Changing the Russian Electoral System: Inside the Black Box

The new law on elections to the State Duma of May 2005 was hardly unexpected. Its major features had already been identified in President Putin's wide-ranging speech to an expanded meeting of the Russian government in September 2004, in which he set out a series of changes that must follow the challenge to state authority that had been presented by the Beslan hostage-taking tragedy at the start of that month. In circumstances of this kind, he told his audience, their system of government had to be ‘not merely adapted to work in crisis situations’ but ‘fundamentally restructured’, so that it could prevent the breakup of the state and the collapse of Russia itself. A ‘crucial element’ in this restructuring was a reconstitution of the governmental system at all levels so that it formed a ‘single system of authority’. The leading officials in every region should be nominated by the head of state and then approved by local parliaments, and there should be stronger national parties. This was one of the ways of ensuring ‘real dialogue and interaction between the authorities in the struggle against terror’. This would in turn require an entirely proportional system of elections to the national parliament.1

Even before Putin's important speech it had been clear that changes were going to be proposed in the election laws, and that the elimination of the single-member constituencies would be one of them. Putin himself had called for a change of this kind in an address to the Central Electoral Commission (CEC, Tsentral'naya izbiratel'naya komissiya Rossiiskoi Federatsii) in May 2004.2 Also, speaking in mid-August, the chairman of the CEC, Alexander Veshnyakov, announced that he would be seeking ‘far-reaching amendments’ along these lines, including not only the abolition of the single-member constituencies but also direct elections to the Federation Council; the corresponding legislation would be introduced before the end of the year.3 Duma deputies themselves were less enthusiastic: some were worried by the loss of their links with a particular locality; others were concerned about the attenuation of their relative independence. Presidential staffers, however, were already conducting ‘explanatory work’, and it was expected that a majority would be more supportive when the legislation itself came to be considered.4 The raising of the threshold from 5% to 7% had, indeed, already been agreed in the election law that was approved in 2002, which in this particular respect was to take effect for the first time in December 2007 (‘O vyborakh’ 2002, article 99).

The decision-making process in post-communist Russia—and indeed before it—has not normally been accessible to outside investigators. Governments are not directly accountable to parliament but to the president, who can dismiss them at any time; and with a Duma that is dominated by a pro-Kremlin ruling party there is little need to explain the merits of legislative changes or persuade a majority of deputies to adopt them, even if (as in this case) there was some initial reluctance to do so. Nor is there much reason to expect a challenge from a mass media that has for the most part been firmly subordinated to the regime itself. We are left, as for many years in the past, with a Kremlin politics in which formal position tells us relatively little about the actual distribution of power, and in which clans, cliques and other networks within and beyond the ruling group will often be more important (a ‘Dnepropetrovsk mafia’ in the Brezhnev years, ‘St Petersburgers’ or siloviki in the Putin–Medvedev era), with senior presidential staff widely regarded as more politically influential than the prime minister himself.5 In the Soviet period T. H. Rigby (1964) described this process as ‘cryptopolitics’, and many of its distinctive features have persisted into later years.

In what follows we will attempt to shed some light on the way in which political change was negotiated in the second term of the Putin presidency by looking more closely at the fundamental restructuring of the electoral system that took place at that time, using elite interviews as our primary source. Interviews of this kind, in any system, raise a number of methodological issues.6 How, for instance, are subjects selected, how is the interview recorded, and what restrictions are placed on the use of the material? There are additional, more complex issues relating to the nature of the source itself: not simply the danger of deliberate misstatement, but of dealing with first-person narratives that will almost inevitably be partial and self-serving. Interview evidence, at the same time, has a compensating virtue in the ability it provides to obtain direct access to the perspectives of key participants. Elite interviews, in particular, allow questions to be raised that can be chosen by the investigator rather than the subject; interviewees can speak freely and, if they wish, anonymously; and the more a context of understanding is built up, the more easily misleading claims can be identified and appropriately discounted. Evidence of this kind has already been used extensively in studies of economic managers and Central Committee members in the late Soviet period (Ellman & Kontorovich 1998; Mawdsley & White 2000), and it is a well established methodology in Western contexts.7

In our own case, the evidence is drawn from a series of interviews with 17 highly placed officials, politicians, or eksperty who were directly involved in the elaboration of the reforms. (A full list is provided in the Appendix.) Some were conducted anonymously, in most cases because of the high-level position of the interviewee, but others were on the record, with photographs and full biographies. Interviews were tape-recorded whenever it was possible to do so, or reconstituted from handwritten notes immediately afterwards. We had prepared a specific list of questions in advance, although we were not always able to complete it because of lack of time or other circumstances. Ideally, we wished to establish the following: what, in the view of our respondents, had led to the changes in electoral legislation that took place in 2005 and later? When had they been agreed? What had been the arguments for and against particular changes, such as the abolition of the single-member constituencies? Who had taken these decisions? And what were their longer-term implications? Our first objective was to capture the objectives of those who were responsible for driving through what was, from the outset, a Kremlin-sponsored programme, while taking account of the views of more independent participants. Clearly, this can be no more than part of a larger study of the far-reaching changes in the rules of the political game that took place under the Putin–Medvedev leadership;8 but those larger accounts are incomplete without a view from inside the ‘black box’ itself.

What were the origins of the electoral reform?

One of the clearest conclusions to emerge from our interviews was that the electoral reforms that were legislated in 2005 had been in preparation long before the Beslan crisis. For one ekspert (Interviewee 6), the immediate origins of the new law lay in the decisions that had been taken by the Central Electoral Commission in August 2004, shortly before the hostage-taking crisis. Approving a set of proposals on electoral reform, the CEC had called for a broadly based ‘discussion’ (‘O rabote’ 2004, p. 5), but in fact it was only the abolition of the single-member constituencies (he went on) that had really been debated, and the outcome had been determined by Putin's clear indication in his speech the following month that he was personally in favour of a wholly proportional system based on national party lists. There had also been some discussion of the proposal to end the direct election of governors, although it was unclear to many how this could possibly be connected with a ‘struggle against terrorism’. The discussion, however, ‘could have no particular significance as the decision had already been taken’, and the shift to a wholly proportional system was ‘immediately supported even by those who had always been outspoken supporters of a majoritarian system’. By this point even the chairman of the CEC, who had helped to guard against ‘openly opportunist changes’ in the previous Duma, had little influence.

The key decisions had, in fact, been taken a long time before this, according to Kremlin insiders. Proposals of this kind had been ‘in the air for ages’, explained a key member of the presidential staff: ‘We just had to make up our minds and do it. And so we did’ (Interviewee 2). It had all begun ‘a long time ago’, agreed a department head in a Kremlin-aligned think-tank (Interviewee 7), in a rather different political situation. There had been ‘no special discussion’ when the same proposals were put forward in 2005, at a time when state structures of all kinds were being strengthened, and there had been no ‘conceptual discussion’ of any kind, other than in a ‘small number of journals and newspapers’ that took a particular interest in such matters and had their own agenda.

