By Boris Kagarlitsky
MOSCOW — The campaigning for the December 19 elections to the State Duma, the lower house of Russia's parliament, was notable for the listlessness of everyone who took part.
It was not simply that the various candidates and parties were uninterested in explaining their views. Even when the politicians had taken positions, they did their best to hide them. The reason was obvious: for the present-day "political class" to speak openly about its ideas and goals would mean arousing the fury of the population.
During 1999 the "party of power" had marched beneath two banners. Bureaucrats of the old school had grouped themselves in the "Unity" bloc (known colloquially as the "Bear"), while young careerists had set up the Union of Rightist Forces.
The master-work of the "Bear" campaign was a cartoon clip in which a bear took over and fixed up a fairytale house, throwing out a wolf that had vowed to privatise the dilapidated dwelling. Audiences, however, would not have forgotten that in the Russian folktale on which the clip was based, the house collapses after the bear moves in. The results of a victory for the Bear were not hard to foresee — and as for the Union of Rightist Forces, the symbolism of the wolf was decidedly apt.
Rigged
The 1999 elections were neither honest nor free. Parties that lacked the blessing of the Kremlin were denied access to the all-Russian television channels, ORT and RTR, while Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov and his bloc, Fatherland All-Russia, were smeared with mud on a daily basis. Unlike in previous elections, no-one attacked the Communists, but they were not allowed to present their views.
There was no indication that the central authorities personally rigged the vote. However, it is a tradition of elections in post-Soviet Russia that regional political chiefs are told what results are expected of them. How these results are obtained is then up to the local leaders, who have a choice of methods ranging from crude falsification to subtle media manipulation.
Where their choice is outright fraud, ballot boxes may be placed in the polling stations already partly full of voting slips favouring "approved" candidates and parties. Or a certain number of ballots, filled in all at once on behalf of electors who have not come to vote, may be thrown in at the last moment.
Direct falsification is encountered less often in the urban districts of European Russia than in the north and east, areas which observers can often reach only by helicopter. The local administrations in these regions are often highly dependent on budget handouts from the centre, and thus have a special incentive to deliver what is required.
Whatever the precise incidence of fraud, the 1999 elections clearly displayed both the influence of regional political chiefs and the power of the Kremlin, which is able to coordinate the efforts of thousands of functionaries. To judge from the election tallies, voters showed an extraordinary solidarity with their regional leaders. Since these leaders line up with a range of political currents, the election results differed strikingly from one province or republic to the next.
In Samara province, 40% of the votes went to the Union of Rightist Forces, of which provincial governor Konstantin Titov is a member. Rural districts populated largely by pensioners were especially zealous in voting for the rightists, who described themselves as the expression of the "new urban generation".
In Bashkortostan, where republican president Murtaza Rakhimov was backing Fatherland All-Russia, no fewer than 73% of voters opted for this bloc, with rural districts again showing particularly single-minded support.
The more remote the region, the stronger the position of the Bear. In the "Bear's dens" of north-east Russia, the Unity bloc headed the poll, gathering more than 28%.
Communists
Russia-wide, first place was ultimately taken by the Communist Party, which won 24.2% of the vote. This figure was marginally above the party's result in the previous elections, held in December 1995. The Bear came in second with 23.4%, followed by Fatherland All-Russia with 12.6%, the Union of Rightist Forces with 8.7%, the liberal Yabloko bloc with 6.1% and the Zhirinovsky bloc with 6%.
The remaining parties and blocs, scoring less than the required 5%, failed to win representation in the Duma. Of those that missed the cut, the most notable was the radical left bloc, Communists, Workers of Russia for the Soviet Union. This bloc had been forced to campaign with almost no funds or access to the mass media.
Paradoxically, the Communist Party can be seen as the main loser in the 1999 elections. Back in November, Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov boasted to the Moscow daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta that his party would win as much as 40% of the vote and, together with its allies, would finish up with two-thirds of the Duma seats — a "constitutional majority". In fact, the Communists not only failed to improve their position in the parliament, but saw their strength sharply curtailed. In the last Duma, the Communists and groups close to them had controlled 205 seats; this time, the party finished up with a mere 111.
