MACHINE POLITICS AND INSTITUTIONALIZED ELECTORATES A Comparative Analysis of Six Duma Elections in Bashkortostan, Russia1 Henry E. Hale George Washington University [email protected] Draft: 31 August 1999 ABSTRACT: A detailed focused comparison of six single-mandate Duma races in the Russian republic of Bashkortostan in 1993 reveals that state executive power, campaign quality and 'institutionalized electorates' best explain which candidates emerged victorious. Every candidate backed by the republic's top authorities won, but by methods better described as machine politics than as fraud. Campaigns were effective primarily when they signaled to a constituency that had long been institutionalized as a selfconscious group under Soviet rule, mainly agrarians and ethnic Russians in Bashkortostan. Money in and of itself had little impact on voting results; while all winning candidates had access to significant financial resources, most of the republic's biggest spenders lost resoundingly. Preliminary investigation suggests that institutionalized electorates are growing in importance, perhaps becoming even more powerful than state actors in the single-mandate district races.

This is an electronic version of an article published in Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, v.15, no.4, December 1999, pp.70-110. The Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics is available online at http://www.informaworld.com and the article URL is http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1743-9116&volume=15&issue=4&spage70

1 The author is especially indebted to Timothy Colton and Jerry Hough for their guiding role in the research project on the 1993 Russian elections of which this study is a part.

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Elections to the Duma are among the most dramatic events in a Russian political calendar packed with surprises and intrigues. Politicians begin angling for these seats years in advance, negotiating coalitions, building new movements or sometimes doggedly preparing to go it alone. Western scholarship has devoted great attention to Russian parliamentary elections, but this attention has focused primarily on only one part of these elections, that part where citizens vote directly for a single political party, which, if it receives more than five percent of ballots cast, then gains a number of seats for its 'list' of candidates proportional to its share of the vote. This competition between 'party lists' receives the lion's share of attention partly because it is dramatic, featuring colorful leaders touting ambitious ideologies and maneuvering strategically to defeat their rivals. This part of the voting also offers Western observers something they can easily identify with: here are political organizations competing for power much as happens in the observers' own countries. The results are also easy to interpret since they tell us exactly how many votes each party has won. In addition, data are quite readily available on all of the most important players in this drama, as the movement leaders are public figures of a nationwide scale and the election results are widely publicized. Yet the party list voting comprises only half of the Duma's 450 seats; the other half are contested in territorial districts by anywhere from two to twenty candidates who may or may not represent a political party and who frequently rely on alliances that are much less formal than those typically reflected in central statistics. Just because these elections do not lend themselves to easy interpretation does not make them any less important; indeed, they also decide half of the seats in the parliament and often offset apparent gains in the party list voting. For example, Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party 'won' the party list half of the voting in 1993 by receiving 24 percent of the vote compared to the 16 percent garnered by the pro-Yeltsin 'Russia's Choice,' but the latter actually gained the larger number of seats in the new parliament

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since it did very well in the territorial (or 'single-mandate') districts while Zhirinovsky's party gained only one such seat. While very little theory has been developed to explain outcomes in the SMD races, several works have provided excellent starts in this direction, notably Colton and Hough (1998) and Moser (1999).i The present article seeks to continue this direction of study by delving deep into the empirical evidence, exploring what might be called the 'microfoundations' of electoral behavior that will eventually enable us to generate a more comprehensive theory of candidate performance in Russia's SMD races. The method I adopt is a focused comparison of six territorial Duma districts in a single administrative region of Russia, where I examine the strategies of every candidate in each of these races and how these translated into electoral outcomes.ii The races analyzed were part of Russia's first post-Soviet parliamentary elections in December 1993.

These elections are

extremely important since they can be seen as critical 'baseline' elections against which Russia's development in the roles of political parties, campaigns and state authorities in elections can be judged. The region in which these six SMD races took place is the Republic of Bashkortostan, which ranks seventh out of 89 Russian regions in terms of population and which has the status of an ethnically designated 'homeland' for the minority Bashkir people (22 percent). The conclusions are very suggestive and have important implications for Russian campaigners themselves as well as observers seeking to understand post-Soviet politics. The overwhelmingly decisive factor was state power, the ability of local machine politicians (induced by the region's top machine politician) to influence important voting patterns in their favor. Campaign tactics were also found to have been extremely important, but not in the ways traditionally assumed. Strong grass-roots and media campaigns worked only when they sent clear signals to what might be called an 'institutionalized electorate,' a set of people possessing a strong group self-consciousness due to Soviet-era policies and institutions that defined important opportunity sets and treated people differently on the basis of these categories. Institutionalized electorates in the Bashkir context were primarily defined by ethnicity and the agrarian sector.iii 3

Even the best campaigns proved quite unable to forge new constituencies in the Russian electoral context in 1993. Surprisingly, money appeared to have only a minor explanatory impact on elections apart from its secondary role in allowing candidates to signal to institutionalized electorates. While all candidates that won had significant financial resources at their disposal, for every such candidate there were several more that invested millions of rubles in their campaigns but who failed to move a significant part of the electorate. The myth of money's omnipotence in Russian elections, therefore, appears to be due more to the 'selection bias' of observers who have only looked at winners who had money, not the losers who had money. The most important explanatory factors, therefore, are 'state power,' campaign quality and 'institutionalized electorates,' and preliminary analysis suggests that these factors have great influence on territorial-district Duma elections in the rest of Russia and that, in fact, the importance of the institutionalized electorates identified in these 1993 elections is only growing.

METHODOLOGY This article seeks to explain the pattern of election outcomes in six SMD races in the Russia's Republic of Bashkortostan in December 1993. By analyzing more than one such race, we stand a greater chance of identifying phenomena that have general importance for Russian or post-Soviet politics. Ideally, we could analyze all 225 SMD races in depth, but the practical difficulties of such a project force a tradeoff between comparative leverage and depth of analysis. The advantage of focusing on a few elections in great detail is that one is better able to identify explanatory factors that may lie deep in the thick of events and involve special local meanings of events and symbols that might escape the researcher with a broader, but 'thinner,' focus. Six proved to be a manageable number of districts, although I was able to study four of them in considerably greater depth than the remaining two. By analyzing only races that occurred within the same region of Russia, Bashkortostan, I was able to control for the impact of regional peculiarities since all candidates faced the same set of regional authorities. This study is, of course, only a beginning. Other investigations should certainly consider election districts 4

in different regions to determine to what extent these conclusions travel and whether other factors may have been missed due to local peculiarities. This research project was originally undertaken as part of the major study organized by Timothy Colton and Jerry Hough of the December 1993 Russian elections which has now been published under the title Growing Pains.iv Unlike that book, the present article focuses entirely on the SMD races, going into considerably more depth on this subject than was possible in the article I wrote for that volume. I spent one month in Bashkortostan gathering information and conducting interviews on the election, arriving in the capital city of Ufa on 17 November 1993 as the unexpected campaign was just getting under way. During the three weeks prior to the election, I read virtually every issue of every major Bashkortostan Russian-language newspaper with a republicwide circulation (Izvestia Bashkortostana, Sovietskaya Bashkiria, Ekonomika i My, Otechestvo) as well as of Ufa's daily Vechernyaya Ufa. I also read whatever issues I could find of smaller weeklies put out by national-cultural groups, interest groups (like trade unions), youth, and private companies. I also followed local television; along with the Steven Segall movies that frequented the screen, I watched every broadcast of the local news program 'Bashkortostan' and the weekly wrap-up 'Nedelya.' Of course, I also observed all of the televised 'round table' debates for candidates. Interviews were an important part of the project. Out of the six Duma races, I was able to interview nearly all candidates or their campaign directors and collect campaign materials in three districts (two in Ufa and the rural Birsky district) and to interview some important candidates in one additional district. In the remaining two districts, remote from the capital, I had to rely mostly on materials in the republic press and television. This article will therefore analyze four races in the greatest depth, examining candidates' own interpretations of the political process as expressed in interviews, although the analysis of the other two races remains substantial based on published and televised material. Specifically, I interviewed 18 of 38 candidates in single-mandate races for Duma seats and various campaign coordinators, political 5

scientists, and other political observers. I asked the candidates a set of standard questions, keeping the tone as conversational as possible, and at the end asked each one to fill out a twopage questionnaire on their political views and perceptions of their electoral district. The questionnaire turned out to be a good way to force concrete answers on political questions, and a decent basis of comparison, but its brevity makes it difficult to draw definite conclusions about any given candidate's views. Most interviews lasted about forty minutes, although some more resembled conversations and lasted nearly two hours, while others caught candidates in a hurry and lasted 15-20 minutes. This article now begins with a brief description of the demographic, legal and political context in which the race took place. It then proceeds to examine the individual SMD races, explaining the outcome in each. Finally, I seek to generalize the findings, teasing out broad patterns in the results and drawing some conclusions about the implications for our understanding of post-Soviet politics.

THE GEOGRAPHIC, POLITICAL AND LEGAL CONTEXT Bashkortostan is not a 'typical' region in many ways, although the conclusions drawn in this article are still likely to have application to the rest of Russia so long as we recognize the republic's peculiarities and adjust our extrapolations accordingly.v Bashkortostan is the seventh largest region of the Russian federation in terms of population, making it very important as a source of votes. From this perspective, it would seem to have been an attractive target for federal parties seeking to get their own candidates elected. Because of its large population, Bashkortostan contains six separate electoral districts (okrugs), more than most of the other Russian regions, making possible a broader comparative analysis than would be possible in other regions. It is one of 32 ethnically designated regions of the Russian Federation, although the 'titular' ethnic group, the Bashkirs, made up just 22 percent of the population in 1993, while the population of closely related Tatars was 28 percent and Russians 39 percent. Bashkirs are traditionally an Islamic people and speak a Turkic tongue, as do their Tatar neighbors. 6

Economically, three main sectors dominate the republic: the oil industry concentrated in Ufa and other medium-sized cities in the northern, central and western part of the republic (such as Neftekamsk, Sterlitamak, and Ishimbay); the military-industrial complex located in the biggest urban areas; and agricultural production. Bashkortostan has a slightly greater rural population than the Russian Federation norm, with 65 percent of the republic living in urban areas compared to Russia's 74 percent. From 1990 to December 1993, Bashkortostan's politics centered around one man and one issue. The man was Murtaza Rakhimov, the chairman of the republic's legislature, then called the Supreme Soviet, a post making him the highest official in Bashkortostan. While he has since come to consolidate almost complete and uncontested control of the republic, as of 1993 Rakhimov was still forced to conclude certain political alliances in order to maintain his control. Thus, in a stroke that helped facilitate the consent of both the industrial elite and the local ethnic Russian community, Rakhimov appointed the ethnically Russian Anatoly Kopsov, formerly the general director of the giant firm Bashkirenergo, as his Prime Minister.vi The one issue around which Bashkortostan politics revolved during this period was the issue of 'sovereignty,' or the degree to which Bashkortostan would be autonomous of the Russian federal government in Moscow. Rakhimov was a staunch advocate of republic sovereignty, refusing throughout much of 1992 and 1993 to pay taxes into the federal budget and winning a special protocol attached to the 1992 Federation Treaty (the basic legal document underlying the Russian Federation that was supposed to be signed by all members of the federation) that sanctioned much of this independent behavior.