But that could hardly be called any kind of significant discussion [he went on], significant for the adoption of concrete decisions. The decision had already been taken, and all that remained was to support it. What else was there to talk about? If the task of strengthening the vertical and strengthening an existing majority had been posed, it was going to be resolved. With whom could there be a discussion in such circumstances? With a minority that had already been defined as one of which no account need be taken?

For one of these Kremlin insiders (Interviewee 2), the whole process had, in fact, begun ‘with Putin's arrival in the Kremlin’. The new president had not at first understood the need for a change in the form of government, and that he would be unable to work without a parliament and the continuing support of a group of deputies. He remained sceptical, but trusted his leading officials to make the necessary arrangements.

And we did a great deal of work so that when he became president he already had people he could rely on in the Duma. But gradually we and he came to understand how important it was to have agreement across all the branches of government. And those decisions were not taken casually. All this was thought through and discussed at great length.

Decisions on the 2005 law had been taken the year before because they had to be ready for the ‘main elections’ of 2007, according to the same official, and there had to be enough time to check the system and make whatever corrections were necessary. The 2007 elections were the ‘main’ ones, because they had been elections not just of United Russia (Edinaya Rossiya) but of Putin himself: ‘His elections personally. If everything went well, it would be an assurance that everything would go well later. If we won, a victory in March 2008 would be inevitable. The second round of elections would simply be technical’.

There were similar views from other Kremlin insiders. A member of the Presidential Administration's department for domestic affairs (Interviewee 5), for instance, agreed that the reforms had begun ‘a long time ago, before my arrival in the Administration. I think in 2001–2002. Perhaps even earlier. And then they tried to make sure they were in time for 2007’. When he began work at the Presidential Administration in 2004 he found that the proposals were ‘already being developed’; by 2005 everything had been completed, and the new system was ready to be implemented. For a think-tank head and Kremlin advisor (Interviewee 4), similarly, the reforms had actually begun ‘earlier, a lot earlier … at the very beginning, in 2000’, with Putin's election to the presidency. There had been two schools of thought in the later Yel'tsin years: one that favoured a move to a non-party system based entirely on single-member constituencies, and another that favoured a more ‘West German’ system based entirely on national lists of candidates that operated through what was, in effect, a ‘party oligarchy’. Yel'tsin himself had been inclined towards the first of these alternatives: he had been suspicious of political parties, concerned they might take away some of his power, and apprehensive—in spite of appearances—about the role the Orthodox Church might play.

A decentralised system based on the regions, the same Kremlin advisor continued, would however have been ‘dangerous for Russia’, it might even have ‘destroyed the country’, and Putin had accordingly favoured the second of these alternatives in which central authority was based on a nationwide party system, a system that was founded on ‘distrust of the masses’. He had been a close student of the experience of West Germany as well as the German Democratic Republic: ‘He understood their model. He saw how it worked. All politics through parties. Easier to control. So this was the model he chose’. There had been two preliminary tasks: first of all, ‘to eliminate the governors with the help of the communists [Kommunisticheskaya partiya Rossiiskoi Federatsii, KPRF]’, and then ‘to eliminate the communists (who were thought to have too much power)’. The reforms themselves had been in preparation from the time of his election in March 2000, and had been ‘completely thought through’ by the end of his first term. The other changes that had taken place, such as the raising of the threshold from 5% to 7% and the abolition of the minimum turnout requirement, were ‘details of no fundamental importance’; the ‘main decision’ had been the move to a wholly proportional system, and everything had followed from that. Indeed, 1999 had been the last ‘real’ election; after these changes had been introduced ‘there were no elections as such’, just ‘games played by state officials’.

In another view, that of a key legal advisor to the Federation Council (Interviewee 13), the electoral reforms of 2005 had their origins in still earlier times, in the constitutional settlement that had emerged from the ‘stormy events’ of late 1993. The new constitution had entrusted the ‘whole range of state power’ to the president, leaving ‘certain modest prerogatives’ in the hands of the parliament, government and the courts; but the existence of a series of other bodies, with their powers and various mechanisms of appointment, had created a ‘certain discomfort in the Kremlin’. For a long time, in particular, it lacked complete control over the election of deputies to the State Duma, and over the appointment of members of the Federation Council. This had led the presidency to initiate a wholesale reform of entire branches of legislation, including electoral legislation, with a view to ensuring the ‘complete predictability’ of the process and of the way that elected bodies were formed, not just at national level but also in the regions. All of this, he confirmed, had begun as early as Putin's first presidential term. It was at this time that the reform of election legislation had been initiated and the automatic representation of governors in the upper house had been ended, after which they began in practice to be appointed directly by the president.

The same principles applied to the transition to a wholly proportional system of election of Duma deputies, the main purpose of which (for this informant, Interviewee 13) was to eliminate the ‘unpredictability’ that had always been inherent in the single-member constituency elections:

Someone unexpected and undesirable might be elected. And if enough of them were elected, the State Duma could become unpredictable in its behaviour. As indeed it had been during the Yel'tsin presidency. You could have said the same about the Federation Council of the time. Now that unpredictability has gone.

The same principles had informed other changes, such as the legislation on political parties. To register a new party had become ‘unbelievably complicated’, with a ‘very high’ level of membership required and at the same time a minimum level of membership in a ‘fairly large’ number of the country's republics and regions. As well as this the parties that were already represented in the Duma had received a number of additional advantages, such as the right to put forward candidates for election at all levels without collecting signatures or paying an electoral deposit (which was itself abolished shortly afterwards: ‘O vnesenii’ 2009a).

The outcome might be a system in which there were no more than, say, four parliamentary parties, or just two or three, of which one would be expected to win at least two-thirds of the seats, which would make the Duma entirely subordinate to the Kremlin. If the other parties were so negligible, why indeed was there any reason to be concerned if they won a few of the remaining seats?

In my view [this informant continued], there's no point seeking a logical explanation: it's typical bureaucratic overinsurance. In other words, there is a directive from above, in the most general of terms, which is put into effect by particular officials with a two, three or fivefold margin of error: we'll put an end to this just in case, and to that, and that … . Even though it's perfectly clear there's nothing to worry about! As, for example, in the last elections to the Duma [in 2007. Without even speaking of the fact that in my opinion, the results were written on paper well in advance of the elections, and then simply announced by the Central Electoral Commission. (Interviewee 13)

Even so the central authorities seemed to have overdone it, forgetting they had only 100% of the vote to allocate, as it could hardly be suggested that a party like Yabloko, with its long parliamentary tradition and clearly defined electorate, could really have won as little as 1%; but that was all that was left when the larger parties had been given the vote shares that were thought to be appropriate.

