The parliamentary elections in Russia
on Sunday, December 4, were seen as a popularity test of Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin, who is running for the presidency in March. The result
was a blow to Putin, registering a sharp fall in support for his United
Russia party. According to the official results, which are undoubtedly
rigged, United Russia obtained just under half of valid votes cast,
which gives it a very small majority in the State Duma.
The parliamentary elections in Russia
on Sunday, December 4, were seen as a popularity test of Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin, who is running for the presidency in March. The result
was a blow to Putin, registering a sharp fall in support for his United
Russia party. According to the official results, which are undoubtedly
rigged, United Russia obtained just under half of valid votes cast,
which gives it a very small majority in the State Duma.
Vladimir Putin. Photo: World Economic ForumParliamentary election took place in Russia, simultaneously with local elections in 27 Russian regions.
Lenin
often stressed the importance of studying each and every statistic that
could shed light on the evolution of class consciousness. He paid
careful attention to even the smallest election and tried to assess its
significance for the development of the class struggle; the changed
relationship between parties and classes. It is therefore necessary to
ask: what is the meaning of these elections and in what direction is
Russia moving?
Elections in Russia have a very relative
importance, since everybody knows they are rigged by the Kremlin. Many
Russians are understandably cynical about elections and political
parties. Nevertheless, Sunday’s election to the Russian parliament (the
Duma) revealed a significant change in the situation. The result for
United Russia must be compared to the 64% that they won in the
parliamentary elections in 2007.
The Duma elections were an
important indicator for Russia’s future. The result of the presidential
elections in March next year is a foregone conclusion. Putin will be the
next President of Russia. But the Kremlin needed to win a
constitutional majority in Sunday’s vote, or 66% of the seats (about 62%
of the vote). In the end it barely managed to scrape a majority. The
ruling party lost its previous two-thirds majority which allowed it to
change the constitution unchallenged.
Seven parties stood for 450
seats, which are allocated on a pro-rata basis to those parties that
garner more that 7% of the votes cast nationwide. This is calculated to
eliminate the smaller parties. It means that just four parties stood a
chance: Putin’s United Russia, the Communist Party (KPRF), Just Russia
(Spravidlivaya Rossiya) and the comically misnamed Liberal Democratic
Party (LDPR) of the right wing demagogue Zhirinovsky. The allocated
seats are filled by the candidates from the party lists filed with the
Central Election Committee at the start of campaign.
The preliminary result on Monday morning, with 95.71% Ballots counted, was as follows:
- United Russia: 49.54%
- Communist Party: 19.16%
- A Just Russia: 13.22%
- Liberal Democratic Party: 11.11%
- Yabloko: 3.3%
- Patriots of Russia: 0.97%
- Right Cause: 0.59%
The breakdown in seats in the Duma will be:
- United Russia: 238 (315 in 2007)
- CRRF: 92 (57)
- A Just Russia: 64 (38)
- Liberal Democratic Party: 56 (40)
United
Russia was founded exclusively as a vehicle for Putin. Now his
authority has suffered a blow from which it will be difficult to
recover. It indicates a slump in his support. It reflects a sharp shift
in public opinion. An increasing number of Russians blame him for the
rampant corruption, falling standards and a stagnant economy. United
Russia is now known as “the party of thieves and crooks.”
Despite
this, few people expected any party but United Russia would be declared
the winner. But voters hoped at least to give Putin a kick. They
certainly succeeded. The drop in support for Putin and his party was
felt even in places such as Vladivostok, Russia’s Pacific capital and
seven time zones east of Moscow. This region was once a bastion of
support for Putin. But many voters here turned to the opposition on
Sunday for the first time in a decade.
Vladimir Putin’s party got
as little as 25.5% in the Noginsk industrial district outside of Moscow,
where the CPRF won. In the central election district of St. Petersburg
(27.7% for United Russia) on Sunday, Putin’s party barely beat A Just
Russia, which tries to present itself as a “socialist” party.
