Political Parties in the Russian Regions (Basees Curzon Series on Russian & East European Studies)

Political Parties in the Russian Regions

Since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia’s party system has suffered a difficult and turbulent infancy. Moscow-based parties have had only very limited territorial penetration, and fragmentation has been one of its most significant features. Based on extensive fieldwork in three Russian regions, this book examines the development of the country’s party system and the role played by parties in regional politics. Using a comparative approach, it scrutinizes the internal structures and activities of the parties, and looks at their decision-making processes, their everyday party life, the activities of party members, and the role of regional party organizations in federal and local election campaigns. Derek S. Hutcheson is a British Academy, and formerly ESRC, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Politics, University of Glasgow. His areas of research include party politics and regional politics in post-Soviet Russia, and questions about the ‘quality of democracy’ in post-Communist Europe.

BASEES/RoutledgeCurzon Series on Russian and East European studies Edited by Richard Sakwa Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Kent at Canterbury

Editorial Committee: George Blazyca, Centre for Contemporary European Studies, University of Paisley Terry Cox, Department of Government, University of Strathclyde Rosalind Marsh, Department of European Studies and Modern Languages, University of Bath David Moon, Department of History, University of Strathclyde Hilary Pilkington, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham Stephen White, Department of Politics, University of Glasgow

1. Ukraine’s Foreign and Security Policy, 1991–2000 Roman Wolczuk 2. Political Parties in the Russian Regions Derek S. Hutcheson 3. Local Communities and Post-Communist Transformation Edited by Simon Smith 4. Repression and Resistance in Communist Europe J.C. Sharman 5. Political Elites and the New Russia Anton Steen 6. Dostoevsky and the Idea of Russianness Sarah Hudspith

Political Parties in the Russian Regions

Derek S. Hutcheson

To all my friends in Russia

First published 2003 by RoutledgeCurzon 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by RoutledgeCurzon 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

RoutledgeCurzon is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2003 Derek S. Hutcheson All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Hutcheson, Derek S. (Derek Stanford), 1977– Political parties in the Russian regions/ Derek S. Hutcheson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Political parties—Russia (Federation) 2. Regionalism—Political aspects—Russia (Federation) 3. Political parties—Russia (Federation)—Volga River Region—Case studies. I. Title. JN6699.A795 H88 2003 324.247—dc21 2002036965 ISBN 0-203-98668-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0–415–30218–8 (Print Edition)

Contents

Preface and acknowledgements List of abbreviations Maps 1

Introduction

vii x xi 1

The rationale of the present study 1 The research for the present study 4 The structure of the book 6 2

Political parties in Russia: the federal level

10

Federal parties: a historical overview 10 Parties in the study 19 The institutional framework of the Russian party system 27 3

Politics and parties in the regions

34

The role of parties in regional politics: an overview 35 The political situations in the case study regions 40 Parties in the case study regions 45 4

Party organizations: federal, regional, local

55

Party organizations in Russia: the theory 55 Party organizations in Russia: the practice 68 Everyday party life: some case studies 80 5

The membership Party members in context 85 Joining and being active in the parties of the middle Volga 91 Attitudes of party members 103

85

vi

Contents

6

Parties and elections in the middle Volga

107

Party organizations in the electoral cycle 107 Campaign strategies 117 Political advertisements 122 7

Russian party development in perspective

131

Parties and their environment 131 The middle Volga in comparative perspective 136 Broader issues: the present study and future research 138 Notes Bibliography Index

143 170 194

Preface and acknowledgements

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian party system has evolved in many interesting directions. The present study seeks to examine the role played by party organizations and activists in the politics of post-Soviet Russia, especially at the regional level, and to fill a gap in our knowledge about the activities of parties ‘outside the Garden Ring’ of Moscow. A few notes on conventions. The system of Russian transliteration used is that utilized by the Oxford Slavonic Papers, with some minor modifications. Where a non-standard form is in common use (e.g. ‘Yeltsin’ rather than ‘El′tsin’), this is used instead. Words ending in ‘ii’ in Russian are transliterated thus, except in surnames, when a ‘y’ is used instead. Authors’ names are cited as they appear on the original book or article. As a result, there may be several different formats used for the same author (e.g. ‘Grigorii Golosov’, ‘Grigorii V. Golosov’ and ‘G.V. Golosov’). The status indicated next to the interviewees is that which they had at the time of the interview in question. Where one person held two offices at the time of the interview, the one that is most relevant to the topic under consideration is that cited. Full details of interviewees, and any subsequent changes in status, are given in the bibliography. Where ‘communist’ is written with a capital ‘C’, it denotes a connection with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF); with a lower case ‘c’, it refers to an ideological persuasion. The word ‘federal’ is generally used in the study to denote the national political level; ‘regional’ to denote subject level; and ‘local’, district level. Some studies consider the post-Soviet State Dumas to be a continuation of the pre-1917 ones, and hence designate the first post-Soviet Duma as the fifth convocation, the second as the sixth, and so on. This practice is not adopted in the present study, which treats the Duma elected in 1993 as the first. Finally, it should be noted that, technically, not all the organizations analyzed in the study are parties. Under legislation valid until recently, there was little practical difference between a party, an electoral association or a movement in terms of electoral participation, although issues such as membership rules differed slightly. New legislation on political parties passed in July 2001 and examined in Chapter 2 means that only organizations registered as ‘parties’ can

