Moscow's mayoral election may seem like just another Russian election. The incumbent, Sergei S. Sobyanin, a loyal ally of President Vladimir V. Putin, is projected to win by a wide margin. His only real challenger stands practically no chance.
Still, the Moscow campaign is a big deal. The challenger is Aleksei A. Navalny, 37, an anti-corruption activist turned politician. In July, many in Russia watched in disbelief as this harsh critic of Mr. Putin was cleared by the Kremlin to take part in the race. Now Muscovites are watching with amusement as their city is transformed into a lively political stage, the likes of which Russia has never seen before. Mr. Navalny’s campaign has scattered kiosks all around Moscow in which workers distribute campaign literature and stickers. Mr. Navalny himself comes to mix with voters at these “cubes” or at Metro stations far from central Moscow. Thousands of unpaid volunteers, managed through a special Web site, have been passing out leaflets in the streets, and the campaign raises funds openly.
All of these techniques are new to Russians, and seem surreal in contrast with the top-down, financially murky way Russia has conducted its political business until now. Even if the outcome of this race is not in doubt, Mr. Navalny’s novel tactics have encouraged Russians in the street to speak candidly with his campaign workers, giving the feel of a genuine democratic contest.
For the 14 years of his rule, Mr. Putin has been taking the Russian political process in an unmistakably authoritarian direction — filtering out the opposition, entrenching insiders in key public offices, making election results as predictable as possible.
Direct gubernatorial elections were banned years ago, but were restored in 2012, as were single-member constituencies. But electoral blocs are still not allowed on the ballot. Officials’ performances are judged on the election results they can produce, an invitation to bully the opposition and manipulate the results.
Simply put, the Kremlin has used elections as a tool to keep the established regime in place, not to help choose new leaders.
So what is Mr. Navalny doing in this race?
First, we need to ask whether Mr. Putin has suddenly decided that an election is not a tool for manipulation after all, but a way for the people to choose their leaders. Has he reversed course?
Yes, say his aides, he has. Vyacheslav V. Volodin, head of the presidential administration’s domestic politics directorate, swears that his powerful agency is now responsible for keeping elections transparent and legitimate.
But there is a context. It was precisely a lack of transparency and legitimacy that left the parliamentary election results of 2011 suspect in many Russians’ eyes and brought about a wave of urban political protest. Mr. Navalny was one of the faces of that movement.
Caught off guard by the popular anger, the Kremlin pledged a return to more inclusive electoral practices. That’s when gubernatorial elections were reinstated, party legislation was liberalized and many restrictions were lifted. The new rules were still restrictive enough, though, to keep people like Mr. Sobyanin in and people like Mr. Navalny out.
Which brings us to this summer, and two decisions: to call an early election in Moscow, and to allow Mr. Navalny to run. Not only did the Kremlin permit Mr. Navalny to participate, but it also deemed his inclusion so necessary that it helped him quickly collect enough signatures to register as a candidate.
If the Kremlin needed Mr. Navalny in the race, though, it still didn’t want him to win. After all, running Moscow is not for outsiders; whoever governs the capital is considered to hold a third-rank post in the country’s political hierarchy. (Nikita S. Khrushchev and Boris N. Yeltsin both ran Moscow before vaulting to the top.)
The leadership had little reason to fear a Navalny victory. It would be hard enough to mount a serious campaign in two summer months in a city of 11.5 million, by official count. And he had been convicted only in July of embezzlement. That conviction, widely believed to have been fabricated by the Kremlin, is under appeal. So the final verdict will be watched with even more interest than Mr. Navalny’s electoral showing.
Still, Moscow wonders why Mr. Putin needed Mr. Navalny in the race at all. Was it also to keep Mr. Sobyanin humble? (The incumbent, it is said, has serious political ambitions.) Or did Mr. Putin’s political managers have some other ingenious plan?
Whatever it was, the unintended consequences of the decision to help Mr. Navalny may prove unsettling to them. He has already done the impossible, boosting his support from the low single digits to 20 percent or more in a matter of weeks.
And his campaign has shown Russians that politics can be different. Moscow residents have seen that a principled stance by one person can force authorities to react. Thousands of young volunteers will remember the thrill of helping run a first-of-its-kind political campaign. And future politicians won’t be able to dismiss the campaign techniques Mr. Navalny introduced.
One way to read the Moscow election is as a runoff between two paths to a future transformation of Russia. The clever, smooth actor accepted by the ruling elite will win the office. But Aleksei Navalny will have changed the rules of Russian politics.
Maxim Trudolyubov is the opinion page editor at the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti.