Putin has made the presidency so dominant in Russian politics that it is tempting to assume other institutions count for little. The very idea must give Putin some rueful amusement. Though members of the ruling group set most of the public agenda, they have not always been able to count on compliance, the Federal Assembly in particular sometimes showing an inclination towards obstruction.
When Putin first became president, the members of both the Federal Assembly’s upper and lower houses were elected. The upper house, the Federation Council, consisted of two representatives from each of the eighty-five regional units of the second tier of governance, and many of them had grown accustomed to running their republics or provinces with scant regard for Yeltsin’s decrees or the cabinet’s policies. In 2004 Putin, believing Russia had become ungovernable, persuaded the State Duma to agree to dispense with elections to the Federation Council and let him appoint the regional governors, apparently convinced that ‘the power vertical’ would immediately work for the general good. The reality turned out differently, and when local problems arose the governors Putin had appointed incurred the blame.1
The Duma remained elective, and Putin’s first prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, had to handle its debates with some delicacy when pursuing his course of economic reforms. It wasn’t just the Communist Party and Liberal-Democratic Party that contained critics of governmental policy: even Putin’s own Unity Party did. Unity had been formed in 1999 to contest the Duma elections, but obtained fewer than a quarter of the seats, and when Putin won the presidency he and Kasyanov had to confront the problem that the communists were the biggest party in the Duma. They manoeuvred their way round this by negotiating Unity’s merger with the All-Russia-Fatherland party that had been led by Luzhkov and Primakov, both of whom he had pushed out of the 2000 presidential electoral contest by means of black propaganda. The newly amalgamated party, United Russia, was proclaimed in April 2001. Although it lacked a majority in the Duma, Kasyanov succeeded in winning enough additional assistance to pass his reforms into law.2
Kasyanov’s rhetoric, he knew, would not win over the Duma by itself, so he bought the support of individual Duma deputies or their constituencies by dispensing local grants – a practice the Americans call pork-barrel politics. It was a process strewn with obstacles. In the Duma elections in December 2003 Putin and Kasyanov were determined to secure an absolute majority. They were disappointed: true, United Russia had emerged as the biggest party, which was an improvement on 1999, but it still lacked a majority. This would require agile management by the next prime minister, Mikhail Fradkov. Financial and political blandishments were offered to obtain defections from other parties so the cabinet could secure the passage of its bills, an uncomfortable mode of politics for Putin, who required a reliable parliamentary base. In December 2007 the administration threw abundant resources into the Duma elections: promises about welfare; more grants for many Russian constituencies to mollify local grievances. Buoyed by a resurgent economy, the current leaders asked the electorate to stick with them as the best way to achieve progress, using campaign buzzwords such as ‘leadership’, ‘order’, ‘stability’ and ‘patriotism’.
Since his party controlled the national TV channels, Putin was assured of getting his message across. United Russia secured 295 out of 450 seats, an absolute majority, comfortably obviating the need for talks with would-be defectors.
This had not come about without the deployment of ‘political technology’. While aiming at victory for his party, Putin maintained the appearance of multiparty competition and procedural fairness, licensing his Deputy Chief of Staff Vladislav Surkov to devise electoral rules that would enable a number of opposition parties to gain a minority of seats. As ever, the Kremlin was indulgent towards Zyuganov’s communists and Zhirinovski’s liberal-democrats, since they no longer stood any chance of defeating United Russia and in any case shared Putin’s priority for central state power and an assertive foreign policy. Putin and Surkov were delighted that Yabloko, the liberal party, won only four Duma seats in 2003 and none at all in subsequent elections. Surkov was a wily operator: whenever a new party emerged on the political spectrum to offer a serious threat – or even a half-serious one – to United Russia, he enabled the creation of rival parties that would take votes away from the newcomer. He took the same precautions against the old Communist Party by surreptitiously helping to found Rodina (Motherland), a patriotic party led by Dmitri Rogozin seeking support from working people.3
Until Surkov’s arrival, politics in Russia were officially a ‘managed democracy’, its procedures different from those in liberal democracies. Such management from on high, it was suggested, was necessary to achieve the full benefit from elections and public debate. Surkov disliked the term for its authoritarian ring:4 he wanted control from above to be exercised but not flaunted. In 2006, with Putin’s permission, he replaced ‘managed democracy’ with ‘sovereign democracy’. Medvedev regarded both slogans with distaste and argued the case for simply ‘real democracy’, which was Kasyanov’s preference too. But unlike Kasyanov, Medvedev reserved his opinion for behind closed doors until such time as he became president.5 Not that Medvedev made conditions easier for United Russia’s rival parties. Like his patron Putin, he permitted or encouraged the emasculation of democratic procedures. For the ruling group this was the qualification for membership.