In April 1993, Rakhimov won popular support for his policies of

economic sovereignty in a republic-wide referendum. The most important contextual event of 1993 was the race for the republic 'presidency' that took place at the same time as the Duma elections, on 12 December. A detailed examination of this race is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is important to remember here that Rakhimov faced an anti-sovereignty opponent for the supreme post in the republic and that Rakhimov mobilized every resource at his disposal to win. Most visibly, this included a massive media 7

campaign (the republic government controlled nearly all of the major media outlets) designed to promote Rakhimov and his Prime Minister and to blacken the name of his chief opponent, bank president Rafis Kadyrov. Few observers were surprised to learn on 13 December that Rakhimov had won this race, and that both he and his prime minister had won the race for the two seats to the Federation Council that were also contested at that time.vii It is also important to note some of the particular legal requirements that federal authorities had set up to regulate the SMD Duma races, some of which were expected to have a strong impact on the kinds of candidates that were likely to win. The most important rule was that candidates could win in a district with a simple plurality of the vote: whoever had the most votes at the end of election day won. Nomination procedures were fairly straightforward; Duma candidates in single-mandate districts needed to collect the signatures of at least one percent of registered voters in their districts or be nominated by an eligible party or bloc, as stipulated in chapter 4 of the Duma Election Statute. Chapter 1, article 6.2 of the Statute of Duma Elections stated that there was no campaign spending limit, which fact was widely expected to give an advantage to candidates with access to the greatest monetary resources. Candidates were to receive a fixed amount of money from the state to run their campaign, reportedly about 300,000 rubles for single-mandate Duma candidates. Chapter 4, article 25.8 stipulated that candidates had to reimburse the state for any official funding received if they withdrew before the race was over for reasons other than illness or something equally serious. This would seem to have provided a big disincentive for candidates to withdraw tactically in deference to a friendly candidate in order to overcome a strong mutual opponent. Chapter 5, article 25.2 held that state organs could not participate in a campaign, a clause meant to reduce the ability of local powerholders to push their own candidates through. According to chapter 5, article 28.2, all state-supported media were to give equal opportunity to candidates to present their views. Similarly, article 28.3 gave each candidate the right to one appearance on local television under equal conditions, which in Bashkortostan turned out to be in the format of a round-table discussion. The Russian leadership also placed limits on the kind of statements candidates could 8

make. Chapter 5, article 29.4 prohibited candidates from calling for the overthrow of the state or the violation of the integrity of the Russian Federation, a clause which may have affected the claims of some extreme Bashkir nationalists. They also could not ignite national or ethnic conflicts. Further, chapter 5 article 30.2 stipulated that no one could publicly damage the 'honor and dignity' of another candidate within seven days of the elections. Reality, however, often defied the rules, but not always. No one publicly accused anyone of violating nomination procedures. State funding for Duma candidates, however, came so late as to be nearly useless, reportedly arriving with only three days to go before the election. This, obviously, hurt the candidates who were financially strapped to begin with. While state organs generally did not campaign openly in their own names, in many cases officials and the heads of local administrations were reportedly quite involved in the campaign, often not officially. No one had to order them to participate; anyone wanting to get on the good side of a candidate-boss or of a boss whose good friend was running for office had a great opportunity in the election campaign. The Bashkortostan media generally did a good job of treating Duma candidates equally despite a heavy bias in favor of Rakhimov in the concurrent races for the republic presidency and the Federation Council.

THE SINGLE-MANDATE DISTRICT ELECTIONS IN BASHKORTOSTAN I now turn to the individual Duma races themselves, characterizing the the strategies and positions of each candidate and how these interacted with district peculiarities to produce a winner. After each of these six races is examined in detail, I will take a step back in order to identify patterns that become evident and to construct an argument about the particular ways in which campaigns proved to be effective in Bashkortostan's 1993 SMD elections.

Duma District No.4: Russian Nationalism Victorious Of the single-mandate Duma districts, Kalininsky No.4 was the most urban and the most Russian. Given this profile, it is perhaps not surprising that the winning candidate was an ethnic 9

Russian belonging to one of the more radically reformist parties. What is perhaps surprising, however, is that this candidate, a professor, beat out two entrepreneurs with well-financed campaigns, as well as an ethnic Russian oil man. Kalininsky District No.4 contains the eastern half of Ufa (formerly the separate city of Chernikovsk, the nearby city of Blagoveshchensk, and two rural rayons (subregions). Only one rural rayon has a non-Russian majority (Tatar), while Ufa and Blagoveshchensk all have Russian majorities. Overall, the district is 93 percent urban and 53 percent Russian .viii Leading into the race, 37-year-old Aleksandr Arinin was in all likelihood the best-known of the four candidates. While he worked for two years as the head of the section of internationality relations and international ties in the Bashkir ASSR committee of the Communist Party, and was by December 1993 the head of the subdepartment of History of the Fatherand and Culture at the Ufa branch of the State Academy of the Sphere of Life and Services, he was far better known for his activity as the head of the local Russian cultural center Rus'. According to one of his newspaper campaign articles: [H]e boldly stepped into the fiercest whirlpool of social life. Driven by the participants of the 'parade of sovereignties,' Russia was carrying itself with closed eyes, risking breaking apart into tiny pieces. And someone had to say that we cannot permit the striving to overcome overcentralization turn into local egoism, that we cannot permit sins committed by the leadership of the CPSU to be laid on the head of the Russian people. Here in the republic this was said in the most decisive tone by Aleksandr Arinin. And not only said, but did much in order to create a counterweight against separatist forces.ix

Although Sergei Shakhray's federal party PRES (The Party for Russian Unity and Accord) nominated him, he was not its stereotypical member. Shakhray had positioned his party in part to be a refuge for local leaders dissatisfied with Yeltsin's late 1993 centralizing tendencies and demanding more autonomy from Russia, and this is how his party was widely perceived. Arinin, however, decided to get into internationality issues for the opposite reason:

the

conviction that autonomy drives were threatening to go too far, turning Russia into a 'crumbly conglomerate'.x Thus he was the only candidate in this district (and one of only two of 20 surveyed) who reacted negatively on the survey to declarations of sovereignty in Russia. It

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would be unfair, however, to present him as a Soviet revanchist; his statements reflect a preference for real decentralization of power, just not one defined in ethnic terms: I agree with him [Shakhray] that federalism should become a means of administration of the state, its territories, economy, and a means of dividing powers between the center and the regions. The right of nations to self-determination including secession declared 75 years ago is unrealizable in Russia, where 150 peoples live. Can you imagine a state consisting of 150 ethnically pure formations? I don't imagine it.xi

Because Shakhray's was the only party to put a federal philosophy at the heart of its platform, he joined it, Arinin declared.xii Economically, too, Arinin was also not a typical Shakhray supporter, if Shakhray supporters were also seen as proponents of the Yeltsin line of reform. Arinin was more of a centrist, calling for gradual marketization and limits on the sale of land. He wanted to keep privatization moving at the same pace, however. Overall, he says, he opposes extremes, disliking both the Communist Party and Russia's Choice.xiii Personal connections appear also to have been very important in uniting Arinin and the PRES: Shakhray's inner circle included Konstantin Zatulin, a businessman who was a big contributor to the campaign. Zatulin, in turn, had strong business ties with Bashkortostan entrepreneurial magnate Nikolai Shvetsov, head of the republic's Union of Entrepreneurs, who in turn had been a political ally of Arinin on the local scene. The Arinin-Shvetsov ties were perhaps reinforced by Shvetsov's status as a leading ethnic Russian politician, although the latter did not take an ethnically charged position in his own run for a Federation Council seat.xiv Perhaps learning from his failed run for the republic supreme soviet in 1990, Arinin was an extremely energetic and effective campaigner. He had a highly-organized campaign team with a well-defined division of functions. This organizational strength enabled him to average 5 meetings with voters per day, sometimes making as many as 10 appearances in a single day.xv While he did not have the clout of a state position or the organizational resources of a bank chairman, he apparently enjoyed the support of Shvetsov's network of entrepreneurs as well as Otechestvo, the newspaper put out by the Russian cultural center Rus', which he headed.

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Arinin also proved skillful at building political alliances that would create the necessary conditions for him to win his race. In fact, he apparently secured an alliance with Rakhimov himself, despite his frequent and often harsh criticism of his leadership. This came about, some opponents said, after a negotiation session between Arinin and Kopsov, the ethnically Russian Prime Minister of the republic and a Rakhimov ally. This deal seems to have emerged from a series of common strategic interests. Rakhimov, not yet strong enough to be sure that he could produce an election victory for himself relying on his own strength, had to avoid openly politicizing the ethnic issue on a republic-wide scale, lest he lose the 39-percent Russian vote in the region. Arinin, not at that time holding any public office, knew that he would face a much tougher election battle if the full force of the state was deployed against him in his race for the Duma seat. In addition, Arinin and Rakhimov were united in their mutual ties to Shakhrai and his party PRES. Shakhrai had won Rakhimov's support for PRES since the latter was to stand for strong republic rights against the centralizing tendencies of other electoral blocs, and, not insignificantly, since Shakhrai's was recognized as a pro-government party (but not the main progovernment party) that could in the future guarantee continued good financial relations with Moscow. Arinin also had close ties to Shakhrai, but though a completely different channel, the channel of 'new entrepreneurial business.' Part of the deal that was evidently struck, therefore, was that Arinin would not oppose Rakhimov and that Rakhimov would not oppose Arinin in their respective races. While neither openly campaigned for the other, Arinin noted his support for Rakhimov even in a private interview with a foreign observer. In part because of these good relations with Rakhimov, Arinin also had the support of the mayor of Ufa.xvi Despite his apparent promise not to mobilize ethnic opposition to Rakhimov's presidential bid, Arinin's campaign strategy remained to stress the ethnic Russian issue in order to win his own race, getting the message out by expanding the circulation of Otechestvo, mailing it for free to most people in the district, placing a few well-produced ads on local TV, and above all working the grass roots with an intense appearance schedule.

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Arinin faced three formidable opponents, however, perhaps the best-organized of which was entrepreneur Arsen Nuridzhanov, a former doctor who ran on the slogan: 'He achieved success himself—he will also achieve success for you!'xvii The youngest of all republican Duma candidates at 34, Nuridzhanov was the head of the firm Alliance, which was the official dealer and servicer for Panasonic, Canon, Samsung and Olivetti in the republic.xviii Nuridzhanov, an ethnic Armenian, was the most radical reformer in the district, lamenting that what was in the Russian people's long-run interest may not have been in the immediate interests of his potential constituents. Among other things, he said, they do not have the information to understand what is ultimately best for the economy. In many ways his economic views were the same as those of many other candidates, calling for lower taxes on business, helping pensioners and the other poor and so on. People's real interests, he said, were to get rid of the old soviet system, although he criticized former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar and Finance Minister Boris Fedorov for not leaving time for people's mentality to change. What Russia could do now, he argued, was to institute a system of lower, less complicated taxes, pass laws to attract foreign investment, and to introduce the ability to sell land, with regulations like those existing in developed capitalist countries. Overall, he favored rapid economic reform as opposed to gradual, the free sale of land, and accelerated privatization.xix While he said he was for a united Russia, he did not make much of an issue of sovereignty. Along with Arinin's, Nuridzhanov had the strongest campaign team in the district, with his own campaign manager, a political scientist, as well as economists, sociologists, and lawyers. Each member of the team had a certain general responsibility, although duties were flexible. They made active use of opinion poll data, the results of which showed widespread support for entrepreneurs and little concern for nationality issues. While Nuridzhanov did once participate in the Congress of the All-Russian Association 'Entrepreneurs for a New Russia,' the same organization for which Shvetsov was a local leader, it appears that Arinin enjoyed more of the Shvetsov team's support than did Nuridzhanov. His campaign manager said that they were cooperating with various entrepreneurs, however.xx Perhaps as a result, his campaign was very 13

well funded, permitting him to launch an all-out media drive for the Duma seat. His TV ads flooded local television; a series of commercials emphasized different themes. One featured him talking about social security, another focused on crime, and another still showed him playing the guitar and singing.xxi

