In mid‑March 2026 the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature went to Mr. Nobody Against Putin by director David Borenstein and cinematographer Pavel Talankin. Until a few months ago Talankin was working at a school in the town of Karabash in Chelyabinsk Oblast, the subject of his film. In this piece we look at how the region from the Oscar‑winning film is preparing for the upcoming State Duma elections.
Are Karabash and Chelyabinsk Oblast really that dirty?
Chelyabinsk Oblast is one of the country’s largest industrial regions: it produces every fourth tonne of rolled steel, every tenth tonne of steel pipe and every fifth kilogram of pasta. The oblast is Russia’s monopoly producer of graphite (95%), magnesite (95%), metallurgical dolomite (71%) and talc (70%).
Unsurprisingly, the region has serious environmental problems: 52% of its territory is contaminated with industrial waste, some of it especially hazardous — benzopyrene, mercury, lead, chromium, manganese and a whole “bouquet” of carcinogenic gaseous substances. Add to that the numerous quarries and spoil heaps around the towns of Satka, Verkhny Ufaley, Kopeysk, Korkino, Yemanzhelinsk and Plast. In the 1950s part of the oblast was exposed to radioactive contamination as a result of an accident at the Mayak waste‑processing facility. The region has more “atomgrads” — towns belonging to the nuclear fuel cycle — than anywhere else in Russia: Snezhinsk (formerly Chelyabinsk‑70), Ozyorsk (formerly Chelyabinsk‑65) and Tryokhgorny (formerly Zlatoust‑36). The blacklist of Russia’s most polluted cities includes Chelyabinsk, Magnitogorsk and the very same Karabash that Pavel Talankin in his film says was “named the dirtiest city on Earth by UNESCO”.
People in the “factory towns” that are so numerous in the oblast face a host of social problems: the quality of amenities and the comfort of the urban environment are low, pollution is severe, and morbidity and crime rates are elevated. All of this is the price paid for the region’s industrial development path, its heavy industrial structure and the relative underdevelopment of other sectors of the economy.
Features of political life in Chelyabinsk Oblast
The oblast’s economic characteristics also influence its politics: large industrial enterprises mean large workforces. In such a situation, enterprise owners and their top managers become the main holders of the “human resource” during elections. Ever since the 1990s, election outcomes have fluctuated in line with shifts in the mood of the industrial “directorate”. In other words, the “administrative resource” here is not so much control over state‑sector employees, as it long was in the rest of the country, but control over the factory workforces of private enterprises. Yet that resource was never concentrated in a single pair of hands, as is the case with the budget‑funded sector: the region has always had several major political players with their own large collectives of factory workers and their families, so the political system remained competitive.
These large industrial corporations have effectively become the real masters of individual towns and districts, and the regional authorities have had little leverage over them, because companies such as MMK or Mechel have their own channels to the federal political elite. If anything, the opposite is true — it is the corporations that have tried to bring the region under their control. For example, governors Mikhail Yurevich (Makfa) and Boris Dubrovsky (MMK) both came from local financial‑industrial groups — though both are now under criminal investigation and living abroad.
Against the backdrop of the prosecution of former governors and the seizure of their business assets, the current governor, Alexei Teksler, has managed to bring the region under control. This is clearly visible from election results, which increasingly resemble those of “anomalous” regions. Whereas in the 2019 gubernatorial election Teksler won with 69%, in 2024 he already scored 81% — though, admittedly, A Just Russia and New People did not field candidates in that election, the Communist Party (CPRF) put forward a municipal deputy, the LDPR fielded a “perennial gubernatorial candidate” who has never polled highly, the Pensioners’ Party nominated a little‑known doctor and participant in the “special military operation” (SVO), and the Green Alternative ran a self‑employed Muscovite who simultaneously stood for governor of Samara Oblast.
The Legislative Assembly has historically served as an informal club for reconciling the interests of big business, but here too everything has become manageable since the current governor arrived.
