Politics of Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 3rd of October 1993, tanks rolled through the streets of Moscow and opened fire on the Russian parliament building. Under the direction of Minister of Defense Pavel Grachev, armored units shelled the White House - the popularly named legislative seat - while military forces occupied the city. It was the closest Russia had come to outright civil war since 1917. That single violent afternoon did not come from nowhere. It was the culmination of a power struggle that had been building since the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991, leaving a country of more than a hundred nationalities with no agreed-upon rules for who actually ran things. What kind of political system would replace nearly seventy years of Soviet governance? Who would hold real power - the president, the parliament, or the regions? And how would a country built around a single party ideology construct something resembling a multiparty democracy? Those are the questions at the heart of Russia's post-Soviet political story.

• 2. The Soviet Inheritance

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  The first Soviet constitution, promulgated in 1924, created a federal structure by incorporating a treaty of union between various republics. Russia, formally known as the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, was the largest of those republics in territory and population. Sovereignty was formally enshrined in flags, constitutions, and even a guaranteed right to secede - but in practice, most sovereign powers were said to have been voluntarily delegated to the Soviet center. That gap between formal rights and real power shaped everything that followed. During the Cold War era, roughly 1947 to 1991, the Russian republic's dominance in central affairs left it paradoxically underdeveloped in key institutions. Unlike other union republics, it lacked a republic-level communist party, a Russian academy of sciences, and Russian branches of trade unions. By the late 1980s, with Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of glasnost and perestroika opening space for public debate, something unexpected happened: ethnic Russians began demanding their own distinct institutions within the republic. In 1990, the RSFSR asserted the primacy of its own laws over those of the Soviet Union - a formal signal that the center was losing its hold. The new legislature elected that year, called the Congress of People's Deputies, was chosen in what observers described as a largely free and competitive vote in March 1990. Among the first acts of that congress was elevating Boris Yeltsin - a former Gorbachev associate who had been pushed out of top party ranks for his radical proposals and erratic personality - to head the congress's permanent working body, the Supreme Soviet.

• 3. Yeltsin and the August Coup

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  The Russian presidential election of June 1991 gave Yeltsin something Gorbachev had specifically avoided: a popular mandate. Gorbachev had arranged to have himself appointed by the Soviet parliament rather than face the electorate. Yeltsin, by contrast, won with more than 57 percent of the vote, defeating five other candidates and doing so despite active efforts by Gorbachev to discourage Russians from voting for him. That legitimacy mattered enormously just two months later. In August 1991, hard-line officials launched a coup against Gorbachev, aiming to stop him from signing a New Union Treaty they believed would destroy the Soviet state. Yeltsin opposed the coup openly and publicly called for Gorbachev's restoration. More critically, his faction influenced elements within the military, the police, and the KGB to refuse the plotters' orders. The coup collapsed after three days, undone by both Yeltsin's defiance and the irresolution of the plotters themselves. What followed moved quickly. Communist Party activities were suspended. Most union republics declared independence. The Baltic states achieved full independence and received diplomatic recognition from many nations; Gorbachev's government formally recognized Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in August and September 1991. In December, one week after Ukraine approved independence by referendum, Yeltsin joined the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus to form the Commonwealth of Independent States. A meeting in Alma-Ata on the 21st of December expanded the CIS further, and all parties declared that the 1922 treaty of union - the legal foundation of the Soviet Union - was annulled. Gorbachev made the announcement officially on the 25th of December 1991. Russia inherited the Soviet seat on the United Nations Security Council and stepped into the Soviet Union's positions in other international bodies.

• 4. Constitutional Crisis

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  Between 1991 and 1993, Russia operated under a deeply contradictory arrangement. The 1978 Soviet-era constitution, heavily amended, described the parliament as the supreme organ of power. But Russia had also added a presidency in 1991, without clarifying how executive and legislative authority would coexist. The Chair of the Supreme Soviet, Ruslan Khasbulatov, became Yeltsin's most vocal critic. In 1992, the Congress of People's Deputies gained the ability to suspend any articles of the constitution, a power it used to chip away at Yeltsin's executive authority. By December 1992, the CPD rejected Yeltsin's nominee for prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, forcing him to appoint the more conservative Viktor Chernomyrdin instead. A national referendum on power-sharing was proposed and then canceled by the parliament in early 1993. On the 25th of April 1993, Russians voted in a referendum that failed to give Yeltsin the threshold the parliament had set - 50 percent of all eligible voters, not just those casting ballots - but a majority of actual voters approved his policies and called for new legislative elections. In June, Yeltsin convened a special constitutional convention to bypass the parliament's competing draft constitution. The convention, which included delegates from 89 subnational jurisdictions and major political organizations, produced a compromise draft in July 1993. The parliament rejected it. In late September 1993, Yeltsin dissolved the parliament by decree, triggering the violent standoff that culminated in the October tank assault. On the 27th of September, military units surrounded the legislative building; 180 delegates refused to leave. After a two-week standoff, Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoy - whom the parliament had confirmed as president after voting to impeach Yeltsin - urged supporters outside to storm Yeltsin's forces, leading to firefights across Moscow.

