Next month, on September 18, Russian voters will head to the polls to decide who gets the 450 seats up for grabs in the State Duma—the lower house of the federal parliament. While Duma hopefuls have been busy collecting signatures and mobilizing their support bases for months already, formal political advertising was prohibited until August 20 (twenty-eight days before the actual voting, with campaigning banned again on the day before the election). Second only to the presidential election, the competition for Duma seats is the most important political contest in Russia. Contents As the country straps in for the final three weeks of campaigning, RuNet Echo looks back at the most memorable political advertisements in Russia over the past two decades, highlighting some of the strangest, silliest, and scariest videos put out by politicians seeking elected office. We’ll start with what could very well be the worst advertisement by a politician ever made. An inconceivable 11 minutes and 20 seconds long, this ad is a musical number featuring a dancing police officer, a tap-dancing professor, a singing pilot, and a whole lot of other people singing, dancing, dance-fighting, and generally just bouncing around. The video didn’t stop 5.5 million people from voting for Yavlinsky, however, but it wasn’t enough to get the liberal opposition candidate into the runoff vote against Boris Yeltsin, who defeated Gennady Zyuganov on July 3 and kept his job as Russian president. Founded in 1995 by then Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, “Our Home” was a one-time political vehicle for the Yeltsin administration. It ultimately dissolved and merged with “United Russia,” the country’s current ruling political party. In 1995, however, Nash Dom had just been founded, and it fashioned itself not as an insider force, but as new blood for a legislative body with too much squabbling and clownery. The beginning of the video shows mayhem on the floor of the Duma, with deputies fighting, reading books with swastikas, and acting generally stupid. The rest of the ad is a mix of industrial footage and Chernomyrdin speaking from an impressive-looking office (don’t miss the dramatic removal of his reading glasses). Four years after trying to win over voters with a musical campaign, Grigory Yavlinsky chose a very different approach in his presidential TV spots in 2000. The advertisements recycle the same theme in different nightmarish near-future scenarios: two prisoners sit in what appears to be a post-Soviet Gulag; two soldiers dodge bullets and fire back at an unseen enemy; a man and woman wait in a panicked food line. In every setting, one person asks the other who they voted for in the recent election. The second character says they were against all the candidates and skipped the election. Lamenting the decision not to vote, the person then says, “I should have voted for the economist—that Yavlinsky fellow,” implying that a Yavlinsky defeat would bring about internment camps, war, and bread lines. Hardcore though the advertisement was, it couldn’t resuscitate Yavlinsky’s political career. He got 1.2 million fewer votes than in 1996, and Vladimir Putin won his first presidential election with ease. While Yavlinsky’s 1996 song-and-dance pitch for the presidency is dated and unbearable today, it was a video in 2003 by SPS that was more immediately damaging. Featuring Russia’s so-called “young reformers” of the 1990s, the ad shows Anatoly Chubais, Boris Nemtsov, and Irina Khakamada aloft in a private luxury jet, discussing matters while typing on a laptop. The video was meant to emphasize the “personal success” of the party’s leadership, but Russians widely mocked the ad for demonstrating the candidates’ wealth and alienation from ordinary voters. In 1999, SPS entered the Duma as the parliament’s fourth-largest party with 29 seats. In the 2003 election, however, it only narrowly remained in the Duma, winning just 3 seats. (In 2008, a year after failing to win any seats in the 2007 election, SPS formally disbanded.) “Let’s Clean the Trash From Moscow!” is one of the most infamous political advertisements in Russian history. The video generated so much controversy that it was actually banned and Rodina was barred from the election, following a complaint by a rival party, claiming that the ad incited ethnic hatred. The video shows dark-skinned Caucasian immigrants tossing watermelon rinds to the ground, complaining about a passing Russian woman pushing a stroller. Party leader Dmitry Rogozin and Yuri Popov, a pro-Rodina Moscow City Duma member, then approach the immigrants and tell them to clear out. Rodina later collapsed as a political party (reviving in another form in 2012), and Rogozin went on to become Russia’s ambassador to NATO.