#6 - RW 274
The Russia Journal
September 18, 2003
Editorial
Spoiled parties

MOSCOW - The State Duma elections are scheduled to take place on Dec. 7. Predictably, rumors of political plots, as well as the ubiquitous "vote for us" signs on every street corner, have sprouted up like mushrooms after the rain. Multiplying as well has been the number of political parties as well as power blocs. Unfortunately, though, despite this great variety of parties and groups — Motherland, Russia, the Party of Life, the People's Party and so on and so forth — the show of fractious democracy is mostly just a veneer.

The majority of these parties and groupings are practically indistinguishable from the pro-Kremlin United Russia, apart from slight variations in flavor. A new bloc that stands apart is the Motherland of Sergei Glazyev, recently departed from the Communist Party and sometimes criticized for a weak stand on conflicts between unions and oligarchic groups. But even Motherland's only short-term effect will probably be to take a few votes from the Communists and a few of the tiny other non-Communist left-wing parties (like former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's Social Democratic Party) and so strengthen United Russia. The rest might as well be parading under a Kremlin banner.

The Duma elections are taking place under the omnipotence of Kremlin power and the only opposition seems to be coming from a few disgruntled oligarchs such as Boris Berezovsky, Vladmir Gusinsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Another oligarchs, Anatoly Chubais, is leading the Union of Right Forces. It is obvious that the Duma will end up with a Communist left flank with 20 percent or so of the seats, with the Union of Right Forces and the increasingly ineffectual Yabloko making on the right crossing the 5 percent barrier needed for parliamentary representation and the center dominated by, well, the centrists — meaning those people that jump when the Kremlin tells them to (plus Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party of Russia thrown in to provide comic relief). The new Duma will likely be as close to what "managed democracy" boils down to in practical terms — a parliament supposedly representing the people that, in fact, is controlled by a few clans and powerful lobbies. The so-called "opposition" in the Duma is as much "managed" as the centrist leadership.

Russia's political parties, with some marginal exceptions, are organized from the top down, not from the grassroots. In this, they mirror the general structure of society as it has existed for the past several centuries — Russia, after all, went straight from tsarist absolutism to Soviet paternalism without skipping a step. Most Russians tend to view the government has something far away over the hills somewhere, a matter for the self-aggrandizement of the elite, and are of the opinion that the best thing that can happen to an ordinary person is to stay as far away from matters of state as possible. And, unfortunately, they are right, at least given how things stand today.

The parties that will form the coming Duma do not, for the most part, serve their electorate and do not have a real political program beyond staying in power — which means, above all, voting the Kremlin way. They are vehicles, not for the expression of the people's will, but for the enlargement of Duma deputies' and their financiers' wallets.

This will not change until the average Russian realizes that he or she has a stake in the decisions that are made in the halls of power and that, rather than being something that it is better to avoid, the state must be made accountable for its actions to the people. Power must be taken from the parliamentary talking heads that mouth words about "democracy" and "freedom" even as they slavishly follow the Kremlin line. Only then will Russia's political groupings be parties in anything but name.

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