In September 2023, the gubernatorial election in Omsk region played out with a precision that, to outside observers, looked like a foregone conclusion. The incumbent—a United Russia loyalist the Kremlin had installed two years earlier—took 78 percent of the vote. Turnout barely cleared 35 percent. The systemic opposition parties—the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR), and A Just Russia—each ran candidates who hammered the governor on housing and infrastructure while steering well clear of the war in Ukraine or the president’s role in regional appointments. No independent candidate made the ballot. No meaningful protest surfaced. The result was neither a surprise nor a scandal.
But reading this outcome as a simple top-down imposition misses the machinery that produced it. The Omsk election was not a script handed down from the Kremlin and performed by obedient actors. It was a plot—a narrative structure that had to accommodate multiple characters with competing interests, sequence events to build and release tension, and deliver a predetermined conclusion while preserving the look of genuine competition. The institution responsible for generating and managing that plot is the Domestic Policy Directorate (DPD) of the Presidential Administration, and its work reveals more about how Russian electoral authoritarianism actually functions than any stack of election-monitoring reports.
The DPD as Narrative Architect
The Domestic Policy Directorate is not a campaign consultancy. It does not write speeches, design posters, or run focus groups in the conventional sense. Its function is structural: it coordinates the informational, administrative, and personnel dimensions of regional elections to ensure that outcomes align with federal priorities while retaining enough surface-level unpredictability to sustain the regime’s legitimacy claims. In practice, the DPD operates as a plot generator for managed political competition, one that must reconcile the demands of multiple elite factions, regional power brokers, and the formal requirements of electoral law.
The metaphor is not frivolous. In narrative theory, a plot generator produces story structures by combining character archetypes, conflict types, and genre conventions according to a set of rules. The DPD performs an analogous function for regional elections. It takes a cast of characters—incumbent governors, challengers from systemic parties, potential spoilers, and the security apparatus that monitors them—and arranges them into a sequence of events that must satisfy several constraints at once. The outcome must be predictable enough to reassure federal elites that their interests are protected. It must be competitive enough to generate turnout figures that can be cited as evidence of public support. And it must be legible enough to regional populations that the result does not provoke the kind of open discontent that requires costly repression.
This is a coordination problem of considerable complexity, and it is the DPD’s institutional raison d’être. The directorate sits at the intersection of the Presidential Administration’s territorial oversight functions, its relations with the State Duma’s faction leaders, and its monitoring of regional elite dynamics. Its head, currently Sergei Kiriyenko, operates not as a campaign manager but as a kind of executive producer, setting the parameters within which regional political dramas unfold.
Character Development: Candidate Selection as Casting
The first act of any regional electoral plot is candidate selection, and here the DPD’s role is less about choosing winners than about managing the field of plausible contenders. In the 2023 cycle, this process was visible in Novosibirsk region, where the incumbent governor, Andrei Travnikov, faced a challenge from the KPRF’s Roman Yakovlev. Yakovlev, a former regional legislator with a background in agricultural policy, was not a genuine threat to Travnikov’s reelection. But his candidacy served a specific narrative function: it let the KPRF show its aging electorate that it still contested power, while giving Travnikov a foil against which he could position himself as a competent manager beset by ideological critics.
The DPD’s involvement in this casting process is indirect but decisive. The directorate does not typically dictate which specific individuals will run. Instead, it manages the conditions under which candidacies emerge. It signals to systemic opposition parties which races are open for genuine competition and which are closed. It negotiates with regional elites over the acceptable level of criticism that challengers can direct at incumbents. And it coordinates with the security services to ensure that candidates who might disrupt the plot—independents with genuine popular support, or figures backed by rival patronage networks—are excluded through administrative means: signature collection requirements, registration technicalities, or the sudden emergence of compromising information.
This is character development in the structural sense. The DPD is not writing dialogue for candidates; it is shaping the cast of characters so that the ensuing drama unfolds within acceptable parameters. A KPRF candidate who criticizes the governor’s housing policy is useful. A KPRF candidate who questions the legitimacy of the electoral system itself is not. The DPD’s task is to ensure that the former type appears on the ballot and the latter does not.
