YABLOKO AND THE CHALLENGE OF BUILDING A LIBERAL PARTY IN RUSSIA

Henry E. Hale George Washington University [email protected]

Draft: May 17, 2004

This is an electronic version of an article published in Europe-Asia Studies, v.56, no.7, November 2004, pp.9931020. Europe-Asia Studies is available online at http://www.informaworld.com and the article URL is http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1465-3427&volume=56&issue=7&spage993

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One of the most striking puzzles of post-Soviet politics has been the weakness of liberal parties in Russia. With the advent of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, liberal voices began streaming into the streets demanding more freedoms, civil rights, and a marketbased economy.1 It was not hard for Westerners to imagine that these early outpourings would provide the basis for a strong liberal party in Russia and that the country’s defining political cleavage would come to be between this party and post-communist socialists. Nevertheless, those parties with the strongest liberal credentials have remained minor players in Russian elections. At no time was this more clear than 2003, when the “party of power” (United Russia) effectively won over two-thirds of the seats in the parliamentary elections and the only other parties able to gain enough seats to register delegations in the Duma were self-avowed socialists and/or nationalists (the Communist Party, the Motherland bloc, and the famously misnamed Liberal Democratic Party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky). The leading liberal party, Yabloko, eked out just four percent of the vote in the nationwide party-list competition that allocated 225 Duma seats and garnered just four of the 225 seats contested in single-member districts. Russia’s party system, therefore, now appears to lack any influential liberal component and to center primarily around the cleavage between the market-statism of United Russia and a leftist camp currently led by the Communist Party, with a significant nationalist current defining a second line of cleavage.2 Comparative political science has developed a number of perspectives by which one can understand the emergence of different kinds of party systems in different countries.

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dominant school of thought argues that party systems are the product of deep social cleavages as mediated, channeled, and influenced by political (especially electoral) institutions.3 Another important strain of theory focuses on the importance of historical legacies that constrain choices

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and shape incentives for system-creators at critical formative moments.4

Accordingly,

explanations of the liberals’ fate in Russia have tended to break down along these theoretical lines. To argue that Russian liberals are weak because society, the state, and history are all stacked against them, however, is to lend a sense of inevitability to the liberals’ current plight that is not warranted. The present article, therefore, follows a third strain of comparative theory that stresses the importance of contingent elite choice and even randomness in societies beginning a transition from authoritarian rule.5 While a focus on social cleavages, institutions, and history is certainly helpful for producing theories that are accurate more often than not, explanations of particular cases sometimes fall into the “not” category and thus require additional elements to be fully explained.6 Such is the case, it is argued, in Russia. Despite what seems to be a pattern of steady liberal weakness, this article contends that a good chance has indeed existed for a strong liberal presence on the Russian party scene, with one particularly critical juncture occurring in the 1999 Duma elections. While the most prominent studies of “the fate of the liberals” have focused on pro-Yeltsin forces7, it was in fact Yabloko that was on the verge of major party status as the turn of the decade approached. Surveys of mass opinion and voting intentions gave observers good reason to think that Yabloko could form the liberal wing of a three- or four-major-party system in Russia. Its failure to realize this potential marks one of the most important developments in the early history of party development (or the lack thereof) in Russia. But while Russian society, history, and political system surely created inhospitable conditions for Yabloko, a detailed examination of internal party politics leading up to the 1999 campaign shows that the party’s failure that year actually owes at least as much to organizational and strategic problems linked to contingent elite choices within Yabloko itself. These organizational and strategic problems came to matter due to a

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highly unexpected set of chance events that shook Russian society in the fall of 1999.8 The result has been the nearly complete absence of Russian liberal parties from Russia’s party system, culminating in their nearly complete disappearance from the parliament at the end of 2003.

Explaining the Liberal Absence from Russia’s Party System The main arguments that have been used to explain liberal parties’ small vote shares in post-Soviet Russia tend to break down along the lines of the comparative political science perspectives noted above, pointing to social cleavages, political institutions, historical legacies, and contingent elite choices. Perhaps the most prominent line of argument essentially contends that liberalism simply has too little support to define a major social cleavage in Russia. The hardest version holds that Russian political culture is inimical to liberalism, essentially dooming liberal parties to lasting irrelevance.9 Another interpretation avers that the economic reforms under former president Boris Yeltsin impoverished, alienated and to a large extent destroyed the Soviet-era “middle class” (doctors, teachers, and other professionals) that would otherwise have become the natural base for a strong liberal party.10 A softer variant concurs that liberalism has little popular support in Russia, but claims that this is primarily because Yeltsin’s team of reformers claimed the liberal mantle for themselves but then tainted it by enacting reforms that became associated with widespread crime, corruption, and/or poverty.11 While Russia certainly contains a significant number of “anti-liberals” and while this undoubtedly reduces the number of votes that liberal parties can hope to win, it is far from clear that the number of those who patently reject any liberal stands is so large as to doom liberal parties to their current level of weakness. For one thing, mass surveys of the same individual

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voters over long periods of time indicate that many voters are quite willing not only to switch parties, but also to switch to parties with very different ideologies. For example, Colton and McFaul find that Yabloko was able to attract many people who had originally planned to vote socialist or statist (“centrist”) during the 1999 Duma campaign and that, among its 1999 voters who had voted in 1995, nearly a third had cast ballots for the Communist Party in 1995. We thus must not lose sight of the capacity for liberal parties to convince people that liberalism is right, even though these people might initially lean in a different direction.12 Indeed, there are grounds to argue that a large share of the population adheres to at least some values that are compatible with a liberal party platform, putting them potentially within reach of a liberal party.13 While one can certainly ask questions that evoke what seem to be highly anti-liberal opinions, a study of public opinion in late 1999 (argued below to be a critical period) reveals that one can also find the following levels of support for important liberal propositions: •

78 percent considered “human rights and democratic freedoms” to be “very important”

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45 percent agreed that individual rights must be protected even if some guilty go free

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40 percent agreed that competition among parties makes Russia’s system stronger

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66 percent agreed that competition among firms makes society stronger

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39 percent agreed that it is “normal” for an owner to get rich off of employees’ labor

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50 percent preferred market reforms (if less painful ones) to a socialist system.14

Even if one counts Yeltsinite reformers among the “liberals,” the total vote for all liberal parties in 1999 was just 15 percent, far below the figures noted above.15 Neither do demographics present an impenetrable low ceiling for liberal parties. While Yabloko and the Yeltsinite liberals have had an advantage among people who have higher education degrees, live in large cities, and are younger, their support is not limited to these

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demographics, which in any case are much larger than the 15 percent of the vote that they have tended to get in national elections. All of this strongly indicates that what is holding liberal parties back is not a rigid social cleavage that hopelessly limits liberal parties to divide up a mere 15 percent of the vote. Although many Russians do hold anti-democratic attitudes, many either do not or would seem to be amenable to being convinced to back a liberal party that frames the issues in the right way.

