Of the four parties that on December 2, 2007, were elected in the State Duma, United
Russia got 64.30 percent of the vote, A Just Russia got 6.80 percent, the Communist
Party of the Russian Federation got 11.57 percent, and the Liberal Democratic Party
of Russia got 8.14 percent. If we take into account that A Just Russia was an artificial
construction, set up by United Russia to attract additional votes, the governing bloc
collected as much as 71.1 percent of the votes (and 78.44 percent of the seats). This
sweeping majority exceeded even the percentage the ANC got in the South African elections
on April 22, 2009 (the ANC got 65.9 percent). The well-oiled and generously financed
United Russia party machine was explicitly set up to support Putin, although Putin
himself was not a party member. This did not prevent Putin accepting, on April 15,
2008, the position of chairman.
Not only did United Russia have a comfortable majority at that time, but, additionally,
the two “opposition” parties, Zhirinovsky’s crypto-fascist Liberal Democratic Party
and the Communist Party, had long since abandoned playing a serious opposition role.
These parties, instead, fully supported the government. The resulting system, therefore,
in practice came close to a one-party state. Richard Sakwa had remarked that already
Unity, United Russia’s predecessor[7] was “neither a modern political party nor a mass movement but was instead a political
association made to order by power elites to advance their interests. [It] . . . could
become the core of a new type of hegemonic party system in which patronage and preference
would be disbursed by a neo-nomenclatura class of state officials loyal to Putin. Unity could become the core of a patronage
system of the type that in July 2000 was voted out of office in Mexico after seventy-one
years.”[8] Unity’s successor, United Russia, indeed, succeeded in establishing itself as the
inheritor of the old monolithic CPSU. Former president Gorbachev called it “the worst
version of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”[9] This was a rather harsh accusation from the mouth of the last president of the
Soviet Union, who made his career inside the defunct CPSU and knew better than anyone
else how rotten the old system was. But Gorbachev made a mistake: United Russia was
not a remake of the old CPSU. Because, quite simply, communism in Russia was definitively
dead. The new pluralistic façade might hide the same monolithic political structure,
but it was situated in a rather different environment: not the former environment
of a communist, centrally planned economy, but the new environment of a state capitalist
economy. This made a big difference and was one of the reasons not to look back to
Soviet times for historical analogies.
The Use of Fake Political Parties
