Without a doubt, the unexpectedly strong pro-reform and pro-regime vote contributed to President Boris Yeltsin’s decision to announce his resignation when he did, on December 31. At no time since his victory over the Communist candidate in the 1996 presidential election has Yeltsin’s core political and economic agenda appeared as secure.

The most significant result of the election was the skyrocketing of pro-regime and pro-reform parties of the Center-Right. Their combined share of the national party-list vote more than doubled, from 17 percent in 1995 to 38 percent: Edinstvo (Unity) with 23 percent, Soyuz Pravikh Sil (the Union of Right Forces, or SPS) with 9 percent, and Yabloko with 6 percent. If the pro-regime Edinstvo, SPS and at least a dozen independent pro-reform deputies manage to unite, theirs will be the single largest bloc of votes.

The gap between the pro-reform presidential majority of the Russian electorate and the go-slow majority of the parliamentary vote has narrowed dramatically. If Grigory Yavlinsky’s pro-market opposition party, Yabloko, and swing votes from the Otechestvo-Vsya Rossiya (Fatherland-All Russia, or OVR) Center/Center-Left bloc join the new pro-regime plurality—at least from time to time on an issue-by-issue basis—a more or less reliable pro-reform majority in the Russian parliament will emerge for the first time since the March 1990 election of the Duma’s predecessor, the Congress of People’s Deputies of Russia.

Although the Communists, with 25 percent of the party-list vote, remain the single largest party in the Duma, the leftist alliance they led has lost its plurality in the legislature. A non-Communist speaker is almost certain to replace the former Pravda editor, Gennady Seleznyov (who prudently ran for governor of the Moscow province). Gone with him will be the Communists’ stranglehold on the legislature, which tormented and deformed reform in the past six years by killing several vital laws (such as land privatization, foreign banks, the rights of foreign shareholders) or by diluting them to the point of meaninglessness (housing subsidies, the tax code, corporate governance, and the bankruptcy of the failed state-subsidized enterprises).

The election has also demonstrated the maturity of the Russian electorate. In the 1995 election, in which forty-seven parties and blocs participated, 50 percent of the votes were cast for marginal parties that did not clear the 5 percent hurdle for the party-list representation in the Duma. This time, only 19 percent of the votes went to the twenty parties that failed the 5 percent test. Not one of the extremist leftist and nationalist parties reached the Duma. The nationalist-populist Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s bloc (formerly the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia) slid from 11 percent of the party-list vote in 1995 to 6 percent and appears to be headed for extinction.

Another sign of greater political health was the emergence of a strong opposition Center/Center-Left coalition. Since 1993, when the first Duma was elected, the void in the political space left of Center has been a key source of political instability, polarization, and the legislature’s inability to work constructively with the government. Created only four months before the election (largely as the springboard for the presidential bid of the bloc’s leader, Evgeniy Primakov), OVR is likely to fill the critical political niche between the Communists and the Center-Right.

The changes in the composition of the legislature reflect momentous shifts below the surface of Russian politics. As Mikhail Dmitriev of the Carnegie Endowment’s Moscow Center put it, there has been "a sharp turn to the Right of all leading parties and blocs" compared with 1995.¹ A colleague, Michael McFaul, concurred that a "growing" and "striking" convergence of positions on economic policy has resulted in consensus "on the necessity of a market economy."²

In the economic programs of all major parties and blocs, including the Communists, tight budgets and low inflation have replaced socialist-populist calls for printing money to meet the ever-expanding responsibilities of the state. Mutatis mutandis, everyone now favors tax cuts and the shift of the tax burden from the producer and the employer to the consumer. Gone is the advocacy of protectionism, with high import tariffs and high customs walls. Even the Communists no longer insist on a return to state control of the economy. More startling still, the Communists have abandoned their core demand for a blanket re-nationalization of privatized industries and now support "guarantees" for the "honest" owners and the "defense" of shareholders’ rights.