We must look beyond popular viewpoints and demographic

characteristics in order to understand the absence of a strong liberal voice among Russia’s influential parties. Legacies of the communist period, political institutions, and contingent elite choice are clearly other pieces to the puzzle. Kitschelt and his colleagues have argued that the USSR’s legacy of “patrimonial communism” weighted the dice in Russia toward the creation of an immensely powerful executive branch (sometimes called superpresidentialism) and the politics of patronage. While they predict that liberal parties in such systems are likely to be divided and weak, they expect the liberals as a whole to be one of the two major political forces constituting the dominant political cleavage (with the other force being socialist-nationalist).16 Gelman, taking Russia’s semi-democratic (“hybrid”) superpresidential regime as a starting point, argues that such a political system confronts “democratic opposition” parties with several difficult dilemmas. One of the most fundamental is the “Dilemma of Lesser Evils”: If the party refuses to cooperate with the regime, it can easily be branded as a bunch of prickly loudmouths playing into the hands of the hardline (i.e. Communist) opposition, but if the party cooperates with the regime so as to actually put into practice some of its ideas, the price of this cooperation is usually the compromise of its principles in other areas, which could ultimately undermine its own electorate. A second major dilemma is that the party faces great pressure to introduce order and

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professionalization in its organization at the same time that this tends to contradict the liberal principles on which the party is based.17 The resulting tendency to neglect organization-building stunts party growth.18 How liberal parties resolve these dilemmas depends on party leaders, which means that the contingent choices they make have the potential to seriously impact the strength of their parties. Building in particular on Kitschelt’s and Gelman’s important characterization of the systemic incentives and constraints that Russian liberal parties face, the present article seeks to refine and deepen our understanding of the role of contingent leadership choice and chance in party-system development in explaining the unfortunate spot in which Russia’s liberal parties currently find themselves. While several theorists have attributed liberal party weakness to contingent elite decisionmaking, the decisions pointed to are often depicted merely as the adoption of unwise campaign tactics or a simple neglect of the need to build party organization.19 The present article seeks to develop this logic more fully. Slightly reformulating the ideas of Gelman and Kitschelt, it is argued that would-be party-builders must make the most of what might be called their starting political capital, or the stock of assets they possess that might be translated into electoral success. It is helpful to think of two kinds of political capital. Ideational capital refers to sets of principles or ideas, including those closely associated with individual personalities, on the basis of which a party can appeal for votes.20 Administrative capital refers to a stock of assets facilitating the provision of direct selective material or symbolic advantages to those individuals who demonstrably support the party’s candidates, be these individuals voters, members, or activists. These advantages “typically take the form of monetary transfers, gifts in kind, jobs in the public sector, preferential treatment in the allocation of social benefits (e.g., housing, welfare payments), regulatory favors, government contracts, and honorary

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memberships and titles.”21

Both forms of capital can potentially generate a great deal of

electoral success, but the key to this success is to adopt campaign strategies that “fit” with the party’s primary form of political capital. The difficulty is that people who might be brought into a party to provide administrative capital may not all share the party’s ideational principles. If a party is based on ideational capital, a strategy of aggressively pursuing administrative capital can dilute the ideational capital.

Likewise, a party based on administrative capital alone risks

alienating this resource if it attempts to tie it to too restrictive a set of ideas. The case of the Yabloko Party illustrates how reconciling these two forms of capital is possible for a liberal party in Russia, but also how this is a very delicate process that can unravel quickly without a coherent leadership strategy. The following pages now turn to the study of Yabloko, making the case that the fate of liberalism in the Putin era hinged largely on the contingent choices its leaders made with respect to the challenges of combining administrative and ideational capital in Russia’s superpresidential system. This discussion begins with an examination of Yabloko’s starting political capital, arguing that by 1999 Yabloko was in fact on the verge of a breakthrough to becoming one of Russia’s “system-defining” parties. The analysis then continues with a study of how the aforementioned dynamics played out in 1999, costing Yabloko this status and ultimately resulting in a bitter defeat in 2003.

The Origins of Yabloko Yabloko’s most valuable starting political capital was ideational, consisting primarily of the personal reputation of its leader, Grigory Yavlinsky. Yavlinsky became widely known in 1990 when he was a deputy prime minister in Yeltsin’s Russia. A young economist, he was

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known as the main author of the famous 500-Day Plan, a package of economic reforms for which Yeltsin lobbied loudly and which Gorbachev at one point advocated before giving in to the opposition of his prime minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov. When Gorbachev effectively torpedoed the plan, Yavlinsky resigned his post in Yeltsin’s government. He reappeared immediately after the August 1991 putsch, however, when Gorbachev and Yeltsin confirmed him as the deputy head of the “interim” USSR government, the Committee on the Operational Management of the National Economy. During this time, Yavlinsky consistently spoke out for the economic need to maintain the unity of the USSR and proposed a series of policy documents intended to achieve this. His stands on the economy and the union brought him into opposition with his former patron, Yeltsin, and the latter’s new premier, Yegor Gaidar, who began embarking on his own economic reform package without paying so much as lip service to Yavlinsky. After the USSR finally collapsed, Yavlinsky achieved a bit of notoriety by sending his team of economists to work on economic reforms in Russia’s third-largest city, Nizhny Novgorod.

Almost

immediately after Gaidar launched his economic reforms, Yavlinsky blasted them as being illconceived, calling for marketization to be conducted in a different way.22 These well known programmatic stands proved to be promising ones in late 1993. Indeed, many Russians favored market-oriented reforms and opposed communism but lamented the rise of new borders within the USSR’s geographic space and were suffering severely during the economic collapse brought on by the Gaidar reforms. At a time when many Russians were disgusted with the Yeltsin Administration’s tendency to use brute force in matters of politics and economics despite its democratic rhetoric, Yavlinsky presented voters with the notion that reforms could be undertaken more democratically, more honestly, less painfully, and more effectively. At this time, he was also seen as someone with government experience, having

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served under both Yeltsin and Gorbachev and then having worked with Nizhny Novgorod’s regional government. As a result, Yavlinsky was found to be the third most trusted politician in Russia in mid-October 1993, trailing Gaidar by less than two percentage points.23 While Yavlinsky lacked some sorts of starting political capital that other electoral entrepreneurs possessed in 1993, he did have other important assets. Since running afoul of Yeltsin and Gaidar in 1991, he had no significant and direct connections to state authorities outside of Nizhny Novgorod. Likewise, he possessed no nationwide organization of any kind, having not previously been engaged in mass politics. By virtue of his pro-market stance, he was able to secure backing from some important emerging banks, notably Most Bank (run by Vladimir Gusinsky, with whom Yavlinsky was personally close) and Menatep Bank (run by Mikhail Khodorkovsky and which reportedly supplied Yabloko’s offices with copy machines, fax machines, and other office supplies).24 Yavlinsky also had personal ties to a group of young, highly respected market-oriented economists. In 1991, upon resigning the transitional Soviet government, Yavlinsky formalized his team in a think-tank he called EPIcenter. EPIcenter, however, had no regional network to speak of and these economists themselves had few other connections to power centers, having largely been left out of Gaidar’s governmental team. Since Yavlinsky had no semblance of a party organization before September 1993 when Yeltsin called snap elections, Yabloko was built in great haste. Yavlinsky’s strategy for partybuilding during this short campaign period was to capitalize on his chief asset, reputation, to cobble together an organization that was little more than the bare minimum needed to field a party list based on strong ideational content. Essentially, this meant rounding up as many freemarket advocates as possible who had been left out of Russia’s Choice or otherwise alienated by the Gaidar and Chernomyrdin reform efforts.

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Yabloko’s organization thus came to be composed of four main groupings of politicians.25 The first, most tightly linked to Yavlinsky himself, emerged from EPIcenter and its close associates, including soon-to-become-major party figures like Sergei Ivanenko and Mikhail Zadornov as well as the former state chief inspector Yury Boldyrev. A second set came from another politicized scholarly institution, the Institute for Humanitarian and Political Research (IGPI). Led by Soviet-era dissident and political prisoner Viacheslav Igrunov, this faction was widely perceived in the party as being more social-democratic in orientation than were the other three groupings, which leaned towards less state intervention in the economy.26 The delegation from St. Petersburg constituted the third grouping all by itself due to its exceptionally strong local organization. This group was primarily known in Russia’s second city as the Regional Party of the Center and possessed a third of the seats in the city legislature by the end of 1993.27 While the Regional Party of the Center did not formally join Yabloko until 1995, its alliance with Yavlinsky effectively made Yabloko’s St. Petersburg branch the only highly developed regional organization that the party possessed as of December 1993.28 The fourth grouping that became a kind of “founding faction” of Yabloko was led by Ivan Grachev. Prior to joining Yabloko, Grachev headed a group of liberal economists in the legislature of Tatarstan and had built up a small network of entrepreneurs and supportive intelligentsia.