viii

Preface and acknowledgements

participate in future elections. For simplicity, the six organizations upon which this study focuses are usually referred to as ‘parties’ in the text, unless their exact legal status is relevant at the time. My thanks are due to a number of people for their help and support with the study during the four years of its preparation. Foremost amongst them is Professor Stephen White of the Department of Politics, University of Glasgow, who has provided invaluable advice and practical assistance on numerous occasions. My thanks are also due to the department as a whole, in particular to Professor Chris Berry as Head of Department, and to Dr Sarah Oates, first for giving permission to use original survey and focus-group data from the ESRCfunded project, ‘Building a New Democracy?: Television, Citizens and Voting in Russia’, and also for her advice in the preparation of this book. In this respect, I am grateful also to Professor Ronald J. Hill of Trinity College Dublin, for his valuable feedback on an earlier version of this study. As Director of the Institute of Central and East European Studies (ICEES) at the University of Glasgow until recently, Professor John Löwenhardt has provided useful counsel on many occasions, for which I am extremely grateful. Pamela Flynn, Avril Johnstone and Caroline Mooney have provided valuable secretarial back-up. The present study is based on extensive fieldwork in Russia, and there are many people to whom I am indebted for their assistance and support during my frequent stays in the country. For their academic and practical assistance, particular thanks are due to Professor Valentin Bazhanov of Ul′yanovsk State University; Oleg Romanov and Professor Aleksandr Shestakov of Samara State University; and Dr Oleg Zaznaev of Kazan′ State University. The assistance rendered by Ol′ga Balashova of the Central Electoral Commission, and various officials from subject and territorial electoral commissions in the Republic of Tatarstan and the provinces of Samara and Ul′yanovsk, has also been much appreciated. For other useful advice and practical help, I am grateful to Lyubov′ Chilikova, Friedrich and Alexandra Demke, Dr Igor Egorov, Dr Alexander Gasparishvili, Zalina Karaeva, Vladimir Kazantsev, Professor V.N. Konev, Professor Natalia Levina, Dr Valentin Mikhailov, Sergei Mironov, Professor Evgenii Molevich, Professor Elena Shestopal, Anastasia Tarasevich and Zinaida Rogozhina. Thanks are also due to the numerous politicians who met me and particularly to those who granted access to internal party meetings and other activities. They are too numerous to mention individually here, but are listed in the bibliography. I also wish to record thanks to the commissioning editor at RoutledgeCurzon, Peter Sowden, for his assistance in the preparation of the book and to Anita Ananda, the project manager. Financial support for the project came from the Economic and Social Research Council and the British Academy, first in the form of an ESRC Research Studentship (R00429834478, October 1998–October 2001), and thereafter in the

Preface and acknowledgements

ix

form of an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (T026271019, January–December 2002), and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (PDF/2002/284, January 2003– ), which support I acknowledge with pleasure. Derek S. Hutcheson July 2002

Abbreviations

ASSR CEC CEC RT CIS CP RSFSR CPRF CPRT CRC DCR DPR FAR FPC FSU LDPR LDPSU MEA OCRT OHR OSCE PL PPUR PRUA RC RiZ RMDR RPSD RSFSR SMD URF USSR UUP

Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic Central Electoral Commission Central Electoral Commission of the Republic of Tatarstan Commonwealth of Independent States Communist Party of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic Communist Party of the Russian Federation Communist Party of the Republic of Tatarstan Congress of Russian Communities Democratic Choice of Russia Democratic Party of Russia Fatherland–All Russia Federal Political Council (URF) Former Soviet Union Liberal Democratic Party of Russia Liberal Democratic Party of the Soviet Union Ministry of Emergency Affairs Organization of Communists in the Republic of Tatarstan Our Home is Russia Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Party List (State Duma elections) Popular Patriotic Union of Russia Party of Russian Unity and Accord Russia’s Choice Ravnopravie i Zakonnost′ (‘Equal Rights and Legality’ – Tatarstan ‘democratic’ movement) Russian Movement for Democratic Reform Russian Party of Social Democrats Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic Single Member District (State Duma elections) Union of Rightist Forces Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Ul′yanovsk Union of Patriots

Samara Province

Map 1 The Russian Federation.

Ul′yanovsk Province

MOSCOW

Republic of Tatarstan

KAZAN′ RIVER

NABEREZHNYE CHELNY

A LG VO

NURLAT

REPUBLIC OF TATARSTAN

RIVER

DIMITROVGRAD

A LG VO

UL′YANOVSK

UL′YANOVSK PROVINCE

R IV ER

TOL′YATTI VOLG A

SAMARA

VO LG A

NOVOKUIBYSHEVSK

SAMARA PROVINCE

Map 2 The middle Volga case study regions.

