It seemsI’m not the only one who thinks the Kremlin may have fallen into its own trap.Nobody can deny that United Russia won an historic victory in Sunday’sparliamentary elections, with 64.1% of the vote, more than 50 points ahead ofthe runners-up, the Communists. But, according to Mikhail Rostovsky in MoskovskyKomsomolets, thereferendum on the Putin Plan failed.
Hewrites:
“In acountry with a Great Leader culture, it’s basically inconceivable for the GreatLeader to be defeated or obviously lose political points. Yet this is more orless what happened [at the polls]. United Russia, under Putin's personalleadership, recorded far more modest results than Putin himself did in the 2004presidential election.”
And it’strue, if you look at the figures, Putin seems to be down more than six millionvotes from his tally four years ago, which is something you can hardly ascribeto Russia’s famously shrinking population. In 2004, he got 49,526,238 votes,compared to a total of 43,531,470 for United Russia this week, which was only40.78% of all the registered voters in the country.
And ifyou begin to look at the stats region by region, or city by city, you find someintriguing results. Kommersant noted, with satirical relish worthy of Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842), a Russian classic ofquestionable headcounts, that the mayor of Glazov in the republic of Udmurtia,where United Russia got no more than 41% has already stepped down. Even inMoscow (54.15%) the landslide was modest, to say the least. In St Petersburg, UnitedRussia only got 50.33%. The result in the Nenets Autonomous Area (48.78%) waseven worse.
Theactual scale of United Russia’s victory, therefore, doesn’t seem to justifysome of the more extreme reactions to the poll results. Boris Nadezhdin, forinstance, a leader of the Union of Rightist Forces, which failed to win asingle seat in the new Duma, told the RFE/RL's Russian Service: “We havereturned to the Soviet Union. It is not parliament or the next president thatwill have real power, but the United Russia party.” But in fact Russia seems tohave narrowly avoided a return to a one-party system. Instead it’s become aone-and-a-half party system, with the three other groupings (Communists, A JustRussia and the Liberal Democrats) lending respectability to a system (as inJapan, Mexico, Italy or India) where a cabal of leaders hijack thedecision-making process.
Two yearsago, of course, Putin declared the fall of the Soviet Union to be “biggestgeopolitical tragedy of the 20th-century”, so perhaps it’s hardly surprisingthat that the USSR’s last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, should hail this week’selection in terms of a salvation after the perdition of the Yeltsin years.
“NowRussia is having a resurgence, not for the first time in its history,"Gorbachev said, at Harvard, in a keynote speech on one-and-a-half partypolitics “We need your understanding that we are halfway in our transition to afree and fully democratic state.”
Many Russians, includingGorbachev, admire Putin for bringing the “dark times” of the 1990s. During thecampaign Putin himself expressed the view that Russia should not hand backpower to those (i.e the Union of Rightist Forces) who want “to bring back thetime of humiliation, dependence and collapse.” Last Sunday, in other words – andthey are the words of Vitaly Ivanov in today’s Izvestia – was not just a vote of confidence inthe Putin Plan. It was also a “referendum” on Russian attitudes towards the“cursed past” and its enthusiasts
