Most of the literature on institutional manipulation in autocracies is devoted to examining the effects of election manipulations' consequences for regime survival and post-election protests and manipulations' effects on the voters' perceptions and attitudes. However, whether facing institutional manipulation influences candidate behavior is still under-investigated. I focus on a common form of institutional manipulation in electoral autocracies - candidate filtering - and investigate to what extent being restricted from running as a candidate in a race affects the decision to challenge the regime in the future. I argue that stronger challengers, who were refused registration as a result of manipulation, would be more likely to participate in the race in the future, in comparison to those who were not filtered and lost to a regime-affiliated candidate. I test the argument on the case of Russia, a prominent example of an electoral authoritarian regime, where candidate filtering has been in use since the early 2000s. I focus on over 25000 local executive and 315 regional legislative elections in 2004-2020.