Another promising development is the end of the self-disenfranchisement of the Center-Right electorate. In 1995, 9.6 million votes (14 percent of the total vote) were cast for pro-reform and pro-government parties that failed to overcome the 5 percent barrier. As a result, although the Right as a whole received only 4 percent fewer votes than the Communist-led Left, the latter ended up with 35 percent more deputies in the Duma. This time, the Center-Right vote was largely consolidated in Edinstvo (14.5 million) and SPS (5.5 million).

The latter—the bloc of unapologetic, true-blue, Hayekian free-marketeers whose motto, in its previous incarnation as Russia’s Choice, was "Liberty, property, law!"—has more than doubled its share of the party-list vote, from 3.9 percent in 1995 to 9 percent. The coalition is led by those who engineered and sustained the transition to capitalism: former prime ministers Yegor Gaidar (forty-three years old) and Sergey Kirienko (thirty-seven), former "privatization tsar" and inflation-slayer Anatoliy Chubais (forty-four), and former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov (forty). The SPS undoubtedly profited from the clear signs of economic revival: industrial output grew almost 8 percent between January and November 1999, compared with the same period last year; the GDP is showing the first significant increase in ten years; and 21 percent of Russians (32 million people) identify themselves to pollsters as "getting along well."³

In addition to the state of the economy (and the last-minute endorsement of the bloc’s economic program by the popular prime minister, Vladimir Putin), the success of the SPS is due to a critical (perhaps central) long-term trend in Russian politics: the coming of political age of the perestroika generation. Those who were children or young teenagers in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, are now in their twenties and thirties. Ideology aside, they seek out parties and candidates closest to them in age and experience, which in their case was so dramatically different from that of their parents or even their older brothers and sisters.

This generation first made its mark in the 1996 presidential election, when exit polls showed 71 percent of those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine voting for Yeltsin and only 23 percent for the Communist candidate, Gennady Zyuganov. In the thirty-to forty-four-year-old category, the president led Zyuganov 57 percent to 36 percent.⁴ This time, with 23 percent of the party-list votes going to Edinstvo, headed by the forty-four-year-old Sergey Shoygu, and 9 percent to SPS, almost one-fourth of the legislature’s seats will belong to parties and blocs led by men and women in their thirties or forties.

In the short run, the age of political candidates is likely to become an issue not limited to the younger electorate. Anyone who has visited Russia since 1997 could not but notice that, in addition to the widespread weariness with Yeltsin’s infirmity and the longing for a consistently active, energetic leader, people long for someone who has not lived primarily under the pre-1985 Soviet regime. As a result, Putin’s relatively young age (forty-seven), energy, and stamina will be an immense advantage in the presidential election, currently scheduled for March 26. Conversely, the age (seventy) and unsteady health of the other leading presidential contender, Primakov, will work against him (and are likely to emerge in exit polls as two of the "negatives" that accounted for the far worse than expected showing of the Primakov-led OVR bloc in the December 1999 poll).

Among the general political and generation trends revealed by this election, the disappointing performance of the Center-Right Yabloko, led by Yavlinsky (forty-seven), stands out as a glaring exception. Widely predicted to become one of the three largest factions in the parliament with at least 10 percent of the vote, Yabloko, which was the fourth largest in the outgoing Duma, finished last among the six parties in the new Duma, with 6 percent of the party-list vote—one percentage point down from the 1995 result.

The immediate cause could have been Yavlinsky’s distinct and less uncompromising position on Chechnya: while supporting the war, he had proposed an ultimatum to the Chechen government to hand over the "terrorists," a temporary cease-fire, and the resumption of the Russian offensive if the Chechen government failed to satisfy Moscow’s demands. Yet a deeper reason is likely to be voter tiredness of Yabloko’s incessant and shrill attacks on the Kremlin, the sterility of its legislative record, its worse-for-the-government-the-better strategy, and its track record of voting with the Communists in the Duma, including such critical instances as Yeltsin’s impeachment or the restrictive law on religious freedom.