While the

aforementioned groups were previously unattached to nationwide organization and thus became constituent members of Yabloko, several more transient alliances were also made. Some key additional deals were struck that brought in individual leaders but that left no long-lasting contribution to organizational structure.29 Chief among these was Vladimir Lukin, Russian ambassador to the United States in 1992 and 1993.

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The coalition of forces first united under the name “Bloc: Yavlinsky-Boldyrev-Lukin,” reflecting its three best-known and most-respected leaders. The acronym YaBL gave rise to the nickname Yabloko, which means “apple” in Russian.

The tag stuck and Yavlinsky’s

organization soon adopted it as its formal moniker and used the fruit as one of its main brand symbols. This combination proved successful in 1993, winning the party nearly 8 percent of the vote and securing it an officially registered delegation (“fraction”) in the Duma. Yabloko sought to build on its 1993 success by further cultivating its ideational reputation and, secondarily, developing its party organization. Yavlinsky personally focused on the former project, continuing to demonstratively reject major Yeltsin reforms and to call for what he said was a better approach to marketization. Yavlinsky was also careful to reject invitations his party received in 1995 to join forces with the Gaidar-led Russia’s Choice movement, which Yabloko considered tainted with the failures of past reforms. Yavlinsky also managed to make his bloc one of the most tightly disciplined in the new parliament, suffering the fewest defections of any bloc.30 Accordingly, Yabloko based its 1995 campaign on these same themes. The result was widely considered to be a success. While the percentage of Yabloko’s vote went down a bit, dipping from 7.9 percent in 1993 to 6.9 percent in 1995, it had expanded its electorate by nearly half a million votes (from 4,233,219 votes in 1993 to 4,767,384 in 1995).31 More importantly, Yabloko was one of only four parties to clear the five-percent barrier in the 1995 party-list competition, the others being the KPRF, Zhirinovsky’s wildly nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, and Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin’s decidedly unideational Our Home is Russia. Yavlinsky’s organization thus became the sole liberal standardbearer among fractions in the Duma. Very importantly, it also began to demonstrate a potential

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to win elections where a plurality of the vote was required; whereas the party garnered just six seats in the territorial-district half of the Duma voting in 1993, it netted 14 in 1995. In the presidential race that followed, in June 1996, Yavlinsky gained 7.3 percent of the ballots and over 5.5 million votes, more even than his party had received in the 1995 Duma election.

Yabloko on the Verge of Major Party Status By the time the 1999 Duma campaign started Yabloko was expected by all to easily clear the five-percent hurdle in the party-list competition and looked poised to finish among the top three parties. Various public opinion surveys studied by different analysts had concurred ever since the 1995-96 election cycle that Yabloko was effectively getting its pro-market, prodemocracy message out to the voters, as has been documented in a number of works.32 Party leader Grigory Yavlinsky had also established his party as a leading and credible voice against corruption in government. A breakthrough of sorts came with the August 1998 financial crisis, an event that seemed to vindicate Yavlinsky’s longstanding claim that the Yeltsinite reformers were creating only “phony capitalism.”33 In the wake of Russia’s forced devaluation and default, Yabloko held out the possibility that “real” market reform was still possible.34 As attention began to focus on the 1999 Duma campaign, Yabloko was riding high in all of the major polls. While the party had registered close to 10 percent in the past, it had now broken that barrier.35 Figure 1 reports the monthly party ratings produced by Russia’s bestknown survey agency, the well respected VTsIOM. These figures show that Yabloko was clearly among Russia’s top three parties, actually pulling even with Fatherland for second place in June, two months before that party merged with All Russia and former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov. Strikingly, Yabloko’s support during this time (May and June 1999) was

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consistently stronger than that of Yavlinsky personally, who, while enjoying a high water mark in his own personal popularity, was polling two or three points lower than his party. [FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE] Powerful Russian elites began to converge more publicly than ever before around Yavlinsky’s party. While Yavlinsky had long been backed by Vladimir Gusinsky’s Most Group, some of its representatives now openly declared their preference for Yabloko, even over Gusinsky’s longtime ally and “cash cow,” Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov.36

While this

“oligarchic” group continued to favor Luzhkov’s presidential prospects over Yavlinsky’s, it was speculated that Most was attempting to engineer an alliance between its two political favorites, a tandem in which Yavlinsky would occupy the post of prime minister.37 In fact, on the strength of Yavlinsky’s and Yabloko’s rising fortunes, many observers referred to Yavlinsky as prime ministerial material, especially after August 1998.38 Accordingly, between 1996 and the fall of 1999, some observers began making the kind of predictions for Yabloko’s future that had not been heard from credible analysts (even Yabloko-friendly ones) in the past. Among Western observers, McFaul, in a 1997 article entitled “Time Ripe for Yabloko”, expected that in 1999 Yabloko would win most of the 25-30 percent of the population who, Russian pollsters estimated, were democratically oriented.39 In the summer of 1999, Rutland assessed Yavlinsky’s support as being strong enough potentially to trade for the post of prime minister under Yeltsin’s successor.40 One prominent Russian analyst of public opinion, Leonid Sedov, projected that Yabloko could win 24 percent of the vote while a leading journalist working for a MOST group publication concurred, predicting 25 percent.41 This striking accumulation of political capital involved two key developments in Yabloko’s party-building strategy.

One of these was the party’s national-level strategy as

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conducted primarily by Yavlinsky. The other was the party’s strategy for building its regional organizations conducted by one of Yavlinsky’s chief deputies, Viacheslav Igrunov.

Yavlinsky’s Coalition-Building Efforts At the national level, Yavlinsky’s primary concern had long been to strengthen his party’s stock of ideational capital. One part of this, of course, was to continue to emphasize the party’s traditional stands in favor of a market transition without “crony capitalism”, greater democracy in the administration of government, and increased attention to human rights. But this strategy alone was making Yabloko very vulnerable to the Dilemma of Lesser Evils. That is, in the process of cultivating a reputation as a party of principled democratic opposition, the party had opened itself to charges that it was merely an organization of intellectual “loudmouths” who didn’t have actual experience governing the transitional economy or who, worse, were unable to make the kind of pragmatic compromises necessary to get something done. With Yabloko’s newfound political weight, however, a strategy to combat this image problem emerged. Yavlinsky was now able to trade on Yabloko’s newfound political credibility as a contender to forge carefully selected, high-profile alliances with Russia’s political and economic elite. Importantly, these alliances were not primarily aimed at gaining administrative capital, at bringing in people who would contribute money and resources to build up the organization. Instead, the goal was to help Yabloko overcome the Dilemma of Lesser Evils by demonstrating that Yabloko was in fact capable of the kind of compromise and coalitions that were necessary to get things done in Russia. Thus Yabloko’s alliances with elite figures during this period did not reflect a comprehensive policy of accumulating organization and resources (administrative

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capital), but instead were mainly aimed at dispelling doubts as to its readiness to govern (that is, shoring up its ideational capital). The party’s St. Petersburg wing, always enjoying a great deal of autonomy within Yabloko and consistently ahead of the organization’s curve, had made the first move in this direction back in 1996. Yabloko’s gubernatorial candidate, Igor Artemiev, withdrew from the race in favor of Vladimir Yakovlev and, in return, received the post of first deputy governor responsible for economic affairs.

While Artemiev resigned two years later after accusing

Yakovlev of bringing criminals into the gubernatorial administration, Yabloko leaders considered joining the city government a relative success in giving Artemiev important visibility in solving concrete economic problems that faced the city. This, in turn, reportedly attracted many new people to the party’s ranks.42 Especially after the August 1998 financial crisis, Yavlinsky made a series of overtures to the political elite signaling his readiness to work with them in governing.

