As a new Russian election season begins, the Kremlin’s fraudsters are working overtime

MOSCOW — Over the past week, Russia’s political parties have been submitting nomination papers for their candidates in September’s parliamentary election. In some cases, gathering the documents has proved more difficult than in others.

One such case involves Yabloko, the last (genuine) opposition party that still retains ballot access — a relic of Russia’s brief stint with democracy in the 1990s. Its list of candidates for the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, includes Andrei Pivovarov, an opposition activist held in pretrial detention and facing up to six years in prison on a charge of belonging to an “undesirable organization” (in his case, the now-defunct Open Russia, founded by exiled Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky). Arrested in May onboard a Polish passenger plane (a tactic echoing Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko), Pivovarov is among the nearly 400 individuals in Russia recognized by human rights groups as political prisoners — and the only one to run in this year’s election.