The results of Russia’s parliamentary elections ought to come as no shock. In spite of the huge accretion of power that they have handed to President Vladimir Putin, they also contain more good news than bad.
Stark though these judgements may sound, especially in the face of the hand-wringing tone of most official Western reactions to last Sunday’s vote, they rest on the basis of historical evidence.
First, the no-shock issue. Low turnouts, a lack of debate, unfair use of the state-controlled media, heavy intervention by oligarchs in the funding process, and ”virtual” parties that have no members or branches and offer voters empty slogans rather than detailed programmes — these have been characteristic of Russian politics for almost a decade.
In every Duma election since the collapse of the one-party state, the Kremlin has used ”administrative resources” to promote its favourites (and in some cases to destroy them later, as with the one-time Afghan war hero General Alexander Lebed). The power of incumbency has been used ruthlessly to raise obstacles for potential challengers. TV and radio stations have manipulated public debate by saturating the airwaves with commentators who blatantly support the central government.
It has been a miserable process, especially after the hopes that accompanied the arrival of open political competition towards the end of the Gorbachev era.
In 1993 when Boris Yeltsin broke the Constitution by suspending Parliament and writing a new Constitution that reduced MPs’ powers, a handful of Moscow-based reporters and Western commentators denounced it as the start of a slippery slope. They have now been vindicated. We argued then that this was a kind of ”market Bolshevism”, designed to push through neo-liberal economic policies in the face of opposition not only in Parliament but in the Russian public at large, at a time when gradual reform rather than wild revolution in both politics and the economy was necessary and possible.
The disputes between president and Parliament in the first post-Soviet years were not a recipe for paralysis, as was claimed. They were the inevitable discomforts inherent in developing democratic compromises and a system of checks and balances that Russia had never had in its history.
But leading Western governments supported the strong-hand concept, falling for and in some cases promoting the false argument that there was an imminent danger of a return to power of Soviet-style communism if Yeltsin did not strike first.
The much more real danger, which subsequently became reality, was that a return to excessive power in the Kremlin and hardline economic reforms would impoverish huge numbers of Russians and discredit the process of democratic change. One reason for the collapse of the Union of Right Forces in last Sunday’s poll was the fierce unpopularity of Anatoly Chubais, the party’s grey cardinal, who drove the neo-liberal privatisation of the early 1990s.
The Russian Communist Party may be a linear descendant of the party of Lenin, but by 1993 it had become an amalgam of authoritarian nationalists and statists, with a few social democrats hidden in its midst. It retained a strong local organisation and had a certain nostalgic appeal for many Russians, but offered few ideas for change.
Since its high point in 1996 — when its presidential candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, took 40% of the vote — the party has been in decline. Yeltsin began to steal some of its clothes with his use of nationalist symbols, but Putin has gone further in combining the Communist Party’s post-1991 nostalgia for order and discipline with its pre-Gorbachevian tradition of bureaucratic authoritarianism.
In this election he stole some of its leftist populism by making a carefully calculated attack on a few selected oligarchs. This clearly took votes away from the communists, even though Putin himself is not only a friend of the oligarchs but their creature. It was the alliance of Yeltsin and the oligarchs, including the Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich, who chose Putin as Yeltsin’s successor.
In advance of this election, the communists adopted the Kremlin’s own cynicism. It literally sold places on its national and regional lists to millionaire oligarchs who, if elected, gain immunity from arrest and prosecution.
Eleven of the top 18 people on the lists were not even party members, and five were linked to the oil giant Yukos, whose founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky is still in prison pending trial. This, too, alienated traditional communist voters and perfectly reflected the party’s ideological bankruptcy.
If Western observers such as the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe now denounce the election as a step backwards in Russia’s eventual transition to democracy, the pity is that they did not do it when the European Institute for the Media was saying the same thing several years ago.
In 1996 the West turned a blind eye to Yeltsin’s electoral manipulations because they liked the result. The hope is that this time they are not criticising the election for similar reasons of expediency — the defeat of the Union of Right Forces and Grigory Yavlinsky’s Yabloko Party.
The good news in the election is that it may lead to a realignment of Russian parties in the long term. The Communist Party has split, not before time, with the creation of the new party — Rodina, or Motherland — which opposes neo-liberal economics.
Although the party’s formation owes much to the Kremlin, which wanted to break the communists apart, Rodina contains forces within it that could develop a genuinely independent and social democratic identity.
Sergei Glaziev, its leader, is one of the brightest progressive economists in Russia. His alliance with the ultra-nationalist Dmitri Rogozin and an authoritarian former general helped him to get votes, but it ought not to last long. The communists may split further now that they see Rodina’s success.
Yabloko’s defeat should provoke a rethink in its ranks. The idea of a merger between Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces, which is being pushed by some commentators, is nonsense. Both parties may be pro-Western and liberal in political terms, but their economic approaches are different. The rightists support the oligarchs and want to take the process of oil privatisation still further.
With Russia’s oil fields already in private hands, they want to sell off (or buy up) the pipelines that remain in the hands of a state-owned monopoly. Yavlinsky, by contrast, is more of a social democrat.
Last week’s election gives a chance for a complete reshuffling of the pack of political cards. The process will be long and hard, and it may lead nowhere.
So many Russians have been turned off politics by the events of the past decade. So many are struggling to survive in conditions of economic hardship. Russia may have several thousands of ”new rich” but it also has millions of ”new poor”.
Cynicism and apathy prevail, as people see the privileges and perks that go with being an MP and the interpenetration of the government and Parliament by narrow-minded business interests.
A realignment of Russia’s political scene is long overdue. It will not happen overnight, but after last week’s poll the chances that it could develop over the next few wilderness years are marginally better than at any time since the Yeltsin coup of 1993. — Â