Immediately after the crisis, he received plaudits for constructively

proposing the moderately leftist Yevgeny Primakov as Prime Minister, calling him the only realistic compromise choice at a time of dire national need; Primakov was soon confirmed and enjoyed broad popular support.43 In mid-1999, Yavlinsky won press attention for preliminarily planning a regional agricultural reform for Orel Oblast with its Communist governor Yegor Stroev, chair of the Federation Council, the upper chamber of Russia’s parliament.44 Prior to mid-1999, however, Yavlinsky remained very cautious regarding actual involvement in federal government. Thus Yavlinsky rejected Primakov’s offer to hand him the post of first deputy prime minister in charge of social affairs, saying that he would not accept such a post unless given virtually complete control over the entire government’s economic policies.45 As his

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party’s ratings in opinion polls were reaching record highs during this period, Yavlinsky appeared to be successfully resolving the Dilemma of Lesser Evils. The most spectacular achievement of Yavlinsky’s national-level party-building effort, however, was still to come.

On 24 August, Yabloko announced an alliance with Sergei

Stepashin, who had been an increasingly popular prime minister just 15 days earlier, when Yeltsin had replaced him with the then-little-known Vladimir Putin.46 For Stepashin to have made this move said volumes about his perception of Yabloko’s potential. Stepashin was widely seen as being capable of creating a strong party of his own; since he had consistently been polling at 5 percent or higher in the race for Russia’s presidency ever since June, many observers believed that any party or bloc he led would be quite likely to clear the critical five-percent threshold for obtaining seats in the party-list Duma election. Moreover, his authority and status as a recent former prime minister put him in excellent position to recruit other major political players for such an effort. Thus leaders of the Union of Right Forces (SPS) recruited him heavily to cement the alliance they had hoped to forge with Our Home is Russia, but were ultimately thwarted by the jealousy of another former prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, who refused to play second fiddle to anyone. Stepashin made clear that he saw Yabloko as a sure bet not only to finish above the five-percent threshold, but to contend for a major share of parliamentary seats. He announced that he would consider the presidency if Yabloko finished at least second in the Duma voting; this statement is all the more telling of Yabloko’s growing authority given Stepashin’s obvious presidential ambitions.47 In an advertisement broadcast on 24 November, Stepashin suggests that a major part of what attracted a former Yeltsin prime minister to Yabloko was his desire to be associated with the party’s well-established reputation

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for personal integrity. In this ad, together with a Yabloko slogan stressing the need for honesty in government, Stepashin declares that “it is time for honest, upright people in power.”48 Yavlinsky’s party, for its part, sought to make the most of Stepashin as an indication that charges it was a “do-nothing” party would no longer stick. Yabloko, a new slogan went, was “ready for power.” Speaking at his party’s congress on 27 August, Yavlinsky told delegates that for Yabloko to achieve its goals, it had to bring in a wide mass of voters who had earlier been unwilling to cast ballots for the party. This, he said, was the reason for the alliance with Stepashin.49 Remarkable also was that Stepashin so much desired to be part of Yabloko’s ticket that he agreed to run as the number-two candidate on its list, below Yavlinsky. The alliance with Stepashin signaled an influx of notables onto Yabloko’s list of candidates for both the single-member-district and party-list halves of the 1999 Duma elections. Major elite figures included the minister of federal and nationality affairs from Stepashin’s government, Viacheslav Mikhailov (later disqualified by the Central Election Commission), Mikhailov’s first deputy Valery Kirpichnikov, and major businessmen like Yury Rumiantsev of the oil-rich Khanty-Mansiisk province.50

One of Russia’s best-known politicians, Nikolai

Travkin, who had led his own Democratic Party of Russia into the Duma independently in 1993 before joining Chernomyrdin’s Our Home is Russia, now defected to Yabloko. Asked directly why he switched, Travkin, then a deputy in the Duma, said that he had moved to Yabloko because it had succeeded in developing a real ideological base where Our Home is Russia had failed, making Yabloko one of only three parties to do so (the others being the Communists and the predecessor to SPS, he said). Travkin reported that he had been looking for a party that was good for more than just one election and was not simply seeking an appointment in government or the presidential administration. Yabloko, he concluded, was the logical choice as it would

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“clearly” last for multiple election cycles.51 Yabloko also welcomed back Mikhail Zadornov, whom Yavlinsky had forced to resign from the party after Zadornov had agreed to serve as Minister of Finance under Chernomyrdin back in 1997.52

Igrunov’s Purity Campaign At the very same time that Yavlinsky was beginning to reach out at the national level to shore up Yabloko’s reputation against charges of cantankerousness, two of his chief deputies in the party squared off over how to build the party’s regional organizations. The issue at stake was whether regional organizations should be built primarily on the enthusiasm of ideologically minded activists (ideational capital) or on the financing, manpower, and connections of Russia’s emerging business community (a form of administrative capital). The debate came to a head immediately after the 1996 presidential election. Ivan Grachev, leader of one of Yabloko’s four main factions as described above, emerged in 1996 as the advocate for plowing the most investment into developing the party’s administrative capital, even if this came at the expense of some ideational capital. A free-market economist, Grachev believed that the party’s brightest future lay in attracting massive support from the business community. In this vision, Yabloko’s appeal would be focused primarily on the new middle class of emerging entrepreneurs. To achieve this, he believed, required adopting a very flexible organizational and ideational strategy.

To impose formal membership and

ideological requirements on prospective supporters as a condition for including them in the organization, he contended, would drive away Russian business, which he argued preferred to retain more formal autonomy in their political operations.

Grachev also believed that the

business community would respond better if Yabloko adopted a more cooperative approach vis-

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à-vis Yeltsin’s governments and economic policies. To make strict adherence to a particular set of ideas an absolute requirement for party participation, he intoned, would leave only incompetent intellectuals (those who were already members) at the helm just when the party and country needed experienced practitioners.53 He counted some 10 Duma deputies on his side as well as the party’s Youth Union. His brother, Igor, was in place as head of the nationwide apparat (administrative structure) of the party, initially putting him in a good position to effect such changes.54 Two of Yabloko’s other main factions took the opposite view, favoring an organization that would be strictly and uncompromisingly based on party “ideology” and the enthusiasm of its true believers, minimizing the party’s dependence on administrative capital. The prototype for the alternative organizational strategy came largely from Yabloko’s St. Petersburg faction. This group’s clout had risen dramatically in 1995 and 1996 since the city’s party organization had won the best result in Yabloko’s party-list campaign (Yabloko came in first place there in 1995) and had obtained a second-place finish for Yavlinsky in the city’s 1996 presidential voting. The St. Petersburg party leaders, whose Yabloko organization had grown out of the city-based Regional Party of the Center (RPC) in existence since 1992, attributed their 1995 and 1996 local success to the tightly run ship that was their party organization. Strong organization had from its start been a central principle of the RPC and, somewhat ironically, the model taken was the Communist Party. The idea was for party membership to be something of an elite affair; not elite in terms of resources but in terms of personal qualities of loyalty, activism, and adherence to central ideological principles (in this case, largely market liberalism). To become a member, an individual required recommendations and the passage through a half-year probationary “candidacy” period, during which time the person’s commitment would be judged. Only then

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would full membership be considered by the party. The central idea was to ensure that the party’s organization was active, robust, and sturdy and would not suffer from the problems that RPC leaders observed in other Russian democratic organizations back in 1992 when it first adopted this strategy, problems of frequent defection of members and the inclusion on party lists of people with widely varying views. The St. Petersburg branch lobbied for the central party organization to adopt these principles for its entire national structure, arguing that the party had to take control of its organization to prevent others from simply jumping on its bandwagon and then seeking to change it fundamentally. Viacheslav Igrunov, the deputy party leader who headed Yabloko’s more socialdemocratic wing and was also the head of the aforementioned think-tank IGPI, was the one who took up the St. Petersburg approach most vigorously, turning it into something of a crusade within the party. Igrunov had roughly 10 Duma deputies that could be counted as firmly in his camp and his close associate, Valery Goriachev, headed the apparat of the party’s Duma fraction.55 A former USSR dissident and political prisoner in a psychiatric ward, Igrunov echoed the concern of the Petersburgers that Yabloko had to stick by and accentuate its longstanding principles in order for the party to have an attractive future. In the Igrunov camp’s eyes, the target electorate was less the new middle class, which it saw as constituting a maximum of about two million people, than the former Soviet middle class. This “old” middle class consisted of teachers, doctors, engineers, skilled workers, professors, and other such groups. Igrunov’s supporters asserted that such people numbered as many as 40 million, dwarfing the electoral potential of a purely business-oriented approach. This target social group was unhappy with the way the transition from Communist rule was turning out but still tended to adhere to liberal

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values. Igrunov’s backers also argued that this group was a potentially more reliable electorate than the business community, which was less likely to develop party loyalties.56 The showdown took place in 1996.57

Grachev appeared to have the upper hand

immediately after the 1996 presidential elections at Yabloko’s fourth party congress, where Grachev’s policies won more delegate votes. Over the next few months, however, Grachev’s position began to slip. The critical moment came when Yavlinsky himself decided to go with Igrunov’s strategy.