Plot Structure: Sequencing Events for Managed Tension
Once the cast is assembled, the DPD must sequence electoral events to produce a narrative arc that sustains public attention without generating uncontrolled escalation. This is where the analogy to screenwriting becomes precise. A well-constructed screenplay, as the StudioBinder guide to scriptwriting explains, relies on scene headings, act breaks, and character entrances to control pacing and audience expectation. The DPD performs a similar function for regional elections, structuring the campaign period into phases that build toward a climax—election day—while ensuring that no scene exceeds its allotted dramatic intensity.
Consider the 2023 mayoral election in Khabarovsk. The race attracted national attention because the incumbent, Sergei Kravchuk, was deeply unpopular, and the region had a history of protest voting dating back to the 2018 gubernatorial election that brought the LDPR’s Sergei Furgal to power. The DPD’s plot for Khabarovsk required careful calibration. The campaign was allowed to generate genuine heat: opposition candidates criticized Kravchuk’s management of public utilities, and local media covered the race with unusual vigor. But the DPD also ensured that the most dangerous potential challengers—those with ties to Furgal’s network or with independent financial resources—were excluded from the ballot through administrative means. The result was a race that felt competitive to voters but whose outcome was never in doubt. Kravchuk won with 52 percent, a figure low enough to suggest contestation but high enough to secure the seat.
This sequencing logic extends to the management of electoral violations. The DPD does not seek to eliminate all irregularities; that would be impossible and, from a narrative perspective, counterproductive. A certain level of visible procedural messiness—ballot-stuffing allegations in a remote precinct, a minor candidate disqualified on technical grounds—serves to reinforce the impression that elections are real events with real stakes. The DPD’s concern is not with the existence of violations but with their distribution. Violations must be localized enough that they do not become a national story, and they must be attributable to local actors rather than federal authorities. When a scandal does break, the DPD’s role is to contain its narrative implications: to ensure that the story becomes about a rogue local official rather than a systemic failure.
Factional Subplots: Managing Elite Competition Within the Script
The most demanding aspect of the DPD’s work is not managing opposition candidates but managing the competing factions within the regime itself. Regional elections are not only contests between the authorities and the opposition; they are also arenas in which different patronage networks compete for influence over personnel appointments, budget allocations, and access to the president. The DPD must generate a plot that accommodates these factional subplots without allowing any single network to capture the narrative.
In the 2023 elections, this dynamic was particularly visible in Krasnoyarsk region, where the gubernatorial race pitted the incumbent, Aleksandr Uss, against a field that included a candidate backed by the industrial conglomerate Norilsk Nickel. Uss, a figure with deep ties to the regional security apparatus, had fallen out of favor with certain federal elites who viewed his governance as insufficiently responsive to corporate interests. The DPD’s task was to manage a race in which the real competition was not between Uss and the opposition but between Uss and the industrial lobby that sought to replace him with a more pliable figure.
The DPD resolved this tension through a characteristic mechanism: it allowed the industrial-backed candidate to run a vigorous campaign that exposed Uss’s vulnerabilities, but it also ensured that the candidate’s registration was contingent on accepting a ceiling on his vote share. The result was a race that served as a warning to Uss—demonstrating that his position depended on federal forbearance—without actually removing him from office. The plot, in other words, was structured to discipline an incumbent rather than replace him, a function that would be invisible to analysts who treat elections solely as contests between regime and opposition.
The Genre Constraint: Why Elections Must Look Like Elections
Underlying all of this is a fundamental constraint that shapes the DPD’s work: Russian regional elections must remain legible as elections. The regime cannot simply announce results without a campaign, because the electoral process itself serves important legitimation functions. It provides a mechanism for measuring elite performance, a channel for signaling public mood, and a ritual that reinforces the constitutional order. But the regime also cannot allow elections to become genuinely competitive, because that would introduce uncertainty into personnel decisions that are meant to be controlled through informal bargaining.