The underlying theme of these ads was that Russia needed

entrepreneurs, who knew the market, in parliament.xxii He also liked to talk about the success of his firm, downplaying its 'buying-and-selling' functions and playing up the servicing it provides. If entrepreneur Nuridzhanov sold himself primarily as a successful market navigator, the other entrepreneur in the race, Rashit Dayanov, portrayed himself as an entrepreneur with a heart: I am a bad businessman. Well, would a 'good businessman' really invest money into something that promises profits not today, not tomorrow—into ecological programs, into education, into science, into the development of Bashkir football, into charity? But for us this is a most important direction of our activity....But real business, this is calculation, marketing, long-term analysis and prediction. And from this point of view, without doubt, we are on the correct path.xxiii

While Dayanov also argued that Russia needs entrepreneurs in the Duma since they best know the market economy, he first and foremost focused on issues of the environment, spirituality, and education, issues others were not discussing. Otherwise, he said, upon reaching parliament, 'my voice would drown in the general choir calling 'down with taxes!'xxiv His supporters listed many of his firm's good deeds: converting manure into fertilizer which would not be harmful to the environment for profit, and removing harmful materials from the bottom of lakes and turning it into fertilizer. He also organized and continued to finance an Arab boarding school, financed a men's and women's soccer team, and financed a drama theater, among other things. Supporters also emphasized his personality: a hard-working man who never took vacations with his money and who still lived in a Khrushchev-style two-room apartment.xxv While he did not talk about economics much, Dayanov was nominated by the centrist bloc Civic Union; but his economic views appeared somewhat less conservative. While he agreed with them that taxes needed to be reduced on producers, that limits needed to be set on the sale of land, and that market transition needed to be gradual, he pushed for even faster

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privatization than had been occurring under Yeltsin and Privatization Minister Anatoly Chubais. Dayanov was more pro-sovereignty than his district competitors, and likely more so than Civic Union as well. Dayanov had a well-organized campaign team, with his wife, whom he described as a member of the 'intelligentsia,' serving as his chief ideologue. He had no strong network of supporters in localities, however, relying on businesses that he had helped in the past to return the favor.

To get out his message of 'healing,' he relied on long newspaper articles and

interviews, posters, fliers, and a few television ads (which were poorly produced, especially compared to those of Arinin).xxvi Except on television, where he appeared on a round table for bloc representatives, he rarely mentioned his Civic Union affiliation. The final candidate, Russian educator and oil man Viktor Rezyapov, put his experience and personality at the center of his campaign. Rezyapov, director of the professional-technical school at the huge enterprise Bashkirenergo (which Prime Minister Kopsov used to run), had also been a republic people's deputy since 1988. One campaign article discussed how it took him forever to walk to work every day, since he would constantly stop to chat with constituents and solve their problems. He did appear accessible; in one ad he published his home address and phone number.xxvii He stressed the need to invest in education, and his supporters advertised his success as the innovative head of an educational institution. On the economy, he argued for faster privatization and the completely free sale of land, although he called for a gradual transition to the market. He was also a believer in state-imposed economic discipline, calling for the state to mandate that transfers between banks take no longer than three weeks. Sovereignty was not a big issue for him, although he appeared to support the republic's current policy on the whole.xxviii Rezyapov said that his campaign team came primarily from the giant firm Bashkirenergo. They had only a weak division of labor and were late getting started with his poster and flier campaign. As of 27 November, just two weeks before the vote, he had made no use of survey data. He did, however, enjoy the support of the newspaper Predprinimatel', which devoted one 15

issue to him and mailed it out free to people in his district. While he had no strong political organization supporting him, he did claim the support of the local oil complex.xxix In this race, however, Arinin started ahead and finished ahead, although it was close in the end. One poll by the firm Antares, published in Arinin's Otechestvo, showed Arinin ahead with 9.8 percent with two-to-three weeks to go in the race, suggesting that he also had the greatest name recognition going into the race. Dayanov came second with 4.1 percent, then Nuridzhanov with 3.1 percent and Rezyapov with 2.2 percent.xxx This poll probably reflects real preferences, judging from the comments of one opponent's frustrated campaign worker that Arinin kept appearing on top of their own surveys. The other candidates also clearly regarded him as the man to beat. As an outspoken critic of many prominent officials, Arinin had many enemies and accordingly drew some attacks. A former rayon soviet deputy accused him of shifting with the political wind, now conveniently forgetting to mention his work in the ideological department of the Communist Party.xxxi

In an article that came dangerously close to violating the rule

prohibiting damage to a candidates honor or dignity within a week of the vote, a central newspaper printed a letter by a former colleague from Bashkir State University's History Department accusing him of joining the Communist Party regional committee only to jump the professors' apartment queue.xxxii By reaching a 'cease-fire' agreement with Rakhimov and Kopsov, Arinin almost certainly avoided more such attacks in the official media. Two of Arinin's opponents, apparently recognizing his advantage, also discussed combining forces to win the race. Dayanov and Rezyapov both described each other as good friends unfortunately stuck in the same district, but the two apparently could not agree on whose prospects were best, and dropped the rather delicate issue. In the end, Arinin ended up winning with 28.9 percent of the vote. Rezyapov, who got off to a slow start, moved into second, perhaps thanks to the mass mailing of his special newspaper issue. Collectively, the entrepreneurs did do pretty well, securing nearly a majority of the vote combined. But separately, they fell.

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What factors help us explain the outcome? Ethnicity seems to have been the decisive factor in this race, despite Nuridzhanov's poll suggesting that this would not be the case. Arinin was primarily known for his stands on ethnic issues, stands against what he saw as undue privileges for ethnic Bashkirs and against the republic's sovereignty drive, and his campaign reflected these themes. Of course, the majority need not have been voting on ethnic grounds; the plurality decision-rule meant that Arinin only needed a small hard core of supporters so long as other candidates split the more moderate vote. Arinin's party affiliation with PRES may have helped him, but PRES had little organizational support in Ufa and Arinin himself was much better known than the party. Dayanov's affiliation with Civic Union may have actually hurt him, given the wide disparity in the vote percentages garnered by him and by his bloc, which gathered between 1-3 percent in the republic. Name recognition also appears to have played a major role, and the identification of this name with a particular policy view that commanded strong support amongst a certain share of the electorate. Economic interests seemed to have had little to do with the outcome; Arinin was a professor and did not campaign strongly in favor of one economic sector or other. His moderate stance on reform did not stand out enough to attract interest-based voting from Ufa's main economic sectors. Campaign financing did not appear to matter much; while Arinin was evidently well funded, so were his opponents, all of whom had the support of large corporations. Nuridzhanov, in particular, used a great deal of his resources to launch a media campaign to win over voters, but this did not generate a massive movement of voters. Interestingly, what appeared to be more effective was energetic grass-roots work, as Arinin was constantly on the move, meeting with carefully targeted audiences during almost every waking minute of the day, it seemed. While the other candidates were active, Arinin's special energy appears to have paid off.

Overall, therefore, ethnic interests, grass-roots campaigning and

features of individual politicians seem to have been the most important factors in explaining result patterns in this urban Ufa district.

District No.5: Agrarian Wins the City 17

Election district No.5 contains the other half of the republic's capital, but with an important demographic twist: attached to it are five rayons with large rural populations. While only 18 percent of the district was rural, this proved to be a vital base of support for a lone Agrarian Party candidate who took on six urbanites in this Duma race. Interestingly, the 'agrarnik' beat out most of the city candidates even on their own turf, pulling off a decisive victory. Further, despite the fact that the district is predominantly Russian, a Tatar won the seat. Sixty-two-year-old Rais Asaev is the picture-perfect agrarnik: a life-long farm worker who made his way up to being chairman of the Collective farm Luch, a perennial leader in the republic. Made hero of socialist labor in 1990, he founded and became leader of the Agrarian Party's Bashkortostan organization, which he remains to this day. His economic views were also typically agrarian, and perhaps this is because he was one of the architects of the Agrarian Party platform, important enough in the all-Russian organization to be named fourth on the party's list of Duma candidates. He favored what he called 'rational' agricultural policy. Land should be given free of charge to those who work it, but they should not be able to sell it—only to pass it on as inheritance. He also advocated large-scale investment designed to revive the village, making it a more pleasant and prosperous place to live. In addition, he called on Russia to stop importing food products that Russia itself can produce; instead it should use the hard currency to import technology for agro-industry. As for the rest of the economy, he wanted to stop the privatization process and conduct an analysis before moving on. He was also for a gradual, as opposed to rapid, transition to a market, which he specified must be a social market. He did not make sovereignty a big issue, but he supported the republic's drive to obtain more autonomy.xxxiii As the only rural candidate in a predominantly urban district, collective farm chairman Rais Asaev had to think not only about winning over fellow villagers, but about how to win enough of the city vote to win the race. He had no highly-organized campaign team, but had a series of people who helped him and spoke for him in different parts of the district. He also had the active support of the local Agrarian Union and Agrarian Party, which had an apparat of six 18

full-time activists at the time. He said he had no sponsors and had no need for them, since he planned no television or newspaper advertising. He took full advantage of the time that the state allotted all candidates, however, appearing on local television two times more than most other candidates since he was the representative of the Agrarian Party in debates between electoral blocs. Overall, along with selling his platform, Asaev made a special point of stressing that agriculture was important to the city as well as the country, a pitch that seemed to work in Ufa. The Agrarian Party puts forward demands for the improvement of the lives of villagers, and on the whole fights for the improvement of the life of all, including city residents....they need bread, butter, cheese, flour, and not to worry.xxxiv

Asaev's most formidable opponent turned out to be a man who in many ways seemed least likely to meet with electoral success, Pavel Dmitriev, a 39-year-old Russian lawyer and owner of the investment firm 'Dmitriev and Sons.' In the televised round table and in person, Dmitriev was very restrained in his remarks and appeared rather bland in comparison to many of the strong personalities he was up against.

An economic moderate, he opposed 'thieving

reforms,' supporting gradual economic reform and the continuation of privatization at the current pace. He also called for setting up charity foundations in localities, creating tax breaks for charity donations. Land sale should be permitted with limits. He staked out a moderate position on sovereignty, as well, supporting the idea of a bilateral Russo-Bashkortostan Treaty in order to get central financial support.xxxv While Dmitriev would not describe his campaign structure while the race was still on, he ran a very effective campaign. For one thing, he managed to avoid an image of blandness and to create one instead of calmness, prudence, virtue, and competence. Rather than the long and sometimes rambling articles and advertisements that some of his opponents relied on, Dmitriev's frequent ads were generally very short pitches, basically just mentioning his name and a few slogans. Many were designed to portray him as a good average family man, like the huge picture of him holding his little daughter along with the folksy 'blitz-interview' that appeared at the top of page one of Ufa's main daily.xxxvi His more substantive articles mainly stressed the need to