Yavlinsky and his Moscow-based coterie of economists and other

intellectuals from his EPIcenter think-tank had paid little attention to regional organization, focusing primarily on Yabloko’s national-level ideology and alliances.58 While the reasoning behind Yavlinsky’s decision remains murky, reports suggest that Yavlinsky simply trusted Igrunov more and tended personally to believe in ideological purity, hoping to limit the party’s pragmatic efforts at building high-profile alliances to those that he could personally negotiate and keep under control. The party then amended its internal voting procedures and Igrunov handily won support for his policy at the fifth Yabloko party congress later in 1996. Accordingly, Igrunov himself became deputy chair of Yabloko in charge of party-building. By 1997, Igrunov had effectively established himself as second only to Yavlinsky in his influence over party organization. Having won the internal power struggle, Igrunov set about to strengthen Yabloko’s ideological line by purging the party of regional cadres who showed signs of deviant views. Acknowledging that it was important to take on allies, Igrunov stressed that it was more important for the party to maintain control over its message, even if this meant maintaining formal party membership at a number as small 5,000 people nationwide. To achieve this purity, he instituted a tightly and centrally controlled membership process for regional Yabloko

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organizations. Regional party headquarters were effectively stripped of the power autonomously to admit new party members, and the process even included a one-year probationary period of “candidate membership.” The alternative in Russia’s context, Igrunov warned, was for regional organizations to use the party’s growing power to create their own private fiefdoms, particularly in the more authoritarian provinces where governors could get in a position to capture local party branches.59 Igrunov’s drive gained special urgency within party circles in June 1998, when Yabloko’s leader in the republic of Kalmykiia, Larisa Yudina, was brutally slain. The killing of Yudina, a local newspaper editor, was widely thought to have been perpetrated by representatives of Kalmykiia’s President Kirsan Iliumzhinov, one of Russia’s most authoritarian regional leaders.60 This, reported one regional party leader, gave special impetus to those in Yabloko seeking to sharpen its line as an opponent of provincial tyranny.61 This purity campaign had far-reaching effects. According to Igrunov, as of March 1999, the party had disbanded a full 11 regional organizations, including those in Omsk, Bashkortostan, Kabardino-Balkariia, Dagestan, and North Ossetia. Indeed, the Yabloko purge hit those organizations hardest that were in the most authoritarian ethnic minority regions of Russia and that had established the most accommodating relationships with these regimes, as in Bashkortostan, an example that will be examined below. The party, however, had no special procedure for declaring a regional organization unworthy. As a rule, the Yabloko Moscow office would regularly monitor regional branches and, if necessary, initiate hearings and in some cases dissolution proceedings.62 Since Igrunov largely controlled this process, which combined informal and formal procedural elements, many in the party interpreted Igrunov’s actions as his own attempt to establish personal authority in the

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party. There were strong circumstantial reasons to suspect that such motivations were not entirely absent. For one thing, Igrunov’s purges largely swept the Grachev faction out of Yabloko. Pro-Grachev Yabloko Duma deputies Rinat Sultanov and Svetlana Gvozdeva were driven away from the party and even Yabloko’s youth union, long oriented to the Grachev group, departed the organization. After suffering these defeats, Grachev himself soon acrimoniously resigned from Yabloko and launched his own movement, which he then brought into the Fatherland-All Russia coalition led by Primakov.63 Furthermore, in at least one case with which the author is familiar, Bashkortostan, the replacement Igrunov chose for a dismissed Grachev man as regional party leader was an Igrunov associate who had ties to IGPI . It is quite hard to disentangle the personal and ideational elements involved in Igrunov’s actions, however. If Yabloko was indeed intent on sharpening its opposition to the worst regional strongmen, it would inevitably clash with Grachev’s forces. This is because Grachev himself was from the relatively authoritarian Tatarstan, had allies in other autocratically inclined provinces like Sultanov in Bashkortostan, and had in fact advocated cooperating instead of clashing with them.64 Furthermore, where the party faced the kind of severe pressures that they did in regions like Kalmykiia and Bashkortostan, one might understand why someone in Igrunov’s position would want to entrust the task of rebuilding to a trusted long-time associate. Even if one grants Igrunov the benefit of the doubt, however, the fact that he undertook this process with such an emphasis on informal procedures and personal ties greatly exacerbated intra-party tensions. Indeed, Igrunov’s reforms generated fierce opposition from advocates of a greater stress on administrative capital, even from those not counted in the Grachev camp. Travkin, who became one of the Yabloko leaders most actively engaged in candidate recruitment, lamented the “humiliating” hoops that would-be members had to jump through (such as “candidate member

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status”) and decried lost opportunities to bring “serious people” into the party fold in the provinces. He cited a litany of examples: the rejection of a proven vote-getting incumbent Duma deputy in Bashkortostan (Aleksandr Arinin; see below); denial of coalition status to a group of major businessmen in Perm; the failure to join with key members of the economic elite in Sverdlovsk.65 One Yabloko-friendly Most Group publication, perhaps in a gentle warning, reported that Yabloko had rejected overtures by the mayor of the major city of Izhevsk and had consequently failed to win any seats in Udmurtiia’s regional elections despite having come into the election as the province’s most popular party. Yabloko’s problem, the magazine reported, was that its dissident nature always led it to nominate little-known candidates.66 Stepashin, after the 1999 Duma campaign, cited other examples of lost opportunities: Igrunov’s refusal to back Yaroslavl governor Lisitsyn in his reelection bid in return for an endorsement of Yabloko as well as a similar proposal from the governor of Tver.67 Igrunov’s supporters, on the other hand, claimed that any opportunity costs in administrative capital were far outweighed by the gains in ideational capital. “When there was a regional organization, we had a rating in the region of 2 percent. When we disbanded it, it grew to 10 percent,” reported one party leader regarding an unidentified region.68 To sort out the contradictory local effects, it is helpful to examine one region where the battle came to a head, the ethnic minority-designated “republic” of Bashkortostan.

