Of the four parties that on December 2, 2007, were elected in the State Duma, United Russia got 64.30 percent of the vote, A Just Russia got 6.80 percent, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation got 11.57 percent, and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia got 8.14 percent. If we take into account that A Just Russia was an artificial construction, set up by United Russia to attract additional votes, the governing bloc collected as much as 71.1 percent of the votes (and 78.44 percent of the seats). This sweeping majority exceeded even the percentage the ANC got in the South African elections on April 22, 2009 (the ANC got 65.9 percent). The well-oiled and generously financed United Russia party machine was explicitly set up to support Putin, although Putin himself was not a party member. This did not prevent Putin accepting, on April 15, 2008, the position of chairman.
Not only did United Russia have a comfortable majority at that time, but, additionally, the two “opposition” parties, Zhirinovsky’s crypto-fascist Liberal Democratic Party and the Communist Party, had long since abandoned playing a serious opposition role. These parties, instead, fully supported the government. The resulting system, therefore, in practice came close to a one-party state. Richard Sakwa had remarked that already Unity, United Russia’s predecessor[7] was “neither a modern political party nor a mass movement but was instead a political association made to order by power elites to advance their interests. [It]… could become the core of a new type of hegemonic party system in which patronage and preference would be disbursed by a neo-nomenclatura class of state officials loyal to Putin. Unity could become the core of a patronage system of the type that in July 2000 was voted out of office in Mexico after seventy-one years.”[8] Unity’s successor, United Russia, indeed, succeeded in establishing itself as the inheritor of the old monolithic CPSU. Former president Gorbachev called it “the worst version of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”[9] This was a rather harsh accusation from the mouth of the last president of the Soviet Union, who made his career inside the defunct CPSU and knew better than anyone else how rotten the old system was. But Gorbachev made a mistake: United Russia was not a remake of the old CPSU. Because, quite simply, communism in Russia was definitively dead. The new pluralistic façade might hide the same monolithic political structure, but it was situated in a rather different environment: not the former environment of a communist, centrally planned economy, but the new environment of a state capitalist economy. This made a big difference and was one of the reasons not to look back to Soviet times for historical analogies.
THE USE OF FAKE POLITICAL PARTIES
On October 28, 2006, a new party was introduced into the Russian party landscape. Its name was Spravedlivaya Rossiya, or A Just Russia[10]—at first sight a promising name, because many Russians deplored the loss of the former socialist model of the defunct Soviet Union and craved a more just and fair society.[11] What was A Just Russia? A new opposition party? A party that would challenge the near monopoly of United Russia? One should forget this illusion. According to the Moscow Times, “Russia… [has] become possibly the first country in history with a two-party system in which both parties share the same overriding principle, that the executive is always right.”[12] In a report for the American Congress, Stuart D. Goldman wrote: “The platforms of United Russia and A Just Russia consisted of little more than the slogan, ‘For Putin.’”[13] He added that the “second pro-Kremlin party, A Just Russia—[is] widely believed to have been created by Kremlin ‘political technologists’… to draw leftist votes away from the Communists.”[14] Goldman was right. The instigator of the new party was Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s deputy head of the presidential administration and a prominent Kremlin ideologue. Surkov was the inventor of the new political concepts of the Putin era, such as the “power vertical” and “sovereign democracy” (which had nothing to do with democracy, but meant merely that no foreign power had the right to define what democracy is). Anna Politkovskaya characterized Surkov as follows: “The deputy head of Putin’s office is a certain Vladislav Surkov, the acknowledged doyen of PR in Russia. He spins webs consisting of pure deceit, lies in place of reality, words instead of deeds.”[15]
Surkov’s “master idea” behind the creation of A Just Russia was to establish a two-party system as existed in the United States, but with one important difference: neither party would embody political alternatives, nor would they lead to an alternation of governing elites. Instead, they would guarantee political continuity by supporting the Putin regime. The hidden aim was that A Just Russia, as the new “left wing” party, would draw votes away from the Communist party. However, even circles close to the Kremlin were not convinced. One of them was former prime minister Primakov, who wrote “proposals can be heard to create in Russia a two-party system. The center left party A Just Russia could aspire to the role of lead second party. But the realization of this project, the idea behind it being attributed to the Kremlin, presents great difficulties. When United Russia was created, the administrative potential was used to the maximum. Many regional and local leaders felt obliged to become members of this party. Might they this time take at least a neutral position, or even support A Just Russia at the Duma elections? And that while V. V. Putin has become leader of United Russia?”[16] Primakov’s skepticism was justified. In the December 2007 Duma elections the strategy did not work out as was planned. Although A Just Russia was secured a place in parliament, the Communist Party resisted better than expected. However, we have to take into account that the Communist Party, although an “opposition party,” did not play a serious opposition role. The party “knows its place” in the existing system and does not transgress its (narrow) limits, as it is dependent on the government for registration, fund-raising, and access to the state controlled TV channels. The same is true for Zhirinovsky’s Liberal-Democratic Party, of which it is said that “according to insider accounts [it] was established by the Soviet KGB to serve as a nationalist pseudo-opposition.”[17]
The Duma that was elected in 2007 exhibited another important defect: this was the absence of liberal parties, such as Yabloko and the Union of the Right Forces. The Kremlin wanted this anomaly to be “repaired” in the run-up to the Duma elections of December 2011. By the beginning of 2010 rumors were already emerging about a new initiative. In February 2010 Owen Matthews, the Moscow correspondent of Newsweek, wrote about “a new liberal pseudo-opposition party the Kremlin is rumored to be cooking up.”[18] However, in the regional elections of March 13, 2011, suddenly another party popped up. It was the Patrioty Rossii (Patriots of Russia). Founded in 2005 by Gennady Semigin, a former member of the Communist Party, it had until then led a mainly dormant existence. The party, using the slogan “Patriotism is superior to Politics,” managed to win nearly 8 percent of the vote in Dagestan. Its program was left-wing, nationalist, and anti-Western.[19] In a comment The Economist wrote: “Analysts say the party is another Kremlin product, tested now with a view to being deployed in the parliamentary election in December [2011]…. Its real purpose, it seems, is to act as a spoiler for the Communist Party and another party, Just Russia, which itself was originally created as a double for United Russia but has since become a genuine challenger. Engineering clone and fake opposition parties is one of the Kremlin’s favourite political ‘technologies.’”[20] All this confirmed what Anna Politkovskaya had written in 2004: “There is a great fashion at the present for bogus political movements created by a directive of the Kremlin. We don’t want the West suspecting that we have a one-party system, that we lack pluralism and are relapsing into authoritarianism.”[21]
7
United Russia was formed in April 2001 from a merger between the Unity Party of Russia and the Fatherland-All Russia Party, led by the mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov.
9
“Gorbachev alarm at Soviet echoes,”
10
“A Just Russia” was originally a merger of three parties:
11
The Gini coefficient, which measures the inequality in a country (0 = total equality and 1 = total inequality) was on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union 0.29. In 2006 it had risen to 0.41—which was above the average of the EU.
13
Stuart D. Goldman, “Russia’s 2008 Presidential Succession,”
16
Primakov,
17
Cf. Anatoly G. Vishnevsky,