Amending the law

There was general agreement, across our informants, that the elimination of the single-member constituencies was the most important single change that had been introduced by the 2005 election law. This was certainly clear to the eksperty. For one leading specialist (Interviewee 6), this was the ‘most important component of the electoral (counter-)reform of 2005–2007’, carried out ‘with the single purpose of increasing the manageability of parliament’ and intended to operate to the exclusive benefit of the Presidential Administration. At a stroke it removed the independents, as well as the deputies from parties that had not been able to reach the party-list threshold; it was deputies with this kind of background that had been the ‘most oppositional’ and the ‘main annoyance for the Kremlin in the fourth convocation of the Duma [between 2003 and 2007’. Even deputies from the ‘party of power’ who had been elected in single-member constituencies were less reliable and allowed themselves more liberties than their colleagues who had been elected on the corresponding party list. Apart from this, single-member deputies ‘were often more loyal to the head of the region than to the party leadership, because their re-election depended to a significant degree on good relations with the head of the region’.

According to another ekspert (Interviewee 9), United Russia might actually have won more seats if the single-member constituencies had been retained; but from the point of view of the Kremlin leadership, single-member constituency deputies were controlled by the regional authorities, ‘and it would be much harder for Staraya ploshchad’ [the Presidential Administration] to supervise 225 constituencies, more precisely 226, than just one’. The wholly proportional system that had been introduced was ‘advantageous only for the top. They got some kind of manageability’. It was also advantageous for ‘officialdom’ as a whole, the ‘rather large corporation’ that had managed to recreate the nomenklatura of the Soviet period and which would more easily be able to deploy its administrative resources in a centrally organised system. The elimination of the single-member constituencies was an ‘action against regional influence’, agreed another ekspert (Interviewee 3).

Now it's harder for the governor to get his people into parliament than before. Now you have to agree everything with a party, that is, work through the Centre. Because of this, the role of governors in the Duma has also declined. And because the governors themselves are now appointed rather than elected. This weakened their influence even more. In the end, the effect of the reform [was] an increase in centralisation and bureaucratisation. Which of course does not increase popular trust in elections.

Senior Kremlin officials themselves conceded that there had been a ‘lot of complications with the single-member deputies’. They were ‘controlled by the governors, the regional elite. It was harder to work with them’, explained a senior member of the domestic affairs department of the Presidential Administration (Interviewee 5). The new system was one in which United Russia itself might indeed win fewer seats, but this was an acceptable price to pay for a Duma that could more easily be managed, and for a proportional system that would on the whole be ‘more transparent. I mean, transparent for us. For the Centre. Simpler to control’.

Everyone agreed that ‘single-seat deputies [meant] the power of the regions’, explained another very senior official (Interviewee 2); and this had to be minimised so that the entire process could be regulated. It was easier to do this by making use of political parties (‘You can do anything at all through the parties’). This also helped to develop the party system, and keep out political opportunists. ‘We couldn't let those guys blackmail us’, explained the same senior official, ‘people like [the opposition politicians] Nemtsov, Limonov and Kas'yanov’, who simply wanted to make things as bad as possible in their own selfish interests. The governors had to be disarmed as well, and the whole system restructured so that it ‘worked like clockwork’.

The other changes in the electoral environment had followed a similar logic. The raising of the threshold from 5% to 7%, for instance, which came into effect for the first time in December 2007. For a leading ekspert (Interviewee 6), the purpose of the change was to eliminate the ‘irritant parties’ (partii-razdrazhiteli). Few of them were a serious political force,

but among the liquidated parties were some that had real structures and popular leaders, and which allowed themselves to make sharp criticisms of the country's leadership. And these were competitors … . For instance, the Russian Communist Workers' Party–Russian Party of Communists [Rossiiskaya kommunisticheskaya rabochaya partiya–Rossiiskaya partiya kommunistov], headed by Duma deputy [Viktor] Tyul'kin, and the Republican Party of Russia [Respublikanskaya Partiya], headed by several Duma deputies elected as independents ([Vladimir] Ryzhkov, [Valerii] Zubov, [Svyatoslav] Nastashevsky). And although these parties had little chance of reaching the threshold, the Kremlin thought their participation in the electoral campaign undesirable. After all, in the course of the electoral campaign itself a lot could have been said that was critical of the Kremlin leaders. You could set the mood of electors, open their eyes to what was happening in the country. This was why the presence of these parties in the electoral race was dangerous. Even if they had practically no chance of success.

A higher threshold obviously meant that fewer parties would win seats in the new Duma: not between four and eight, as in earlier elections, but perhaps no more than three. This meant that successful parties would take an even larger share of seats, as parties that had not reached the threshold would be denied any representation; and the best placed party—in other words, United Russia—would gain most of all. A higher threshold would have still further effects. In particular, it could become self-fulfilling, in that parties that were projected to fall below the minimum that was required to win seats would find that businessmen became less interested in financing them, and that politicians who appeared to have a promising future would avoid them. Electors, continued this informant (Interviewee 6), would in turn be less likely to vote for them.

And so I think the raising of the threshold had a palpably negative effect, on the one hand, increasing the effect of the abolition of the single-member constituencies and making the Duma less genuinely representative, and on the other, helping to force most of the parties (apart from the four main ones) to the margins of political life.

The effect of the higher threshold was amplified by the ban on the formation of electoral blocs, through which smaller parties had, in the past, been able to combine their forces.

Kremlin officials took a very similar view of the effect of a higher threshold, although they obviously saw it in more positive terms. The raising of the electoral threshold, explained a key member of the department of domestic affairs of the Presidential Administration (Interviewee 5), was indeed a

part of the logic of the reforms as a whole, and the logic of party-based elections. Ideally we would like to have two or three major, powerful parties. And the minor parties should be killed off. Otherwise it wouldn't be elections, but endless squabbles of unknown ‘politicians’ in inverted commas.

The reforms, for this Kremlin insider, were ‘just an acceleration of this process, of a completely natural process’. Some of the officials who were involved in these discussions thought two parties would be an optimal number, as in many Western countries; but this was still some distance from what currently existed, and so in the end they had decided on three: ‘one, a governing party, in the centre, with opponents on the left and the right’. This left no obvious place for the Liberal Democrats (Liberal'no-demokraticheskaya partiya rossii), but the party would continue to play an ‘important function’, from the Kremlin's viewpoint, as long as people voted for it (‘in the political game you sometimes need a variety of players’).