United
Russia also polled poorly in Kareliya (32.3%), the Russian region near
Finland; in Arkhangelsk (31.8%), the Arctic Sea port; and in Primorsky
Krai (33.4%), the Pacific coastal region in the Far East. Meanwhile, in
the Dmitrov area of the Moscow region (29.0%), home to ailing industrial
districts, the Communist Party captured almost as much of the vote as
UR.
Regime in crisis
Putin was recently named by Forbes
magazine as the world’s second most-powerful person, behind only U.S.
President Barrack Obama. Now suddenly he looks like a Colossus with feet
of clay. Twelve years ago, when Putin was first propelled to power on
the basis of the widespread revulsion with the rule of the western
stooge Boris Yeltsin, he enjoyed wide public approval. He seemed to take
measures against the oligarchs who had enriched themselves under
Yeltsin and his nationalist demagogy and pose of “standing up to the
West” temporarily assisted him.
Yet, the main reason was the
economic recovery that followed the economic debacle of 1998. Russian
nominal gross domestic product (GDP) rose to $1.9 trillion this year, as
opposed to only $200 billion in 1999. This was a temporary relief. Now,
all illusions have evaporated. People realise that the supposed attack
on the oligarchs was merely a case of transferring the loot from one
group of gangsters to another, while the majority are no better off than
they were before. Russia has been hit hard by the global economic
crisis. Putin is now commonly referred to as a dictator, while United
Russia is seen by many voters as deeply corrupt.
This election was
really a referendum on Vladimir Putin and the ruling United Russia
party. Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of parliament and United Russia’s
chairman, argued that the party put in a strong performance compared
with other European ruling parties. But this argument will fool nobody.
The truth is that Putin’s regime has lost all legitimacy among voters,
particularly in large cities.
The results were also a blow for
Dmitri Medvedev, who as United Russia’s candidate for prime minister was
theoretically the party’s leader in the Duma elections. “Taken the more
complicated configuration of the Duma, we will have to enter in to
coalitions and agreements [with other parties] on certain issues,” he
said Sunday. “This is what parliamentarianism and democracy are about.”
To
talk about parliamentarianism and democracy in Russia is, of course, a
joke in poor taste. The Duma is rightly seen by most people as merely a
rubber stamp body for the Kremlin. However, if United Russia loses its
majority that situation may change. The Kremlin clique will be compelled
to manoeuvre and negotiate with other parties. The March presidential
elections – previously expected to be a coronation for Mr. Putin – may
now prove to be more complicated.
The constitution stipulates that
political power should be concentrated in the Duma because it is an
elected body. In reality, however, it is in the hands of the Kremlin
clique controlled by Putin. Putin served as president from 2000 to 2008
but was prohibited by the constitution from running for a third
consecutive term. He got around this inconvenience by a transparent
manoeuvre. When Putin was obliged to stand down as President, he gave
the job to his stooge Dmitry Medvedev. But real power remained in
Putin’s hands.
From the start it was clear that Putin intended to
return to his old job as president. Medvedev predictably said he would
back Putin’s bid, hoping to be given the office of prime minister as a
reward. Putin planned to return to the presidency in March for another
two terms until 2024. But as Robert Burns said long ago: “The best – laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men gang aft agley.”
Dirty tricks
Abraham
Lincoln pointed out that it is possible to fool some of the people all
the time, and all of the people some of the time, but it is not possible
to fool all the people all of the time. Nobody believes the official
lies anymore. There was widespread cynicism about the election.
There
can be no doubt that even the bad result for United Russia was greatly
inflated. The real result will have been much worse. There have been
widespread reports of ballot-stuffing, voter intimidation and the
harassment of election observers. During the election campaign there
were many reports of illegal manipulation of the press and other dirty
tricks organized by the Kremlin.
“We have received thousands of
calls from regional offices, confirming massive violations and fraud,”
said Communist Party deputy head Ivan Melnikov on the party website.