While rejecting the charge of Machiavellian manipulation, Surkov was astonishingly frank about his ambitions on behalf of the leadership. Appearing before a United Russia gathering in February 2006, he opined that the objective should be not just to win the Duma the following year but to hold on to it for a minimum of ‘ten to fifteen years’.6 He saw the issue in almost apocalyptic terms. A year later he recounted that the Presidential Administration ‘was engaged in preventing revolution in the country’ on a daily basis.7 He saw Putin and his United Russia as crucial for the maintenance of stability and progress. If this necessitated devious practices, even deception, Surkov was the man for the job – and Putin endorsed him.
But Putin saw ‘sovereign democracy’ as a useful euphemism for what he was trying to achieve for his country, and Surkov’s term was officially adopted, signifying Russia’s determination to behave as it liked anywhere in the world: most of the world’s democracies, Putin was fond of declaring, were subservient to America’s geopolitical interests and demands,8 whereas he, as Russian leader, refused to be cast as the US president’s little brother. Like Putin, Surkov saw Washington’s connivances as the greatest threat to national independence, and this was the rationale for the restriction of internal freedoms in Russia. No foreign power was going to be permitted to interfere in Russian public affairs. The country’s rulers were determined to thwart America’s potential interference in its electoral process: as a result they distrusted all international media organizations, IT corporations and charitable non-governmental bodies. The Kremlin leaders themselves, of course, were adept at manipulating Russian elections, but feared that foreigners would seize every chance to deploy the same skills.
Other Kremlin officials had their doubts, and argued for a looser form of politics that could accommodate greater debate and dissent. Putin increasingly disappointed them. In hindsight, Gleb Pavlovski, Putin’s one-time adviser, believed on the basis of his experience in the Presidential Administration that Putin had originally hoped to construct a two-party system, striking a balance between United Russia and the Communist Party, on the premise that the communists would turn themselves into a social-democratic party.9 If Putin truly had such an ambition in mind, he soon discarded it – and the communist leader Zyuganov relapsed into a blinkered chauvinism rather than social-democracy. Putin, it would seem, continued to believe in the need for a more flexible political order, but thought this might best come about through the growth of active factions inside his own United Russia. Pavlovski has also written that Putin is aware Russia faces ‘stagnation’ unless it changes its system of governance and transforms its economy so that the ‘generals’ no longer hold the whip hand.10 It was political self-interest, according to Pavlovski, that dissuaded Putin from taking the plunge, apparently having realized that political reform would threaten his own supporters’ interests.11 But Putin had once told Secretary of State Rice that the Liberal Party had succeeded in governing Japan for nearly all the years since the Second World War, and he saw no reason for Russia not to take the same route.12
There was little fuss in the way the State Duma and Federation Council processed bills. Legislative activity, which while Kasyanov was premier had been large scale and frenetic, dwindled to reforms of secondary importance. The two houses tended to work in harmony with the government, the president and each other. It became rare for either the Federation Council or the president to veto legislation. In turn, the Duma took its revising work seriously, especially when the ruling elite was divided – and United Russia became the locus of heavy internal lobbying.13 Bills initiated by the Presidential Administration were consistently successful: between 2007 and 2011 not one met with failure, even though debates were often fiery. The liberal-democrat leader Zhirinovski was not alone in his combustible behaviour, and he and successive Duma Speakers had to work hard to keep order. But United Russia had both an absolute majority and internal discipline. It could trounce all polemics from the podium or from the seated tiers of the debating hall.14
With his reputation for political adroitness, Surkov was assigned the task of repeating his magic at the next Duma election in December 2011. Medvedev was still president, but had already announced that he would stand aside for Putin, and Putin indicated his wish for Medvedev to resume the premiership if he himself were to return as president, a project that became known as ‘the tandem’. Putin and Medvedev were treating the country as their patrimony. The announcement of their intentions prompted a wave of public protest, and demonstrations filled the central squares in Moscow.