1

Introduction

The rationale of the present study When Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in March 1985 and embarked upon the policy of perestroika (‘restructuring’), aimed at rejuvenating the Soviet system, few would have envisaged that the world’s second superpower would no longer exist less than seven years later. More than a decade on from the emergence of an independent Russia in late 1991, it is possible to look back at the turbulent transition process – encompassing massive political, economic and social upheaval – which ensued. Arguably this process of transformation continues at the beginning of the twenty-first century under Russia’s second post-Soviet leader, Vladimir Putin, but there are signs that the pace of change may be slowing. As the Russian Federation enters its second decade of independence, and Putin attempts to consolidate the political system, it is a timely moment to reflect on developments since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Transformation in Russia is part of a wider process of transition from oneparty communist rule across Central and Eastern Europe. Indeed, it can be argued that this has been part of a larger ‘wave’ of democratization taking place in the last quarter of the twentieth century.1 Changes in the Russian political system are thus not taking place in isolation. There is great merit in adopting a comparative approach to establish ways in which the Russian transition resembles or differs from analogous transformations which have taken place elsewhere. Russia’s experience has not been the most typical, but as the largest country in the world and by far the most influential of the fifteen successor states that emerged from a former superpower, arguably the outcome of the process is among the most significant. There are various ways of examining the process of regime transformation. One is to examine the change in basis of institutional change – how the organs of state power have altered in structure through the process of transformation. Another is through elite turnover – the extent to which there has been a revolution of personnel. One of the most notable observations from previous and contemporaneous transitions has been the extent to which political parties have

2

Introduction

been seen to play a role in the stabilization of the new regime.2 If democracy is held to be ‘meaningful and extensive competition . . . through regular, free and fair elections’, as Diamond et al. term it, or effective participation and the right to form and join associations, as Dahl stresses, a structured party system can be the cornerstone of such a polity,3 providing the linkage between state and society.4 All of these approaches are used in the present volume, which seeks to address an underdeveloped field of research – the development of local political party organizations in Russia. It looks at the way in which party activists ‘on the ground’ have influenced politics in the decade since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and, in particular, it analyzes the role that they played in the electoral cycle of 1999–2001. Such an approach is much needed in the context of the post-Soviet transformation. One of the salient features of Russian politics in the 1990s was the way in which power devolved outwards from the centre to the regions. The Russian Federation comprises eighty-nine ‘subjects’, or constituent units. These are not on an equal footing, but have differing levels of autonomy from the centre. There are twenty-one national republics (respubliki), which have the highest level of autonomy and generally exist where a non-Russian ethnic group is in the majority or plurality; six territories (kraya), forty-nine provinces (oblasti), one autonomous province (avtonomnaya oblast′), ten autonomous areas (avtonomnye okruga), and two cities of federal standing (Moscow and St. Petersburg). This structure was inherited from the Soviet Union, although four autonomous regions were ‘upgraded’ to republics. Whereas all types of region were united by the CPSU structure in the Soviet era, however, in the 1990s the differences in status and autonomy among regions became more acute.5 Below the level of constituent subject, each region is divided into several districts (raiony), whose number varies. In other words, government in Russia takes place on three levels: federal (all-Russian), regional/republican (subject-level), and local (district-level). The election of Vladimir Putin, who is seeking to re-establish a more uniform system of administration to Russia, has added a fourth level: seven over-arching federal districts, each headed by a presidential appointee. These seven federal district heads are in turn the superiors of the rather splendidly named ‘Chief Federal Inspectors’ in each region, whose aim is to ensure that regional political decisions do not contravene federal legislation, and begin the task of reining in the regional autonomy which built up in the 1990s.6 This administrative diversity has been reflected in the party system. One of the most notable features of Russian party development has been the fragmentation of Moscow-centred parties, mirroring the increased devolution of power to the regions of the Russian Federation. To examine parties at a central level – as most studies have done hitherto – is to miss significant channels of the political and party decision-making process. This is not to deny the validity of such studies, but rather to suggest that in order to understand the role of parties fully, both macro- and micro-level study is necessary. Thus there is great advantage in looking under the surface and examining parties’ activities at the regional and local levels. One of the central issues of this study is to determine the impact which these regional branches have had on the politics of the constituent subjects

Introduction 3 of Russia, as distinct from federal politics, and to examine the links between these two factors. The study does not assume a priori that parties have played a major role in the transformation. Indeed, it is notable that the Russian transformation appears to have accorded them a relatively minor role in comparison with previous transitions. Politicians at the federal and regional level have developed extra-party power bases,7 and politics appears to consist mainly of intra-elite or intrabureaucratic competition, channelled through personal contact networks.8 Having said this, Vladimir Putin has publicly acknowledged the importance of establishing a strong party system, and, as will be seen in Chapter 2, there has been a wave of new legislation on political parties and elections since he was elected president in 2000. However, the main aim of the present volume is that of filling a gap in our knowledge of party activities at the sub-federal level, which has until now been a very much under-researched field. Most studies of Russian parties have focused on federal-level elections,9 or on the institutional context of the emerging party system as a whole.10 There have been few works which have focused on parties as independent organizations (other than dictionaries of the parties11), and still fewer have used comparative methodology to analyze party organizations systematically.12 Similarly, although there has been extensive research conducted on developments in regional politics, much of it has focused on the processes of local politics outside the party system, or on regional variations in federal elections. Of the few people to have investigated the role of parties in regional politics consistently, Vladimir Gel′man, Grigorii Golosov and Galina Luchterhandt-Mikhaleva have perhaps been the most prolific in their output.13 Nonetheless, even these political scientists have tended to focus on parties as electoral instruments, rather than as organizations. The present study seeks to marry a study of party politics with that of regional politics, focusing on parties as independent organizations whilst basing many of its findings on party activities in the 1999–2001 elections. Instead of focusing on the results, however, it examines the parties ‘from the inside’, taking advantage of one of the great opportunities opened to the political scientist since the fall of the Soviet Union – the opportunity to examine politics ‘on the ground’ and in non-metropolitan areas. However, this study aims to be far more than a snapshot of party organizations in the 1999–2001 electoral cycle. It utilizes as case studies the six main parties which emerged from the 1999 parliamentary elections, examining their work in three regions of middle Russia, and making comparisons on four levels: interregional, inter-party, between centre and periphery, and between Russia and other countries which have undertaken or are undertaking simultaneously the process of transformation. Broadly speaking, the study is concerned with five key thematic issues: (1) the development of multi-party politics in post-Communist Russia; (2) the increasing importance of regional and local actors in Russian politics; (3) the organizational structures of the main political parties, and the links between party bodies at various levels; (4) the individual activism of party members; and (5) the place of Russia in the wider post-communist wave of political transitions.

