In 2005 a debate had already started inside United Russia over the possibility of organizing different ideological currents inside the party. The initiative for this was taken by Vladimir Pligin, president of the Constitutional Legislation Committee of the Duma. Pligin published a text, cosigned by some thirty colleagues, in which they asked for ideological platforms in the party. The party leadership, however, was not in favor of this initiative. Boris Gryzlov, speaker of the Duma and party leader, was categorically against. He declared “that there will be no organizationally formalized platforms or wings in United Russia. Discussion is not only natural and necessary . . . but discussion must not be to the detriment of party discipline.”[42] And he added: “We cannot and have not the right to divide ourselves into right and left.”[43] Gryzlov was acting in line with an established Soviet tradition of “democratic centralism.” He reminded his audience that already “Lenin sternly warned about the adverse effects of factionalism.”[44] Gryzlov went on to repeat the official party ideology, which was, according to him, located in the center. It was “social conservatism,” which intended “to maintain order, social stability, [and] unconditional defense by the government of legally acquired property.” This “social conservatism,” he went on, “was broader than any political current, because one can find elements of it in the traditional left and right.”[45] An ideology that finds its elements “in the traditional left and right” is necessarily centrist. In 2005, when Gryzlov wrote these lines, order and status quo were, indeed, still the most important objectives of the regime. This conservatism was logical for a party in power. Would it be enough, however, to stay ahead when competing against the parties and movements that were propagating a passionate brand of patriotism and were animated by great-Russian chauvinism and ultranationalist fervor? Konstantin Kosachev, a Duma member of United Russia, dared to challenge Gryzlov in an article titled “Why Would a Bear Need Wings?” Kosachev wrote: “What some hastened to call ‘wings’—something that, as party leader Boris Gryzlov said, a bear, which is the party’s symbol, hardly needs—should be more aptly seen as working groups . . . and not something generating internal conflict within the party.”[46] Kosachev won, because Gryzlov’s initial negative response could not prevent discussion groups being set up before long within United Russia.
One of these was the Center for Social and Conservative Policy. In 2007 this faction
started the Russian Project, led by the popular TV presenter Ivan Demidov and Andrey
Isaev, a Duma deputy. The project initiated a discussion on the Russian nation, national
identity, and “Russianness” (
United Russia’s New Ultranationalist Course
