United Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  United Russia controls more than seven in ten seats in the State Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament. That single fact raises a cascade of questions: how does a country of more than a hundred million voters end up with one party so dominant it can rewrite the constitution by a show of hands? And what exactly does United Russia believe in, beyond supporting the man at the top?

  The party was formed on the 1st of December 2001, but its roots stretch back to a desperate improvisation in 1999, when Kremlin insiders needed a vehicle to survive an election they thought they were going to lose. What they built instead became the defining political institution of modern Russia. Its votes peaked at 64.3 percent of the national ballot in 2007. Its ideology has been officially relabelled at least twice. And its most powerful figure has never formally been a member.

  To understand United Russia is to understand how political power is assembled, maintained, and occasionally hidden in contemporary Russia.

• 2. A Party Born of Panic

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  Boris Berezovsky, according to a LiveJournal post by Tatyana Yumasheva, Yeltsin's daughter, was one of the founders of the movement that became United Russia. That the party later preferred not to advertise this connection tells you something about how quickly its fortunes shifted.

  In the summer of 1999, Kremlin insiders created the Unity bloc specifically to counter the Fatherland - All Russia coalition led by Yuri Luzhkov and Yevgeny Primakov. The insiders did not expect Unity to win. President Boris Yeltsin was very unpopular, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's approval ratings were still in single digits. They appointed the charismatic Minister of Emergency Situations, Sergei Shoigu, to lead the new party and tried to copy OVR's formula of emphasising competence and pragmatism.

  Then two things changed everything. Putin sent troops into Chechnya following bombings in Moscow and other cities, and the war effort proved enormously popular. Television owned by Berezovsky and the state-controlled RTR both covered it favourably. By December 1999, Unity had taken 23.3 percent of the vote, well ahead of OVR's 13.3 percent and nearly matching the Communist Party at 24.3 percent. Yeltsin's resignation on the 31st of December 1999 cleared the path for Putin's presidential run, and Luzhkov and Primakov withdrew from the race once the Duma results made the outcome clear.

  Unity had been built for a single election. What happened next was something different entirely.

• 3. Building the Machine

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  In April 2001, OVR and Unity leaders announced they had begun merging. By July of that year, the unified body held a founding congress under the name Union of Unity and Fatherland. The All Russia movement, led by Mintimer Shaimiev, joined them. On the 1st of December 2001, the merger was formalised as the All-Russian Party "Unity and Fatherland - United Russia."

  The party grew rapidly, though not yet into first place. By the 13th of January 2003, United Russia claimed 257,000 members, placing it behind the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia at 600,000 and the Communists at 500,000. The party received formal registration from the Ministry of Justice on the 31st of January 2003.

  Boris Gryzlov replaced Sergei Shoigu as party leader at the Second Congress in March 2003, and at the Fourth Congress in December of that year the party finally shed the Unity and Fatherland name altogether, becoming simply United Russia. Gryzlov simultaneously became speaker of the State Duma, a combination of roles that reflected the blurring of party and parliament that would define the institution going forward.

  The 2003 Duma elections, held on the 7th of December, gave United Russia 37.57 percent of the vote and, when combined with single-mandate members, a constitutional majority. In the 1999-2003 Duma, 93 percent of legislation that cleared a third reading was signed by the president, up from 76 percent in the preceding period. What Yeltsin had often done through presidential decrees, Putin now did through a disciplined parliamentary majority.

• 4. The 2007 Peak

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  On the 1st of October 2007, President Putin stood before the United Russia party congress and agreed to head the party's candidate list for the December elections, while refusing to formally join as a member. His name appeared alone at the top of the federal list. The electoral program was titled "Putin's Plan: A Worthy Future for a Great Country."

  United Russia refused to participate in broadcast political debates during the 2007 campaign. The party also raised the election threshold from five to seven percent for those elections, making it harder for smaller parties to win seats. The tightening of candidate and voter registration requirements added further structural advantages.

  On the 2nd of December 2007, United Russia received 64.20 percent of the vote, giving it 315 seats and a constitutional majority in the State Duma. The Communist Party finished a distant second with 11.57 percent. During the December 2007 election, voters and the election monitoring group Golos accused the party of numerous violations of election law.