Surkov performed his tried-and-tested trick of promoting parties that would help United Russia by taking votes away from others. To this end he approached the Just Cause party that spoke for business interests and enabled the billionaire financier Mikhail Prokhorov to assume its leadership. Prokhorov’s vision for Russia was more liberal than Putin’s, and for a while support for Just Cause rose in the opinion polls – high enough to have an impact on the outcome of the election but not enough to threaten Putin. Unfortunately for Surkov, Prokhorov unexpectedly outlived his usefulness for the Kremlin by starting to think of himself as a true contender and to fulminate against Putin’s record. This was not in the script. A political ingénu as well a man of considerable vanity, Prokhorov was surprised when the Just Cause party disowned him. He quickly discovered that Surkov had engineered this.15 An affronted Prokhorov announced his intention to stand as an independent in the 2012 presidential poll. His campaign predictably ended in defeat, with barely 8 per cent of the vote.
Surkov’s confidence, however, proved equally misplaced. His reputation as a wonder worker evaporated when at the December 2011 polls United Russia obtained only 49 per cent of the vote. Luckily for him, victory in the constituencies meant the party obtained 238 out of 450 seats in the Duma, a decline from the previous election but still a small absolute majority.
Voices were raised about widespread fraud in the counting of votes. At some polling stations ballot boxes were filmed being stuffed with false voting slips. Alexei Navalny and others in opposition organized protests on central Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square. Not only Prokhorov but even Putin’s friend and ex-Finance Minister Kudrin made an appearance. Although police and their batons contained the trouble, Medvedev and Putin took no chances. The election result was officially confirmed. Meanwhile they promoted a bill to limit public demonstrations. For the Duma’s anti-government minority, this was a signal that the Putin team aspired to govern forever. United Russia’s critics staged an ‘Italian strike’ by proposing a stream of amendments. Leading oppositionist Gennadi Gudkov, an ex-KGB colonel who had taken the unusual step of joining the Opposition, was charged with business fraud and suspended from the Duma.16 Trouble in parliament sparked trouble on the streets. Bolotnaya Square was again filled with protesters. Violent policing destroyed the Opposition’s hope that other cities would follow the Moscow precedent, and the Kremlin survived the trial of strength. But not without concluding that complacency was unsustainable.
Everyone could see that the Duma, however neutered by pre-election legal manipulation and outright electoral swindle, retained an importance in the public imagination – even though opinion polls yielded far from complimentary verdicts on the performance of the elected politicians themselves. Bolotnaya Square had erupted once and could again, regardless of whether Navalny was in custody. The protesters had shown historical insight in their choice of venue: no ordinary metropolitan spot, but the place where the great rebel leaders in earlier centuries, Stenka Razin and Yemelyan Pugachëv, had been executed. The police in 2011–12 did not carry out the excruciating punishments that Tsar Alexei and Catherine the Great had dispensed, but many in the crowd endured severe beatings, and judicial proceedings were initiated against the organizers. When Nemtsov and Navalny led protests against Putin’s presidential inauguration, they were taken into custody.