19

have trained lawyers in the Duma and his concern for the needy.xxxvii The fact that he was the vice president of the Foundation for Journalist Solidarity, which officially endorsed him, certainly did not hurt his campaign. He had ads in many small weeklies and, according to a former opponent, sent out a mailing targeted to ethnic Russians in the district. He did not make many campaign trips personally; his helpers spoke for him at first and towards the end of the campaign he began showing up personally.xxxviii Political science professor Sergei Lavrentiev was probably the most creative campaigner in the republic, seeming genuinely to enjoy the campaign as a chance to study the workings of the political process. Once a university Communist party secretary, Lavrentiev joined Rutskoy's Party of Free Russia before its leader was shelled out of the Russian Parliament building in October 1991, events for which Lavrentiev blamed both sides. With the elections, several blocs offered to nominate him for the Duma, including Civic Union, Shakhray's PRES, and the former youth wing of Rutskoy's party, the bloc 'Future Russia—New Names' (FR-NN). Since he did not want to share a ticket with candidates running on the other blocs' lists, he chose FR-NN. It was less awkward, he said, to sell a bloc rather than oneself. He described the bloc as 'centrist' and characterized its philosophy as being to bring young, uncorrupted people into the Duma, with the average age of its candidates being 34.xxxix Lavrentiev himself supported a rapid transition to the market as opposed to a gradual one, continuing privatization at the same pace, and establishing the right to the unrestricted sale of land. He did not make sovereignty a big issue, calling for the reintroduction of direct federal taxationxl, but calling for decentralization without the right to secession.xli Lavrentiev's campaign team was loosely organized, but his electoral strategy was very well thought-out. He had no personal organizational backing other than that of his bloc, but he secured several important endorsements, including Arinin's Russian cultural center Rus', the Union of Entrepreneurs, and the Federation of Democratic Youth. While as a professor he had few personal resources, he was a very active fund-raiser, despite saying that he felt awkward 'begging' for financial help. Negotiations with several firms, such as the Concern Germes, 20

helped finance a big effort which he early on estimated would cost some 35 million rubles. His idea was to avoid long boring ads and focus on short newspaper articles, especially in rayon newspapers, as well as on local radio ads. On the final day of campaigning, therefore, he bought local radio time targeted to catch people on their drive home from work. In one creative move, he presented a 'Future Russia—New Names Prize' to the most promising young hockey player on Ufa's hockey team, which had recently made it among the leaders in Russia's top division and thus had generated some extra fan support. Lavrentiev also peddled his services as a political scientist to rayon newspapers looking for someone to answer voters' election questions.xlii Overall, he proved adept at getting publicity from a state-run media that was extremely passive in its coverage of the Duma races. The message he got out was essentially two-fold: that Future Russia—New Names could help get Russia out of the political and economic crises and that Russia needed professionals in parliament, such as political scientists. A fourth candidate, Fanis Rayanov, the head of the law faculty at Bashkortostan State University, campaigned almost exclusively on the need for qualified lawyers in the Duma. I don't promise my voters mountains of gold, as other pretenders to the parliament often do: to bring gas to the countryside, to lay down roads, to build bridges etc. My task as a deputy of the State Duma, if, of course, I am elected—this is to prepare good laws and to pursue their direct fulfillment. And I know how to do this; I have been engaged in this for a quarter of a century. The State Duma, as is known, is elected for two years. I have nothing against an engineer, the president of a collective farm, a writer, the director of a factory, a businessman, who will sit in the Duma and defend the interest of their voters and the representatives of their branches. But while they are learning to understand such difficult ideas as the division of powers, the federal structure of the state, two years will pass and they will not have had time to do anything. Just during the years of Soviet power over 300,000 legislative acts were passed. Just try to get an understanding of these in such a short time. And indeed all accepted new laws must be linked with the ones accepted earlier.xliii

He said his economic views were closest to those of economist Grigory Yavlinsky and Shakhray's Party, calling for faster privatization, gradual marketization, and the limited ability to sell land. He also favored decentralization of power in Russia, but preferred a 'federation' to 'confederation.'xliv The 55-year-old Rayanov had a loose campaign organization, made up mostly of students and university colleagues. While he assigned no sharp division of functions to his team, he had

21

representatives in different parts of the district. He secured the support of several important organizations, including the republic Union of Entrepreneurs and and bloc 'People and Progress.' Rather surprisingly, this ethnic Bashkir won endorsements from both the Tatar Cultural Center and the Russian cultural Center 'Rus,' although he had to share the latter in his district with Lavrentiev. Nevertheless, he enjoyed little financial backing, saying it was awkward for him to ask for money. He thus depended mostly on an unpaid staff, state-provided funds and office support from the law department (for example, xeroxing campaign fliers).

The Union of

Entrepreneurs promised him the use of a car, however.xlv He thus launched no significant television campaign, instead relying on fliers, newspaper articles and personal appearances. The only candidate with a post in the state administration was 34-year-old Radik Dayanov, the head of the agro-industrial division of the administration of one Ufa rayon. An economic centrist, he called for gradual marketization, the continuation of privatization at the same pace, and the right to sell land with certain restrictions. He fully supported republics' sovereignty drives, and called for Bashkortostan to base its relations on a treaty with Russia which did not allow for secession. He did not stress such issues in his campaign, however, instead focusing on promises to solve concrete problems like housing construction, installation of telephones, the connection of villages to gas lines, road construction and so on.xlvi He said he had worked in the branches of the administration dealing with housing and telephonization, and knew where to direct the money.xlvii He said he had a loosely organized campaign team made up of friends, some of whom were also financial sponsors. He got little of the big support that those higher up in state structures enjoyed, however. He relied mostly on personal appearances, fliers, and television ads that aired in the final days of the campaign.xlviii A sixth candidate based his campaign on the idea that the railroads needed a representative in the Duma, Nail Bakhtizin, deputy head engineer of the Bashkortostan division of the Kuybyshev Railroad. A former leader of the Communist Youth League (Komsomol) in the Bashkir ASSR who became a businessman before joining the railroad, he argued that he knew both how to organize people and how to manage a market. Stressing that the railroad still 22

worked well in Bashkortostan, he called for more discipline and order in society, as well as for a gradual transition to the market. He also said, however, that entrepreneurship needed to be encouraged and called for faster privatization. He was not enamored of the republic's sovereignty drive, however. His campaign also stressed his personal character; he did not like to allow himself weakness, quitting smoking and drinking several years ago, and pouring cold water on himself every morning for invigoration. A meeting with him in his office did suggest that he was an enthusiastic and effective organizer of people, and this was reflected in his highly-structured campaign team. Most of this team came from fellow railroaders, but he enjoyed the support of his former colleagues in business and likely the Komsomol.xlix These friends bought him 15 whole minutes on television in the final days of the campaign, and enabled him to mount a formidable flier campaign.l The final candidate, 39-year-old Viktor Vyazovoy, was the only candidate to align himself vocally with Rakhimov's chief opponent in the presidential race, Rafis Kadyrov. In the televised round table for district candidates, he spent his entire opening speech praising Kadyrov and attacking the powerful forces trying to keep him down.li Accordingly, his platform in other fora stressed the corruption of top local officialdom, and blamed the Communist Party apparat for causing him barely to lose a race for the Russian parliament in 1990. The head of the advertising agency Biznes, he called for tax reduction on producers and the needy, higher taxes on 'superprofits,' support of the military industry, and an increase in mining mineral resources.lii He campaigned against sovereignty, warning against 'the full collapse of Russia into separate principalities.'liii Since he was the only candidate in the district to refuse to talk with a foreign observer before the vote (having second thoughts after actually arriving at the observer's makeshift office), it is difficult to characterize his campaign. In any case, he did not mount a very visible television campaign and appeared to rely mostly on official allotments of TV time and newspaper space, as well as on the usual fliers and personal appearances. Overall, Asaev's status as the only rural candidate undoubtedly was a big factor in his victory with 23 percent of the vote. He had a natural base of support that made up 18 percent of 23

the district's population, and extremely high rural and low urban turnout magnified this advantage. The urban vote was split relatively evenly between all seven candidates, with even Asaev performing very well there. Pavel Dmitriev managed to come out the leader in the city rayons, but received little village support, ending up in second place overall with 15 percent of the vote. During the campaign, some of Asaev's opponents clearly recognized this problem. Rayanov, for example, said that he and Lavrentiev really needed to combine forces so as to avoid splitting their intelligentsia constituency, but doubted it was possible to establish clearly which of them had the better chance to win and thus who should drop out. Rayanov also paid a visit to Collective Farm Luch, trying to convince Asaev to support him in the rural areas, since Asaev himself was likely to make it into parliament anyway as number four on the Agrarian Party list. These results, curiously, seem to indicate the importance of a somewhat different set of factors from those described in District No.4.

In the present contest, sectoral interest (or

arguably geographical interest) seems to have been the story, as Asaev nearly monopolized the rural vote. None of the other candidates clearly represented a powerful social interest, except perhaps the intelligentsia whose vote Rayanov and Lavrentiev probably split and which was not likely to have been large in any case. Ethnic interests seem to have been of little importance in this predominantly Russian district, as none of the candidates campaigned on explicitly ethnic issues, although Dmitriev may have used some Russian symbolism in mailings. The Russian cultural center Rus' supported both Lavrentiev and Rayanov, but it did not appear to help them much, and in any case they may have split this vote. Asaev's status as head of the republic's Agrarian Party probably helped him, since it signaled to villagers that he was one of them and since the party provided organizational support. Just his position as chairman of a well-known prosperous farm is also likely to have been important. The other bloc representative, Lavrentiev, did poorly, but this corresponded to the abysmal performance of Future Russia—New Names in the party list race. State actors seemed to be of little importance, and Dayanov was apparently too low in the state administration to win a big push. Political campaign organization and strategy seems to have mattered little;

there was little difference in the performances of 24

Dmitriev, Bakhtizin and Dayanov, all of whom bought significant time on TV, and the rest who did not. Indeed, the winner, Asaev, did not purchase ads at all, although he did get extra TV exposure on roundtable debates between representatives of parties and blocs. The candidates who spent considerable effort and money on their campaigns, like Lavrentiev, actually fared worse on the whole than those who did not, like Asaev and Rayanov.

District No.3: State Power in the Village Given the pattern in the district just analyzed, the result in District No.3 should be no surprise:

a strongly state-backed agrarnik won decisively in the most rural district of the

republic. Nevertheless, it is rather surprising that a candidate from distant Ufa was able to beat a fellow agrarnik on his own turf as well as an entrepreneur with a strong regional support base and a former USSR people's deputy who now heads one of the largest enterprises in the republic. Covering the northern reaches of Bashkortostan, Birsky election district No.3 contained 17 rural rayons and included four cities of between 20-35,000 people. The only big urban center was Neftekamsk, a city of 122,000. Despite the fact that 62 percent of the population lives in rural areas, however, only one candidate came from the countryside. The district also features a fairly well-balanced mix of ethnic groups; only about 20 percent of the people are Russians, while approximately 25 percent are Bashkirs and around 30 percent are Tatars. Nevertheless, none of the six candidates were Tatars, while five nominees were Bashkir. Of the others, one was Russian and one German. Tossing his proverbial hat into the ring from distant Ufa was 43-year-old Ramil Mirsaev, an ethnic Bashkir who was for nearly ten years the deputy minister of agriculture and produce of Bashkortostan in charge of construction. Publicly endorsing the program of the Agrarian Party, he called for gradual economic reform, continuation of privatization at the same pace, and the preservation of collective farms, opposing the free sale of land. He was also a strong supporter of Rakhimov's sovereignty policy. In his appearances, however, he did not stress these issues as much as the record of his ministry's achievements while he was in office, wielding a large 25

arsenal of statistics. In one interview, after noting he had been in the ministry 10 years, he stated: Now our main concern is the construction of social facilities of the village, construction of gas pipelines, roads, housing, schools, kindergartens....In 1984, when I came to the ministry, 40 kilometers of gas pipeline were constructed in the republic. But last year, 1200 kilometers, at the same time 9700 kilometers were constructed in the whole of Russia.liv

His campaign was well-organized, coordinated largely by his brother, also a ministry official. He had the evident support not only of the republic leadership, but of the Agrarian Union and Agrarian Party, which did not nominate him, but endorsed him. In many ways he was ideally prepared for a run in a rural region, since he undoubtedly had contacts and considerable influence with the local administrations and farm chairmen whom he had helped to install gas lines and to lay roads. Mirsaev was not the only agrarnik running in the district; he had to face 50-year-old Boris Tsypyshev, the ethnic Russian chairman of the Collective Farm 'Lenin's Path.' Tsypyshev, like Mirsaev, was not nominated by the Agrarian Party but he actively supported its platform and in turn was also endorsed by it along with Mirsaev. Economically, his views were quite similar to those of Mirsaev, although he was a bit more willing to tolerate the sale of land but less enthusiastic about privatization of state property.lv

Basically, though, he preached rural

revival.lvi Unlike Mirsaev, he appeared to have no strong network of supporters besides the Agrarian Party, although he had personal friends promoting him in different parts of the district. In many ways, Yuri Sharipov would seem to have been a likely winner. Nominated by the bloc Civic Union, he indeed presented an impressive resume. Ethnically Bashkir, he was Vice President of Arkady Volsky's Union of Entrepreneurs and Industrialists and was the president of the Bashkortostan organization. He was an academician and an honored economist of the Bashkir Autonomous Republic. He also occupied general director's seat of the privatized telecommunications enterprise 'Concern BETO,' one of the republic's biggest military-conversion success stories and also one of its biggest enterprises. In 1988 he founded the agro-industrial

26

complex Salavatsky, which he emphasized to rural residents. He also initiated the creation of an educational-production complex and the factory 'Charity' which allowed mothers, invalids and pensioners to work at home.lvii He espoused a platform that one might brand the 'Standard Economic Package' since the combination was so commonly propagated in the republic: lower taxes, gradual marketization, support for the needy, and 'land to those who work it' with only limited rights to sell it.

