#1 - JRL 8014
Moscow Times
January 14, 2004
Monolithic New Duma Is Just an Illusion
By Nikolai Petrov
The political year 2003 ended with the first plenary session of the fourth State Duma, giving voters a look at the representatives they elected on Dec. 7 and setting the tone for the next four years. Tellingly, the speakers who addressed this combined battalion of new deputies --army general and 1991 putsch participant Valentin Varennikov, President (and Colonel) Vladimir Putin and Boris Gryzlov, former interior minister and now speaker of the lower house -- all hammered home the same priorities: doubling Russia's GDP, winning the war on poverty and pushing forward with military reform. All three points were unveiled in Putin's last address to the Federal Assembly. That's what you call staying on message.
Putin, addressing the Duma for the first time as president, called on deputies "to serve as an example of devotion to the basic principles of democracy" before rolling out a laundry list of market-based reforms they will be expected to see into law. The list included an overhaul of public health and education, creation of an affordable housing market, development of banking, financial and tax collection systems, fine-tuning the laws on land ownership, strengthening ownership rights, increasing the efficiency of public spending and improving the performance of all government agencies.
The changing of the guard is typical of the Putin era. Before there were personalities. Now there are cogs in a machine, installed to perform a specific function. And by all accounts, the new Duma will have strictly limited functions. In Gryzlov, the new speaker, we have a second Sergei Mironov. In the new Duma we have a second Federation Council.
Gryzlov's election marked the first time that the Duma speaker is also a faction leader. In a way this makes sense. After all, if Gryzlov wants to gather his more than 300-strong faction in one room he'll have little choice but to use the Duma's main chamber. Duma sessions are going to look like meetings of the United Russia faction with a sprinkling of special guests from other parties.
In the past, bitter competition between rival factions drove the number of committees in the Duma to 28. Hopes that the new one-party majority might downsize a few of them came to nothing. All the bigwigs who rallied to the Kremlin's banner need big offices and foreign cars, after all. So much for administrative reform and trimming bureaucracy.
In fact, the number of deputy speakers rose this time around to 10, including two first deputies. Just three of the deputies come from the "minor factions." The rest are Unirussians. As a result, United Russia has eight of the 11 votes on the Duma Council, which sets the agenda for the lower house.
And what about the "new right"? Forget about it. There are only a couple dozen independent deputies in the Duma, and the bar for registering a new deputy group has been raised from 35 to 55. The real size of the Duma is now equivalent to the size of its dominant faction. United Russia's deputies will play all the major roles; the rest of the deputies are nothing more than extras.
The decisiveness with which the pro-Kremlin majority altered the Duma's rules and regulations to suit its needs should leave no doubt that it could amend the election laws and the Constitution just as quickly and just as radically.
And yet the new Duma only appears to be monolithic and manageable. The new majority is more than happy to follow the Kremlin's orders as it divides the spoils, but the faction is far from indivisible. Political parties, which clashed on the floor of the Duma, have given way to the parties of governors and special interests who will clash behind closed doors. The Kremlin clans who pull the Duma's strings are also far from unified. The battle for leadership posts in the new Duma promises to be a serious one, and the outcome will become clear when the Duma convenes later this week. It is already obvious, however, that while it won the battle on Dec. 7, the Kremlin, and society as a whole, have lost the war. The fourth Duma will be a reliable tool for the Kremlin, but the quality of the legislation it passes is certain to decline now that all quality control mechanisms have been dismantled. Mistakes are inevitable, and we're all going to pay the price.
Nikolai Petrov, head of the Center for Political and Geographical Research, contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.