The banning of electoral blocs, from the Kremlin's perspective, was a part of this larger picture. ‘We couldn't allow the strengthening of the extrasystemic opposition’, explained the same official (‘we’, in this connection, meant the Presidential Administration, ‘the Centre as a whole’, or ‘Moscow’). There was a ‘real danger’ here from democrats, or national-patriots; but they could not allow the risks that would be involved, with the ‘fate of the country’ in the balance. It was not simply that groups of this kind might be represented in parliament. A ‘public struggle’ would begin, and there would be open and perhaps bitter polemics. All of this at a time when they were dealing with the ‘overload’ that was involved in the attempt to complete a change to a new leadership and a new configuration of power. Stability, in his view (Interviewee 5), had to be the overriding goal, and ‘more important than democracy as it is understood in the West’. People just wanted a peaceful life, and Putin had done a great deal to secure it: ‘So if the reforms have introduced a greater element of stability and predictability to the elections, that's not bad, but good. Now is not the time for democracy’. Nor would that time be soon (‘Russia needs another hundred years to become a democratic country’).

The abolition of the ‘against all’ facility took place a year after the new law had been adopted, and in the face of considerable public opposition.9 The specialist community, according to one of their representatives, was also hostile (Interviewee 6). The vote ‘against all’ had been steadily increasing; even so, it would hardly have reached more than 6–8% by the time of the December 2007 Duma election, which would have made no real difference to the outcome. There might, however, have been a larger vote ‘against all’ in the 2008 presidential contest, not least because there had been no candidate who was representative of democratic or national-patriotic opinion; and it had presumably been for this reason that the facility had been discontinued. As it turned out, the authorities would actually have had little cause for concern. So in the end it had been ‘over-insurance, although quite useful, as there might be situations in the future when the risk of a protest vote was higher (as at present [January 2009], in connection with the economic crisis)’.

The decision to remove ‘against all’ had also reflected the recommendations of OSCE monitoring missions, added another ekspert (Interviewee 3); it brought Russian practice closer to that of the major Western democracies, but at the same time denied voters an opportunity to express their dissatisfaction with the candidates on offer and made them even more inclined to take a sceptical view of the electoral process as a whole.

Indeed there were Kremlin officials who shared some of these reservations. Why, asked our informant in the domestic affairs department of the Presidential Administration (Interviewee 5), was there any need to ‘annoy people and generate a negative discussion?’; but ‘in the end the view prevailed that all the same there [was] a danger of the accumulation of protest votes under that heading, and it was decided not to take the risk. Who wanted new elections, and the unnecessary spending and anxiety they would entail?’ A year or two later, everyone seemed to have forgotten the facility had ever existed; and electors, after all, could still refuse to vote, or spoil their ballot paper. A higher-level source in the Presidential Administration was even more categoric (Interviewee 2). What had it ever been, he asked, but an ‘atavism of the Yel'tsin epoch’, whose only effect had been to encourage irresponsible criticism and make it even more difficult to achieve the turnout that had been necessary? Also, what had it to do with democracy, when in many democratic countries there was no provision of this kind? All they wanted was to avoid ‘repeated elections, and nervous tension, and stupid and unnecessary arguments’. This was the view the Administration had eventually found most persuasive, and there had actually been little opposition; ordinary people just wanted to get on with their lives and had other ways of expressing their views on public issues if they wished to do so.

A similar logic informed the decisions about political parties, which had been given the exclusive right to nominate candidates at all levels. One way of regulating their affairs was to introduce increasingly demanding requirements in terms of membership, such as took place in 2004 (‘O vnesenii izmenenii’ 2004 (somewhat moderated in ‘O vnesenii izmenenii’ 2009a)). Another was to conduct a review of all the existing parties that had the effect, by the end of 2006, of reducing the total by about half;10 but there were many other ways, according to one of our eksperty (Interviewee 6). The authorities, for instance, could force out individual party leaders: such as the leader of the Pensioners' Party (Rossiiskaya partiya pensionerov), Duma deputy Valerii Gartung, whose party had begun to enjoy some success at regional elections and might have had some chance of reaching the threshold; or the Rodina leader, Dmitri Rogozin, who had been forced to stand down in March 2006 after his party had been prevented from contesting elections in the majority of regions. The new leaders of both parties then agreed to merge with the Russian Party of Life (Rossiiskaya partiya zhizni) to form A Just Russia (Spravedlivaya Rossiya) under the leadership of Putin's friend, Sergei Mironov. ‘Two successful but not entirely loyal and predictable parties had been eliminated’, Interviewee 6 explained. There were fewer competitors. Even in the parties that were allowed to stand in December 2007 a series of ‘undesirable’ candidates had been excluded, among them former Duma deputy chairmen or fraction leaders Rogozin, Sergei Glaz'ev, Vladimir Ryzhkov and Irina Khakamada.

From the Kremlin's point of view, however, in the words of a regime-affiliated think-tank director (Interviewee 8), ‘The political arena [had] to be finally cleaned up’. It was ‘perfectly normal’ when smaller parties disappeared and were absorbed by larger ones; the parties that had disappeared—the Greens (Zelenye), Peace and Concord (Partiya rossiiskogo mira i soglasiya) and many others—were simply ‘political garbage’, holding back the development of the political system rather than developing it. The number of parties was certainly no indicator in itself of the presence of democracy, or otherwise. The presence of the Greens, for instance, ‘would only create a high level of noise in the system, and at the same time hinder its development’; and this process was still continuing. From the Kremlin's viewpoint, ‘we had to make sure all the political garbage was quickly eliminated, as we need solid, substantial parties that can take responsibility for political decisions, that represent real social forces, that have significant support in the society’.

There had been something of a ‘thaw’ in this connection during the Medvedev presidency, reflecting the thrust of his first address to the Duma and the efforts that had been made to strengthen the representation of minor parties (‘O vnesenii izmenenii’ 2009b) and their coverage in the media (‘O garantiyakh’ 2009), but this would not be the kind of change that had been demanded by Western-oriented ‘liberals’.

Who decided?

Both inside and outside the Kremlin there was little doubt that the key decisions had been taken at the very top; not even the head of the Central Electoral Commission, Alexander Veshnyakov, had been directly involved in them. Veshnyakov, according to one ekspert (Interviewee 9)

as far as he could, as a state official, [had] resisted. And that resistance was very evident. It cost him a lot of nervous energy and affected his health, so far as I know, after he was unexpectedly excluded from the CEC [in March 2007], and then left for six months without any alternative employment [he eventually became Russian ambassador to Latvia]. For a state official that's equivalent to suicide. Another person would have shot himself. They dealt with him very severely. Why? Because he objected, seriously objected—of course, in the form in which a state official is able to express an opinion of this kind. For an official of his level these objections were unexpected. If he had worked in the Stalin years, he would not have allowed himself to act in this way. He would have known how it would end.

Veshnyakov, for instance, had announced after the adoption of the new framework law in 2002 that there would be no more far-reaching reforms and that any further changes would be relatively minor,11 but a new wave of reform began two years later, changing it to such an extent that it had in effect become a new law. Veshnyakov had also promised to end the notorious parovozy [locomotives] system by ensuring that if a member of the troika at the head of a party list chose not to take up their seat, it would be awarded to a different party.12 There had indeed been a provision to this effect in the first draft of the framework law, but then the Kremlin changed its mind and made things even worse by allowing the parties themselves to reallocate seats, and if they wished, to a different region. In addition, Veshnyakov had insisted that if a party or a candidate refused to take part in the pre-election debates they should have no right to free broadcasts; this was duly included in the first draft of the new election law in 2004, but then removed. Veshnyakov had done his best to resist these regressive changes and had also spoken out against the abolition of the minimum turnout requirement in November 2006, once again to no effect.13 ‘They did not forgive him all that.’

