sense, however, the three-day voting procedure has presented a real contest—one between two images of Russia. On the one hand, the Kremlin employed tremendous coercion to create the impression of unanimous, enthusiastic support for the 71-year-old dictator. On the other hand, protests during the voting showed that the country harbours a great deal of pent-up resentment against Mr Putin and his usurpation of power.

The Kremlin’s strategy had two seemingly contradictory elements, according to Golos, an independent election-monitoring group. (Golos continues its work even though it has been stigmatised as a “foreign agent” and its co-founder, Grigoriy Melkonyants, imprisoned.) One was to discourage independently minded, politically active Russians from turning up at polling stations. Russians were told that the vote would be an uneventful ritual. In the state-controlled media the elections were mentioned more than a third less frequently than the 2018 elections had been. The three extra candidates placed on the ballot to create an appearance of choice polled around 5% or lower; they did not campaign, and all spoke approvingly of the war and of Mr Putin. One otherwise tame candidate who spoke against the war, Boris Nadezhdin, was disqualified after his drive for signatures to get on the ballot attracted worryingly long queues of people. Mr Putin was identified in state media not as a candidate but as president.

At the same time, the Kremlin herded public-sector workers (who depend on the state for their livelihood) to the polls. Large state and private firms were instructed to use a workday to bring their employees to polling stations (hence the decision to start the balloting on Friday) and to ensure they voted as instructed. Employees were told to vote at their workplaces, where they could be easily monitored, and to provide screenshots of their filled-in ballots. To prevent sabotage, the Kremlin created a geolocation voting app which ties the voter’s mobile-phone number to a particular polling station. The app only works at the station where the voter is registered.

Voters’ physical presence at polling stations had nothing to do with determining the outcome. They were there to provide a visual image of majority support for Mr Putin and his war. State television showed happy voters filling polling stations marked with the Latin letter V, one of the symbols of Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. “A great future awaits us,” said a middle-aged voter interviewed on state television. “Our mighty country is getting even mightier,” a young female voter echoed. Those who could not be directly controlled by their employers received text messages encouraging them to vote from home electronically, promising free prizes (ranging from a restaurant meal to a package holiday).

In addition to such carrots, the Kremlin also wielded a stick. Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader who died in prison in the Arctic a month before the “elections”, had encouraged voters to all go to the polls at noon, and to vote against Mr Putin, spoil their ballot paper or simply show their opposition by lengthening the queue. The government warned that anyone who did so would suffer consequences. The prosecutor-general’s office issued repeated warnings against arriving “simultaneously at a certain date and time”.

Despite the threats (and fears of provocation by security services), precisely at midday queues of protest voters started to form across the country. It is hard to establish how many people turned up for such silent “noon against Putin” protests. But photos posted on social media showed queues stretching for hundreds of metres, with helmeted police and prison vans waiting nearby. Protesters disseminated photos of their ballot papers marked “no to war” and “Putin is a thief and murderer”. Many crossed out Mr Putin’s name and replaced it with “Navalny”. Some voters in Moscow held on to their ballots, took them to the cemetery where Navalny is buried and placed them at his grave. Long queues formed at polling stations abroad, as well: Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny’s widow, joined “noon against Putin” in Berlin.

The protests cannot alter the Kremlin’s predetermined result. But they do affect the perception of Mr Putin’s legitimacy in the eyes of many Russians, including some of his own bureaucrats. They also show that, far from being united in complying with the regime, many Russians will seize any chance to protest—at least if not faced with a high risk of prison. Several participants in the “noon against Putin” protests in Moscow said they had felt the same atmosphere of inspired solidarity as at Navalny’s funeral on March 1st.

Although the protests were peaceful and legal, the Kremlin is unlikely to leave the protesters in peace. Before the elections, volunteers who collected signatures for Mr Nadezhdin were attacked by thugs. On March 12th Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s chief of staff, was assaulted and beaten up outside his home in Vilnius in Lithuania. There was sporadic violence at some polling stations (a few Molotov cocktails were lobbed) and a mysterious telephone hoax led some voters to disfigure ballots with dye. Whoever was behind them, these incidents could serve as another excuse for the Kremlin to engage in more repression—as if it needed one. For many Russians, the coercion employed to get Mr Putin reconfirmed will leave a bad aftertaste. The election’s result was predetermined; what comes after it is not. ■