The Clash Over the Bashkortostan Yabloko Organization69 Bashkortostan was one of the republics whose party branches were targeted by Igrunov for organizational overhaul. The origins of this local organization certainly fit the pattern singled out for attack by Igrunov. Formed with the political blessing of republic President Murtaza

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Rakhimov, Bashkortostan’s branch of Yabloko initially adopted a conciliatory attitude towards the strongman’s leadership. This situation attracted little attention until the republic’s June 1998 presidential elections approached. During this campaign, Rakhimov’s officials managed to get both of his major rivals disqualified from the race, in one case invoking a local law that was unconstitutional according to Russian courts.70 As a result, Rakhimov ran virtually unopposed in these elections, challenged only by a minor minister in his own government who actually campaigned for Rakhimov but whose presence lent at least a façade of legitimacy to the process.71 During this time, the province’s voters witnessed an odd spectacle: their branch of Russia’s most solidly pro-democracy and human-rights-oriented party endorsed one of Russia’s most notoriously authoritarian regional bosses. Bashkortostan’s Yabloko leader, Duma Deputy Rinat Sultanov, a Grachev ally, argued that the party’s long-term goals were best served through cooperating with powerful regional strongmen and thus backed Rakhimov. While this issue had raised some concern within Yabloko prior to June 1998, it came to a head once news of the Yudina killing in Kalmykiia broke just days before the Bashkortostan election. Yavlinsky personally jumped into the fray, blasting Rakhimov’s victory as a “grandiose profanation called a presidential election” in an open letter to President Yeltsin. He warned that such developments threatened to lead to the country’s “feudal disintegration” and called on Yeltsin to intervene, asking the Russian leader whether he was ready to assume responsibility for “future political murders.”72 Sultanov’s endorsement of Rakhimov came to be viewed in this light and many party leaders believed that Sultanov was now more Rakhimov’s than Yavlinsky’s man. Sultanov knew that his stance would ruffle some feathers in the party, but thought the dissension would be

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temporary and argued that the party could better implement some of its goals by cooperating with Rakhimov in areas where interests coincided. At Igrunov’s prompting, the central party organization sent a commission to Bashkortostan to investigate and correct the situation. This commission, led by Duma Deputy Anatoly Golov, not originally in one of Yabloko’s four main groupings, came back with a report depicting a faulty political line and listing scores of instances in which the local organization was not in step with the party charter on technical organizational issues. Such technical violations, it was understood, could be more easily cited as grounds to replace the branch’s leadership than could ideational heresies. On the basis of these findings, the commission ruled in December 1998 that the party conference electing Sultanov as leader was invalid and began the process of replacing him and many of his deputies and followers. The Golov commission, however, moved to retain those parts of the Bashkortostan organization that were found not to be under Rakhimov’s control, including cells in the cities of Beloretsk, Neftekamsk, and Sterlitamak. The capital city Ufa’s organization, however, was to be completely disbanded and replaced. In Sultanov’s old post, the central party installed a longtime Igrunov ally, Sergei Fufaev, a journalist who had ties to Igrunov’s IGPI institute and who at the time worked for the local city paper Vecherniaia Ufa. For a time, Sultanov refused to recognize the central party’s efforts, resulting in a “two Yabloko system” in the republic. By mid-1999, however, he had acquiesced and ceded the claim to the Yabloko mantle to Fufaev. While this process antagonized the Grachev group in Yabloko, the party recovered very quickly in the region by rebuilding on the basis of Rakhimov’s most incorrigible opposition. The hard core of this opposition was the Russian nationalist movement Rus’, known as the chief critic of Rakhimov’s drive for republic sovereignty vis-à-vis Russia ever since the movement’s

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founding in 1992. Very strong in the cities, traditionally targeted by Yabloko, Rus’ commanded a reported 100 activists, its own newspaper, resources sufficient to circulate 200,000 copies of this newspaper free of charge in 1999, alliances with other anti-Rakhimov organizations, and the reputation of its leader, Aleksandr Arinin, a two-term Duma deputy and one of the two opposition figures disqualified in the republic’s June 1998 presidential race.73 While a Yabloko aligned with Rakhimov certainly looked strange, an alliance with an organization known mainly for its Russian nationalist stands also raised eyebrows. In part, this was clearly a move designed to reinforce Yabloko’s image as an uncompromising opposition to regional political machines. There was also an element of pragmatism involved, however, as Yabloko was surely attracted by the fact that Rus’ was unrivaled as the strongest organization opposing Rakhimov in the region. More important, however, appears to have been the personal networks of key Yabloko leaders. Igrunov had long worked with Fufaev through the regional work of Igrunov’s institute. Over time, Igrunov came to rely on Fufaev for his interpretation of events in this important republic. Fufaev, in turn, had long cooperated with Rus’ and its leader, Arinin. While the alliance with Rus’ certainly compromised Yabloko’s liberal stance, Igrunov sought to limit the damage by, strikingly, refusing to admit Arinin himself, who was the figure in Rus’ most prominently associated with its nationalistic stands. Many in Yabloko, including Travkin, lobbied to bring Arinin in, citing his status as a proven vote-getter as a two-term incumbent Duma deputy.74 But despite Arinin’s request to join, the party turned him down even as the Duma elections approached because his personal reputation for “strident” Russophile nationalism did not fit well with the ideological line that Yabloko, under Igrunov’s leadership, was trying to strengthen. Yabloko continued to support Arinin informally in various elections for some years to come, however.

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Seeking to absorb Arinin’s organization and its anti-Rakhimov reputation without Arinin, Yabloko also reached out to almost all other major opposition figures in the republic. One of the most prominent of these was Zagir Khakimov, head of the Tatar Public Center of Bashkortostan, who became Yabloko’s nominee in one of the republic’s six territorial Duma districts in the 1999 election. Reflecting one of the many quirks of Russia’s system of ethnic enclaves, the 1989 census found not only that Russians constituted a large plurality of the population in Bashkortostan, but that more people there identified themselves as ethnic Tatars than ethnic Bashkirs, who comprised just 22 percent of the population. While Tatars and Bashkirs are close in terms of religious tradition, language, and history, Tatar organizations were in the 1990s highly critical of what they saw as Rakhimov’s attempts to “Bashkirize” Tatars, teaching only Bashkir and Russian in regional schools, for example. The Yabloko alliance with the Tatar Public Center, then, represented a connection with another large organizational network, this one concentrated in the northwest of the republic, which borders Tatarstan. Yabloko also attracted Marat Mirgaziamov, the republic’s former Prime Minister, to its fold. Mirgaziamov, who had opposed Rakhimov since the latter ousted him from his post in the early 1990s, was the other major candidate (the first being Arinin) who had been disqualified from the republic’s presidential election in June 1998. The former prime minister was at the time one of the republic’s best known figures, garnering support far broader than that potentially provided by his status as an ethnic Tatar. The ability of Yabloko to attract such figures, and in Arinin’s case to gain some control over their organizations while actually rejecting them themselves, strongly illustrates the level of political pull that the party had achieved between 1995 and 1999. Both Arinin and Mirgaziamov retained aspirations to the Bashkortostan presidency, and both saw their best hope in aligning

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with Yabloko. Arinin already had his own local party organization as well as proven votewinning experience. Mirgaziamov could well have built his own (underground) regional party based on his personal authority, but chose Yabloko. Asked why he had opted for Yavlinsky’s party, Mirgaziamov replied that he liked Yabloko’s reputation for honesty, its dedication to a strong social policy, and the party leadership’s new commitment to end its “do-nothing” stance, as evidenced by the alliance with Stepashin. While stressing that he did not “need” Yabloko, Mirgaziamov volunteered that the party would assist him not only by lending him its reputation, but also by intervening on his behalf against any pressure republic authorities put on his campaign, by supplying him with a campaign headquarters, by providing information through Yabloko’s links to other candidates, by producing campaign informational literature to distribute, by transferring money to pay the deposit necessary to register as a candidate, by gaining him publicity on central television, and by assisting him in campaign analysis and strategy thanks to the party’s access to better polling data than those that Mirgaziamov would have on his own. Bashkortostan’s two most prominent opposition leaders, therefore, found Yabloko to be so appealing as a partner that they basically accepted a coalition on the terms that Yabloko itself set.