For instance, the 2020 regional deputy elections produced a curiosity that could warrant a criminal case but has never been investigated. The Green Alternative party unexpectedly entered the regional parliament (thereby gaining the right to nominate candidates without collecting signatures for the 2021 State Duma elections). Yet it managed to clear the 5.36% threshold only thanks to strange results in the city of Zlatoust: across eight precincts its average result was 19.12% of the vote, and in four precincts it allegedly polled between 29% and 39% while United Russia received around 3% — meaning that someone probably simply swapped the results of the two parties so that the Green Alternative would become a federal “beneficiary”.
In the 2025 elections United Russia won more than 50% of the mandates for the first time, all six SVO‑participant candidates became deputies, and one of the SVO participants, Denis Moiseyev, was elected first deputy speaker of the Legislative Assembly. In the municipal elections that same year the “party of power” won 623 of the 723 mandates.
Also in 2025, the composition of 45 of the 51 territorial election commissions in the region was changed, with United Russia representatives taking over as chairs.
Helping to maintain control over this once‑difficult region is the war, now in its fourth year, and the receipt of large orders for defence enterprises. Chelyabinsk Oblast has also become a forge of personnel for the territories in the combat zone. For example, former deputy governor Irina Gekht became head of the government in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, while former mayor of Miass Yegor Kovalchuk took up an analogous post in Luhansk. In the rating of Russian regions by comprehensive involvement in supporting the SVO, compiled by the Centre for Political Information back at the beginning of 2025, Chelyabinsk Oblast was awarded a high 13th place.
What is happening to politics under the conditions of the SVO
Naturally, this situation has had a very strong impact on the political landscape. A Just Russia — which is effectively the second most influential party in the region — the CPRF and the LDPR have in recent years virtually abandoned protest rhetoric and are actively demonstrating their readiness to support initiatives put forward by the regional authorities. Individual serving politicians are gradually switching from other parties to United Russia. For example, in April 2025 former Chelyabinsk City Duma deputy and ex‑gubernatorial candidate Eldar Gilmutdinov left the CPRF for the “party of power”; Pavel Loginov, a former deputy of the Miass City Assembly, became a regional deputy for United Russia after switching from A Just Russia; Yevgeny Reva also became a regional deputy, swapping the LDPR for United Russia. This trend looks set to continue: a high‑profile statement in early 2026 revealed plans by State Duma deputy for Chelyabinsk Oblast Stanislav Naumov (LDPR) to change his party affiliation and his readiness to run for the Duma again, this time for United Russia. Public discussion is also swirling around a possible similar move by another Duma member, A Just Russia’s Yana Lantratova, who is also being considered among other candidates for the post of Russian ombudsman.
The unofficial start of the Duma campaign was the formation on 5 March 2026 of an organising committee for the United Russia primaries, headed by the governor of Chelyabinsk Oblast. The primaries will take place in the region from 25 to 31 May 2026. But even before that, in December 2025, Governor Alexei Teksler shared plans for campaign preparations, including the grooming of a managerial elite from among SVO veterans, and in the first week of February 2026 Chelyabinsk hosted the first in a series of regional and inter‑regional United Russia forums — the “There Is a Result!” forum, attended by Vladimir Yakushev, secretary of the United Russia General Council. At the party level, Chelyabinsk Oblast is being positioned as a model region for the development and implementation of the party’s programme.
The gulf between the “military” and the “civilian”: how residents and the regional economy are faring during the SVO
Support for the SVO is cultivated in the region not only at the ideological level but also directly. Former deputy governor Yegor Kovalchuk, now chairman of the government of the Luhansk People’s Republic, noted back in 2023 that the output of almost 70% of the region’s enterprises was already being used in the defence‑industrial complex (OPK) in 2023. He also pointed out that from the beginning of 2022, i.e. from the start of the SVO, the number of enterprises involved in producing military goods had quadrupled by 2023. To date the number of such enterprises has grown from 23 in 2022 to 190 in 2025. In 2022 these enterprises employed 148,000 people.