He was for what he called an 'integrated federative state with

independent republics, regions and territories.' In short, his views seemed to jive with those of his constituency, even if he himself was not an agrarnik. Further, he had a highly organized campaign team, mostly consisting of old colleagues, and enjoyed the financial backing of his own firm and those associated with Volsky and Civic Union, reportedly flying from meeting to meeting in a helicopter. Arkady Volsky even visited Ufa and appeared together with Sharipov in the round table debate between party and bloc representatives. Despite such advantages, however, Sharipov suffered from image problems connected with his past.

While politicians like Boris Yeltsin have managed to win popular support

regardless of unfulfilled promises, Sharipov was not so fortunate. He was nearly universally known in Ufa as the man who in 1989 had promised to install a telephone in every house in the capital if elected to the USSR Supreme Soviet, and who failed to follow through, a fact not escaped by the countryside. Indeed, Ufa was and remains greatly underserviced in the sphere of telephone technology, a major sore spot among residents. While he portrayed himself as the organizer of the company that had 'telephonized' much of the republic, few observers took him seriously as a candidate primarily because of this one broken promise. Partly, perhaps, he also suffered from the ignominy of being associated with the USSR government and local Party politics, but this does not seem to have hurt other candidates like Arinin. His woes also, however, reflected the low appeal of Volsky's Civic Union bloc that nominated him. If Sharipov represented the military-industrial complex, Vladimir Gofman, an ethnic German, represented the oil industry. Head of the Geological-Exploratory Bureau of the oil enterprise Bashneft, the 46-year-old Gofman mainly stressed his experience. 27

Except the obligation to work honestly if, of course, I am elected, I promise my voters nothing: not the construction of bridges, not a kindergarten, not the supply of high-grade seeds....My basic task I see in the creation of the type of system of passing laws which should work for people.lviii

On economics, he called primarily for tax cuts for priority sectors, notably oil and agriculture, without which the economy would collapse.lix On sovereignty, he complained that 'each side pulls the blanket to himself,' calling for economic independence and political unity.lx Gofman was also one of few Duma candidates to publicly support Kadyrov in the republic's presidential race.lxi This district's Duma competition also featured a successful entrepreneur, 38-year-old Robert Akhiyarov, director of the firm Atlant, which produced fiberglass trailers on German chassis. While favoring a gradual market transition, he wanted to accelerate the privatization process and stimulate entrepreneurial activity. He also had the guts to take on the Agrarian line, calling for an active effort to promote private farms, while not actually breaking up collective ones. An ethnic Bashkir, he tended to support republic sovereignty. Like most entrepreneurs, he had a well-organized campaign team including a former editor of a central daily. He used opinion polls for the cities, where he believed he was doing fairly well. To get out his message, actively used television, radio and a Neftekamsk newspaper (Kontakt) which gave him a big endorsement in one issue. Overall, he stressed his experience in the market making decisions, as opposed to taking orders (a thinly veiled reference to his main opponent, Mirsaev).lxii He appealed to villagers by stressing what he had done for his home village: building roads, housing, and a mosque, among other things.lxiii The final two candidates were both representatives of the intelligentsia. Marat Malikov, the 55-year-old head of the sub-department of Constitutional Law at Bashkortostan State University, presented fairly conservative economic views: gradual economic reform, slower privatization, and no sale of land. To help the less fortunate, he suggested a system whereby goods would be sold to the needy at lower prices, and where by the prices of industrial goods would be regulated to assist the village. Nevertheless, he said he favored the radical reformist

28

and pro-Yeltsin bloc Russia's Choice.

Like his colleague Rayanov, he stressed the need for

lawyers in parliament: The salvation of Russia and the Republic of Bashkortostan from collapse is the business of specialistslawyers who can create a social-legal economy, directed at the needs of the population.lxiv

He fully supported Rakhimov's sovereignty drive. He did most of his campaign planning himself, relying on a few helpers in different areas. He lamented that he had no sponsors, and no car—he traveled to nearly all of his district's rayons and cities from his home in Ufa on public transportation. He was particularly frustrated by the fact that the government support that had been promised to candidates by law came only with a few days left in the race. He did not want to join a party or bloc because he did not see their squabbling amongst themselves to be constructive, and it would have forced him to compromise his views.lxv The other intelligentsia candidate was 41-year-old Alim Akhmadeyev, a political scientist-sociologist at the Birsk Pedagogical Institute. An ethnic Bashkir, he favored a strict anti-inflationary fiscal and credit policy, as well as the strict regulation of monopolies. Arguing that the state should use economic levers to regulate the economy, he called for reduced taxes on business and a few years of special credits to collective farms while they privatize. He favored economic, not political sovereignty, under the slogan 'In Russia and With Russia.'lxvi He did 90 percent of the campaign work himself, according to his campaign advisor, and relied on student volunteers. While he got some financial and organizational help from his firm 'Selling,' for the most part he relied on the state resources officially provided him. Tactically, he decided to focus on the cities, counting on a 70 percent turnout. He also targeted three rural rayons, where he appeared on local television.lxvii He was one of the only Duma candidates to criticize opponents publicly, reminding people of Sharipov's telephonization promise and accusing 'heads of branches' of using their influence on heads of administration to get into parliament.lxviii Despite the efforts of all his opponents, Mirsaev was the favorite going into the election, and he ended up winning with 37.5 percent of the vote. One opponent's team even privately

29

conceded before the actual election that he would probably win. Mirsaev was able to defeat Tsypyshev in the countryside probably because the latter had a much weaker campaign team and could not match Mirsaev's connections, who were able to deliver the vote. Mirsaev was also in a much better position to promise tangible benefits to his district, such as gas lines and roads, due to his government post. District No.3, therefore, indicates that state actors holding important offices in a region can be expected to do well. Mirsaev's Agrarian endorsement may have helped him in the villages, but it would have helped him no more than it helped Tsypyshev and was probably nowhere near as important as the relationship with local leaders Mirsaev developed over his ten years of heading up ministry agricultural construction work. His campaign tactics may also have played a role, since his command of friendly statistics made his campaign appearances stand out from the usual barrage of slogans and promises.

On the whole, though, Sharipov's and

Akhiyarov's well-run and well-financed campaigns seemed to have helped them very little. Social interests also seemed to have been important, as rural regions voted overwhelmingly for candidates running on agrarian platforms. Unlike the first district we analyzed, ethnicity was not a major factor in this race—Bashkirs were disproportionately represented in the candidate field despite their minority position, and Mirsaev (an ethnic Bashkir) received a far greater percentage of the vote than the share of Bashkirs in the district's population.

District No.6: Power and Oil Sterlitamak district No.6 contained Bashkortostan's biggest and most polluted oilchemical industrial cities: Sterlitamak, Salavat, and Ishimbay. While it also contained six rural rayons, they only made up a quarter of the population. While a small rural component was the key to victory for agrarnik Asaev in one Ufa district, no candidate from the village appeared here. This was not due to a shortage of candidacies; ten men successfully got their names on the ballot, although one withdrew before the race got under way. Such a plethora of candidates put a premium on core constituencies, since theoretically 12 percent of the vote could win the election. 30

This led to a big struggle to stand out of the pack, even leading to negotiations amongst candidates for strategic withdrawals.

In the end, however, the only mayor to run for a

Bashkortostan Duma seat won the race, enjoying the strong support of the Rakhimov-Kopsov team and his old colleagues in the oil industry. State actors seemed to be the most important factor, therefore, although the results would also seem to support the significance of social interests. If a representative of the oil industry was to win anywhere in Bashkortostan, it would be here. From this perspective then, it is no surprise that Ishimbay mayor Yuri Utkin won the race, being among other things an honored oil worker of the republic. Utkin, who said he would vote for Shakhray's party PRES but was not nominated by this organization, campaigned on the Standard Economic Package of lower taxes, preservation of collective farms, and gradual reform with support for ailing industry. He also strongly favored Bashkortostan's sovereignty drive.lxix He also campaigned on what one might call the 'Ishimbay Miracle.' According to one supporter: It seems like a paradox: all around us there is economic collapse, a deficit of resources, a stand-off of individuals and collectives, but in Ishimbay for three years the volume of production has not fallen, capital construction is actively being conducted, the lowest prices on many goods for now are holding, most of all on food products...I will say more: students in the schools of the city eat for free, and pensioners and students use city transport services for free.lxx

He also even argued that local administration heads needed to be represented in parliament, since they represented the region as a whole, not just particular interests.lxxi His opponents were concentrated in two areas: two were from outside the district in Ufa, while the other six were all from the city of Sterlitamak. The Ufa candidates were a chemistry professor at Bashkortostan State University who campaigned explicitly on Reaganomics, Najib Valitov, and a deputy director of a division of the republic procuracy who stressed law and order and the Standard Economic Package, Timirkhan Sabirov. Valitov was nominated by Shakhray's party PRES, a fact that emphasizes the strange coalition brought together by this organization. The Sterlitamak candidates were quite varied. Yuri Beloglazov was a Russian people's deputy, now the head of the city administration of trolleybuses, outspoken against Rakhimov's

31

sovereignty drive. Anatoly Starkov, president of the trade union committee of the oil-chemical plant Kaustik, was nominated by the republic trade unions and campaigned mainly on workers' issues. Professor Grigory Rutman was another prominent oil man, general director of the enterprise Neftekhimichesky Zavod, also campaigning on the Standard Economic Package. His Sterlitamak opponents seemed to treat him as a favorite to do best amongst the six. Sergei Kalentiev, the head of the firm 'Marketing,' was nominated by the bloc of Grigory Yavlinsky (later to be called Yabloko) and campaigned mainly on the virtues of Yavlinsky and his own experience with his firm. The remaining two candidates were Vladimir Davydov, a railroad administrator, and Rustem Kuzbekov, the head doctor at the enterprise Sterlitamakstroy. In the end, Utkin won an astounding 48.5 percent of the vote, and state actors were decisive in this result.