• 5. The 1993 Constitution

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  The constitution approved by referendum in December 1993 created a strong presidency and a new bicameral parliament called the Federal Assembly. The referendum's threshold had been quietly adjusted: instead of requiring 50 percent of all eligible voters, approval required only 50 percent of participating voters. The measure passed with 58.4 percent of registered voters approving it. The document declared Russia a democratic, federative, law-based state with a republican form of government. State power was divided among legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Diversity of ideologies and religions was sanctioned, and no compulsory state ideology could be adopted. The constitution created a dual executive of president and prime minister, with the president as the dominant figure. Russia's strong presidency drew comparisons to that of Charles de Gaulle in the French Fifth Republic. Presidential powers were extensive: the president could issue decrees with the force of law without judicial review, dissolve the lower house of parliament under certain conditions, schedule referendums previously reserved to the parliament, and act as Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. Removing a president was made deliberately difficult. Impeachment required a finding by the Supreme Court that the president's actions constituted a crime, a ruling by the Constitutional Court that proper procedures were followed, adoption of charges by a special State Duma commission, confirmation by at least two-thirds of State Duma deputies, and a two-thirds vote in the Federation Council. If the upper house failed to act within three months, the charges were dropped automatically. The 616-member Federal Assembly consisted of the 450-member State Duma and the 166-member Federation Council. Deputies of the State Duma worked full-time on legislative duties and could not simultaneously hold Government positions - a break from Soviet legislative practice.

• 6. Power Struggles After 1993

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  Despite the new constitution weakening their position relative to the presidency, the parliaments elected in 1993 and 1995 found ways to assert themselves. In February 1994, the State Duma voted to grant amnesty to the leaders of the August 1991 coup - a move Yeltsin denounced but that fell within the Duma's constitutional authority. In October 1994, both chambers passed a law over Yeltsin's veto requiring the government to submit quarterly reports on budget expenditures. The most serious confrontation came in June 1995, when the State Duma voted no confidence in the government following a Chechen rebel raid on the Russian town of Budenovsk, where rebels took more than 1,000 hostages. Dissatisfaction with economic reforms also fed the vote. A second no-confidence motion failed in early July. In his February 1996 State of the Union address, Yeltsin praised the previous parliament for passing significant legislation while criticizing it for failing to act on private land ownership, tax reform, and judicial reform. The 1996 presidential election shaped up as a direct contest between Yeltsin and Gennady Zyuganov of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. In opinion polls in early 1996, Yeltsin's popularity rating had fallen below 10 percent for a prolonged period. His campaign, featuring heavy television exposure, speeches across Russia, and campaign-sponsored concerts, pulled him to a 3 percent plurality over Zyuganov in the first round. Turnout in the first round was high, with about 70 percent of 108.5 million eligible voters participating. After the first round, Yeltsin appointed Alexander Lebed - who had placed third - as head of the Security Council, a tactically significant move that broadened his appeal. Three weeks later, Yeltsin defeated Zyuganov in the runoff, 54 percent to 40 percent.

• 7. The Putin Era

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  The first presidential elections after the Yeltsin era were held on the 26th of March 2000. Vladimir Putin, who had been made prime minister and then acting president following Yeltsin's resignation, won in the first round with 53 percent of the vote in what was judged generally free and fair. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe noted professional organization of the March 2004 elections while flagging unequal treatment of candidates by state-controlled media. After winning that second term, Putin dismissed Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and his entire cabinet on the 24th of February 2004 - a move required by the constitution, since the document does not permit removing a prime minister without firing the whole government. Regional power, which had expanded during the 1990s as Moscow made concessions to the 89 subnational jurisdictions, was rolled back under Putin. Direct elections of regional governors, which had been a feature of the 1990s, were replaced by direct presidential appointment in 2005. In September 2007, Putin accepted the resignation of Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov and appointed Viktor Zubkov. In the 2008 presidential election, Dmitry Medvedev won by a large margin with Putin's public backing, creating what analysts called a governing tandem between a constitutionally powerful president and an influential prime minister. Freedom House listed Russia as "not free" from 2005 onward. The Economist Intelligence Unit had previously rated Russia a "hybrid regime" with some democratic features as late as 2007, but shifted its rating to "authoritarian" by 2011. Political scientist Larry Diamond, writing in 2015, stated that no serious scholar would consider Russia a democracy. During Putin's first presidential term, the Russian economy grew at an average of 7 percent per year, attributed to economic reforms and a fivefold increase in oil and gas prices.

• 8. Federal Structure and Regional Power

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  The 1993 constitution enumerated eighty-nine subnational jurisdictions, including twenty-one ethnic enclaves with republic status, ten autonomous regions, one Jewish Autonomous Oblast, six territories, and forty-nine provinces. Moscow and St. Petersburg were designated cities of federal significance, equivalent in status to the oblasts. The Federation Treaty, signed in March 1992 by Yeltsin and most regional leaders, had carved out shared and reserved powers before the new constitution was ratified. Once the 1993 constitution took effect, however, the Federation Treaty was demoted to subconstitutional status. Any discrepancies between the treaty and the constitution were resolved in favor of the constitution. Relations between the center and the regions remained contested through bilateral power-sharing treaties. The Republic of Tatarstan - one of two republics that had refused to sign the Federation Treaty in 1992 - concluded an agreement with Moscow in February 1994, giving up its sovereignty claim and accepting Russia's taxing authority in exchange for control over oil and other resources and the right to sign economic agreements with other countries. By mid-1996, almost one-third of federal subunits had concluded similar power-sharing treaties or charters. An unresolved tension ran through the entire system: many subnational jurisdictions had their own constitutions that allocated powers inconsistently with the federal document. As of 1996, no adjudication process had been devised to resolve those conflicts. In the 1995 State Duma elections, Moscow Oblast received nearly 38 percent of the lower house seats based on the concentration of party-list candidates in the capital - a disproportion that Federation Council speaker Vladimir Shumeyko publicly criticized as feeding dangerous popular discontent with the parliament.