This tension is what gives the DPD’s work its distinctive character. The directorate is not trying to produce perfect simulations of democratic competition. It is trying to produce electoral events that satisfy a specific set of genre conventions—the conventions of managed democracy—while accommodating the substantive interests of the elite networks that sustain the regime. The plot must be recognizable as an election plot, with candidates, campaigns, and a vote, but it must also deliver a predetermined outcome. This is a more demanding task than either pure authoritarian imposition or pure democratic competition, and it requires institutional capacities that are easily overlooked.
The Reedsy plot generator tool offers a useful analogy here. That tool allows writers to specify genre, tone, protagonist, conflict, and stakes, and then generates a structured outline that respects those parameters. The DPD operates similarly: it takes the genre of “managed regional election,” the tone of “competitive but controlled,” a protagonist in the form of the incumbent governor, a conflict structured around permissible criticism, and stakes that are high enough to generate turnout but low enough to preclude genuine uncertainty. The output is an electoral plot that satisfies all these constraints simultaneously.
Institutional Tensions: When the Plot Generator Malfunctions
No plot generator produces perfect output on every iteration, and the DPD’s record includes notable failures. The 2018 gubernatorial election in Khabarovsk, which produced Furgal’s surprise victory over the United Russia incumbent, was a case in which the DPD’s plot collapsed because it underestimated the depth of regional discontent and overestimated the incumbent’s capacity to mobilize administrative resources. The 2020 constitutional amendment vote, while not a regional election, revealed similar vulnerabilities: the DPD’s narrative management produced turnout figures that strained credulity and generated more international ridicule than domestic legitimation.
These failures are instructive because they reveal the institutional tensions that the DPD must constantly manage. The directorate sits at the intersection of multiple hierarchies: the Presidential Administration’s territorial directorates, the security services’ monitoring apparatus, the United Russia party structure, and the regional executive branches. Each of these actors has its own interests and its own information about conditions on the ground. The DPD’s plot must reconcile these competing perspectives into a single narrative, and when the reconciliation fails, the result is not a different plot but a visible breakdown in narrative coherence—a moment when the constructedness of the electoral process becomes apparent to participants and observers alike.
The 2023 elections saw fewer such breakdowns, in part because the DPD has refined its methods and in part because the political environment has become more constrained. The war in Ukraine has reduced the space for electoral contestation by elevating national security as a justification for administrative control. But the underlying institutional tensions remain, and they will reassert themselves when the political environment shifts.
Implications for Analysis
Understanding the DPD as a plot generator has several implications for how analysts should approach Russian regional elections. First, it suggests that the relevant unit of analysis is not the individual election but the cycle of elections that the DPD coordinates. The directorate thinks in terms of narrative arcs that span multiple regions and multiple years, and individual races make sense only within that broader structure.
Second, it implies that the most important electoral outcomes are often not the vote totals but the personnel and patronage adjustments that occur in the campaign’s wake. A governor who wins with 60 percent but loses control over a key budgetary portfolio has suffered a defeat that the electoral numbers will not capture. Analysts who focus exclusively on vote shares will miss the factional bargaining that the DPD’s plot is designed to facilitate.
Third, it underscores the importance of informal rules in Russian electoral governance. The DPD’s work is not codified in law or regulation. It operates through personal relationships, telephone calls, and the implicit understandings that structure elite behavior. To study Russian elections without studying these informal mechanisms is to study the script without understanding the production process that generated it.
Finally, the plot generator framework helps explain why Russian electoral authoritarianism has proven more durable than many Western analysts expected. The DPD’s narrative management does not simply suppress competition; it channels competition into forms that reinforce the regime’s control over personnel and resources. The systemic opposition parties are not merely tolerated; they are incorporated into the plot as characters whose presence makes the story more convincing. The regional elites are not simply commanded; they are given roles that allow them to demonstrate loyalty while pursuing their own interests within acceptable bounds. This is not a system that can be understood through the lens of democratic norms, but neither is it a simple dictatorship. It is a narrative production system, and the DPD is its most important institutional author.