Nor was there any serious consultation with elected representatives. Had there been any discussion, we asked a well-placed specialist (Interviewee 3)? Yes, for the most part in the appropriate Duma committees.

But what kind of discussion? It's the job of government and of the Presidential Administration to introduce proposals. And everyone else can only make minor criticisms and corrections. The initiative for such a reform can't come from public organisations, but only from the Kremlin, from the structures of the Administration. In other words there is a sort of discussion, but of course not a fully-fledged discussion in which equal partners work out a balanced solution.

In this case the two sides in this case were far from equal—‘one side proposes, and the other side accepts’. In other words, a ‘pseudo-discussion’, even though it still left some opportunity for public organisations to exercise a little influence and remove at least the more obvious inconsistencies in the early drafts of the new law. Constructive amendments, perhaps as many as 150, had met a ‘brick wall’ (Interviewee 9), and parties that were independent of the Kremlin, including Yabloko (Interviewee 16) and the Communist Party (Interviewee 17), had been entirely excluded.

Even United Russia had played a marginal role as it was simply an ‘instrument of the Administration’, necessary, in the view of a well-qualified ekspert (Interviewee 9), only because the Administration itself could not put forward election candidates. This was the opposite of the position that had prevailed in Soviet times:

The Administration used to be an instrument of the Party, now it's the other way round. The overwhelming majority of changes were adopted for the convenience of the Administration. Not all, of course. And it is little changes of this other kind to which they direct attention whenever they want to suggest that everything is moving in the right direction … and that changes have been taking place that are aimed at the democratisation of the electoral process.

The marginal significance of the Duma was in the end a reflection of its subordinate constitutional position, explained an independent-minded deputy from the United Russia fraction (Interviewee 14); it was just an ‘extension of the executive and nothing more than that, it simply ratifies the decisions of the executive’. Only a ‘great optimist’ could even call United Russia a ‘ruling party’ as, in spite of a majority of seats, it ‘influenced nothing’.

By contrast it was clear to all, eksperty as well as senior officials, that the Kremlin's own preferences would invariably prevail. ‘In some respects’, explained a leading election specialist (Interviewee 6), ‘we know precisely that the president stated his position, and that it was not simply more influential than other views, but decisive’. The abolition of the single-member constituencies, for instance, had been ‘quickly supported even by those who had always been passionate proponents of the majority system’. On other questions it could only be assumed that the position of the Presidential Administration had been the dominant one. Why had they suddenly decided to remove the ‘against all’ option, for instance, although its removal had not even been considered in the earlier discussion? It could hardly be suggested that a legislative initiative by the Tver’ regional assembly had achieved such a miraculous transformation; the entire sequence only made sense if it was assumed that everything had been decided beforehand within the Presidential Administration. Broadly speaking, for this informant, ‘Putin and Medvedev decided many things. And then their subordinates worked them out more fully’.

For another informant, a leading counsellor from the law department of the Federation Council (Interviewee 13), the answer was unavoidably a guess, but

you [had] to conclude that it [was] some kind of structures of the Presidential Administration, of the Central Electoral Commission [that had been decisive]—of those who [had] been given the job by the Kremlin of ‘being responsible for elections’, let's put it that way. And for the results of elections. And they [responded] as best they [could]. That is to say the task [was] formulated at what might be called the highest level, it seems to me, in the most general terms, and more specific recommendations [were] worked out by mostly lower-level officials. Then a consultation in the Presidential Administration, after which what is already a proposal reaches the desk of Putin, let's say … . And he says, ‘Fine, let's get to work’. Or something like that.

The CEC head, Alexander Veshnyakov, had not been part of this decision-making circle; even so it was thought too dangerous to leave an ‘outsider’ in charge of the forthcoming elections, and so Putin had swapped him for a close associate, Vladimir Churov, with whom there would be ‘no problems’ (Interviewee 16). (Churov, indeed, later became famous for his ‘first law’, according to which Putin was ‘always right’.14)

There were similar views from other quarters. The reforms, according to another specialist with close Kremlin connections (Interviewee 7), had been prepared by the Presidential Administration, and by its ‘political bloc’ in particular. For the director of a publicly-funded advisory body (Interviewee 1), the key figure was the deputy head of the Presidential Administration, Vladislav Surkov, who could be ‘regarded as the father of the reforms. And his team of political technologists’. For another specialist (Interviewee 3): ‘No-one will tell you—it's a state secret who takes these decisions. But putting it in general terms, then of course first of all the president and his administration’. For a former Constitutional Court judge the ideologists of the reform had similarly been ‘concentrated in one place’, in a ‘very narrow circle of officials of the [Presidential] Administration, who supervise questions of domestic politics’. This included the people around Surkov, ‘and President Putin had the decisive role. Personally’ (Interviewee 10). The deputy head of an Academy of Sciences institute with (again) close Kremlin connections was equally clear that the ‘brain centre’ of the reforms had been in the Kremlin, within the Presidential Administration, and among ‘Surkov and his team’ in particular (Interviewee 11). Party politicians took a similar view.15

Kremlin insiders were able to spell out the decision-making mechanisms in rather more detail. There had, indeed, been discussions, although ‘discussion behind the Kremlin wall is a very specific thing. Everyone tries to identify the main idea and support it. Discussions are dangerous’ (Interviewee 5). In this case, matters had been resolved by a series of ‘special conferences’ in the Presidential Administration in which all aspects of the question had been thoroughly examined before a proposal was taken forward to ‘the boss’ in the form of a document with various attachments, based in turn on background papers from the various departments. Everything would be set out in the final document, with ‘all the pluses and possible minuses’, and as a collective statement (‘a chinovnik can't be an author’). If it was considered satisfactory, a resolution would be prepared; if not it would be considered further. It was meetings like this that had proposed the elimination of the single-member constituencies—in other words, meetings of anything from five or six up to 10 or 15 senior officials, meeting in the Presidential Administration. There had also been other, still higher-level meetings to which even not the most senior Kremlin officials had been admitted, although they prepared the relevant documentation. Their own meetings had been chaired by Surkov, or sometimes by others; they did not normally ‘argue’ so much as ‘weigh up the alternatives’. Everything was done deliberately, not in the ‘emergency regime’ that had been common in earlier years: ‘Now we understand what figures we need, and how to work with the parties’ (Interviewee 2).

A similar view came from a senior official in the department of domestic affairs of the Administration (Interviewee 5). Who had been the inspiration of the reforms?