Most obviously, Utkin's status as the mayor of a city of 72,000

undoubtedly gave him an advantage, both for name recognition and his influence on people who could help him mobilize support. One opponent said that a protest had even been filed to the election commission complaining that the local administration (under Utkin) was participating in the campaign, which was illegal. In reality, this opponent said, old attitudes towards authority meant that no one actually needed to be ordered to support Utkin; anyone wanting to get ahead could simply volunteer. Utkin's office was all the more effective since people seemed really to believe that life there was better than elsewhere in the rather depressed region. Perhaps equally importantly, Utkin also enjoyed the support of Rakhimov and Kopsov, and they appeared together when the latter were in the district. Utkin was thus able to ride in partly on Rakhimov's coattails. Of the other candidates, only Sabirov had a potentially important (but lower level) state post in the procuracy, but he did not enjoy the clear support of the Rakhimov-Kopsov team in his endeavor. Other parts of political society seemed to matter less than state power. Valitov, endorsed by a party that did well in Bashkortostan, PRES, did not come close to the independent Utkin. Nor did Yavlinsky's man Kalentiev, although Yavlinsky's bloc also did not do well in the republic. Campaign strategy may have made a difference, since Utkin clearly had a well32

financed political organization.

He was the only Sterlitamak candidate to run a major ad

campaign on republic central television, featuring his pet black cat dancing a jig. Social interests may also have been important, since one would have expected oil-chemical representatives to get a big share of the vote in this oil-heavy district, as did in fact happen with Utkin. Ethnic interests do not seem to have mattered. Utkin himself was a member of the council of elders of the oldest clan of Bashkirs, the Yurmaty, and won in a predominantly Russian district. Utkin's opponents also expected geographic interests to be important. Noting the coincidence that all of Utkin's opponents were from either outside of the district or concentrated in Sterlitamak, the Sterlitamak candidates organized a meeting a few days before the election to discuss whether or how they could unite forces against Utkin's Ishimbay power base as well as his support from the Bashkortostan center. Nothing came of the meeting, and they all lost. On the whole, in Sterlitamak district No.6, state actors appeared to be the most important factors, along with the social interests emanating from the oil industry.

District No.2: Agrarians Rout Bashkir Cultural Activists Most of the republic's ethnic Bashkirs are concentrated in the mountainous south, making it little surprise that the only two Bashkir writers running for parliament chose to run in Baymaksky District No.2. They were two of just five candidates competing. What may be surprising, however, is that both of these candidates lost decisively to one of two agrarian candidates. The Baymak election district contained six cities of under 100,000 people and 12 rural rayons, with 55 percent of the population living in urban areas. This was also the most Bashkir of election districts; 43 percent of the population was Bashkir, as opposed to 38 percent Russian. The most notable feature of this race was the presence of two writers, both of whom were well-known for their struggle for Bashkir cultural autonomy and affirmative action. Gazim Shafikov, an Ufa resident, was nominated by Shakhray's PRES and made sovereignty and Bashkir culture the main planks of his campaign platform. He also stressed the benefits of 33

sovereignty for other nationalities.lxxii The other writer, Azat Abdullin, had lived long in Moscow and spent time in his appearances explaining how he was able to help Bashkirs from his location in the Russian capital (for example, by persuading the Press Ministry to allot more money for Bashkir publications).lxxiii The two agrarians included the eventual winner, state farm chairman Akhmetgaley Galiev and Nikolay Pavlov, president of the rayon committee of trade unions of the agroindustrial complex of the Kuyurgazinsky Rayon. Both won endorsements from the Agrarian Party and both campaigned on agrarian issues.

Galiev's supporters stressed that his farm,

Matraevsky, was the only profitable farm in Khaybullinsky Rayon, and called for non-profitable farms to be privatized rather than subsidized. This proposal differentiated him from many agrarniks but he did not, however, support making land an object of sale.lxxiv The final candidate was Rim Niyazgulov, president of the production-commercial association Bashkortostan attached to the Council of Ministers of Bashkortostan in Ufa. While not a formal party nominee, he said he supported Shakhray's PRES.lxxv In this race, social interest appeared to win out in a head-to-head contest with ethnic interests. Shafikov fared remarkably badly, as did Abdullin. Rural voters came out for the agrarniks, despite Abdullin's protest that to defend agrarian interests 'you don't have to be an agrarnik.'lxxvi In effect, Abdullin's words were turned around against him as voters also decided that you don't have to be a cultural activist to represent Bashkir culture. Thus, when faced with a choice between two agrarians, voters chose the Bashkir one over the Russian one, giving Galiev 28.4 percent of the vote. While I found no evidence from my distant Ufa vantage point that Galiev stressed ethnic themes, a geographic breakdown of the votes does strongly suggest that the most heavily Bashkir areas voted for Galiev while the most heavily Russian areas voted for Pavlov. Several other factors were important in this race. The fact that the Agrarian Party had endorsed Galiev helped rural voters decide that his views were closest to their own. Shafikov's PRES affiliation, however, did not seem to help him, as one would expect given the wide variety 34

of candidates with conflicting views that PRES nominated in the republic. State actors were not much of a factor here. While Niyazgulov headed a concern attached to the Council of Ministers, he was critical of the government in his campaign, neutralizing any big push he might otherwise have received from it.lxxvii Overall, no candidate received strong state backing. Factors specific to individual politicians may also have been important; aside from being remote, both Shafikov and Abdullin were reportedly ill during parts of the race, hindering their ability to run effective campaigns, something for which even their significant name recognition could not compensate. Another factor might have been that both Shafikov and Abdullin, while avid in support for Bashkir culture, had long ago moved to big cities far from the district, which fact may have led some voters to choose as their representatives men who had remained closer to home.

District No.7: Agrarians, Bankers, and a Democrat The race in Tuymazy Election District No.7 followed a familiar pattern: an agrarnik won in a district with an urban majority. The district's population was 53 percent urban, containing three medium-sized cities of nearly 100,000 people, one town, and 12 rayons with large rural populations. Located in the western part of the republic that borders Tatarstan, it was the most Tatar of districts; 44 percent of its residents were ethnically Tatar, 28 percent were Russian, and only 18 percent were Bashkir. This time, however, the agrarian vote was potentially split three ways in a seven-man field, but an agrarnik nevertheless came out on top. The winner was Zifkat Saetgaliev, the director of the Bashkir Scientific Research ProjectMaking-Technological Institute of Animal Husbandry and Feed Production. Formerly the head of the collective farm Ulianova, he was first secretary of a rayon Communist Party organization before taking his job at the institute. Endorsed but not nominated by the Agrarian Party, he basically campaigned on its platform, calling Yeltsin's reform path a big mistake. He favored Rakhimov's sovereignty policy. His opponents included two others with a claim to being agrarniks. One was Gennady Kulik, a consultant for the Moscow-based firm Ineksintereksport and a former USSR minister 35

who became deputy prime minister in charge of agriculture under Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov in 1998. He was actually nominated by the Agrarian Party. The other was Anvar Gabdullovich, a former collective farm chairman and rayon soviet president who became president of the local branch of republic presidential candidate Rafis Kadyrov's Bank Vostok. He campaigned for more investment in agriculture and the Standard Economic Package. Another Bank Vostok branch president ended up in this district, Anatoly Grishchenkov, a former head of the local Communist Party committee division of personnel and propaganda. He also favored the Standard Economic Package. The district also featured an oil man, the head of the enterprise Aksakovneft Vladimir Merzlyakov. He, too, favored the Standard Economic Package and said that Deng Xiao Peng of China was his favorite politician. The black sheep of the herd was Rinat Mukhtarov, the director of the children's surgical division of the medical-sanitary section of the enterprise Tuymazaneft. A 'Democratic Russia' activist, he was an ardent supporter of Gaidar, Yeltsin and Russia's Choice, portraying anyone else as a coup-plotting revanchist. Social interests were clearly important in this race, as rural regions voted significantly for agrarian candidates like the winner Saetgaliev, who got 37.4 percent of the vote. Interestingly, the fact that Kulik had the Agrarian Party nomination did not stop the Agrarians from endorsing Saetgaliev as well, and the nomination obviously did not give Kulik stronger rural support than Saetgaliev. Kulik apparently did not make much good use of his nomination; he lived in Moscow and did not even show up for his televised roundtable debate. Galimov was not endorsed by the Agrarians. No other bloc endorsed candidates in this region. Mukhtarov did clearly identify himself with Russia's Choice, and his performance generally matched the weak performance of his bloc in the republic. State actors were not a factor, as no candidate enjoyed significant support from local authorities. Overall, then, the story in District No.7 was rural sectoral loyalty combined with Kulik's absence from the republic and Agrarian Party endorsements.

EXPLAINING THE BIGGER PICTURE 36

The above analysis demonstrates that looking at each race in isolation, the outcomes are usually overdetermined. In most cases, many factors combined to produce a winner, with state power, campaign tactics, agrarian interests, and ethnicity frequently entering the picture. Looking at all of the Bashkortostan SMD races at once, however, certain patterns emerge that enable us to home in on the most important causes, producing a 'layered' explanation that has important implications for elections in the rest of Russia. State power was clearly the most important factor: in every race where a candidate either occupied a top state post or enjoyed strong backing from the republic leadership, that candidate won.

It is frequently argued that Russia's regional leaders achieve their electoral success

primarily by means of fraud, involving ballot-stuffing or the fraudulent reporting of results. But the cases in Bashkortostan suggest other possibilities that are sometimes more subtle and less scandalous. Most obviously, state leaders controlled most local media and were therefore in a strong position to influence public opinion when they felt strongly enough to do so. This is especially true in rural areas where alternative sources of information are more scarce. State leaders can also credibly threaten reprisals against districts that do not vote their way. Critically, these threats often need not even actually be made; they are implied by the very declaration that the state apparatus supports a particular candidate. The presidents of collective farms or major industries cannot help but worry about the consequences for their own enterprises were their region to register a strong anti-administration vote. They thus have extra motivation to support state-sponsored candidates. It must not be forgotten that in Bashkortostan another possibility is evident, that republic leaders were simply well-attuned to popular opinion on all key issues and reaped the support of voters who backed their policies. While earlier votes and polls cited above show this is in part the case, since the republic population tended to favor both republic sovereignty and gradual economic reforms, such 'view compatibility' cannot explain why other candidates with similar views but no strong state backing fared so much more poorly than did the state-supported candidates.

37

These six single-mandate district Duma races also have critical implications for our understanding of the importance of campaigns in post-Soviet elections. Campaigns proved most effective when they actively mobilized what I label here an 'institutionalized electorate.' While future work will need to refine this concept further and examine its applicability in other regions, Bashkortostan's experience suggests that Soviet state institutions left important political legacies in the form of certain self-conscious potential constituencies and that those candidates did best that targeted well-organized campaigns at these particular constituencies. For the purposes of this paper, I define an institutionalized electorate as a set of people possessing a strong group self-consciousness due to past state policies and institutions that defined important opportunity sets and treated people differently on the basis of these categories. Political science's theory of 'historical institutionalism' has long stressed the power of state institutions (broadly defined) in shaping not only the preferences of groups of people but the groups themselves.lxxviii Similar ideas, under the theoretical banner of 'constructivism,' have been developed with particular power to explain the appearance of ethnic groups in modern society.lxxix State institutions often explicitly define groups, telling people that they belong to certain categories and not others. While this in and of itself may not affect people's behavior and preferences, these categories can become very important to an individual's identity when the state starts to privilege some categories and to discriminate against others.

Even without overt

discrimination, such categories can become meaningful if the state uses them to define its expectations for people's behavior and thereby informs the way these categories of people are administered and treated. These new institutionalized categories of people become even more potent when they correspond to 'objective' differences among people, such as those defined by language or geographical location. When the state maintains such categories and treats them as important for at least a generation, they can become deeply rooted in society, influencing people's behavior and ways of thinking long after the policies in question (or the state itself) change or disappear. The present analysis of Bashkortostan politics suggests that the Soviet state

38

did indeed leave such social legacies, and, moreover, that these legacies are critically important in determining voting patterns in a democratizing society. The most potent such group in Bashkortostan was the rural population, very successfully recruited by the Agrarian Party. 'Peasants' was an explicit social category in the USSR, referring primarily to people living in rural villages and working on collective farms. While peasants had their 'own' newspapers and were treated by the state in both media and administration as having a defined set of collective needs and preferences, they were united above all by the geographical isolation of their villages, a situation that often gave them an identity distinct from that of citydwellers. Their lives were also more likely than urbanites' to revolve entirely around the same activities since social organizations and opportunities were fewer and occupational diversity less pronounced. They also did not have access to the same television channels as did cities and their kiosks carried fewer newspapers and journals.