4

Introduction

The research for the present study As noted above, the book focuses on the activities of six of the main parties in contemporary Russia. These are introduced in more detail in Chapter 2, but at the moment it is worth noting that they divide into two main groups. The first is the troika of organizations which have won seats in every post-Soviet election, namely the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), the main successor organization to the CPSU; the curiously-named Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), which is actually nationalist in ideology and is headed by the well-known Vladimir Zhirinovsky; and the Yabloko party, the most established ‘liberal’ organization in contemporary Russia, led by Grigorii Yavlinsky. In addition to these three, analysis will also be made of three parties and movements which did not exist a few months before the 1999 State Duma election, yet which together accounted for more than two-fifths of the ballots cast for party lists in that election: the Union of Rightist Forces (URF) and the Fatherland and Unity movements, the latter two of which now form a party called ‘United Russia’. Much of the book is based on extensive fieldwork conducted between 1999 and 2002 in three regions of the Mid-Volga: the Republic of Tatarstan and the provinces of Samara and Ul′yanovsk. These three regions form a geographically close but politically disparate group of constituent subjects, located about 600 miles to the east of Moscow at the point where the vast River Volga turns sharp right and begins its long journey southwards to the Caspian Sea. Tatarstan is one of the twenty-one national republics mentioned earlier. It is heavily industrialized and oil-rich, allowing the Republic’s government to subsidize the local economy.14 Until 1552, the capital, Kazan′, was the centre of a khanate. Thereafter the area was conquered by Russia and incorporated gradually into the Empire. In the Soviet Union, Tatarstan had the status of an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR), which preserved its national identity, an issue that became salient in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Following a tense relationship with the federal centre, Tatarstan’s relationship with Russia was resolved in a 1994 treaty which gave it more autonomy than virtually any other constituent subject of the Federation. To the south of Tatarstan lies the province of Samara (known in the Soviet period as Kuibyshev), which is one of the ‘hubs’ of the Mid-Volga. It is somewhat unusual for a Russian region, insofar as its second city – the factory town of Tol′yatti, home of the automotive giant AvtoVAZ – is also large, and is powerful independently of the regional capital. Of the three case study regions, Samara is the most urbanized and has the highest proportion of Russians within its borders. Economically, it is one of the most advanced regions of Russia, having followed a more liberal economic policy in the post-Soviet period than most. Average per capita income in January 2002 was about 9 per cent above the Russian average and the highest in the Mid-Volga Federal District. Ul′yanovsk province is located between Tatarstan and Samara. It is smaller than its neighbours, and less influential economically and politically. Nonetheless, its role in the country’s history and culture has been significant. The town

Introduction 5 was founded in 1648 (first called Sinbirsk and thereafter Simbirsk), and was the birthplace of several well-known writers and poets such as Karamzin and Goncharov. Among its famous political luminaries were Aleksandr Kerensky (1881–1970), the head of the provisional government in 1917, and, perhaps most notably, Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), after whom the city was renamed (using his real surname of Ul′yanov) following his death.15 Administratively, it was not until 1943 that Ul′yanovsk became a separate administrative region in the Soviet Union. Hitherto it had been part of the MidVolga territory and (from 1936) the rural part of the Kuibyshev (now Samara) province. Its industrial base developed relatively late, but in the late Soviet period, large automobile and aircraft factories were built, contributing to the rapid growth of Ul′yanovsk city. Economically it is in the lower half of Russia’s regions: the typical per capita income in January 2002 was almost half the Russian average. It can be seen that the three contrasting case study regions, which together account for 6 per cent of Russia’s total population and just under 1 per cent of its area, provide an almost ideal laboratory for a regionally-orientated study. Before, during and after the federal elections of 1999–2000 (from the beginning of October 1999 to the end of July 2000), the author was resident in Ul′yanovsk, the central of the three regions, and commuted frequently to Tatarstan and Samara, the capital cities of which are approximately six hours to the north and south respectively (regardless of the weather, temperature or road conditions!). In addition to this extended period, there were several shorter return trips throughout 2001 and the first half of 2002, lasting a few weeks each. These trips allowed him further to observe political events in the regions and enabled him to develop constructive relationships with local party and political officials. During the fieldwork periods, he had the opportunity of visiting all the major parties’ headquarters in each region several times, to speak to candidates, key personnel and activists, and to observe the election campaigns and regional political situations as they developed. Many of the interviews carried out with parties took the form of semi-structured discussions; where possible similar questions about their respective election campaigns were asked to each party in each region at approximately the same stage. He was also able to attend various party meetings and conferences and to meet both formally and informally with ‘rank and file’ party members. In addition to this, meetings were organized with other non-party actors in the political process, such as electoral commission officials, representatives of the respective regional administrations, and local political scientists and sociologists. On several occasions trips were also undertaken to Moscow, where discussions ensued at party headquarters and, in some cases, with key members of the parties’ State Duma factions. These frequent trips among the three regions and to Moscow allowed election campaigns and party developments to be viewed from several different perspectives. The author observed two of the elections – the Russian presidential election in March 2000, and the Tatar presidential election a year later – as an accredited international observer, the former in Samara province as part of the team connected to the