Yavlinsky has accepted the voters’ verdict with customary grace and humility. The election, he said, was "exactly" the kind that would have been arranged by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR.⁵ The "people," Yavlinsky continued, "do not want to think, analyze, or calculate seriously."⁶ There simply had been no democratic revolution in Russia in 1991, Yavlinsky declared—a fact that he kept secret when his party participated in the parliamentary elections of 1993 and 1995, when he ran for president of Russia in 1996, and during the most recent campaign until the day after December 19.⁷

Russian voters made an informed choice. As in 1995, freedom of campaign allowed innumerable leaflets, door-to-door canvassing, television ads, and thousands of political billboards. Each of the twenty-six parties that fielded national party lists of candidates received a total of three-plus hours of free air time on three national television networks⁸ and two and a half hours on four national radio stations.⁹ Extensive (often exhaustive) and almost always objective coverage of the parties, their platforms, and the candidates was provided by such national newspapers as Kommersant-Daily, Izvestia, and Vremya MN, as well as the private NTV television channel.

Every week Russia’s highest-rated television host, NTV’s Evgeniy Kiselev, conducted television debates between invited guests on his live, prime-time late evening show, Glas naroda (The People’s Voice). In addition to the questions from Kiselev and one another, the guests were queried by the live audience in the studios and by outside callers. Among the political leaders appearing on the show were Yavlinsky (he participated three times, more than anyone else), Kirienko, Irina Khakamada (SPS), and Chubais. Zyuganov, Primakov, and the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov (OVR), were repeatedly invited to debate but declined. The voters, however, hardly needed a Chubais-Zyuganov (or Yavlinsky-Primakov) debate to educate them to the difference between the Union of Right Forces and the Communists (or between Yabloko and OVR).

The more or less objective media outlets coexisted with (and were frequently drowned out by) the party press and television. In this raucous and messy bazaar of ideas, Russian voters were exposed to every imaginable angle on the campaign purveyed by the combatants in a brutally partisan media war of an East European, Italian, Israeli, or nineteenth-century American variety. Among the most vocal were almost 500 Communist and "Communist-influenced" national and local newspapers with a daily readership exceeding 10 million and the nationally broadcast "Parliamentary Hour," which the Communist Party used to air its views.

In addition to the fire from the hard Left, the Yeltsin administration and pro-regime parties such as Edinstvo were daily raked over the coals by the Luzhkov-controlled media group, which included the brash, muckraking tabloid Moskovskiy Komsomoletz, the popular evening daily Vechernyaya Moskva (Evening Moscow), and the TV Tsentr-Moskva national television channel, known as "Luzhkov’s TV." The latter had been created explicitly to conduct pro-OVR electoral propaganda and to castigate the bloc’s opponents. In these media Luzhkov waged his anti-Kremlin campaign, with a seemingly inexhaustible stream of allegations of corruption and money-laundering against the president, his family, and his friends. In the past eight months, one had to be blind and deaf in Russia to miss even the smallest detail in the story of alleged payments for credit card bills by the Swiss company Mabetex for Yeltsin and his daughter, Tatyana D’yachenko.

Allied with Luzhkov against the Kremlin and Edinstvo was Russia’s largest media empire, the Most group, owned by the "oligarch" Vladimir Gusinsky. Among Most’s holdings—which include the popular Time Magazine look-alike (Itogi weekly), NTV, and the Echo of Moscow radio station—the most aggressive and consistent in its anti-regime animus was the daily Segodnya. While the Most outlets unfailingly portrayed Primakov in a positive light, Gusinsky’s favorite party was Yabloko; in support of it, he deployed his enormous media resources. (Yavlinsky received most of his financial support from another "oligarch," Mikhail Khodorkovskiy.)

