#11
Jamestown Foundation
13 March 2002--Volume VII, Issue 10
RUSSIA'S WEEK: News and analysis from Russia and the
former Soviet States
MANAGED DEMOCRACY....
So powerful is the democratic idea that its enemies must usurp it. Thus
Lenin's democratic centralism, the old German Democratic Republic, the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
A phrase gaining currency in Russia today is "managed democracy,"
in which law serves the state and ensures that governors can claim the consent
of the governed. Pro-democracy stalwarts of the 1980s and 1990s--including Yuly
Rybakov, Sergei Yushenkov, Yelena Bonner, Lev Ponomarev, Valeria Novodvorskaya
and Igor Yakovenko--accuse the government of seeking the "liquidation"
of liberal reforms. In an open letter published last week in Boris Berezovsky's
Nezavisimaya Gazeta, they said the government "deletes" the opposition
from national politics by denying it television exposure. Grigory Yavlinsky, a
Duma deputy and founder of the small but fiercely independent Yabloko party,
said "managed democracy" includes government control of the mass
media, elections in which candidates suddenly withdraw or are disqualified,
politically inspired or directed judicial decisions, and the transfer of power
from the regions to the Kremlin.
The Kremlin's efforts to create a broad pro-government political coalition
are either managed democracy at its most subtle, or political management at its
most crass. In 1999, then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin created Unity, a
nonideological "party of power" that swapped Kremlin favors and access
for political support. In 2000 Unity cut a deal with the Communists that
squeezed Fatherland, the party of Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov and former Prime
Minister Yevgeny Primakov, out of leadership positions in the parliament. After
a brief show of petulance Primakov came to understand his situation clearly. He
withdrew from the 2000 presidential race and left Putin an easy winner as the
only serious alternative to the Communists.
Last year, Unity took control of the legislature through a political fusion
with Fatherland and the antifederalist All-Russia movement led by Tatarstan's
President Mintimer Shaimiev. Last week regional branches of the new
organization, called United Russia, held founding conferences. The meetings were
often ragged and rivalrous, with losers asking Moscow to change the outcome. For
example:
--Chelyabinsk: A group of dissident "Afghantsy," veterans of the
Afghan war, gained control of the conference and excluded the local Unity
leader, deputy governor Vladimir Dyatlov. When Dyatlov complained, the national
leadership declared the local results invalid.
--Lipetsk: Yevgeny Syrov was supposed to win the local leadership, but he
didn't even make it to the council from which the leader is chosen. Now the
national Unity party has the ballots under review.
--Saratov: Governor Dmitry Ayatskov kept two Unity members out of the
conference and provoked a walkout by several others, who appealed to the
national leadership for relief.
--Conferences in Altai Krai, Khabarovsk Krai, the Jewish Autonomous Region
and Orel had similar conflicts.
Press reports say the national party wants to expel defiant regional branches
and get rid of "gubernatorial license." But high-handed bosses like
Dmitry Ayatskov are more the rule than the exception in much of the country, and
the Kremlin is likely to tell the party leadership that sometimes, politics
really is local.
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