Yabloko’s National Campaign Debacle of 1999 Campaigns are critical moments for party-building because the public focuses on parties in such periods far more intensely than at any other time. It is thus extremely important for a party’s campaign to fit well with the form of political capital that stands at the base of a party’s strength. In the case of Yabloko, the period leading up to the 1999 Duma campaign found a party that had accumulated a great deal of ideational capital and that had used it to significantly expand its potential to win supporters both in the electorate and among the elite. Yabloko’s

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actual campaign, however, strikingly neglected the ideas in which it had invested so much over the years. In an important sense, Yabloko failed in 1999 not because it was liberal but because it failed to be liberal during the campaign. It is important to recognize, however, that in putting so many of its political eggs in the ideational basket, Yabloko sacrificed a great opportunity to dramatically expand its organization and other administrative resources by accepting into its ranks more of the elites that were increasingly gravitating toward it. Thus, when the party’s ideational appeal collapsed, the party had scarce administrative capital available to fall back on. Viacheslav Igrunov, Yabloko’s chief party-builder, was also its campaign chairman in the fall of 1999. In keeping with his and Yavlinsky’s emphasis on the party’s ideational capital, Igrunov based the campaign primarily on the message “honesty in government and order in the country”, references to Yavlinsky’s reputation for integrity and Stepashin’s experience as minister of internal affairs.75 But in what became a very troubling pattern during the campaign, Igrunov and Yavlinsky made very little effort to integrate Stepashin into the campaign decisionmaking process, evidently considering the former prime minister’s role to consist primarily of just being on the party list in order to demonstrate Yabloko’s readiness to build the broad coalitions necessary to govern. The priority, then, was on promoting Yavlinsky, who personified the party’s traditional ideational appeals.76 Accordingly, the party’s voice in most party ads and televised appearances was that of Yavlinsky, who then stressed how Yabloko was able to do real things, such as initiating a law in Sakhalin that provided new jobs.77 Stepashin later lamented that the campaign wound up being all about Yavlinsky.78 While this might have been enough for a strong Yabloko showing had the trajectory of August 1999 continued through the fall, Russia’s political scene was shaken to the core when two deadly bombs obliterated ordinary apartment buildings in Moscow on September 9 and 13.

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These events and other related bombings ultimately killed some 300 people. People feared for their lives as the destroyed apartment complexes were ordinary working-class domiciles like those in which millions of Russians lived. Yavlinsky thus averred in a speech to his party’s congress on 19 September that the apartment bombings had turned Russian into “another country.”79 This speech, Yavlinsky’s major address launching the party’s election campaign, clearly evidenced the degree to which Yabloko struggled with how to respond to the terrorist acts. While he sought to fit the bombings and their aftermath into traditional Yabloko themes, such as the incompetence of the Russian government, he in fact spent the vast majority of his time talking tough on security issues, not a traditional Yabloko strong suit. The government, he railed, had wasted the three years of peace offered by the 1996 Khasaviurt Accords and had failed to take action against an “obvious” threat to Russian security. Russia, he said, needed to wake up to ensure its own security, supporting the armed forces and activating special services in Dagestan and Chechnya, but not sending inexperienced draftees. Accordingly, Yabloko delegates quickly altered the central slogan of their campaign platform from “The Future. Trust. Stability.” to “The Future. Trust. Security.”80 Yabloko was already off-message. Speaking right after Yavlinsky to the 19 September party congress, Stepashin likewise began by stating that traditional Yabloko concerns were his top political priorities (in particular, the battle against corruption), but then proceeded to spend almost all of his address on how to achieve national security. The statements of Stepashin, given his experience in the security sphere, had more gravitas than those of Yavlinsky and might have enabled the party to pull off a law-and-order campaign strategy. But the party initially stuck by its decision to focus primarily on Yavlinsky during the campaign. For example, soon after the official period for television campaigning began in November, the party aired advertisements

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that opened or closed with footage of modern soldiers, images of World War II victories, and Yavlinsky himself reflecting on his own family’s role in defending the country in days gone by.81 There was no mention of Stepashin. While Yabloko did air some television advertisements featuring Stepashin on the law-and-order theme in December, this took place only after much damage had been done to the party’s reputation.82 The fundamental problem proved to be that the Yavlinsky-Stepashin alliance was founded not upon agreement in their approach to Russian security but upon the more traditional Yabloko issues of economic reform, democratic principles, and honesty in government. These were the elements of reputation that Yabloko possessed and Stepashin either wanted or was willing to accept publicly. But it was precisely issues of security that came to the fore as each bomb destroyed another apartment building and as Yeltsin’s new prime minister, Vladimir Putin, responded with increasingly aggressive military moves to subdue the breakaway region of Chechnya. These events forced Yabloko’s duumvirate to respond, especially Stepashin as the partner with the most important security experience. But the deal bringing Stepashin onto the party list, as noted above, had not involved integrating him tightly into the process of crafting Yabloko’s message. While this may not have been necessary had the campaign remained focused on Yabloko’s traditional issues, with which Stepashin had agreed, this became a major problem when a central issue (security) leapt to the fore on which Yavlinsky and Stepashin had very different instincts. Thus both Yavlinsky’s campaign manager and Stepashin himself made clear to an observer that Stepashin and Yavlinsky did not coordinate their major public statements, generating a significant degree of frustration within the campaign.83 Stepashin, an author of Russia’s 1994 military assault on Chechnya, was much more inclined to back Putin’s violent response to violence than was Yavlinsky. While Stepashin

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opposed what he called a “large-scale” ground offensive in Chechnya, he said that he did not consider that to be what Putin was doing. Stepashin thus publicly supported the future president on this issue quite consistently.84 He opposed negotiations with the Chechen leadership so long as well-known terrorists Basaev and Khattab were there and called IMF attempts to link credits to the Chechnya issue “political blackmail.”85 Yavlinsky wrestled much more with his own response. On one hand, he had built his party largely on his reputation as an uncompromising advocate of human rights and good government, including his opposition to the 1994-96 Chechen War. These large stocks of ideational capital would seem to have dictated a natural “dovish” response on Chechnya, opposing an aggressive military response and speaking out forcefully for a more peaceful resolution of the crisis, including negotiations with Chechnya’s elected leadership, which would not have created so many innocent victims in Chechnya. On the other hand, he feared alienating the popular majority that was supporting Putin’s military operation. To resist the nationalist upsurge, he and his colleagues worried, would be to risk defeat in the elections.86 The Yabloko leader’s statements, as a result, were widely perceived to be muddled. In a high-profile meeting of Duma leaders with Putin, Yavlinsky took the occasion to declare as Yabloko’s “special position” on Chechnya both that “one must in no circumstances replace a battle with bandits with large-scale military actions” and that “the ringleaders must be punished, and if punishing them is impossible, destroyed.”87 Unlike Stepashin, he called for immediate negotiations with Chechnya’s state leadership and for the conclusion of a deal whereby Chechnya would provide Russia’s security (how went unspecified) and Russia would provide Chechnya’s samostoiatel’nost’.88 This Russian term is quite ambiguous, potentially connoting both “independence” in the sense of international recognition as a state and the much more

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limited concept of “autonomy,” which Chechnya’s leadership had long considered inadequate. The low point for Yavlinsky on the Chechnya issue came in November, when, without coordinating with Stepashin89, he circulated a declaration proposing a ceasefire that would last 30 days. During this time, the Chechen leader would be presented with a list of demands that most observers regarded as impossible to fulfill quickly given conditions in Chechnya: the release of all hostages (many held by renegade warlords); a halt to associated kidnappings; the surrender of the terrorists to stand trial in Russia; and the adoption of decisive measures to disarm all nonstate military formations. If the Chechen leader rejected this, Yavlinsky would have given people 30 days to evacuate the republic, at which point federal forces would unleash its massive military might on the region.90 The plan thus at once advocated a ceasefire, an ultimatum, and relentless bombing of the region. Stepashin himself was then forced to perform an awkward verbal balancing act, declaring that he supported both Putin’s actions and Yavlinsky’s plan. Seeking to avoid the appearance of a conflict, Stepashin publicly “amended” Yavlinsky’s proposals to make them “more realistic.” Specifically, he opposed the key call for halting military actions for 30 days, endorsing only the ultimatum as a means to force a peace.91 Unable to forge a common line, Yabloko effectively dropped the issue of Chechnya completely from its campaign in the final weeks before the election.92 Given that no other major party opposed the second war in Chechnya, Yabloko missed a unique chance to galvanize its reputation as a human-rights oriented party opposed to the use of violence in politics.