6

Introduction

Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). This allowed him to visit polling stations, both rural and urban, to see the electoral process in action and to observe the accuracy with which electoral legislation was followed. It also facilitated inspection of the ballot counts, and enabled the tracing of the result through the territorial and subject-level electoral commissions. Thus, to a large extent, the information contained in this volume is the result of many months of data collection in the regions of middle Russia. However, in addition to this it utilizes a broad range of other sources, especially local and party literature and legal texts. Furthermore, quantitative information was collected on party members in the form of an eight-page questionnaire which was completed by members of the Communist Party in Tatarstan and Ul′yanovsk and by members of the Union of Rightist Forces in Ul′yanovsk, examining their motives for and forms of participation in party life. (The results of this analysis can be found in Chapter 5.) In order to avoid the danger of creating a work which focused exclusively on regional party activity and ignored the wider picture of the Russian political system and transformation, national representative surveys and focus group data were used, where appropriate, to provide a broader perspective on questions of party development.16 The result, it is hoped, is a study which does not lose sight of these wider issues, but which provides a hitherto unprecedented amount of detail about the activities of Russian party organizations outside the federal capitals and their relationships with their party organizations as a whole. The comparative nature of the work means that it allows the interaction of parties with their environments to be seen in a more meaningful context.

The structure of the book The book is divided into seven chapters. These move from the general to the specific and return to wider issues in the final chapter. Before examining party activity at the regional and local levels, it is first of all necessary to introduce the Russian political and party systems and the institutional backdrop to them. Chapter 2 begins by tracing the development of multipartyism in Russia to the present day, utilizing democratic transition theory to highlight ways in which the Russian party system has deviated from the traditional pattern of party formation. It notes the way in which Vladimir Putin’s administration has accorded a higher priority to the strengthening of the party system than did his predecessor Boris Yeltsin’s, and discusses whether the measures which have been taken will result in a party system which is artificially managed. It also introduces in more detail the six organizations mentioned above, which are used in the rest of the book as case studies. The final section of the chapter examines the institutional framework of party activity in the Russian Federation. In Chapter 3 the study moves from the federal picture to the main focus of the present research – parties at the regional and local level. The first part examines the degree of party participation in regional and local politics, analysing regional and local election results from almost all of the eighty-nine ‘subjects’ of the

Introduction 7 Russian Federation. Where it uses quantitative techniques to achieve an overview of the role of parties as a whole in local politics, the remainder of the chapter moves the discussion onto a more qualitative footing, introducing the post-Soviet political features and party branches of the three case study regions mentioned above. Chapters 4–6 examine regional and party activity thematically. General theories about centralized control over party decision-making have been advanced since the first studies of parties over a century ago. Authors such as Michels, Duverger and von Beyme have examined the internal workings of parties and used their findings to develop various theories of party organization.17 One of the most interesting recent examinations of party organization theory is that by Angelo Panebianco.18 Like the aforementioned, his analysis is based on Western case studies, but its central premise – that party institutionalization is dependent on the circumstances of party formation – can be hypothesized to have wider validity. For this reason, it serves as the starting point for the analysis in Chapter 4, which examines the spheres of influence of Russian party organizations at different levels. A theoretical examination of the party statutes is followed by an empirical evaluation of the reality of decision-making, based on observations in the case study regions of the role played by regional and local activists on party decisions. The chapter ends by examining everyday party life in the case study regions. Chapter 5 focuses on the members and activists of the case study parties. The question of why people become involved in politics is one which has long fascinated political scientists. Models to explain activism can be divided into three main groups – resource-based, rational choice and general incentive. Resourcebased models hypothesize that those with the greatest resources, the greatest sense of efficacy, and the greatest involvement in institutions from which the politically active are recruited, will in turn be the most active,19 but they are arguably not well suited to the post-Soviet context, where communist-era recruitment networks have been fragmented and the notion of ‘social class’ is ambiguous. Moreover, as will be seen in Chapter 5, it is often those with the fewest resources who are the most active at the ‘grassroots’ of Russian politics. Thus it is on the rational choice and general incentives models that we focus in Chapter 5. In its simplest form, the rational choice model holds that individuals decide whether or not to become active on the basis of an objective calculation of costs and benefits concerning their involvement.20 A crucial problem with this argument was highlighted in a seminal work by Mancur Olson, who spotted the so-called ‘paradox of participation’.21 The chance that an individual party member will affect substantially the party’s chance of electoral success is extremely small, but the implementation of the party programme is a pure public good, which means that it will affect all voters whether or not they were active in (or even voted for) the party. This renders participation irrational, since if a party were successful electorally, an individual could gain the benefits of the party programme without the costs of involvement, ‘free-riding’ on the efforts of others. Since Olson pointed this out, overcoming the ‘paradox of participation’ has become one of the most fiercely debated questions of rational choice theory.22