The dramatic fall in the size and influence of the parliamentary bloc headed by the Communists did not reflect any rightward shift by voters. Rather, it stemmed from the peculiarities of Russia's electoral laws.
At the time of the 1995 elections, the right-wing side of Russian politics was split into a series of contending fragments. The result was that much of the vote for the right was wasted on groups that failed to make the 5% barrier. The mandates that would have gone to minor groups were distributed among the four parties that won more than 5%.
The bonus for the Communist Party amounted to around 50 seats. This provided the Communists with exceptional political opportunities, which the party leaders never managed to exploit.
The eclipse of the Communists in the most recent elections was accompanied by a sharp increase, to 105, in the number of independents who won Duma positions by topping the poll in territorial electorates. A significant number of these new deputies are regarded as leftists, although they also include the oil magnates Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky.
A number of non-party deputies were also elected on the Communists' list, including the prominent economist Sergei Glazyev.
Chechnya war
As usual, the "party of power" proclaimed its victory. There was only one thing overshadowing the celebrations — the war in Chechnya. Though used by the state authorities as their main campaign ace, the war was already a hopeless debacle.
While the votes were being counted in Moscow, Russian troops, who had been airlifted into the mountains in the days before the elections solely to allow Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to give another "victorious" interview, were being annihilated.
The airborne forces had been dropped on a mountain fittingly named the "City of the Dead". There they remained beneath a mortar barrage, blockaded and lacking adequate supplies of both food and ammunition. In the streets and squares of Grozny lay the corpses of hundreds of soldiers who had died in the course of a drawn-out assault, the very fact of which was concealed from the Russian public.
The propaganda machine was no longer coping with the situation, and even Nezavisimaya Gazeta, which at the start of the conflict had taken an ultra-militarist position, stated on December 21 that the armed forces were "hiding the truth about the battles in Grozny". The Putin government was trapped. It could neither end the war nor win it. All it could do was dig in its heels and tighten its censorship, while arguing to an increasingly angry society that Russians had an unquestioning love for the state authorities.
The generals, who had hoped that the politicians would once again pull the army out of Chechnya and accept blame for the defeat, had miscalculated. No-one was about to bring the troops home. The army was being sacrificed to electoral expediency. Successful vote rigging required a propaganda cover, and the officers and troops were condemned to pay for the false ratings with their blood.
The setbacks in the war made the electoral victory of the party of power meaningless. The lies and crimes, the bombed-out villages and pointlessly slaughtered soldiers will have to be answered for — and not only to the Chechens and world opinion, but also to the Russian population. The situation does not provide the slightest grounds for optimism.
Yeltsin
The position on the Chechen front, along with Russia's socio-economic condition, is deteriorating fast. Even with the help of censorship and information manipulation, it is impossible to maintain the illusion of well-being until the June presidential elections when, according to the original scenario, Putin will replace Boris Yeltsin.
On December 30, Yeltsin made his final public appearance in the Kremlin, bestowing the decoration of Hero of Russia on two of the leading commanders of the Chechnya campaign, generals Kazantsev and Shamanov. While Yeltsin declared that they had conducted themselves irreproachably, the heroes themselves looked decidedly gloomy.
Next day, Yeltsin went into early retirement, in the process spoiling the people's new year celebrations. Instead of being able to turn their backs on politics and forget the country's disasters for at least one day in the year, millions of people, gathered around their new year's tables, were forced to discuss anxiously what would happen next.
In his last presidential address, Yeltsin looked completely broken. He seemed about to burst into tears and even asked the people for their forgiveness. It was as if he were making a speech at his own funeral. For Yeltsin, farewelling power was more terrible than farewelling life.
The triumph of the party of power in 1999 does not mark the beginning of a new period in the history of post-Soviet Russia. Putin's acting presidency is merely the latest stage in the death-agony. Russian society is fated to pay in blood for the incompetence, irresponsibility and treachery of its elites.