Arrayed on the Kremlin’s side were media owned by the mogul Boris Berezovsky. With his newspapers no match for Luzhkov’s or Gusinsky’s in popularity or circulation, the vicious anti-Luzhkov and anti-OVR propaganda campaign was primarily conducted on the ORT television channel.

Paradoxically, the war in Chechnya was hardly a factor in the election because all major parties, following the opinion polls, supported it. Although it might be a revelation to U.S. editorialists, there are such things in democracies as popular wars, which the majority of people believe to be just. In the short run, these wars may greatly boost a leader’s standing, as Grenada did for Ronald Reagan and the Falklands for Margaret Thatcher, or become a steppingstone toward the political summit for younger politicians, as the Rough Rider exploits in Cuba did for Teddy Roosevelt. Furthermore, democracies can be quite ruthless, occasionally even savage, in prosecuting wars on the periphery, especially colonial wars or wars against secessionist guerrillas, while remaining democracies, as witness India in the Punjab, Turkey in Kurdistan, France in Algeria, and Israel in southern Lebanon in 1982.

If anyone stood to gain from the war, it should have been the nationalists, such as Zhirinovsky, and the Communist-led "popular-patriotic" Left, which for years deplored the dissolution of the Soviet Union and advocated recentralization of the Russian state. Of the parties on the Right, Edinstvo might have profited from the war indirectly through an endorsement by Prime Minister Putin, whose astronomic approval rating is tied to the prosecution of the Chechen war, deemed just by more than 70 percent of the Russian public.

The best news about the 1999 Russian parliamentary election was hardly new: nothing is ever lost permanently, so long as ordinary men and women have a choice and can exercise it freely. The more than 63 million Russians (61 percent of the registered electorate), old and young, who trudged in the dark and cold of a Russian December through snow and sleet, many with small children on sleds in tow, to vote at 94,000 polling stations stretched across eleven time zones, are owed a collective apology by American editorial writers, columnists, and congressmen responsible for the disgraceful "who lost Russia?" hullabaloo, epitomized by Rep. Dick Armey’s labeling this struggling democracy "a looted and bankrupt zone of nuclearized anarchy."

There will be no apology, of course. But there is hope that the U.S. media and the House of Representatives, elected by 36 percent of U.S. voters, might notice this election and begin to develop a long-range, informed, and multidimensional vision of Russia immune both to the minute considerations of American politics and to the Russian scandal du jour.

Notes

1. "Parlamentskie vybory v Rossii: Ekonomicheskie programmy vedushchikh partiy i blokov" (Parliamentary elections in Russia: Economic programs of the leading parties and blocs), Brifing 11(1) (November 1999): 4 (Carnegie Moscow Center).

2. Preface, in "Russia’s 1999 Duma Elections: Comparing Party Platforms," ed. Tanya Krasnopertseva, Carnegie Moscow Center, http://www.ceip.org/programs/ruseuras/ Elections/elecbulletin1.htm (December 13, 1999).

3. Leonid Byzov, "What about the Voters?" in Primer on Russia’s 1999 Duma Election, eds. Michael McFaul, Nikolai Petrov, Andrei Ryabov, and Elizabeth Reisch (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999), p. 11.

4. "How Russians Voted in the Runoff," New York Times, July 4, 1996, p. A8.

5. David Hoffman, "Russian Pins Election Defeat on War Hysteria," Washington Post, December 25, 1999, p. A30.

6. Ibid.

7. Celestine Bohlen, "Election in Russia Bolsters Yeltsin Allies in Parliament," New York Times, December 20, 1999, p. A15.

8. ORT (two hours and twenty minutes), Rossiyskoe Televidenie (thirty-five minutes), and TV Tsentr-Moskva (twenty-five minutes).

9. Radio Rossii (one hour), Mayak (thirty minutes), Golos Rossii (thirty minutes), and Yunost’-Molodezhniy Kanal (thirty minutes).

Leon Aron is a resident scholar and the director of Russian Studies at AEI. A shorter version of this essay was published in the January 3-January 10 issue of the Weekly Standard.