8

Introduction

Some pointed to the provision of ‘selective incentives’ – specific private benefits tied to the provision of collective goods, available exclusively to those actors who contribute towards the provision – as a means by which parties and organizations could motivate involvement.23 Yet this would imply that individuals joined political parties because of material or other incentives and were not interested in the party’s policies, since policy falls under the category of a collective good.24 Clearly, at least in an established party system, the latter assumption is absurd. For this reason, Whiteley et al. have proposed a ‘general incentives’ model, based not on individual but on collective interests.25 These include altruism (where individuals think not only of individual benefit but of group benefit also, and realize that if everybody were to free-ride, the collective benefit would be diminished), and emotional or expressive attachment to the party.26 (To this can be added charisma-based attraction to the leader.) Other general incentives include social norms (whereby individuals would be motivated to become active if those around them, whose values they respect, and from whom they seek approval, were also active); and the perceived probability of the group/party as a whole being able to achieve its programme.27 The general incentives model forms the basis of Chapter 5, which examines motives for joining and becoming active in the case study parties in the Mid-Volga area. It is based on survey work, extensive interviews, and focus groups with party members and leaders, and also examines the attitudes of party members towards various federal- and local-level politicians. Such data in the Russian context have been very rare hitherto, and although its wider validity is difficult to assess, this chapter provides at least some insight into the mindset of party members. Chapter 6 examines party participation in election campaigns at the regional level. As mentioned earlier, the study seeks to focus on parties as actors in elections, rather than on the elections themselves. The first part of the chapter discusses the participation of parties in the 1999–2001 electoral cycle, examining the campaign links between the parties nationally and regionally. Thereafter, it investigates the professionalization of election campaigns in Russia and the campaign methodology used – so-called ‘electoral technology’. A vast literature has developed (mainly in Russian) on the subject, but most of it takes the form of instruction manuals for candidates, rather than any attempt to analyze comparatively the approaches of different political actors to the organization of an election campaign. Chapter 6 seeks to redress the balance somewhat, and goes on to examine the ways in which such campaign methodology was visible in federal and local campaign advertising and analyze its effect on voters. The regional and local approach taken by the present study provides a useful prism with which to augment our knowledge of party activities ‘on the ground’. Nonetheless, it is important not to overlook the wider systematic significance of these regional activities. For this reason, the final chapter attempts to establish whether the Mid-Volga region is typical of Russia as a whole. This analysis makes use of the primary survey data mentioned above, collected immediately after the 1995 and 1999 State Duma elections, and of supplementary data from

Introduction 9 spring 2001. Furthermore, although the main focus of the present study is on the development of parties in Russia, it is important not to forget the fact that the country is only one of a number in East-Central Europe currently engaged in the process of political transition and party system formation. Drawing on the observations made in comparative analyses of such previous democratic transitions, together with studies of other East-Central European countries over the past decade, the final chapter attempts to establish the points of similarity between some of these transitions, and the differing trajectories of others. There is of course the danger, highlighted by Fleron, Ahl and Lane, of simply translating theories derived from Western transitions over to the current wave, without taking account of the different circumstances prevailing in East-Central Europe and Russia.28 However, in the context of the present study, such a comparative analysis lends wider perspective to the regionally-based information available in the Mid-Volga. In overall terms, the book seeks to make a contribution to each of the five genres outlined earlier, and to provide new information on the activities of parties and their members at the regional level in Russia. As mentioned already, the main emphasis of the study is comparative, examining six party organizations in three locations. The comparisons are sometimes made by party and sometimes by location, depending upon whether inter-regional or inter-party differences are more important in the context of each topic examined. For historical and organizational reasons, more emphasis is placed on certain organizations than others at various points in the discussion. A study of regional and local party activity cannot be understood fully without examining the context in which such activity takes place. It is with this that the study begins.

2

Political parties in Russia The federal level

Before beginning our investigation into regional party activities, it is necessary to introduce the Russian party system and its actors at the federal level. This will enable us to examine regional and local party activities in subsequent chapters with some knowledge of the context in which these activities take place. The chapter begins by outlining the development of multi-partyism in Russia. Since the abolition of the one-party system in 1990, numerous parties have been created and have disappeared, and the parties which form the basis of the present study have evolved out of this process. Although the main focus of the present study is on contemporary party activism and organization, this section will concentrate on the overarching issues involved and outline the development of the party system since the late 1980s to the present day. More specific details will be given in the second section, which introduces the six parties which won representation in the State Duma in 1999 through the party list vote. These form the basis of the present study. The final part of the chapter analyzes the institutional framework regulating the development of the parties and the party system – the role afforded to them by the Russian Constitution; the electoral system; and the new legislation on political parties which came into effect in summer 2001.

