Anatomy of the Party of Power

More than anything else, Vladimir Putin understands power: how to get it; how to consolidate it. His predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, knew how to seize power but not how to consolidate it, which partly explains why power seeped away throughout his presidency. President Putin’s success, however, has bred its own problem: he consolidated power at the center so well that opposition is brewing in Russia’s regions.

Yeltsin’s biggest failing was in not creating a viable, non-ideological party — a “party of power” — to buttress his regime. He tried to do so in 1995, but the Chechen War drove Russia’s democrats away from him. Moreover, his efforts here were amazingly clumsy.

Yeltsin once spoke about his scheme to link two centrists. With “Ivan Rybkin (then Duma’s speaker),” Yelstin said on TV, “leading the left flank, and Viktor Chernomyrdin (then prime minister) leading the right, we will encircle everyone.” But by linking both parties to his very unpopular self, Yeltsin damaged both.

Perhaps if both wings had united, that single party would have appeared as an unbeatable juggernaut. Such unity, however, was impossible, for an obvious Russian reason: the faction leaders hated each other too much to get together, even for their own good.

Indeed, Rybkin was told to pretend to be opposed to Yeltsin’s policies, but when he did object, Chernomyrdin summoned Rybkin to his office for “clarifications.” When businessmen learned about this “dressing down,” they became afraid to finance Rybkin’s party. In the end, Rybkin went unelected and Chernomyrdin’s ‘Our Home Is Russia’ (NDR) came third.

Yeltsin failed to consolidate political support for other reasons as well, the most important being his unwillingness (or inability) to forcefully manipulate the media. Of course, transformation of the presidential administration into a public relations machine began under Yeltsin when Anatoli Chubais directed the 1996 election campaign. Before that, the Kremlin had little idea about how to manipulate the new media outlets that Russia’s infant democracy had produced. Today’s Kremlin, however, is full of clever ideas about how to control and intimidate newspapers, radio, and television.

In the 1995 election, Yeltsin would have been happy if the NDR secured 25% to 30% of the vote. Putin is far more ambitious. He will be displeased if ‘United Russia’ — the “party of power” he has built — wins less than 50% of the seats in the next Duma.

But are the results of the parliamentary elections due this coming January truly a foregone conclusion? Or are surprises in store for Putin?

Surprises seem likely because Russia’s political dividing line has shifted, but the President’s political strategy hasn’t recognized that fact. Indeed, he appears set to be waging battles against the communists that are already won.

Putin’s re-consolidation of power within the Kremlin, after much of it escaped to the regions during the Yeltsin years, dramatically shifted Russia’s political dividing line. In the past, that dividing line separated right and left, but the line at the forthcoming elections will run between the federal center and the regions.

The loss of political power in the regions (regional governors, for example, were evicted from the Duma’s upper house) has incited serious discontent that is spilling over into the public sphere. That discontent will likely gather momentum as elections near, which may be enough to stop the federal authorities from meeting their strategic goal of winning an unchallengeable majority of seats in the new Duma.

Vast administrative resources are being used to secure the desired result. But Russia’s bureaucracy is no disciplined machine, and the lower reaches of the state’s ‘vertical’ power structure may well ally themselves — quietly — with regional authorities to prevent the center from gaining too many votes. Regional administrations also possess their own instruments of obstruction, including propaganda outlets in the regional media, as well as the ability to manipulate ballot papers.

Indeed, President Putin’s failure to “reconquer” his home city of St. Petersburg, now controlled by a bitter political opponent of the President, Vladimir Yakovlev, demonstrates the bureaucratic powers that local leaders retain. So the real issue in the forthcoming Duma elections will be how powerfully regional elites confront Putin.

Their ability to defy the president may be aided by the fact that the Kremlin is failing to recognize the potential of their challenge. So far, the main target of its campaign is the communists, whom Kremlin political operatives hope to destroy in the way they destroyed Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, head of the Fatherland party, who were the leading non-communist challengers during Putin’s first presidential campaign.

That focus on the battle with the communists may allow other forces to sneak into the Duma by the back door. The Boris Nemtsov/Sergei Kiriyenko ‘Union of Right Forces’ (SPS) is one party that seems certain to benefit in this way. Indeed, the SPS electorate is growing faster than that of other parties.

In principle, all of Russia’s political elites appear to have — or pretend to have — resigned themselves to a political landscape with Putin alone on the mountaintop and everyone else consigned to the valley below. The upcoming elections won’t knock the president off that mountain, but his ‘party of power’ is not omnipotent enough to silence the dissenting echoes rising from below.

Georgy Satarov was a senior advisor to President Yeltsin and one of the main pro-Yeltsin strategists during the 1995 Duma election campaign.