This meant village residents had a greater

tendency to depend on the same sources of information, a phenomenon that continued to be true through 1993, and this information had been strongly influenced by the state. The second important 'institutionalized electorate' in Bashkortostan was defined by ethnicity.

Constructivist scholars of nationality, led by Ronald Grigor Suny and Rogers

Brubaker, have convincingly demonstrated that the pattern of nationalities emerging from the USSR in 1991 were very different from the ethnic mix that first fell under Soviet rule some 70 years before. While the Soviet regime did much to Russify its population, it did even more to intensify or even create senses of ethnic distinctiveness. Indeed, before 1917, there was no such thing as “Uzbekistan” or “Kyrgyzstan,' and Dmitry Gorenburg has shown that the very concept of Bashkir ethnicity was in a great state of flux before (and even during) Soviet rule. Starting in the 1920s with its effort to coopt local nationalists and to help people pass through what they thought was a necessary stage en route to communism, the Soviet regime created ethnic homelands, codified languages, generated “national” literatures, educated people in their native tongues and embedded nationality in important practices that had large impacts on people’s lives, and the 'Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic' was no exception.lxxx Nationality, for 39

example, was emblazoned on 'passports' that citizens were required to carry with them at all times. Moreover, the Soviet state at various times in its history gave explicit preference to some nationalities over others (based on this passport entry) in some of the state's most prestigious jobs, making nationality nearly impossible for people to ignore. This policy, for example, helps explain why a minority Bashkir, Murtaza Rakhimov, occupied the top post in the republic as of 1991. Accordingly, when the state declared that it was important to know who was Bashkir, it also became important to know who was not Bashkir, making ethnic Russians here somewhat more aware of their own ethnic distinctiveness than their counterparts in other regions where there was no significant 'nationality issue.' These groups did not simply mobilize themselves in the election, however, for reasons amply explained in the political science literature on the difficulties of collective action.lxxxi One might also add that people have multiple identities that depend on context and that interest cleavages often cut across one another, forcing some people to choose which identity and which of their interests to invoke to determine their voting decisions.lxxxii

This means that

Bashkortostan's Duma candidates had to run strong campaigns in order to convince these institutionalized electorates that their interests were in fact at stake in this election and that other lines of interest along which they might have voted were less important. The Agrarian Party and Aleksandr Arinin did the best job of this in Bashkortostan. The Agrarian sweep of the republic's elections was dramatic: they captured four of six territorial seats, and in addition they received by far the greatest percentage of the party list vote, not analyzed in this paper. In short, everywhere an agrarian ran, an agrarian won. In two Duma races, state power was also backing the agrarians, which might also account for these particular victories. In each of the other cases, however, rural voters turned out in droves behind their men, giving them strong pluralities even in highly urban districts as described above. Starting at the top, the agrarians were particularly well-organized at the republic level, putting together a very effective campaign. They had the services of the Agrarian Party and the Agrarian Union, something akin to an agricultural extension service, as well as agro-industrial trade union 40

cadres.lxxxiii These had close contact with farm chairmen and were able to mount effective campaigns for their candidates, as described earlier. The Agrarian Party also benefited from the fact that rural voters were more susceptible to state manipulation, and more receptive to it given their collective identity as peasants. Since Rakhimov's administration backed the Agrarian Party, the latter found it easy to recruit voters in Bashkortostan's remote villages. Initially, rural areas in Russia were known for their relative dearth of information sources. Rural communities were also easier to mobilize and manipulate electorally than urban ones. Farm chairman were often in a position to influence what little information came into the village. Further, since it was easy to determine how a particular collective farm voted due to its geographic isolation, leaders could more easily threaten to deny it key resources if its votes did not come out right. One might also dare to cite rural traditions of deference, periodic peasant rebellions notwithstanding.

Further, as implied by Mancur Olson, it is generally easier to

mobilize smaller, compact communities for collective action than larger, dispersed ones, a factor which helps explain the high rural voter turnout that gave rural regions even more influence on voting outcomes.lxxxiv While all this made state support particularly valuable, the Agrarians were doing well just by gaining the support of collective farm chairs. Only one other institutionalized electorate played an important role in Bashkortostan in 1993, albeit in a much more limited way: ethnic Russians. While Aleksandr Arinin was the only candidate in the territorial Duma races to make ethnic Russian symbolism an obvious part of his campaign, it was quite effective for him as described earlier. The keys to his success were a vigorous grass-roots campaign effort and significant name-recognition; but these were primarily important insofar as they sent strong signals to a relatively coherent constituency, restive Russians.

Arinin's newspaper, the title of which translates to 'Fatherland,' enjoyed wide

circulation and had regularly presented the ethnic Russian cause in the republic. While, as shown earlier, many Russians favored the Bashkortostan sovereignty drive, many did not and this created a resentment which evidence suggests began to boil over amongst Russians in the year leading up to the elections. Arguably, Zhirinovsky's strong showing in the party list voting 41

(13 percent) also reflected this trend. An additional element in Arinin's victory, of course, was the plurality rule. He was able to mobilize only quarter of the voting public in his district, but this was enough to win.lxxxv No other Duma candidate dared to campaign openly on a Russian nationalist platform in 1993. Since Bashkortostan's leadership successfully sought to defuse ethnic issues in the campaign through a combination of intimidation and elite alliances, other ethnic electorates did not play a major role in these elections.lxxxvi Initially, no Tatar candidate sought openly to play the Tatar card other than the head of the Tatar Public Center (TOTs), whose run for the republic presidency faltered when he could not collect enough signatures to get on the ballot. The only place where ethnically Bashkir candidates made nationality a central issue was Baymaksky district No.2. Nevertheless, their failure to mobilize a Bashkir electorate appears to be due to two factors other than the supposed impotence of the Bashkir issue. First, both Bashkir nationalists (Abdullin and Shafikov) appeared to run poor campaigns and had not lived in the district for years, as described above. Second, they ran up against the problem of cross-cutting cleavages:

most ethnic Bashkirs are rural, which means that they belonged to two

institutionalized electorates. Since two Agrarian candidates were competing against the two nationalists, Abdullin and Shafikov were forced to compete to demonstrate that voters needed to vote 'ethnic' rather than 'rural.' Voters appear to have decided to vote first as rural voters and second as ethnic ones. Thus the two agrarniks finished first and second in the balloting, but when choosing which agrarian to support, ethnic criteria appear to have determined which of these two agrarians won. Thus, in this most Bashkir of districts, the Bashkir agrarian beat out the Slavic one, and a look at rayon-level election results lends credence to the idea that the most heavily Bashkir areas voted more for the Bashkir candidate Galiev while the most heavily Russian areas voted more for Pavlov. One might even suggest that Abdullin and Shafikov did succeed in politicizing ethnicity in this district, but that they did not manage to convince people that this was the only thing that mattered. A plurality of voters decided that they did want a Bashkir in office, but a Bashkir with agricultural (rather than just cultural) experience. 42

Together, the 'state power' and 'institutionalized electorate' explanations can explain the outcomes in every SMD Duma race in Bashkortostan, and they also fit well with the other elections that took place in the republic at that time. Rakhimov and Kopsov, the ultimate statebacked candidates, won their races for the republic presidency and the Federation Council, and the two parties that received the strongest backing from the republic leadership (the Agrarian Party and PRES) came in first and third in the party list voting, receiving far more than their federal average vote percentages. It is also important to note what aspects of campaigning were not decisive in Bashkortostan in 1993. Most dramatically, candidates were not able simply to buy election victories as has often been presumed to be the case. While those candidates that made no effort to find sponsors and did not have their own sources of wealth often fared poorly, the graveyard of Bashkortostan politics is littered with political corpses that spent millions on campaigns but lost nonetheless. While money was certainly a prerequisite for waging a winning campaign, it by no means ensured even a respectable showing. Campaign tactics by themselves also mattered little. Many losing candidates had lavishly financed, extremely creative and well-organized campaigns, including entrepreneurs Sharipov, Nuridzhanov, Akhiyarov and Shvetsov, as well as lawyer-entrepreneur Dmitriev and political scientist Lavrentiev. And Asaev, in his successful run for office, relied mostly on the organizational infrastructure of the Agrarian Union and did not spend much money on a media campaign. The unsuccessful big-spending candidates made mostly broad policy appeals as opposed to those aimed at particular social interests, and this rarely produced a victory in the singlemandate plurality districts. This widespread failure to create new and broad constituencies was at least in part due to the extremely short time period between the announcement of elections and the elections themselves; a mere three months. To change people's consciousness, to convince them that a new policy or ideology is in their interest, requires time, especially when many competing ideas are being presented at once. To be sure, a great number of candidates and an overwhelming amount of information bombarded the voter in the days leading into the vote. 43

Given informational chaos and a lack of time to sort it all out, people simply looked for candidates who were saying familiar things and who could present themselves as credible defenders of an interest they already identified with, that is, of an institutionalized electorate left over from the Soviet era. Thus a candidate bearing the stamp of the Agrarian Party or Agrarian Union, as well as perhaps that of the farm chairman or republic leader, tended to stand out. Similarly, Arinin's prior reputation as a staunch defender of Russian interests was critical in such a situation.

Nevertheless, it is unclear that a longer campaign would have produced a

significantly different result, since political parties in Russia had not yet had time to establish clear reputations and policy positions that could have served to carve out new constituencies. Longer campaigns themselves are unlikely to change this pattern significantly given the informational overload that will still accompany them.

Indeed, as more and more parties

proliferate, it becomes harder and harder for any of them to gain the attention of potential voters for long enough to have an impact on their way of thinking. Instead, new are only likely to develop as the result of careful ideological work and a great deal of contact with voters and public relations activity over years where no election campaign is underway. Yet few parties indeed have the organizational and financial resources capable of pulling this off in today's Russia, and in fact, the state itself (particularly at the regional level) is in the best position to shape the coalescence or development of specific electoral constituencies; the state is certainly in a position to hinder this process in many regions of Russia, including Bashkortostan. The result may be that the constituencies identified in the 1993 Duma elections will remain the most important ones in the SMD races for some time to come, but that where the regional government actively seeks to interfere, it may well continue to succeed.