Though Putin had won the contest with ease in the first round and was easily the country’s favourite politician, his team had behaved in character by engaging in some precautionary ballot rigging. There was also a strong suspicion that a cyber-attack on the opposition newspaper Novaya gazeta had been carried out on the Kremlin’s orders. Putin has never been content simply to win: he feels a compulsion to annihilate by whatever dirty methods are required.
The Duma settled down into the routine of enabling the Kremlin’s purposes. In the parliamentary election of December 2016, United Russia consolidated its dominance by gaining 54 per cent of the popular vote and 343 seats, easily sufficient to take control of the legislative process. Medvedev, party chairman since leaving the presidency in 2012, kept watch over the discipline necessary to pass the laws he and Putin desired. The other parties were as noisy as they always had been, but the Duma failed to discomfit the Kremlin leaders and their clique. Neither the Duma nor the Federation Council exploited the chance to follow up the corruption scandals in the press and on the internet. In many other countries – and not just North America and the rest of Europe – parliamentarians would have raised a fuss about the sumptuous palaces allegedly being built for Putin, Medvedev, Patrushev and others, but those who set the agenda of Duma and Council saw to it that no such discussions took place. Malfeasance could be scrutinized only if United Russia’s leaders gave permission – and they were unlikely to facilitate the shaming of their patrons.
Even though United Russia has faced no serious electoral challenge since 2003, Russia’s is not a one-party system. This is in marked contrast to the way in which the USSR was governed. Nowadays there is no Communist Party to oversee and coordinate policies and impose obedience. Indeed, United Russia, lacking the machinery to perform even quite simple administrative tasks, has never been asked to fulfil such a function. Its conferences have little impact on government programmes, and its central board has only titular status.
When Medvedev came before the Duma on 11 April 2018 to give his prime ministerial report on the government’s performance over the previous six years, he boasted of fifteen hundred initiatives passed into law. He could hardly pretend they amounted to much, but he made the most of legislative reforms that introduced the obligation to use up-to-date technology in public institutions, to achieve transparency in the national budget and to extend the territory available for agriculture.17 Other laws tended to relate to foreign policy. In December 2012 the so-called Dima Yakovlev law prohibited Americans from adopting Russian orphans. In March 2014 the Duma approved the legislative instrument for Crimea to ‘join’ Russia. In July 2016 the law on extremism and terrorism was updated so as to compel internet servers in Russia to store the records of their users and make state surveillance easier. The same month saw the passing of a bill to prevent missionary work by non-registered religious organizations. In January 2017 a Duma majority legislated to decriminalize physical beatings inside the family home.
The Duma rarely attracted much attention in the media after the disturbances of 2011–12 died away. Rumbustious debates, especially when deputies pushed each other about, were more likely to gain TV viewers than measured legislative proceedings. Just once was there a touch of levity. On 1 April 2013 a deputy from the Liberal-Democratic Party presented a bill restricting the sale and consumption of garlic. Public buildings and even private residences would be affected, and sales were prohibited except in adequately ventilated premises. To protect the health of pregnant women, teachers and children this malodorous vegetable was to disappear from public spaces altogether. The joke was lost on many observers until the bill’s promoter explained that it was April Fools’ Day.18
Most people, however, took little notice of the Duma’s proceedings, be they solemn or light-hearted. United Russia offered no prospect of lively public engagement because people joined it mainly to improve their careers or increase their bank balances – Putin had long tried to keep himself separate from its management, leaving the chairmanship to Medvedev. But Putin now saw the need for a broader kind of politics, something more imaginative than a political party to reinvigorate the system.
