KURSK (Russia): With aggressive recruiting and laws that could further sideline opponents, the United Russia party that underpins President Vladimir Putin is consolidating its power to a level that critics compare to the Communists’ political monopoly in Soviet days.
In March, United Russia announced that it had one million members and planned to recruit another million before parliamentary elections in 2007, numbers that dwarf every other party’s. Regional governors, business leaders and key bureaucrats, seeing where political power lies, have been flocking to its ranks.
“United Russia’s task is not just to win in 2007 but to think how to achieve the party’s dominance over the next 10 to 15 years,” Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s deputy chief of staff, told party activists in February.
Surkov went on to warn that the party would have to ‘reduce dependence on administrative resources’, jargon for using bureaucratic powers to disperse potential challengers. United Russia would finally have to ‘master the habits of ideological battle’, he said, to compete in the multiparty system the Kremlin insists is slowly being built.
Opinion polls show that Putin, who is not a member of United Russia but uses it as his political machine, is popular with the Russian public. But the Kremlin is not inclined to allow any meaningful opposition, analysts here say. “They want to monopolise all of the political space,” said Nikolai Petrov, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Centre. He described the party as a vehicle to be used to neuter parliament and allow all power to flow from the Kremlin.
Putin’s rollback of democratic institutions in Russia may be at centre stage in St. Petersburg next month, when Russia hosts the annual meeting of the Group of Eight, made up of Russia and the seven largest industrial democracies. Among other measures, Putin has reversed the popular election of regional governors, curtailed independent broadcasts, imposed new restrictions on grassroots advocacy groups and squeezed rival parties, reducing them to obscurity.
In March, Rodina, a populist, nationalist party that was once groomed by the Kremlin but had recently sounded increasingly independent themes, was struck from the ballot in seven of eight regional elections. In the one region where it stood, the party came in second.
In Moscow, Rodina was accused of fanning ethnic hatred when it ran an advertisement attacking illegal immigrants. In Kursk and other regions, courts found it guilty of bribing voters by handing out campaign trinkets with the party logo. The party is routinely depicted as fascist by United Russia and state-controlled television stations, a charge that its former leader, Dmitry Rogozin, calls ludicrous.
Rogozin stepped down in March. He said in an interview that senior Kremlin officials had warned him that his party would not be allowed to contest elections if he remained in a leadership position. “I could have stayed, but the party would have been destroyed,” he said. “They want to be a ruling party with a permitted and managed opposition.”
But for all its apparent strength, United Russia rests on uncertain foundations, according to critics and some party members. It has benefited from Putin’s personal popularity and the inherent weakness and disunity of opposition groups, but it may still find it difficult to attract more than 40 per cent of all voters, according to Petrov and other analysts.
In less than two years, moreover, Putin will be gone. The loyalty of much of the party’s vast membership does not flow from deep ideological affinity, some critics say, but from the less dependable motive of self-interest.
“United Russia is a career ladder” somewhat like the old Soviet Communist Party, said Rostislav Turovsky, an analyst of regional politics at the Centre for Political Technologies in Moscow. Joining ‘is the essential and probably the only way to become part of the elite’.
“People are joining for self-realisation,” said Yevgeny Zhilinkov, a 21-year-old youth activist in the Kursk branch of the party. “I’m expanding my horizontal connections by dealing with influential people. I would like to make a political career.”
In the last two years, about 20 governors — former Communists and independents — have joined the party, often bringing with them key members of local political, business and bureaucratic elites, according to Petrov.
Governors of 71 of Russia’s 88 regions now pledge allegiance to United Russia, and the party controls 58 of the country’s regional parliaments. The Communist Party has become so alarmed by the scale of defections from its ranks that last month it ordered members to report all contacts with government bodies in an effort to rein in what it called ‘political betrayal’. Alexander Mikhailov, 54, a lifelong Communist and governor of the Kursk region, defected to United Russia last year. “He had no choice,” said Vladimir Slatinov, a political analyst and head of the department of public administration at Kursk State University. “For the governor, it was a question of keeping himself in power.”
After 2004, when Putin asserted the right to appoint governors, Mikhailov’s political future depended on a constituency of one — not the local voters who first put him in office. Mikhailov declined to be interviewed, but he told a Kursk weekly last year, “Certain people might think it strange, but I have always said that I agree with and support everything the president does.”
In the national parliament over the last year, United Russia has pushed through a series of laws that critics charge are designed to prevent genuine electoral combat and lock in the party’s preeminence.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service
