On Monday, few people paid attention to the first meeting of the State Duma of the Russian Federation following the summer recess, except the deputies themselves. The Parliament has long ceased to play the central role in Russian politics that it did in the early 1990s. Instead, it has grown ever more detached from the country’s real concerns.

“The process began back in 2004, exactly five years ago, when in the aftermath of the terrorist attack against a school in Beslan, then-President Vladimir Putin suggested electing the Duma’s members solely by parties’ electoral lists,” explained Oleg Smolin, a member of the opposition Communist faction in the State Duma. “This made Duma deputies responsible before the leadership of their parties and not before the voters in their regions. I think the deputies’ first responsibility should be before their voters, and not before their parties, some of which were created from above.”

The change in the country’s electoral laws, initiated by Putin and approved by the Parliament in late 2004 and early 2005, was officially justified by the need to strengthen the “unity of the country” in the face of terrorist acts such as the one in Beslan. The other explanation was the need to speed up the growth of political parties, which in 2004 were, and largely still are, some of the least trusted institutions in the country.

“Yes, the trust for parties was at a dangerously low point in 2004, even the most optimistic polls did not give them more than 20 percent of public trust,” said Alexander Ivanchenko, the chairman of Russia’s Central Electoral Commission in 1996 to 1999. “But I am not sure that switching to elections by party lists alone in the year 2004 was the right way to solve the problem. Until then, 50 percent of State Duma deputies were elected by party lists and 50 percent by direct local vote. The parties still had a long way to go to make themselves known and influential in the regions; they were still learning to ‘digest’ the 50 percent portion of Duma seats which they got under the 1993 law on elections. Instead of letting parties develop themselves step by step, we just gave them a huge advance payment.”

Tightening their grip on power, the leaders of United Russia, the “party of power” with an absolute majority in the Duma since 2003, introduced ever stricter party discipline for members of Duma factions. In 2004 to 2007 a number of changes were introduced to the Duma’s rules, forcing the deputies to toe their parties’ line on such important issues as budget votes, defense, and foreign policy. The idea was to have the country governed by “specialists and not by players in party politics,” as Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, once put it.

“If they indeed wanted to make the political leadership of the country more professional, this policy failed,” said Smolin. “We know what kind of ‘specialists’ are taking decisions here, for example, from the recent scandal with standardized testing for high school graduates and with the army reform. The aim of our Communist faction is to make these experts as harmless and powerless as possible.”

The Communist faction has announced that opposing the government’s plans for army and education reforms, as well as launching an investigation of the recent accident at a Siberian electric power station, will be its top priorities in this Duma session.

“Parliamentary life cannot remain unchanged after the accident in Siberia and an avalanche of protest letters we are getting from the military and university professors on reforms in their spheres,” said Ivan Melnikov, the deputy speaker of the Duma from the Communist faction. “If some people on top think they can run the country without a Parliament, they just don’t know how people’s psyche has changed since pre-Mikhail Gorbachev times,” added his colleague, Communist deputy Vladimir Solovyov.

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