According to Governor Alexei Teksler, since August 2022 around 40,000 people have taken up jobs at OPK enterprises, including almost four thousand who were previously unemployed. Thus, by the end of 2023 the total number of workers in the defence sector could have reached around 188,000.
And it is largely “thanks” to the OPK that the region, where according to 2022 data the share of people living below the poverty line exceeded 11% of the population, managed by the end of 2025 to climb in the RIA Rating regional income ranking from 47th to 27th place. This was also helped by payments under social‑support programmes for those signing contracts with the Ministry of Defence or the National Guard.
The region’s civilian sector, meanwhile — which accounts for the overwhelming majority of those employed in the economy — is forced to survive by the laws of natural selection.
In 2022, 4,966 new commercial enterprises opened in Chelyabinsk Oblast while 4,654 closed. Thus the number of opened companies exceeded the number of closed ones by 6.7%. Compared with 2021, the number of closures fell by 30%. But already in 2023 the trend changed sharply: 4,563 enterprises opened and 5,722 closed; in 2024, 3,300 companies were opened and 4,400 closed. In terms of the decline in the number of active commercial organisations (–1,100), the region placed fourth in the FinExpertiza portal’s ranking. In 2025, 2,780 were opened while 1.6 times as many — 4,544 companies — were liquidated over the year. In terms of net company loss in 2025, Chelyabinsk Oblast entered the top 10 Russian regions: the number of closed commercial organisations exceeded the number of opened ones by 1,764. Only Moscow (27,400), St Petersburg (3,300), Sverdlovsk (2,300), Moscow (2,100) and Samara oblasts (1,900) had higher figures.
Despite the overall rise in prosperity for some of the region’s residents thanks to defence contracts and military service, other problems are not going away.
For example, because of constant industrial emissions in large cities such as Chelyabinsk and Magnitogorsk, Chelyabinsk Oblast has still not risen from 80th place in the National Environmental Rating, despite serious environmental modernisation at MMK. And this, of course, affects residents’ moods.
Colossal difficulties are being recorded in the healthcare system. Despite the existence of high‑tech centres, hospitals and maternity homes are closing in small towns and rural areas, medical staff are leaving for private medical centres, ambulance accessibility is shrinking, the share of paid medicine is growing, and there is a noticeable shortage of specialist doctors and mid‑level medical personnel. All of this affects both the accessibility of medical care and the health of the region’s residents.
The demographic situation is not improving either: the population is declining, and migration is not always able to compensate for the loss. Skilled personnel and young people are leaving for million‑plus cities with higher wages, such as Moscow or Yekaterinburg.
Utility networks are worn out, and the quality of drinking water in a whole range of municipalities is very poor. Utility tariffs, meanwhile, are rising. At the same time, prices in the region are generally high — according to Romir, in 2024 Chelyabinsk had the second most expensive food basket among Russian cities. Even Moscow and St Petersburg turned out to be cheaper; only Krasnodar was ahead.
Adding to tensions in society are the recurrent utility collapses, internet and messenger shutdowns, mass culling of cattle, and corruption cases involving officials and deputies that spill into the public domain.
What to expect from the 2026 elections
As a result, we are now seeing a divergence of two trends.
On the one hand, in purely administrative terms the positions of United Russia and the regional authorities that oversee it have strengthened considerably over five years; other parties and politicians have been forced to abandon strident protest rhetoric; and several hundred thousand residents of the region have significantly improved their material situation thanks to the war.
At the same time, the rest of the population is facing mounting problems — rising prices, environmental and social issues, internet shutdowns. Chelyabinsk political analyst and head of the Monitor research group Alexei Shirinkin believes that at the elections the “rally‑around‑the‑flag” effect, against the backdrop of a difficult economic situation, ever‑rising shop prices and growing utility bills, will compete with protest voting.
There is, however, another question: to what extent will the official election results, under current conditions, reflect the real mood of the region’s residents?