“I can’t rule out that all this will lead to mass protests,” Mr. Zyuganov said Saturday on Twitter. “I am sure that people won’t stand for a blatant substitution of their choice.”
Last summer, widespread fraud in the presidential election in neighboring Belarus set off huge street protests — a scenario that analysts say the Kremlin is determined to prevent from occurring in Russia. Buses of riot police officers were stationed around central Moscow throughout the weekend, but it was too soon to tell whether any protests would materialize.
The authorities appeared to be pulling out all the stops to get the typical United Russia base to the polls: public sector workers, members of the military and security services, and pensioners. In central Moscow on Friday, groups of men in civilian clothes, all with similar, tightly cropped haircuts, lined up outside a polling station that covers the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Some acknowledged that they were members of the military and that they had been “strongly advised” by their commanders to vote on Friday. Others said that they had been given time off to vote before the weekend, which they planned to spend out of town.
And many Russians continue to support Mr. Putin. Outside a Moscow polling place, a schoolteacher, Tatyana Kolosova, 46, said she had voted against United Russia to inject some “competition into the political sphere.” She said that she hoped for a government shake-up after the elections that would result in more being done to reduce unemployment and support private business.
But she dismissed Mr. Navalny as “an enemy of our country” and promised to vote for Mr. Putin if he ran for a fifth term as president in 2024, recalling the relative poverty and chaos of the 1990s, before he came to power.
“I’m thankful that God gave us such a leader,” she said.
Adam Satariano contributed reporting from London.