He turned away from Surkov towards Deputy Prime Minister Vyacheslav Volodin, who persuaded Putin that the way to enhance his appeal was to hold conferences and large meetings and bask in the warmth of a patriotic audience. In spring 2011 Volodin proposed a movement to be called the All-Russia Popular Front: there had been a front of that name, alongside fronts of the USSR’s other nations, in the years of Gorbachëv’s perestroika. Now it was revived and remodelled to the Kremlin’s satisfaction, as a more effective sounding board than United Russia, which was stuffed full of careerists, for the Kremlin leadership to learn about the grievances arising in society. People of other parties were encouraged to join the Front, and funds and organization were put at its disposal for a series of events around the country. Putin, who was elected its chairman in June 2013, attended some of them and was feted as the hero of his time. Apparently Volodin also recommended the Front as a way for Putin to outflank Medvedev, who was then contemplating a run for a second presidential turn.19 Surkov, a Medvedev supporter, was annoyed to learn about the plan only from news agency reports.20
Volodin was rewarded with appointment as First Deputy Chief of Staff in the Presidential Administration, and the Front set up working parties to discuss ways of monitoring and publicizing the fulfilment of presidential decrees – with Putin happily acknowledging the help these working parties had given.21 But the net effect on public affairs was minimal, and the Popular Front organizers contented themselves with their assemblies and galas. Once again a flashy political innovation came to naught.
Still seeing his difficulties in apocalyptic terms, however, instinctively distrusting any club, enterprise or association that operated beyond the reach of state control, Putin sometimes spoke as though the entire country was warrened with conspiracies:
Indirect ways are always being found to get hold of funds and spend them on the purposes intended by the donors. Of course, the recent decisions [on foreign agents] restrict the use of foreign sources for internal political struggle in Russia. These decisions established definite obstacles, but they are being bypassed and it’s essential that this doesn’t happen.22
Though Putin accepted that most Russian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) did not constitute a genuine ‘fifth column’, he added: ‘This doesn’t mean, however, that there aren’t any people who serve foreign interests in Russia. Such people do exist. Who are these people? They use money in the struggle of internal politics that they have received from foreign states and they had no scruples in taking it from them.’23
All Russian NGOs were therefore put under pressure to conform. In November 2012 the law was amended to require those carrying out ‘political activities’ to register with the Ministry of Justice as ‘foreign agents’,24 compelling several outstanding bodies to seek official sanction to continue. Among them is Memorial, which courageously campaigns for human rights and maintains an archive on the abuses of the Soviet past. Another is the Levada Centre, an independent polling body of global renown. Many organizations with international funding have had to withdraw from Russia altogether, and the Kremlin has severely curtailed the space available for uncongenial public critiques of its actions.
Politics steadily became more authoritarian. Previously many had thought this an unfair epithet, since Russia had regular elections, oppositionist parties and critical media outlets, but a consensus developed on the harsh and corrupt practices in public affairs. Putin has sometimes been characterized as a dictator, but this is too strong a word as his control of the ruling group has never been absolute. But rulers throughout the world with his reputation have still stopped at nothing, including assassinations, to tighten their grip on power, their methods frequently reminiscent of organized crime, to the extent that Russia has sometimes been called a mafia state and a kleptocracy.25 The evidence is compelling that high-ranking politicians from the 1990s onwards have had links to big criminal groups. But it’s doubtful that the bosses of organized crime can issue orders to Putin and his ministers: more likely, the mafias carry out profitable errands for the Kremlin. The FSB has found that criminals are able to get their dirty business done more expeditiously than the intelligence operatives.26
This symbiosis of state and organized crime makes Russia a dangerous place for the administration’s enemies at home and abroad. But Putin refuses to see much wrong with Russian politics. He asks people to imagine the alternatives:
Do you want dozens of people like [ex-Georgian President] Saakashvili running around our public places here? The person you named is a Russian version of Saakashvili. And do you want such Saakashvilis to destabilize the situation in the country? Do you want us to live from one [Kyiv-style] Maidan to the next? To have attempted coups? We have already been through all this. Do you want to bring all this back again? I am sure that the absolute, overwhelming majority of Russian citizens do not want this and will not allow this.27
He is a ruler who believes his people are lucky to have him as their president.