It’s hard to write about the Russian Presidential election, not because it is particularly difficult to understand but because the normal language of such things can’t describe it. There are candidates, but their names can appear on the ballot only if the Kremlin allows it. There is a campaign, but candidates are allowed to appear on television only if the Kremlin O.K.s it. There are, usually, debates, but Vladimir Putin, who has been in power in Russia for eighteen years and is running for another six-year term, doesn’t deign to take part in them. There are opinion polls, but their results are adjusted to fit the probable result of the vote. And then there is the vote, but its outcome is preordained. In other words, the event scheduled for March 18, 2018, is not an election, but it is called one.

Russians face the choice between “voting” in the “election” and boycotting it. The decision is harder than it may seem. The boycott argument is clear: taking part in an obvious travesty serves only to legitimize its architects. Proponents of participation, on the other hand, argue that an election, even a sham one, puts stress on the regime, thereby creating a chance for change. The Kremlin goes to great lengths to ensure that the spectacle is empty—why make their job easier? Put more simply, every person who boycotts the election increases the number of percentage points by which Putin stands to win; this argument is suspect, however, since the relationship between official election results and actual votes cast is uncertain.

All the same arguments have been made before. It’s not the first or even the second or third time that Russia is holding a sham election. Six long years ago, when Putin last had himself “elected,” two of his most prominent opponents—the chess champion turned politician Garry Kasparov and the longtime politician Boris Nemtsov—called for a boycott. But the anti-corruption blogger Alexey Navalny opposed this call. “There is no mobilizing message in the call to a boycott,” he argued. “It just says, ‘Stay home, watch TV, be outraged.’ But we spend all day watching TV and being outraged as it is.” Nor, he argued, would a boycott succeed in significantly lowering voter turnout.

In December, 2011, following a blatantly rigged parliamentary election, Russians suddenly took to the streets to protest. It seemed that the whole country was swept up in the demonstrations: people protested all over the country, and famous writers, musicians, and actors joined in. Even a television host named Ksenia Sobchak, a young woman known to have close ties to the Putin family (her father was Putin’s first boss in politics), joined the fight. Navalny, Nemtsov, and Kasparov emerged as the most visible organizers of the protests. Then, in March, 2012, Putin claimed victory, with sixty-three per cent of the vote, and moved quickly to crack down on his opponents. In 2013, Kasparov was forced to emigrate. Nemtsov was killed in 2015. Navalny has been repeatedly dragged into court on charges of fraud and embezzlement. In the summer of 2013, he was sentenced to a five-year prison term, which was changed to a suspended sentence when thousands of people again took to the streets, risking arrest. At the end of 2014, Navalny was sentenced to house arrest, and his brother was imprisoned—in effect, taken hostage.

Navalny has appealed all of his convictions to the European Court on Human Rights, where he has won every time. Most recently, the European court labelled Navalny’s 2014 conviction and sentence “arbitrary”. But the Russian Ministry of Justice is considering an appeal, so, for now, Navalny remains a convicted felon in Russia and his brother remains behind bars. In spite of unrelenting attacks—in addition to being brought up on charges, Navalny has been assaulted physically—he has built his anti-corruption blog into a large, professionally staffed investigative organization that continues to expose corruption among Russian officials and to publicize the findings through its phenomenally popular YouTube channel. This year, Navalny has also twice called for large-scale protests, which have brought more Russians out into the streets in more cities than ever before. Still, these protests are not exactly political action: each one of the participants comes out heeding Navalny’s call, but all of them are not acting together—and, when the protests are over, they go home to watch TV and be outraged. This year, Navalny has tried to register as a candidate for President. If he were allowed to campaign, he would finally be able to gather his supporters into a political organization.

It would have taken a pathological kind of optimism to entertain the possibility that the Kremlin would allow Navalny to be registered as a candidate—to campaign and to have his name appear on the ballot in March. Russian law bans convicted felons from running for office, so the formal legal groundwork for rejecting Navalny’s application had been laid (notwithstanding the E.C.H.R. decision). But, even before Navalny tried to register as a candidate, things got complicated. Sobchak, the television host, declared her own candidacy. Her candidacy appeared to have the Kremlin stamp of approval: one of the hallmarks of an “election” is the presence of a candidate apparently oppositional enough to lend the spectacle a sort of legitimacy but tame enough not to be a threat. Six years ago, this role was played by the billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, who told me at the time that he had been directly asked by a Kremlin operative to enter politics. (Prokhorov now lives in New York.) Unlike Navalny, Sobchak was given airtime on government-controlled television. But she sounded nothing like a token candidate: she spoke up against the Russian occupation of Crimea and in favor of L.G.B.T. rights. She positioned herself explicitly as a protest candidate, asking everyone who opposes Putin to vote for her; she dubbed her own candidacy “none of the above.”

In a convoluted and striking stunt, Sobchak attended Putin’s giant annual press conference, on December 14th, where she was allowed to ask a question. “I have a question about competition during this election,” she said, and proceeded to voice a question that Navalny had publicly asked her to pose. She mentioned the trumped-up charges against Navalny, and she noted that even she had had difficulty campaigning, because people were too frightened to rent space to her or distribute her campaign literature. “People understand that to be in the opposition in Russia means that you will either be killed or imprisoned, or something else of the sort will happen to you. My question is: Why does this happen? Are the authorities frightened of honest competition?”

Putin gave a rambling, partly incoherent answer, in which, without naming Navalny, he accused him of wanting to “destabilize” Russia. “This cannot be allowed!” he said, to applause from his handpicked audience of several hundred.

On Monday, Navalny’s application went before the Central Election Commission. The video of the proceeding, posted by Navalny’s organization, is painful to watch: it is the battle of man against bureaucracy, the sort that Hannah Arendt described as the “rule by Nobody.” Navalny laid out the case for registering him as a candidate, noting that his convictions had been deemed invalid by the E.C.H.R. and calling on the election officials to exercise their right to act independently in accordance with the law. In response, the commission chairwoman claimed to be helpless to register Navalny, and proceeded to accuse him of raising money under false pretenses and of “making idiots out of young people.” Hard as he tried, Navalny could not get the officials to engage with the substance of his argument. The commission voted unanimously to deny him registration.

As soon as the commission meeting was over, Navalny posted a prerecorded video calling on Russians to boycott the “election.” Sobchak responded by quoting him back to himself, repeating his six-year-old statement on the futility of staying home and raging at the television. “Elections remain the only way to change anything,” she wrote. Of course, she is assuming that there is, in fact, a way to change something in Russia.