Surkov, probably. He looked after such things. Although maybe some of the ideas had already been worked out under Medvedev (that is, when Medvedev headed the Administration). But most likely Surkov. His lads. They mostly dealt with the perfection of the political technologies [that is, of the variety of means by which the Kremlin authorities manipulated election outcomes], so that everything flowed smoothly, without disruptions.

There had been a ‘special group’ for this purpose within the department of domestic affairs, of experts and political technologists, that Surkov convened; it occasionally included the president's representative in the Duma. As it happened, our informant himself would have preferred a system based on single-member constituencies and a much stronger parliament. One reason was that he was familiar with life in the regions, the Altai territory in particular, and thought local people themselves were usually the best placed to judge the kind of person who would represent them most effectively in Moscow: ‘After all everything is on view, everything is known about a person and his family. So it's hard to deceive the electorate’. He had not, however, put this kind of preference forward as it was not he who took such decisions, and it would just hold things up if he objected once the decision had been taken: ‘We work in a team, so we have to work for a common cause, and not declare our positions. That's the point of state service: we are agents of the state. We are limited in our rights and freedoms’.

Implications

Even for their opponents, some of the implications of the electoral reforms were clearly positive. No longer, for instance, would there be a ‘competition of “money bags” in the majority districts’, according to a Kremlin-aligned academic, although in his view this was the ‘only plus’ of the new system (Interviewee 11). For another ekspert there was greater clarity in the new system, and the elimination of the minimum turnout requirement saved a great deal of money that would otherwise have been spent on repeat elections. At the same time the minor parties had been marginalised, which meant that there was a greater degree of stability in the choices that were available to voters. Now the only part of the political spectrum that had still to stabilise was the right wing, but that would soon be resolved as Right Cause (Pravoe Delo) established itself in place of the three parties that had agreed to merge their separate identities within it (Interviewee 3). Communist deputies, not surprisingly, were also in favour of the strengthening of the major parties. The parties themselves had to be developed, and their role in the political system had to be extended: ‘If such decisions had not been taken, Russia's party system would have needed at least another decade before it could start to fill the ranks of the political elite’ (Interviewee 17).

There was an equally positive assessment from a member of the Just Russia (Spravedlivaya Rossiya) fraction (Interviewee 12). The new system, he suggested, had helped to dissipate some of the foolish notions that had circulated in the ‘romantic’ 1980s and 1990s, such as ‘the more parties, the more democracy’, and it had helped to establish ‘powerful, I would put it like this, responsible parties’, which were the only ones that would be able to hold the executive to account and speak for civil society. This also meant the ‘marginalisation of destructive and extra-systemic forces’, not just ‘radical nationalists and extremists’ but also a variety of ‘orange’ groupings of the kind that had organised the ‘dissenters’ marches' and which did not represent the interests of civil society in Russia so much as the interests of other countries. Party systems elsewhere had experienced a very similar sequence of changes. The minimum turnout requirement might certainly have been retained, but it was no guarantee of ‘legitimacy or representativeness’, and the ‘against all’ facility had been promoted by the Yabloko jurist and deputy Viktor Sheinis at a time when ‘nihilism and protest’ had been in vogue; it had been ‘harmful to the political culture’ in that it had ‘encouraged and strengthened counterproductive negative attitudes’. A choice ‘should always be concrete, and positive’.

However, even those whose orientation was broadly pro-Kremlin were aware of the shortcomings of the new system. For instance, its effect on the quality of legislation. As an ekspert who had also been a local government deputy put it (Interviewee 7), the reforms had certainly increased the manageability of the legislative process, and laws could now be adopted as quickly as the authorities might wish. In other words, ‘those who had promoted the reforms got the result they wanted. There were fewer procedural difficulties in the adoption of laws, which had formerly aroused a lot of argument and discussion and had taken a great deal of time. Now they can be adopted as quickly as necessary’. In the longer term, however, this ‘undoubtedly [reduced] the quality of those laws and of government decisions in general, above all because it bases the law on a one-sided and uniform understanding of the situation when it should reflect the interests of the many, and not just of those who are gaining [a personal advantage]’. All the changes had been directed towards the strengthening of the power vertical, and of presidential authority in particular, but if the president's authority began to decline, ‘the whole scheme would begin to fall apart’.

The domination of the Duma by United Russia, indeed, was such (in the view of an opposition deputy) as to

make impossible the adoption of any decisions, or any law, of which they disapprove. And the United Russia fraction itself votes only as directed by the government. Its deputies don't even bother to turn up, what's the point? A few people are there all the time, who vote on behalf of the other members of the fraction. On duty, so to speak. So at the moment the existence of parliamentarianism as such is seriously in question—the Duma by itself already resolves nothing. And that is a result of the reforms of recent years. (Interviewee 17)

The entire parliamentary process, for a legal expert from the Federation Council, had in fact become a form of ‘decoration’. The Duma, in particular, carried out a ‘purely technical function—it removes obvious blunders from the draft legislation that is proposed by the president or government’. The Kremlin did, of course, have a staff of its own, a ‘ministry of lawmaking’ that was responsible for drafting the legislation in the first place; but it could sometimes miss errors and inconsistencies: ‘So there's an apparatus in the Duma that identifies all these oversights and makes all the necessary amendments to the legislation during the second reading, after which it's voted through’ (Interviewee 13).

The Federation Council itself worked in much the same way, according to the same official. Its first two convocations, in 1993 and 1995, respectively, had been quite influential; the first in particular, the only one to be directly elected, had brought ‘all kinds of unexpected people’ into its membership, and had often rejected draft legislation or forced its reconsideration. Even the second convocation, which included governors who were still directly elected by the region they represented, had been relatively independent in its judgements. During the Yel'tsin years they had, for instance, refused to accept the repeated nomination of Alexei Il'yushenko as Prosecutor General (and eventually obliged him to resign), and the governors exercised considerable authority in their home region: ‘Now anything like that is simply inconceivable’. Sessions of the Federation Council took no more than a few hours, and appointments were not discussed, just voted on: ‘Everything, as a rule, is approved. It simply rubber-stamps whatever the Duma has already agreed’. The regular government hour was an equally ‘decorative procedure’. A minister or deputy minister would appear and give a report; ‘he's asked a few questions—and that's it’. The result was that the Federation Council had become ‘a form of honorary exile. Or the opposite, the start of someone's political career’ (Interviewee 13).