Federal parties: a historical overview As noted in Chapter 1, transformation from a one-party to a multi-party political regime is not a new phenomenon. Studies of similar transformations in other countries provide a general theoretical framework against which the Russian experience can be measured. The process of party system formation can typically be divided into four main phases. It will be seen in the following pages that some of these are applicable to the Russian case, but not all: 1

Reaction to the old regime. This may coincide with liberalization, during which barriers to the development of civil society are lifted. It is typical to find a broad coalition of movements opposed to the previous regime. ‘Antipolitical’ groups characterized by vague programmes, ‘catch-all’ appeal and a loose

Political parties at the federal level

2

3

4

11

organizational structure predominate. The political cleavage is along an antiregime versus pro-regime axis, and the aim is representation, not power.1 Centrifugal tendencies. After the fall of the authoritarian regime, political alignments are restructured, since the opposition loses the only common factor uniting it. Typically, the number of political groups mushrooms, but most have little infrastructure, and the founding elections test their organizational abilities.2 This stage and the next one take place in the transition phase of transformation, the period between two consolidated regimes. Splits, fusions and births. The founding elections define the first party system. Thereafter, political alliances are shaped by transformation issues. This period is characterized by frequent coalition-making and -breaking, and political parties emerge and disappear regularly.3 This is due in part to the non-institutionalized nature of the party system, since there are no great costs attached to splitting from a fledgling organization or merging with an existing one. Consolidation. Eventually, a stable pattern of inter-party relationships emerges. In much of East-Central Europe, and especially in Russia, the crystallization of party support based on societal cleavages may still lie in the future.

Using this framework, derived from democratic transition theory, the discussion now turns to the Russian example. It traces developments from the collapse of the USSR and the elections to the Soviet and Russian Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989–90, through the first election to the State Duma in December 1993, and the development of the party system in the wake of the second and third Duma elections in 1995 and 1999. Reaction to the old regime? The neformaly period (1986–91) It was suggested that the first step in a typical evolution is liberalization, accompanied by a broadly-based front against the old regime which unites many strands of contradictory thought along an anti/pro-regime cleavage. This is reminiscent of the early stages of the Russian transformation. During Mikhail Gorbachev’s period in office (1985–91) as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and, later, also as executive president of the USSR, his policies of perestroika (‘restructuring’) and glasnost′ (‘openness’) allowed a more open discourse to develop. Initially, these programmes were conceived as a means of increasing responsibility and attacking the ossified bureaucratic planned economy,4 but just as democratic transition theory hypothesizes that leaders of authoritarian systems become trapped by liberalization, so Gorbachev became isolated between conservatives and reformers. By 1990, what had been conceived as a carefully controlled experiment to rejuvenate the hegemonic CPSU had moved from the state to the societal realm. Furthermore, Gorbachev’s ‘inveterate tinkering’ with institutions, designed to bolster his own position, generally had unexpected consequences, which in turn led to further ad hoc ‘institutional fixes’.5

12

Political parties at the federal level

In the ‘party’ sphere, this phase witnessed the creation of so-called ‘neformaly’ – ‘informals’.6 Unlike every other organization hitherto, they were independent of the state and enjoyed no formal legal status. Informals began as discussion clubs in 1986–7, usually with specific local or issue-based agendas, and over time they became increasingly politicized as it became obvious that the reform impetus would have to come from non-Party channels. The process was accelerated in 1989 with the election of the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies. Although the electoral process was still weighted strongly in the CPSU’s favour – ultimately, 87.6 per cent of elected deputies were CPSU members – it represented the first all-Union election in the history of the USSR in which some degree of real choice could be exercised by voters, and many middle-ranking Party nominees suffered spectacular defeats.7 Although independent candidates were not allowed officially, voters’ clubs and citizens’ committees succeeded in the selection and election of a small minority of reform-minded individuals. Among those elected was Boris Yeltsin, who was still a member of the CPSU but had been excluded from the list of candidates nominated for the Party’s reserved hundred seats. Despite the huge proliferation of movements, at the beginning of 1990 the stress still lay on the ne of neformaly, since article six of the 1977 Soviet Constitution rendered the CPSU the ‘leading and guiding force of Soviet society’.8 Having earlier resisted pressure for change, Gorbachev acknowledged the untenable nature of this monopoly in February 1990,9 and in March, two weeks before the elections to the Russian (as opposed to all-Union) Congress of People’s Deputies, the Constitution was altered.10 By late 1990, there were at least 457 political movements in the Russian Soviet Republic alone.11 The wider implications of this first stage of party system evolution in the USSR must be considered. First, the elections in 1989 and 1990 were not founding elections, even if there was a degree of choice which had not existed before. The 1989 all-Union Congress of People’s Deputies election preceded the legalization of parties, and the Russian one came just two weeks after the restrictions were lifted in March 1990. Second, the multitude of neformaly could be categorized into four broad groups: ‘democrats’; socialists; radical anti-communists; and national-patriots.12 After March 1990, it was also possible to highlight a democratic/ reactionary axis, which reflected the splits within the Soviet leadership and the discourse of public debate at the time.13 Also noticeable was the lack of a political middle, a trend which was to continue over the following decade.14 Third, the removal of the CPSU’s leading role simply legalized a pre-existing phenomenon. Unlike most cases in East-Central Europe, the mushrooming of political groups began in Russia before the fall of the previous regime, rather than after it. The extent to which Russia followed the characteristic ‘anti-regime coalition’ model is also debatable. The anti-regime coalitions observed in previous transitions were mirrored to an extent by the creation of ‘Democratic Russia’,15 but this was a broad and loose confederation of ‘democrats’ increasingly active but riven by factionalism, and in no way comparable to the popular fronts in the German