“Throughout the day, it was like receiving reports from a war zone.”
CPRF leader Gennady Zyuganov denounced electoral fraud and described the
election as “theft on an especially grand scale”. He said police had
barred Communist monitors from several polling stations across the
country, adding that”some ended up in hospital with broken bones”. Some
ballot boxes, he said, had been stuffed with ballots even before voting
began.
In various cities, business managers demanded that their
employees vote for United Russia, threatening them with pay cuts or even
dismissal if they didn’t. During classes, teachers made their students
check off United Russia on hundreds of blank ballots. Entire apartment
buildings discovered that none of the residents were on voter lists. It
was also reported that none of the students, scholars or teachers at
Moscow State University from outside Moscow could vote. They had to
return to their hometowns to cast their ballots.
Violence was
widespread. In Belgorod, a Communist Party regional deputy was beaten up
by the police. In Perm, the campaign manager for an oppositional party
was beaten by unidentified men using baseball bats. In Bratsk, Irkutsk
region, unidentified masked men kidnapped the 16-year-old daughter of
the head of the local Communist Party branch office. They released her
with a message for her mother: “Quit the campaign, or we’ll kidnap her
for real”.
Several prominent Russian news organizations, including The New Times and Kommersant newspapers, as well as Echo of
Moscow radio, saw their websites crash under apparent denial-of-service
attacks just before polling stations opened, leaving them unable to
report on the growing number of complaints about irregularities at
polling stations. Small protests broke out on the streets of Moscow and
other cities, and the approaches to the Kremlin and Red Square were
blocked on Sunday night by rows of Interior Ministry soldiers and troop
carriers.
The rigging was blatant. The slogan of the day was: “Vote early and vote often.” The Economist reported:
“Throughout
the day young people in identical white coats were ferried between
polling stations—some voting more than a dozen times, according to
Russian journalists. I saw several organised groups casting ballots in
different polling stations with distant voting permits.”
In
some regions the sum of votes cast for all parties exceeded 140%. In
Chechnya, ruled by a Putin stooge, Ramzan Kadyrov, United Russia’s
result was 99.5% – just as in the good old days of the Soviet Union! It
is perhaps appropriate that a similar result was achieved in a Moscow
psychiatric hospital.
Russians know that parties like
Zhirinovsky’s LDPR and Just Russia are in the Kremlin’s pocket and will
vote with United Russia in parliament. Just Russia, which masquerades as
a “Social Democratic” party, was in fact set up by Putin to take votes
away from the CPRF. Gennady Gudkov, a senior member of Just Russia,
admitted in a sudden attack of sincerity: “We are losing votes to the
Communist Party, who people think of as more of an opposition party
because it doesn’t have a history of cooperation with the authorities
like we sadly do.”
Even before the counting was complete, the
party’s leader Mironov said he “did not rule out” a coalition with
United Russia. Zyuganov has apparently made similar statements. All this
lifts the curtain behind which the dirty game of political intrigue is
being constantly played out in Russia.
Despite all the dirty
tricks and vote-rigging, the Kremlin’s campaign to maintain the current
ruling clique in power has gone badly wrong. All the manoeuvres and
vote-rigging has failed to prevent a spectacular decline in the vote for
Putin’s party.
The CPRF
By one of those ironies with
which history is so rich, the Soviet Union collapsed 20 years ago this
week. Yet the main winner in Sunday’s election was the Communist Party
of the Russian Federation. This was no accident. Reuters yesterday
carried an article with the title: Russian communists win support as Putin party fades. It comments:
“Just
20 years ago, they seemed consigned to the dustbin of history. […]
The Communist Party (CPRF) for most Russians evokes images of bemedaled
war veterans and the elderly poor deprived of pensions and left behind
in a ‘New Russia’ of glitzy indulgence. Large swathes of society have
appeared beyond the reach of the red flag and hammer and sickle.”