CONCLUSION It remains for other studies to demonstrate to what extent these patterns hold outside of the Bashkortostan context and after December 1993. The influence of state power on the SMD election process appears quite widespread in Russia, and one can cite [CUT MADE] Tatarstan, 44

Kalmykia, Mordovia, Kemerovo and Orel as cases where the regional executive apparatus holds great sway over electoral processes. Clearly, however, not all regional leaders have proven willing or able to influence elections in this way, as in Nizhny Novgorod, Sverdlovsk and Primorsky Krai. While it is tempting to say that state power has even increased over SMD Duma elections in places like Bashkortostan since 1993, in fact the pattern appears to have changed little between 1993 and 1995. While many regions have greatly tightened their grip on local electoral practices, sometimes this influence has been strongest over local elections (for governors and legislators) and over federal presidential races, but not over the SMD Duma races. Bashkortostan is a good example:

while state-backed candidates did well in three of the

republic's six races in the 1995 Duma elections (the last ones before 1999), opposition candidates (from the Communist Party and Rus') won the other three, sometimes against state-backed opponents. But the opposition victories all came in races that the Bashkir state had not contested back in 1993, suggesting that the state was so successful in 1993 partly because it chose its battles well. State power still appears to be an important explanatory factor in regional politics, but primarily in districts with strong rural components and primarily when the state backs an agrarian-friendly candidate.lxxxvii

The Duma race of 1999, however, is featuring the

unprecedentedly active involvement of regional leaders in contesting the single-mandate seats, making 1999 an excellent test of just how powerful the provincial bosses can be. The power of the institutionalized electorate argument is much more difficult to assess in other regions because it requires the kind of in-depth analysis of individual single-mandate districts that has just not been done (or at least written about) in many other regions, especially after 1993. In particular, it is not clear that institutionalized electorates existing in Bashkortostan (primarily ethnic groups and agrarian populations) exist in the same self-conscious form elsewhere, or even that any such constituencies exist. An important task for future research, therefore, will be to conduct just such deep examinations of other regions in order to determine the breadth of this argument's explanatory power. Nevertheless, it is at least suggestive that Colton's and Hough's 1993 surveys across Russia found that social structure best predicted 45

the performance of the Communist and Agrarian parties in the party list competition, the two parties that signalled most actively and clearly to institutionalized electorates. While the Communists did not nominate any candidate in Bashkorostan's single-mandate districts in 1993, they clearly had a core of self-identified voters left over from the CPSU which meet the definition of an institutionalized electorate (and indeed, they too fared well when they nominated candidates in 1995, winning two of the six seats in the republic). Nevertheless, the Colton-Hough survey also shows that even the rural and ex-communist electorates were highly divided in terms of party choice in the party list race, making clear that the idea of institutionalized electorates is only probabilistic, making it more likely (not certain) that a given individual will choose to vote for a given party.lxxxviii In Bashkortostan, however, a cursory examination suggests that the institutionalized electorates that existed in 1993 are only increasing in potency, probably because they have been nurtured in their development by the deputies that have come to represent them in parliament. Thus, in the 1995 elections, Arinin managed to get reelected even though Rakhimov now openly opposed him with the full force of the state apparatus. Similarly, agrarian-friendly candidates (if we include a communist State Farm director not backed by the Agrarian party in this category) won in Bashkortostan's three most rural districts, at least once against a clearly state-backed candidate.lxxxix Accordingly, statistical work by Hale in 1999 has shown that the positive effect of Agrarian and Communist Party campaigning grew dramatically in the singlemandate districts between 1993 and 1995 throughout the Russian Federation.xc No matter whether these patterns hold afterwards, [cut made] the 1993 elections remain an important baseline against which future Russian elections must be compared to asses the development of the electoral process. The results of this study suggest that Russia got off to a pretty good start in 1993, although state power appears to have been more influential than permissible in what most people would call a democracy. This study shows that observers of future races should look particularly carefully not only at state power, however, but at an

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important pattern of campaigning to mobilize institutionalized electorates that proved decisive in 1993 and appears to have only gathered strength in 1995. i Timothy J. Colton and Jerry F. Hough (eds.), Growing Pains (Washington, DC: Brookings University Press, 1998); Robert Moser, Comparative Politics (1999).

ii This article thus covers the same races as my chapter in the Colton-Hough volume (Henry Hale, "Bashkortostan: The Logic of Ethnic Machine Politics and the Consolidation of Democracy," pp.599-636), but goes into much more depth on the different candidates and their strategies than the space limitations in the latter volume would allow and expands the theoretical discussion of electoral patterns in the SMD races.

iii In Hale, 'Bashkortostan,' I also argue that ethnicity played a subtle role in influencing the kinds of candidates that decided to become candidates in Bashkortostan, but did not develop the argument in the direction taken here.

iv Colton and Hough. v Data for this paragraph come from Hale, 'Bashkortostan,' and from Michael McFaul and Nikolai Petrov, Politicheskiy Almanakh Rossiyskoy Federatsii 1993-1997gg. (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment, 1998), p.82.

vi McFaul and Petrov, p.87; Hale, 'Bashkortostan.' vii The Federation Council ceased to be directly elected as of Dec. 1995, but before that the top two vote-getters in the Federation Council race in each republic or region of Russia automatically won seats in this body. Currently, the leaders of the regional executive and legislative branches of power automatically get these seats.

viii Data are from the 1989 USSR census and reports from the republic Statistical Administration together with the Russian State Committee on Statistics for the first half of 1993.

ix Sovietskaya Bashkiria, 8 Dec. 1993, p2. x Tropinin, P. Vechernyaya Ufa, 10 Dec. 1993, p3. xi Leninets, No,54, 6-12 Dec. 1993, p4. xii Otechestvo, No.37, 8 Dec. 1993, p1. xiii Interview with Aleksandr Arinin, 30 Nov. 1993. xiv Interview with a former leading PRES official, March 1999.

xv Interviews with Arinin and

other observers who knew Arinin, including political scientist Sergei Lavrentiev, 15 Dec. 1993.

xvi Otechestvo, No.37, 8 Dec. 1993, p2. xvii Campaign flier for Nuridzhanov. xviii Vechernyaya Ufa, 10 Dec. 1993, p3. xix Interview with Arsen Nuridzhanov, 1 Dec. 1993.

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xx Interview with Nuridzhanov and his campaign manager, 1 Dec. 1993. xxi For example, see Shark TV, Bashkortostan, 2140 Bashkortostan time, 9 Dec. 1993; Bashkortostan TV, 2150 Bashkortostan time, 10 Dec. 1993.

xxii Valeyev, R. Sovietskaya Bashkiria, 9 Dec. 1993, p2. xxiii Insert 'Zelyenyy Dom', Sovietskaya Bashkiria, 26 Nov. 1993, p3. xxiv Interview with Rashit Dayanov, 27 Nov. 1993. xxv Vechernyaya Ufa, 7 Dec. 1993, p2. xxvi For example, Bashkortostan TV, 2150 Bashkortostan time, 10 Dec. 1993. xxvii Leninets, No.53, 29 Nov. - 5 Dec. 1993, p.14. xxviii Interview with Viktor Rezyapov, 27 Nov. 1993. xxix Ibid. xxx Otechestvo, No.36, Dec. 1993, p1. xxxi Voskresnaya Gazeta, No.50, Dec. 1993, p.2. xxxii Izvestia Bashkortostana, 11 Dec. 1993, p.2. xxxiii Interview with Rais Asaev, 3 Dec. 1993. xxxiv Asaev interview. xxxv Interview with Pavel Dmitriev, 1 Dec. 1993. xxxvi Vechernyaya Ufa, 9 Dec. 1993, p1. xxxvii See, for example, Vechernyaya Ufa, 8 Dec. 1993, p2. xxxviii Interview with Dmitriev. xxxix Izvestia Bashkortostana, 1 Dec. 1993, p1. xl Sovietskaya Bashkiria, 4 Dec. 1993, p2. xli Otechestvo, No.36,

Dec. 1993, p3.

xlii Interview with Sergei Lavrentiev, 25 Nov. 1993.

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xliii Vechernyaya Ufa, 2 Dec. 1993, p2. xliv Interview with Fanis Rayanov, 30 Nov. 1993. xlv ibid. xlvi Vechernyaya Ufa, 10 Dec. 1993, p4. xlvii Interview with Radik Dayanov, 2 Dec. 1993. xlviii See, for example, Bashkortostan TV, 2155 Bashkortostan time, 8 Dec. 1993. xlix Interview with Nail Bakhtizin, 26 Nov. 1993. l His long TV ad broadcast on Tolpar TV, Bashkortostan, 1815 Bashkortostan time, 10 Dec. 1993. li Round table discussion for Kirovsky district No.5, Bashkortostan TV, 2035 Bashkortostan time, 23 Nov. 1993. lii Viktor Vyazovoy campaign flier. liii Vechernyaya Ufa, 10 Dec. 1993, p4. liv Sovietskaya Bashkiria 7 Dec. 1993, p2. lv Interview with Boris Tsypyshev, 7 Dec. 1993. lvi Round Table discussion of candidates in Birsky Okrug No.5, Bashkortostan TV, 2035 Bashkortostan time, 7 Dec. 1993. lvii Leaflet supporting Yuri Sharipov. lviii Izvestia Bashkortostana, 7 Dec. 1993, p3. lix Sovietskaya Bashkiria, 2 Dec. 1993, p2. lx Izvestia Bashkortostana, 7 Dec. 1993, p3. lxi District No.3 round table discussion. lxii Interview with Robert Akhiyarov, 7 Dec. 1993. lxiii Izvestia Bashkortostana, 7 Dec. 1993, p3. lxiv Sovietskaya Bashkiria, 2 Dec. 1993, p2. lxv Interview with Malikov, 7 Dec. 1993, p2. lxvi Izvestia Bashkortostana, 11 Dec. 1993, p2.

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lxvii Interview with Ildar Yunosov, campaign advisor to Alim Akhmadeyev, 9 Dec. 1993. lxviii Ibid. lxix Vaysman, Serafim. Izvestia Bashkortostana, 2 Dec. 1993, p2. lxx Ibid. lxxi Sovietskaya Bashkiria, 9 Dec. 1993, p3. lxxii Interview with Gazim Shafikov, 26 Nov. 1993. lxxiii Round table number two for bloc candidates, Bashkortostan TV. lxxiv Izvestia Bashkortostana, 11 Dec. 1993, p2. lxxv Round table for district No.2. lxxvi Ibid. lxxvii See, for example, the round table. lxxviii For a good review of the historical institutionalist literature, see Kathleen Thelen and Sven Steinmo, 'Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,' in Steinmo, Thelen, and Frank Longsreth (eds.) Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp.1-32. lxxix Perhaps the most famous work in this tradition is Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (NY: Verso, 1991).

lxxx Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed; Philip G. Roeder, 'Soviet Federalism and Ethnic Mobilization,' World Politics, Vol.43, No.2 (January 1991), pp.196-232; Dmitry Gorenburg, 'Identity Change in Bashkortostan: Tatars into Bashkirs and Back,' Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol.22, No.3 (May 1999), pp.554-80; Yuri Slezkine, 'How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,' Slavic Review, Vol.53, No.2 (Summer 1994), pp.414-452; James Critchlow, Nationalism in Uzbekistan: A Soviet Republic’s Road to Sovereignty (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991). lxxxi The classic work on this subject is Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). The 'Resource Mobilization' school contends that grievances in society can be manipulated and redefined for political purposes which have little to do with the particular interest involved (John D. McCarthy & Mayer N. Zald, 'Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory,' American Journal of Sociology, Vol.86, No.6 (1977), pp.1212-41; J. Craig Jenkins, 'Resource Mobilization Theory and the Study of Social Movements,' 1983).

lxxxii For an excellent analysis of the importance of situational identity, see Anya Peterson Royce, Ethnic Identity: Strategies of Diversity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982).

lxxxiii Izvestia Bashkortostana, 30 Nov. 1993, p.1 lxxxiv Olson, pp.22-36.

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lxxxv I do not mean to detract from the other issues on which Arinin campaigned which undoubtedly gained him support, such as economic reform, but his views here did not differ too greatly from those of his opponents, and the argument presented in this section fits the broad patterns observed in other parts of the republic.

lxxxvi For a more detailed description of the ethnic coalition-building activity of Rakhimov, see Hale, 'Bashkortostan.' lxxxvii See McFaul and Petrov, pp.92-93. lxxxviii Colton, Timothy J. "Determinants of the Party Vote," in Colton and Hough 1998, p.91. lxxxix McFaul and Petrov, pp.92-93. xc Hale, Henry E. "The Party's On: The Impact of Political Organizations in Russia's Single-Mandate Districts," unpublished paper availabe from the author, August 1999.

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