Political parties at the federal level

13

16

Democratic Republic or to Solidarity in Poland. By comparison with East-Central Europe, arguably the implosion of the ruling party contributed more as an independent variable to the collapse of the old regime. After the fall of the regime: centrifugal tendencies? (1991–3) It will be recalled that centrifugal tendencies resulting from the removal of the common opponent typically become more prevalent after the collapse of the regime. Usually these result in a restructuring of political alignments, culminating in the founding election. In the four months following the attempted August 1991 coup, what remained of the Soviet system disintegrated. In a country ruled for over 70 years by the Communist Party alone, Russian president Boris Yeltsin used the opportunity to sign decrees suspending the Party’s activities on Russian soil, and Gorbachev resigned as general secretary when it became apparent that the coup had been led by hardline elements of the Party’s ‘inner circle’. Just four months later – on 25 December 1991, by which time many of the union republics had declared independence or sovereignty, and the leaders of the three Slavic republics had formed the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) – Gorbachev also resigned as Soviet president. The Soviet Union itself had effectively ceased to exist, leaving him without a country to govern. The post-Soviet era had begun, but whereas the founding elections in EastCentral Europe had taken place within months of the fall of the regime, often with a provisional government in the meantime, it was not until December 1993 that the first post-Soviet election took place in Russia. The intervening two years were marred by conflict between Yeltsin (whose position as Russian president emanated from popular election in June 1991, at which time Russia was, of course, still part of the Soviet Union) and parliament, in the form of the (Russian) Congress of People’s Deputies and its Supreme Soviet, elected in 1990. Given that the Soviet-era constitution of the Russian union republic had not envisaged a situation in which it would become an independent entity, and that a popularly elected president was a late addition to the system, it was unclear who had the overriding authority. The vacuum ended in the euphemistically named ‘October Events’. In late September 1993, Yeltsin disbanded the parliament in a move which he himself acknowledged to be in violation of the Constitution.17 His ‘victory’ in the subsequent bloody stand-off in early October set the scene for the country’s first post-Soviet election in December of the same year, its first fully open election since 1917. If the long period before the founding election marked Russia out from the common pattern of regime transformation, the centrifugal tendencies of the infant party system were more typical. The unity of the anti-Communist front was shattered when the CPSU was removed from power, and the main cleavages within Russian politics became the issues of ‘shock therapy’ (rapid economic changes which initially resulted in hyperinflation) and whether the Soviet Union should have been retained in revised form. The long period of political vacuum meant

14

Political parties at the federal level

that the broad communist, democratic and nationalist groups of the transitional party system had not yet been tested under electoral circumstances,18 which resulted in a proliferation of divan (‘sofa’) or ‘pseudo’-parties.19 The fact that parties played a fairly minor role in the existing parliament did nothing to help the system’s development. Most deputies were formally affiliated with parliamentary blocs, but these played little institutional role.20 The full Congress of People’s Deputies met only nine times between 1990 and 1993, and ‘routine’ legislative duties were devolved to the smaller Supreme Soviet, where factions were similarly ‘small, numerous and amoeba-like’.21 The 35-strong presidium, chaired by Ruslan Khasbulatov, was the Supreme Soviet’s leadership body and it consisted of committee, rather than faction, chairs. Yeltsin’s declaration of himself to be above parties was mirrored by the growing tendency for charismatic, leader-oriented parties with weak organizational structures. The December 1993 election to the new State Duma could be considered the ‘founding’ election, and was arguably the somewhat delayed culmination of the previous period of party building, institutionalizing pre-existing political groupings.22 A full description of the voting system can be found elsewhere, and it is analyzed later in this chapter.23 Essentially, it split the 450-member State Duma into two halves, with 225 members to be elected from federal party lists, and the remainder by simple plurality in each of 225 single-member district (SMD) constituencies. Indeed, there was some element of filtering in the electoral process, as is often the case in a founding election: of the thirty-five organizations which had the right to collect signatures, twenty-one used it. Thirteen blocs were registered and eight surmounted the 5 per cent barrier necessary for representation in the party list section of the vote. Whilst being still a comparatively high number, it at least allowed a more meaningful analysis of the emerging party system than the 457 movements which had been in existence three years before. The victorious blocs, together with the other four movements which won SMD seats, split into three main groupings: left-Communist; centrist/democrat; and the surprisingly strong nationalist-patriotic wing, led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR). However, more than half the deputies elected in the single-member seats (141 of 225) had no party affiliation. A summary of the result of the election is shown in Table 2.1. Several commentators highlighted the weakness of the parties as independent variables. None of the organizations which competed in the single-member campaigns, for instance, fielded candidates in all 225 constituencies (a trend which has continued in the second and third Duma elections, as Chapter 6 shows).24 Various factors militated against the emergence of a stable party system at this stage, including the increasingly presidential system of government and the fragmented nature of Russian society. Rather than being issue- or cleavage-based, most parties were vehicles for their leaders and appeared to exist only nominally as extra-parliamentary organizations. It was noted that, after popular participation in the fall of the CPSU, politics was increasingly becoming a game of ‘private, top level intrigues’ once more.25

Political parties at the federal level

15

Table 2.1 Election to the State Duma (first convocation), December 1993 Party/Bloc

% PR party list vote

Russia’s Choice (RC) Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) Agrarian Party of Russia Yavlinsky–Boldyrev–Lukin Bloc (Yabloko) Women of Russia Party of Russian Unity and Accord (PRUA) Democratic Party of Russia (DPR) [5 per cent party list barrier] Four other organizations winning less than 5 per cent in Party List and fewer than 10 SMD seats each Against all Independents

15.51 22.92

70 64

15.6 14.2

12.40

48

10.7

7.99 7.86

33 23

7.3 5.1

8.13 6.73

23 19

5.1 4.2

5.52

15

3.3