Russia Profile
www.russiaprofile.org
April 11, 2007
Out of Power, But Not Out of Business
Russia's Liberals Need to Reinvent Themselves
Comment by Alexei Kiva
Alexei Kiva is a professor at the Institute for Eastern Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences
In February the local electoral commission in St. Petersburg refused to register the Yabloko party for local elections. The Union of Right Forces (SPS) experienced similar problems in several other regions. The expert community is split on how these events can be interpreted. Do they mean the final political death of the liberals or do they indicate that the authorities are afraid of their liberal critics?
Neither of these interpretations is accurate. Yabloko and SPS have a very slim chance of winning a fair election. They were given their chance by society during the 1990s and they failed to use it. The next opportunity will offer itself only after a long pause, if ever. These 1990s liberals are being squeezed out of their political niche both from the right, as United Russia picked up the rhetoric of building a strong Russia by developing a modern market economy, and Just Russia exploits their social agenda from the left flank.
But being defeated in federal elections does not mean that the liberals are no longer needed by society. SPS and Yabloko are not represented in the State Duma, but their representatives hold important posts in the government. The former leader of SPS Sergei Kiriyenko heads Russia's nuclear agency, while Anatoly Chubais, the party's main sponsor, is the CEO of Russia's electricity monopoly. Alexei Kudrin is the country's finance minister and German Gref is the powerful minister of economic development and trade.
Even more striking, the current Russian government uses the expert advice of the Center for Strategic Planning and the Institute of Transition Economy, the same think tanks that advised the liberal cabinets of the 1990s. Chubais was basically right when he said recently that Putin has, in fact, not only continued his economic policies, but even kept the same expert team for formulating its strategy.
This situation of "governing without being elected" puts SPS in a rather dubious position since its official leader Nikita Belykh criticizes Putin's regime for its backsliding on democracy while some of the party's unofficial leaders remain part of the ruling regime.
As for Yabloko, its chances are even slimmer. Its influence in the economic bloc of the government is not as strong as that of SPS. Yabloko did not tarnish its image by participating in the "shock therapy" and privatization and generally distances itself from most of the big business.
Over the last few years, however, the party lost some of its best human resources. Vladimir Lukin, one of Yabloko's three founders, became Russia's High Commissioner on Human Rights. Another founder, Yuri Boldyrev, quit in late 1990s. Grigory Yavlinsky, Yabloko's irreplaceable leader since its founding in 1993, has begun to keep a relatively low profile. Although Moscow City Duma deputy Sergei Mitrokhin occasionally gets some attention, his image is one of an active protester rather than a serious politician.
Yabloko's ideology has many supporters, but its lack of leadership and access to media resources render it virtually invisible in big politics. All of this makes Yabloko's chances in the December State Duma elections rather bleak.
How did the liberals find themselves in a situation where it is almost certain they will not play a major role in the upcoming elections? Unfortunately, Russia has failed to develop its own liberal ideology. Since before the 1917 revolution, liberals in Russia have been viewed as an alien group, trying to implant Western practices on Russian soil. During the times when the image of the West in Russia improved and the influence of Western policies increased, so did the influence of the liberals in domestic Russian politics. Now that the West has largely lost its fight for Russian public opinion, the liberals' chances have also declined.
Besides tying their policy too closely to Western concepts and models, the liberals made the mistake of taking a very limited "economic" approach to their electoral base. In 1995, when the liberals tried to reform their movement and gave it the new name of the Democratic Choice of Russia (DVR) I tried to tell party leader Yegor Gaidar that orienting DVR solely towards the elite members of society who would benefit from the group's proposed economic reforms would be counterproductive. I received a response from Leonid Gozman, the party's chief sociologist, who said that DVR had calculated everything in advance and they did not need to make any changes in their targeted electorate.
When the big oil and gas business stopped supporting the liberals, they lost access to the mass media outlets controlled by the same group of businessmen and became marginalized.
I don't think, however, that this situation should be viewed in tragic terms. There are many representatives of the liberal mindset in the government. The marginalization of the old liberal parties does not mean the end of liberal ideology in Russia. It will just have to be reborn in a new form.