  That 64.3 percent share remains United Russia's all-time high. The party was by that point not merely dominant; it was being tasked, in the words of Vladislav Surkov, with securing the dominance of the party for at least ten to fifteen more years. Surkov, deputy head of the presidential administration, had introduced the concept of "sovereign democracy" as the party's organizing ideology, and he instructed members to create permanent groups for propaganda support against political opponents in every region.

• 5. Ideology as Instrument

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  At the 11th Party Congress in St. Petersburg on the 21st of November 2009, United Russia officially proclaimed Russian conservatism as its ideology. In 2015, the party shifted again, adopting liberal conservatism. The 2003 manifesto "The Path of National Success" had described an entirely different vision: minimising differences between rich and poor, combining state regulation with market freedoms, and rejecting both left and right in favour of "political centrism."

  Political scientists have described the party variously as centrist, centre-right, right-wing, a big-tent party, a party of power, and a presidential party. The internal architecture supports several of these readings at once. The party contains a formally recognised left wing called the Centre for Social Conservative Policy, a liberal wing called the "November 4" club, and a national-conservative group called the State Patriotic Club.

  United Russia has worked closely with the Russian Orthodox Church. The think tank Izborsky Club, founded in 2012 by Aleksandr Prokhanov, promotes Russian nationalism and systematic opposition to liberal ideas and was part of a broader network of intellectual institutions Putin encouraged. In 2017, political scientists Anuradha M. Chenoy and Rajan Kumar characterised the party's agenda as supporting state capitalism, soft nationalism, Eurasianism, and closer alliance with China.

  The party's own long-standing self-description is simpler: "the party of real deeds." On the 21st of October 2021, Putin spoke at the Valdai Discussion Club about "healthy conservatism," describing it as a reliance on traditions, a real assessment of oneself and others, and the rejection of extremism as a way of action.

• 6. Electoral Architecture

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  United Russia developed what it called the "locomotive" strategy for Duma elections: placing famous figures at the top of regional party lists who had no intention of actually serving as deputies once elected. In 2003-37 elected candidates from United Russia refused deputy mandates. In 2007, 116 did. In 2011, the number was 99. The names at the top of the list in those years included the President of the Russian Federation, heads of regions, government ministers, and city mayors.

  The 2016 elections, held on the 18th of September, exposed a parallel feature of United Russia's internal primaries. More than 20 people who had not participated in the May 2016 primary were nominated by the party as candidates in what were described as "passing places" on the list. In the Sverdlovsk Oblast regional list, the candidates who came second and third in the internal vote were given the top positions, while the primary's actual winners were placed further down. A candidate who finished fourth in the Nizhny Tagil district primary was appointed as the party's nominee there.

  Since 2009, United Russia has also supported formally independent candidates in local elections when the party's own brand was seen as an electoral liability. By the 2012 Moscow municipal elections, the party nominated no official candidates at all in 125 intra-city districts. Secretary General Andrey Turchak addressed this in November 2019, stating that in the upcoming 2021 Duma elections, United Russia would nominate its own candidates and that members should be proud of their party affiliation rather than hiding it.

• 7. Grassroots and Digital Reach

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  As of the figures in the source, United Russia has 82,631 primary branches and 2,595 local branches across Russia, with regional branches in every subject of the Russian Federation. In 2013, the party claimed a membership of two million people. A study by Timothy J. Colton, Henry E. Hale, and Michael McFaul, conducted after the March 2008 presidential election, found that 30 percent of the Russian population identified as loyalists of the party.

  On the 26th of May 2019, United Russia applied electronic preliminary voting using blockchain technology in 47 regions. By 2021, the party's preliminary voting ran from the 24th to the 30th of May nationwide; more than 12 million voters participated in that round of internal elections, with around six million voting online. Access required authorisation through the State Services portal.

  At the 2021 Duma elections, the party entered the campaign with a People's Programme drawn from more than two million proposals submitted by citizens through meetings, party reception offices, and a dedicated website at np.er.ru. Volunteer activists and social workers made up more than 30 percent of candidates at the primary stage. The 2021 elections ultimately returned 324 seats for United Russia, enough to maintain a constitutional majority despite pre-election polls that showed support running at around 30 percent.

  In December 2022, the European Union sanctioned United Russia over the invasion of Ukraine. That same month, the party declined to hold its annual congress, with sources citing the party's unreadiness to propose a strategic agenda, a move that was itself a violation of the party charter.