Kremlin squeezes political parties

For the past decade the Kremlin has been weeding and pruning Russia's wild and overgrown post-Soviet political garden, hoping to shape a legislative system based on a few large, permanent, and loyal parties.

Now, with a fresh parliamentary campaign barely a year away, President Vladimir Putin may come under pressure to lend credibility to the process by actually joining a party himself.

Though Russia has a presidential system sometimes likened to that in the US, its post-Soviet presidents have been made by Kremlin intrigues rather than a grass-roots process of primaries and electoral standard-bearing for a major party. "Russia has evolved into a kind of a monarchy, where the president stands above politics," says Andrei Ryabov, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow. "The president makes decisions, but he is not answerable for them. He is not tied to a particular team and a party that reaches down into the society. This gives him a lot of room to maneuver and manipulate, but it comes at a cost for our democracy."

Like his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, Mr. Putin has played an active role in creating political parties and dictating their place in Russian political life. Mr. Yeltsin actually formed a new "party of power" to carry the Kremlin's banner into each fresh election, only to discard it afterward. In 1999 the Unity Party finished first in parliamentary elections, though it had been founded only a few months earlier by a group of business oligarchs and top officials and had only one plank in its platform: to support the new prime minister and presidential heir, Vladimir Putin.

Unity has since merged with several other groups and become a sprawling political camp called United Russia, which dominates the Duma, openly boasts of vast official backing, and aspires to be the permanent party of Kremlin power. Yet Putin declines to become a member, and has lately flirted with an alternative "party of power" started by his personal friend Sergei Mironov, the chairman of Parliament's upper house.

"Many of our political parties have been grown in a Kremlin petri dish," says Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the independent Center for Strategic Studies in Moscow. "We lack a grassroots system of party formation, and now it doesn't look like it will develop."

Russia has almost 200 parties of every imaginable stripe, but only a few of them will be left standing after a tough reregistration process is completed under a Kremlin-authored law passed by the Duma last year. Under the law, a party must have at least 10,000 members, and demonstrate a significant presence in at least half of Russia's 89 regions, in order to win the right to participate in elections at any level. "Even the largest parties are having trouble meeting the requirements, but smaller and region-based parties don't have a chance," says Vladimir Pribuilovsky, director ofPanorama, an independent political think tank. "The field will narrow significantly by the time of the elections."

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