The main argument in favour of the higher threshold in Duma elections had been that it would keep out minor parties that had no real support, explained a Communist deputy, and that it would encourage the formation of larger parties that would be able to direct the legislative process. It had also been claimed that abolishing the single-member constituencies would eliminate the ‘swindlers’ who had ‘[fooled] the people with their manipulations and [bought] up everyone’. The single-member constituencies, in fact, had often returned ‘talented people who [were] popular in the regions’ (Interviewee 17). It had been an ‘enormous political mistake’, agreed a member of the United Russia fraction who had been a single-seat deputy in the previous convocation. By eliminating the single-member constituencies they had ‘closed off a route for active and talented people who [wanted] to make a name for themselves’. Single-member districts were perfectly compatible with party membership and party competition, but they were based above all on the ‘qualities of the individual’. As the authorities saw it, this had led in the past to the election of ‘too many awkward people’ with ‘too many opinions’, so they had decided to ‘close it all down’. The direct result had been a ‘sharp decline in the quality of the political and economic members of the so-called elite’ (Interviewee 14).

Nobody, insisted a very senior member of the Presidential Administration, could possibly want a parliament that operated as a ‘big collective farm’; what they needed instead was a ‘well-articulated mechanism with which government [could] work’, as one of the ‘transmission belts’ (which was the language of the Stalinist 1930s) of the political system. Who could forget the 1990s, when it had been a ‘big problem’ to decide anything at all? Everything became enmeshed in ‘endless arguments’, and there was ‘nothing but talk’. So they had wanted to establish a ‘better-organised system of government’ in its place (Interviewee 2), but the reforms had actually converted the parliament into a ‘pocket body consisting mainly of officials, a trade union of officials representing in the main the interests of the bureaucracy’, in the view of a senior Yabloko leader (Interviewee 16). Few would gain from the ‘single-party system’ that had now come into existence, added a Liberal Democratic deputy (Interviewee 15). Why, for instance, should ordinary people bother to approach the Communists, or the Liberal Democrats, or A Just Russia, if ‘everything is decided by the majority’? Also, if the government had no reason to take any interest in the views of the legislature as a whole, was it surprising that the wider society had little confidence in it?

As these remarks suggested, the reforms—intentionally or otherwise—had (in the view of one of our ekspert informants) in fact established a ‘real legal and political platform for the establishment of not even a relative but the unconditional monopoly of a single political force’ (Interviewee 15). The effect of this political monopoly, in the hands of the Kremlin's ‘party of power’, would be to return them to the position that had existed when Russia was one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union—‘in other words, to long-term political and economic stagnation’. In fact, suggested this informant, they were repeating the entire trajectory of the Soviet Union, which had also regressed from the multiparty politics that had survived the October revolution to the gradual elimination of alternatives and finally the establishment of a single-party monopoly. This was still more likely in a situation of economic crisis, such as had begun to develop in late 2008, when there might be considerable support for the banning of demonstrations and similar restrictions (Interviewee 7). What a Communist deputy called the ‘curtailment of political space’ had the further consequence that the various currents of opinion that obviously existed, in the absence of a party that could articulate them, would seek to express themselves through the variety of ‘centres’ that had been set up within United Russia itself. A 7% threshold would normally mean a two-party Duma, and this would ‘certainly not reflect the [full] spectrum of political opinion’ (Interviewee 17).

The parties themselves were meanwhile passing through a series of evolutionary changes that had the effect of converting them, in the view of a legal advisor to the Federation Council, into what were effectively state agencies. One of these changes was that they began to receive state funding, initially on a modest scale, in proportion to their votes at successive Duma and presidential elections; this obviously advantaged the larger parties, and most of all United Russia (‘O politicheskikh’ 2001). They also ceased to be ‘public associations’, as they had been in the perestroika years, and turned into government-sponsored mechanisms of electoral mobilisation. The shift to an entirely proportional electoral system had the same effect. If ordinary citizens who were not members of a political party wanted to stand at an election, they had to approach a regional party organisation with a request to include them in the party's list of candidates, a decision that had then to be approved by its national leadership. The state insisted on a provision of this kind in the rules of all of the registered political parties, which made party rules a part of the state system, and a form of law. The whole purpose of parties became a different one: instead of public organisations, one of whose activities was to put forward candidates at elections, this was now ‘almost the only thing a party does’ (Interviewee 13).

For a few, the current situation could even be compared—and not necessarily to its advantage—with the position that had existed at the end of the Soviet period. The reforms, explained the same informant, had systematically removed any incentive to vote for citizens who had any other wish than to support the authorities. The result was that they had, in effect,

returned to the system that existed in the Soviet Union, at the time of the CPSU [Kommunisticheskaya partiya Sovetskogo Soyuza]. Except at that time it was more honest: it was clearly stated that there was a single party, against which you could vote by crossing out its name on the ballot paper. And now it's the same, with minor changes. For observers from Europe and America the appearance of democracy is maintained: we have elections that are multi-party, with a choice of candidates, secret voting, and an equal and universal franchise. But everybody really knows beforehand who will win the parliamentary elections, and who will win the presidential elections, and all the rest is just for decoration.

He himself had predicted, to within a single decimal point, what results Medvedev was likely to achieve in the presidential election of March 2008. The logic was very simple: he had to win more than United Russia had secured at the parliamentary election, but slightly less than Putin had secured at the previous presidential contest.

There were still larger implications for the relationship between regime and society. The elimination of the single-member constituencies was particularly important in this connection. As one ekspert put it, the reforms had ‘distanced parties from their electors and their problems. Before their elimination the candidates elected by a district usually knew the problems of their electorate and territory and took part in the elections in order to resolve them. Now that link is much looser’ (Interviewee 3).

For a Communist deputy, similarly, the reforms had made government ‘even more distant from the society’. For a start, the representation of United Russia in the Duma was quite out of proportion to the support it actually enjoyed among ordinary people. The only way it had achieved this kind of overall majority was through the changes that had taken place in the election law, and the higher threshold in particular. Its use of administrative resource had also been important. The various government ministries, in particular, had acted as the ‘electoral offices of United Russia’, and made sure the enterprises and organisations for which they were responsible ‘voted the right way’. This was the ‘power vertical in all its unattractive effectiveness’ (Interviewee 17).

There were still more uncompromising verdicts. For Yabloko, for instance, the changes that had taken place were ‘entirely retrograde’; they had ‘cut off a significant part of the population from participation in political life, deprived a significant part of the population of representation in the State Duma, and weakened that form of link between a deputy and his electors that takes place through the form of single-member elections’ (Interviewee 16). Even those who had less a priori hostility to government policy were concerned about the danger that a more ‘stable’ and ‘predictable’ system might become increasingly ossified. During perestroika and the early post-communist years, changes were taking place all the time, explained our informant in the legal administration of the Federation Council (Interviewee 13), and the way in which they took place depended on a multiplicity of factors, such that ‘it could even seem that if someone intervened in a particular way at the right time in the right place it could turn the course of history in another direction. Now there is no impression of this kind at all’.

