House raids, bugging devices, threats, violence and demeaning posters are just a few things Vladimir Putin's critics have faced while trying to run for city parliament in the Russian capital. Two years after President Putin was elected for a historic third term - facing mass protests in Moscow where less than half of the population voted for him - the Kremlin strongman is riding high in the polls while the opposition is all but stamped out.
And as the authorities seek to tighten their grip on society after seizing the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in March, even the Moscow city duma - a decorative body stripped of almost all decision-making power - seems to be considered a potential threat. The 35-seat body that discusses matters in Moscow - which has a population of over 11 million and annual budget of about $50 billion - became the latest target of Kremlin foes scrambling around for at least a modicum of political representation.
But out of two dozen independent candidates who sought to run for office in the September election for the city duma, only two were able to file documents in time for Friday's deadline. "It's because of fear. They have to show that they can squash anybody," said Nikolai Lyaskin, an ally of opposition leader Alexei Navalny who tried to qualify for the polls, but failed due to what he said was constant harassment.
Over the past month Lyaskin, who also faces alleged politically-motivated embezzlement charges over Navalny's crowdfunded mayoral campaign last year, says he found a tracking and bugging device in his car and constantly dealt with provocateurs at campaign events who "yelled about killings in eastern Ukraine" where pro-Russian separatists are fighting against the Western-backed government forces. But with protest icon Navalny held under house arrest on graft charges the opposition say are meant to cut him off from average Russians, his closest colleagues like Lyaskin face not just hostility from the authorities but renewed apathy from Muscovites. "What changed (since Putin became president) is that people stopped believing that change is possible," said Lyaskin, who works on anti-corruption projects in a group Navalny founded.
Another independent candidate Olga Romanova received threats and was put on posters calling her a "fascist" who receives money from Ukraine's ultra-nationalist group Right Sector - an organisation banned and vilified in Russia amid the crisis in Ukraine. Despite endorsement from several celebrities, Romanova was also unable to file her candidacy, which due to the latest restrictive legislation requires gathering about 5,000 precisely verified signatures with passport information in the neighbourhood.
Navalny, who received 27 percent in the mayoral polls but has now all but disappeared from public view, slammed the city duma elections as "fake" and pointed out on his website that Arnold Schwarzenegger only had to gather 65 signatures to be put on the ballot for the California governorship. "That was the instinct of the regime: to erect a barrier that high," said political analyst Alexei Makarkin of the Center of Political Technologies.
"The opposition is weakened, it is in decline, many people are disappointed in it," he said. "The mood has changed. People are afraid to put their names down for the opposition, afraid of being fired, summoned to the police, afraid of war and instability."
"Nobody wants to be the fifth column," he added, using the term Putin has revived recently to describe domestic dissent amid Moscow's stand-off with the West over Ukraine. "A fear has returned from the Soviet era." Protest moods have plummeted since the opposition rallies of 2011 and 2012, and are currently at the lowest point for more than a decade, according to data from independent pollster Levada Centre released on Friday. Eighty-one percent said any political protests in their town were unlikely, the highest in the 17 years that Levada has polled on the issue. Only nine percent said they would go to a rally if there was one in their area.
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