But
Sunday’s vote has changed this perception. The CPRF doubled its vote to
about 20 percent and is now the second largest party in the Duma. Not
that this expresses any great enthusiasm for the policies of Zyuganov.
Many people do not trust the party because of its past and because of
Zyuganov’s manoeuvres. So how is this vote to be explained? The answer
is not difficult to find. The vote for the CPRF reflects a growing
undercurrent of discontent in Russian society with all that has happened
in the last two decades.
The end of the Soviet Union led to an
unprecedented economic collapse and the wholesale plundering of the
state by big business. The result was the rule of wealthy and corrupt
oligarchs, who fought for the division of the spoils looted from the
Russian people. After the economic collapse of 1998 there was a certain
revival mainly based on the export of Russian oil and gas. Huge fortunes
were made by a few, but most Russians were left in a state of poverty.
The levels of inequality soared.
Russia was hard hit by the crisis
of 2008, but the economy is beginning to recover, and expected to grow
at around 4-4.5% this year. But Russia’s 143 million people have not
seen much benefit from this growth. They have seen their living
standards eroded by high prices, a slowdown in real wage growth, a
crumbling welfare state and unemployment. They compare this to the vast
riches of the oligarchs, huge and growing inequality and obscene
corruption at the top.
The benefits of recovery are being skimmed
off by the business elite around the Kremlin. The people of Russia have
now got the worst of all worlds: the chaos, exploitation and inequality
of capitalism and the corrupt, authoritarian and bureaucratic state left
over from Stalinism. The Russian blogosphere compares Putin’s party to
the old CPSU of Stalinist times. One popular image shows the face of an
aged Putin’s face superimposed on a portrait of the decrepit Soviet
leader Leonid Brezhnev.
The ruling party is hated, but people who
wish to protest against it do not have much choice. The regime has made
it impossible for small parties to register, so the smaller Communist
Parties like the Russian Communist Workers’ Party (RKRP) are excluded.
Just Russia is widely seen as a puppet of the Kremlin (although in
Petersburg they got more votes than the CPRF). The CPRF has gained for
the simple reason that there is no alternative.
For many Russians
disillusioned by rampant corruption and a widening gap between rich and
poor, the communists represented the only credible opposition to Putin’s
United Russia. Partly it is a question of organizational superiority.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the party retained a strong national
organization based on regions and workplaces. Most of the others are
parties in name only. The nationalist LDPR is built around one man, the
right wing demagogue Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Other parties lack national
structure.
One Western banker in Moscow is quoted by Reuters as
saying: “The Communists are the only real party out there.” “United
Russia is a joke, Just Russia is a joke and the LDPR is a joke and many
people know it. So they vote communist because they realize it is a real
vote for the opposition and against United Russia.”
“United
Russia has angered everybody and people are looking for an alternative,”
said Alexander Kurov, 19, a student of physics in Moscow told Reuters:
“I don’t particularly like the communists but there is no one else (to
vote for) and I don’t want my vote to be stolen.” “They are a different
party than in Soviet times,” Anna, 21, a student of mechanics at the
Moscow State University, said. “I have a lot of friends who are
activists for the Communists Party. It’s become popular.”
Even a
layer of the middle class and professional people, disillusioned with
Putin and the Kremlin clique, is turning to the CPRF. Reuters quotes the
words of a young woman, Yulia Serpikova, 27, a freelance location
manager in the film industry: “With sadness I remember how I
passionately vowed to my grandfather I would never vote for the
Communists. It’s sad that with the ballot in hand I had to tick the box
for them to vote against it all.”
The success of the CPRF
undoubtedly reflects disenchantment with Putin and his party. But that
is only part of the story, however. For many Russian workers, the old
Soviet Union, for all its faults, was far preferable to what they have
now. The idea is widespread, especially in the provinces far from Moscow
and Petersburg: “Things were better before.”