For a former member of the Constitutional Court (Interviewee 10) it was not simply electoral reform that was required but more far-reaching changes. There was no link at all between government and society; but this was not simply because of the electoral system. Had the Duma, for instance, ever rejected a draft law that had been presented to it by the Russian government? Or approved a proposal that the Presidential Administration had been known to oppose? The electoral system operated within a certain context, and it operated effectively only if it was underpinned by a real separation of powers: ‘We have another system, other principles, which are not democratic in respect of the formation of government, but evidence of its undemocratic character’. Elections, in these circumstances, were simply ‘window-dressing’, a form of ‘decoration intended to show that government is legitimate’. She could well remember the elections that had taken place in the last years of the Soviet Union: ‘There was a lively, interesting contest among absolutely marvellous people. They had not come up through government itself, they were people concerned about the future of the country and full of all kinds of initiatives’. Now that initiative had exhausted itself; the system simply looked after itself, and had no interest in anything else: ‘That's elections for you!’.

Conclusions

On our evidence, the electoral reforms of 2005 and after had been in preparation for a long time; their announcement was precipitated by the Beslan hostage-taking crisis, but their logic and even their specific features had been elaborated much earlier, from at least the start of Putin's first presidential term. The reforms were led from above by the Presidential Administration, within the context of a strategy that had been approved by the country's top leadership, and were implemented in stages, with little public or even specialist discussion. The most important of the changes, for those who had initiated them and also for their opponents, was the elimination of the single-member constituencies.

The main aim of the reforms, for those who had initiated them, was to enhance the stability and manageability (upravlyaemost’) of the system of government by removing any elements of the existing system that might have been a source of unpredictability, or anything that might have allowed regional leaders to exert an undue degree of influence. If there was any doubt, from the perspective of these reformers, the presumption should be in favour of elimination. Outside the Kremlin however, there was a greater awareness that the advantages of introducing a very different electoral system from the perspective of the Putin–Medvedev leadership had been achieved at very considerable cost: particularly the loss of constituency links for deputies, which widened the political distance between regime and society and weakened the capacity of elected representatives to hold their government to account.

Notes

The interview material on which this essay principally relies was gathered by the Institute of Applied Politics in Moscow under the direction of Ol'ga Kryshtanovskaya with the support of ESRC grant RES-062-23-1378; the research was also supported by a collaborative award to Stephen White and Ian McAllister (ESRC RES-000-22-2352 and ARC LX09883137, respectively), and by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to Stephen White (F/00 179/AR). A preliminary version was presented to the BASEES annual conference at Cambridge in March 2009.

¹ Rossiiskaya gazeta, 14 September 2004, pp. 1, 3.

² Kommersant, 7 May 2004, p. 1.

³ Kommersant, 12 August 2004, p. 1.

⁴ Kommersant, 12 August 2004, p. 3.

⁵When the former president became prime minister in 2008 he obviously headed the list; but at the start of the same year, for instance, Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov was in tenth position in Nezavisimaya gazeta's monthly ratings, with Vladislav Surkov, Igor’ Sechin and Sergei Sobyanin, all members of the Presidential Administration, in third, fourth and fifth positions respectively (31 January 2008, p. 10).

⁶Dexter (2006) is the classic study; a more recent review is available in Morris (2009).

⁷An extensive oral archive of the Soviet Elites Project is held in transcript form in Glasgow University Library, Ms Gen 1749.

⁸See for instance Mendras (2011) and White (2011).

⁹In a national survey conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation, for instance, 59% wanted to retain the ‘against all’ provision and only 24% were prepared to relinquish it (Fond obshchestvennogo mneniya 2005). For the amendment to the law see Sobranie zakonodatel'stva Rossiiskoi Federatsii (hereafter SZ), no. 29, item 3125, 12 July 2006; on the wider context see White and McAllister (2008).

¹⁰ Kommersant, 27 October 2006, p. 2.

¹¹ Kommersant-vlast’, 2 July 2002, p. 27.

¹²Veshnyakov was speaking at a meeting in Lipetsk on 29 September 2006 (Kommersant, 14 March 2007, p. 3).

¹³Veshnyakov described the amendments to the framework law that removed the minimum turnout requirement as ‘premature and radical’ (Nezavisimaya gazeta, 16 November 2006, p. 2); all the same, the second reading was approved by a large majority, and the changes were signed into law the following month (SZ, 50, item 5303, 5 December 2006). In the spring of 2007 the Duma and presidential election laws were amended accordingly (SZ, 18, item 2118, 26 April 2007).

¹⁴ Kommersant, 9 April 2007, p. 4.

¹⁵For a Liberal Democratic deputy, for instance, the key decisions had been taken ‘at the level of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, when he was president, or at the level of his Administration, someone there sorted these things out. Most probably, at the level of the Administration’ (Interviewee 15). For a leading Yabloko member (Interviewee 16) it had been ‘Putin, and perhaps others’, such as the functionaries from United Russia and the Presidential Administration, who had formulated some of the specific proposals, although Putin undoubtedly bore the political responsibility for them, ‘and the United Russia party, of course’; all in all, a ‘rather small circle’. For a Communist deputy (Interviewee 17), it was again the Presidential Administration that had taken the lead, although the biggest role had, in fact, been played by Vladimir Pligin, chairman of the Duma committee on constitutional legislation and state construction—‘he pushed it all more actively than others’; ‘Kremlin jurists’ had made a further contribution.

Appendix

Interviews were conducted with the following:

1.	The director of a state-funded elections support body, 4 December 2008.
2.	A very senior member of the Presidential Administration with special responsibility for relations with the Duma and former Russian Supreme Soviet deputy, 4 January 2009.
3.	A leading elections specialist and international elections monitor, 19 January 2009.
4.	The director of a leading pro-Kremlin think-tank and advisor to the head of the Presidential Administration, 26 January 2009.
5.	A counsellor in the domestic affairs administration of the Russian President, 28 January 2009.
6.	A leading elections specialist associated with the Independent Institute of Elections, 23 January 2009.
7.	The head of the administrative reform department at a prominent pro-Kremlin think-tank and former Duma deputy, 2 February 2009.
8.	The director of a leading pro-Kremlin think-tank, 29 January 2009.
9.	A leading elections specialist, former local deputy and prominent Yabloko member, 6 February 2009.
10.	A leading legal academic and former Constitutional Court member, 13 February 2009.
11.	A leading academic and CIS specialist with close Kremlin associations, 9 February 2009.
12.	A member of the A Just Russia parliamentary fraction and member of the Duma committee on constitutional legislation and state construction, 9 April 2009.
13.	A leading legal advisor on the staff of the Federation Council, 29 January 2009.
14.	A member of the United Russia fraction in the Duma, 21 April 2009.
15.	A member of the Liberal Democratic Party fraction in the Duma, 22 April 2009.
16.	A leading member of the Yabloko party and former Duma deputy, 15 April 2009.
17.	A member of the CPRF parliamentary fraction and party office-holder, 24 April 2009.

All of the interviews were conducted in Moscow by Ol'ga Kryshtanovskaya and other project staff.