On Monday, Russia’s Supreme Court ruled that the liberal opposition party Yabloko could not stand in September’s parliamentary elections. The Kremlin seems to be scared of the risk of a strong protest vote, a reminder that while these elections are obviously carefully managed shams, they are not completely pointless. The same cannot necessarily be said of the parliamentarians themselves.
The elections to the State Duma, the lower chamber of the legislature, will be held over three days from 18 to 20 September. In total, 450 deputies will be elected, 11 from the occupied territories in Ukraine.
The results will be rigged to ensure that the bulk of the seats will be won by the governing United Russia bloc, campaigning under the slogan “United Russia is the President’s Team”. There are 19 other parties registered, from the Communists and the Greens to the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, and even the Party of Pensioners. Almost all are essentially fake opposition parties, there to give the system the appearance of plurality, yet voting in line with the government on any matters of note.
Although still pretty marginal, Yabloko was the only party that really does challenge the Kremlin and the war and had a chance of passing the 5 per cent threshold needed to be represented in the Duma. Originally, the Kremlin seemed willing to let it run for the sake of appearances, before becoming alarmed by a surge of online support. Hence the sudden turnaround, with the Supreme Court ruling that it had received illegal donations from abroad.
After all, while the results may be rigged, the electoral process does have some meaning. Trying to maintain the pretence of fair elections does require the Kremlin to free up a little more space for some degree of public debate.
Then, while it will announce whatever numbers it chooses, it also knows that the wider the gap between the real and official results, the less effective the poll will be as a legitimating ritual, and the greater the risk of public protest. The 2011-13 Bolotnaya Protests, the largest in post-Soviet times, were triggered by a sense that the elections had been stolen.
The vote matters enough that even Vladimir Putin, who has been increasingly distant and obsessed with his war, has had to make an effort to be seen consulting with local leaders and addressing bread-and-butter issues. He all but forced the central bank to make a cut in the painfully high base rate and also issued a decree promising to crack down on profiteers driving food prices up artificially.
But even if the elections matter in their own way, the parliamentarians themselves rarely do.
Their role is increasingly confined to voting how Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin tells them, and competing for who can come up with the most cringingly sycophantic praise of Putin and performative initiatives to demonstrate their patriotism. Communist Gennady Zyuganov, in theory the leader of the main opposition party, has praised Putin’s “flawless genius”.
Foreign-brand vehicles parked in front of the Russian State Duma in central Moscow. Cars and other vehicles seem a particular weakness for politicians (Photo: Alexander Nemonov/AFP)No wonder that, despite the continuing presence of a handful of relatively serious and professional deputies, so many seem much more committed to their careers, their bank accounts and their often bizarre pet projects.
Many devote themselves to the accumulation of property, like Vitaly Belousov from the avowed democratic socialist A Just Russia party. According to the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, he owns property totalling to more than the entire Principality of Monaco. Still, his holdings are dwarfed by those of the premier Duma land baron, United Russia’s Nikolay Goncharov, more than six times larger. There is also the family of the Chechen MP Bekkhan Agayev, which still controls investment funds with €100m (£86m) in property assets across Germany, Luxembourg and other European countries.
Cars and other vehicles seem a particular weakness for many, over and above the Maybach and Bentley limousines, Porsche Cayennes and bulletproof Mercedes that ferry them to the Duma sessions. A Just Russia’s Konstantin Aydakov has a fleet of 38 vehicles, from vintage Soviet cars to jet skis. Andrei Efimov, has only nine, but makes up in weight what he lacks in numbers, having a particular passion for lorries, from Russian Kamazs to a Swedish Scania.
Aleksey Zhuravlyov has made absurd claims about brothels in Denmark where, he said, people could rape turtles (Photo: Sasha Mordovets/Getty)With no power comes no responsibility. Many deputies scarcely bother participating in Duma debates to a degree that would shock even the laziest British MP. Others, though, embrace the opportunity to indulge their passions and prejudices.
There is the hawkish Aleksey Zhuravlyov, who claimed that Denmark had a special zoo where people could legally rape turtles; United Russia’s Tatiana Butskaya, who proposed banning access to internet porn for Russians without children; the nationalist Yevgeny Fyodorov who once described rock music as “US-instigated sabotage”; and Nikolai Valuev, the seven-foot-tall former heavyweight boxing champion, whose enthusiasm is the hunt for the fabled Siberian Yeti.
It is easy to scoff, but if it is between that and making another speech in praise of Putin, perhaps the Yeti is the better option.
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