This mood must be
widespread among older workers, but it is beginning to find a reflection
in a layer of the youth, as shown by one contributor to the CPRF’s chat
forum, who offered a new genre of “communist cool” with a rap
composition, the words of which are interesting:
Want to get back what they took from me
Free schooling ain’t no free lunch
Free medicine is my right, you see
What matters to you? Whose side you on?
Want to help your country
So it’s our choice and it’s our rap
So we go vote for the CPRF
A sea-change in Russia
In
retrospect, these elections will be seen as a sea-change in Russian
politics. Slowly but surely, the working class is recovering from the
apathy, trauma and disorientation that followed the collapse of the
USSR. Beneath the surface there is a growing mood of anger, frustration
and rage. There is a burning hatred for the ruling clique and the
bloated oligarchy that has enriched itself at the expense of the
majority of Russians.
The fate of Russia is now firmly tied to the
vicissitudes of the world capitalist market, which is sliding
inexorably in the direction of a new and even deeper slump. A further
collapse of demand in Europe and the United States will mean steep falls
in the price of oil and gas and the other raw materials that are the
mainstay of the Russian economy. Falling living standards and
unemployment will throw petrol onto the flames of the rage that is
already felt by millions of ordinary Russians.
“People are sick and tired of Putin,” said Yevgenia Albats, editor in chief of The New Times,
a pro-opposition newspaper in Moscow. “They turn on the TV and they see
Putin, Putin, Putin, and at the same time they see don’t see their
lives improving significantly.” The anger is growing and dissent is
becoming bolder and more vocal. Recently, Putin was jeered during an
appearance at a mixed-martial-arts match in Moscow – clear evidence
Russians had turned on the “strongman” in the Kremlin.
The idea
that Putin cannot be defeated has now been punctured. And the CPRF has
emerged clearly as the only alternative. One CPRF Deputy hailed the
victory as “a new political reality” on Sunday evening. That remains to
be seen. The CPRF has yet to establish its credentials as a real
opposition party. But in spite of the policies of Zyuganov, support for
the CPRF will grow for the simple reason that there is no alternative.
Putin’s
plan to return to the presidency next year faces a more serious
challenge following his stunning electoral setback in Sunday’s
elections. After the election, Medvedev said that they should
re-introduce the rule allowing people to vote “against all”. This is
intended to take votes away from opposition parties like the CPRF. This
is an expression of the desperation of the ruling clique. The Kremlin
will do everything in its power to prevent genuine opposition candidates
from registering. But if they try to hold onto power by rigging the
elections again, that can have even more explosive consequences.
The
crisis of the regime will deepen in the next period. The leaders of
United Russia will be fighting like cats in a sack, with Putin trying to
put the blame on the others for all his problems. These divisions at
the top are a distorted reflection of the growing tensions in Russia
society, and they will further increase the tension and discontent in
society.
Recently The Financial Times carried a long
article about Russia in which it compared the present situation to the
position just over 20 years ago – just before the collapse of the Soviet
Union. After two decades of gangster capitalism the people of Russia
are disenchanted with the joys of market economics. The vote last Sunday
was a massive vote of no confidence, not just in Putin and the Kremlin
crew but in the entire economic and political system.
The recent
election results were only a very muted reflection of the widespread
anger that is reaching boiling point. Western observers fear that the
anger that is building up will sooner or later erupt onto the streets of
Russian cities. Business New Europe expressed these fears when it wrote
after the elections:
“[…] ruling Russia by
presidential fiat rather than debate amongst parties increases the
likelihood of some sort of revolution, as the people are excluded from
the political process entirely and have nowhere to blow off steam except
on the street.” (http://www.bne.eu/)
The
crisis of the regime and the political intrigues and electoral
combinations are only a caricature expression of the insoluble social
contradictions and the discontent that is building up beneath the
surface. The longer Putin and his clique try to hang onto power, the
more explosive the contradictions will become. What happened in Tunisia
and Egypt can happen also in Russia.
