The "Red Belt": Myth or Reality?

Abstract

The elections are over, political speculation has begun, and the results of the national election provide fertile soil for them. The leaders of the CPRF [Communist Party of the Russian Federation], who just yesterday did not want anything to do with representatives of the "antipopu-lar regime," are now, since this regime has once again received a popular vote of confidence, trumpeting the necessity of creating a coalition government everywhere. Let us leave the unprecedented "political flexibility" of the implacable opposition to its own conscience and stick to the core of the problem. Can we imagine a situation in which Republican candidate Dole, having lost the election, suddenly began to demand from the president "X" number of cabinet seats on the grounds that he had accumulated so many votes? That would be, as Clinton would say, if he used the Russian idiom, "raving nonsense."