Indeed, an analysis of public opinion data from the fall of 1999

demonstrates that the public was far from hawkish on Chechnya and that above all it was looking to be led. Indeed, shortly after the September 1999 apartment bombings, polls showed that 53 percent of the population said that they would actually have been “happy” to grant the

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troublesome republic independence. Of course, they looked to be led primarily by the person who was effectively running the country at the time, Prime Minister Putin. But while much of the public fell into line by supporting Putin’s military response to the terrorist bombings, polls show that the number of people who would have been “happy” for Chechnya to be independent was still as high 20 percent even in December.93 Even a Yabloko-friendly publication later conceded that principled opponents of the war, despite the heavy propaganda blitz in favor of the military action, constituted 15 percent of the population.94 This strongly suggests that a clearer and more courageous stand could have garnered a sizable “peace vote” for Yabloko, especially since this was more consistent with the human-rights-oriented reputation that Yabloko had long cultivated. Contrary to a view common in the West, therefore, Yabloko’s chief problem in 1999 was not that it supposedly stood stout in opposition to violence in Chechnya and then lost votes in a nationalist backlash. Instead, its chief problem was its inability to take a clear stand of any kind. The evidence for this is loud and clear in opinion polls.

Strikingly, during the fall 1999

campaign, 45 percent of Russian voters reported that they did not know what Yabloko’s position on Chechnya was while 32 percent believed Yabloko had taken a hard line. Only 14 percent interpreted Yabloko’s autumn statements and actions as indicating a dovish stance.95 Thus not only did Yabloko fail to stand out on the issue of Chechnya, but only two percent of the population believed that Yabloko was the party most competent to handle the problem.96 Yabloko’s leaders also failed to coordinate on other issues that came to the fore in the wake of the bombings, notably Yeltsin’s longstanding effort to forge a Russian-Belarusian union. Yabloko at first stuck by its principled opposition to this union and its leading advocate, the authoritarian Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenka. One of the party’s deputies was

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arrested in Minsk for participating in an anti-Lukashenka rally in mid-October, and, most dramatically, Yavlinsky demonstratively led his followers out of the Duma hall during Lukashenka’s speech in late October, another move to which Stepashin (in vain) objected.97 Dissension within Yabloko’s party list, voiced by none other than its number-two and numberthree candidates, Stepashin and Lukin, quickly forced Yavlinsky into a rethink. Evidently concerned that his party was appearing soft on nationalist credentials due to its statements on Chechnya, Yavlinsky performed an abrupt about-face and Yabloko’s Duma fraction voted for the Russian-Belarusian Treaty shortly before election day in December.98 Unfortunately for Yabloko, all this did not occur in a political vacuum--its opponents and rivals seized the opportunity to draw voters to their own parties by pointing out its shortcomings and inconsistencies. The Union of Right Forces (SPS), desperate to get back over the fivepercent barrier that it had failed to clear in 1995, dealt the most devastating blows. In one widely watched and extensively reported debate on the NTV network in November, SPS campaign manager Anatoly Chubais mercilessly attacked Yavlinsky and Yabloko for wishy-washiness on key issues, notably Chechnya and Belarus. Taking a simple pro-Putin stand on Chechnya, Chubais went so far as to call Yavlinsky a traitor for betraying the interests of his country. This stand, along with other successful SPS campaign tactics, were widely credited (both inside and outside of Yabloko) with enabling SPS to vault from the verge of political oblivion into fourth place in the party voting, well ahead of Yabloko.99 Chubais’ attacks were devastating not because people actually voted on the issues of Chechnya or Belarus, but because they firmly impaled Yabloko on one sharp horn of the Dilemma of Lesser Evils. That is, Yabloko’s unclear and shifting stands on Chechnya and Belarus were cited as evidence that Yabloko, by sitting on the sidelines of government as a “constant critic”, was in fact incapable of formulating its own

37

policies and therefore unfit to govern.100 Analogous attacks on Yabloko’s candidates in the single-member districts hurt their prospects as well. In the home stretch of the campaign, Yabloko struggled to contain the damage by releasing a series of new ads emphasizing traditional Yabloko stands, giving more attention to Stepashin, and, critically, countering the Dilemma of Lesser Evils. Avoiding problematic issues like Chechnya, they mainly sought to show that Yabloko was in fact capable of putting its ideas into practice, citing a series of concrete accomplishments in the Duma and in the provinces.101 In one ad designed to rebut the charge that staying in opposition to the government reflected incompetence, Yavlinsky asked: “If a person says for ten years that two times two equals four, is he stupid or principled--what do you think?”102 By all accounts, this was too little, too late. To make matters worse, many regional party leaders, very enthusiastic about party strategy prior to the campaign, later complained that the central organization had appeared to forget about them in the heat of the contest.

One organization reported being told that

headquarters never provided the campaign strategy it had promised to guide its local campaign. Another lamented that Yabloko had assured them money was coming but never sent it.103 Campaign informational materials arrived only two weeks before the election in some regions and the television ads produced by a Most Group company for the party’s district candidates were generic in nature; each featured Yavlinsky or Stepashin speaking while standing next to the candidate, who was silent. In the end, Colton and McFaul found that about half of people who at one point planned to vote for Yabloko abandoned that party during the 1999 campaign period.104 They further reported that Yabloko’s vote was almost entirely unrelated to issues, with the only exception being the party’s advantage among people who opposed the rule of a strongman.105 Yabloko was

38

thus largely reduced to the vote of its hard core of loyalists, netting just 5.9 percent of the partylist vote in the Duma competition (down from 6.9 in 1995) and only four district seats (dropping from 14 in 1995). In terms of the number of votes received, the party dropped from 4.8 million in 1995 to just 4.0 million in 1999. The campaign of 1999, therefore, had undermined virtually everything that Yabloko had been working for up until that point. First, the horrific terrorist acts of September 1999 shifted the focus away from most of the issues on which Yabloko’s ideational capital was largely based and on which Yavlinsky and Stepashin had struck their coalitional deal. Second, on the key issue that became salient, Yabloko failed to take the bold anti-war stand that would have played to its ideational strengths on human rights issues and, even worse, came forth with no coherent stand at all. Third, this inability to choose either clear opposition or clear support of the government was precisely what Chubais and SPS hit hardest during the campaign, impaling Yabloko on a sharp horns of the Dilemma of Lesser Evils, from which Yavlinsky had struggled so hard to free himself.

Conclusion: Liberal Parties in 2003 and Beyond In this way, we see how a series of largely chance events and contingent elite decisions, tactical moves made by both Yabloko and its rivals, had a major impact on the formation of Russia’s party system. The 1999 election debacle has had lasting effects. Between 1999 and 2003, Yabloko’s ratings tended to remain only precariously over five percent and some even speculated that it was in danger of falling below this threshold in 2003, something hardly anyone had predicted in 1999. This loss of political weight also made it very difficult for Yabloko to recruit powerful allies and sources of funding, rendering an aggressive strategy of accumulating

39

administrative capital nearly impossible. Thus when Yabloko’s campaign again went sour in 2003, for reasons beyond the scope of the present article, it had little to fall back on and slipped below the five-percent barrier in the party-list race. Similarly, it won only four single-memberdistrict seats in the new Duma.106 Thus, while Yabloko was poised in the summer of 1999 to form a strong liberal component in a consolidating Russian party system, by December 2003 it had virtually disappeared from the national parliament, liberalism with it. Some have suggested that Yabloko might have helped avert this liberal plight by accepting invitations from the parties of Gaidar and Chubais to merge. To be sure, Yabloko was certainly damaged by aggressive negative campaigns in 1999 and 2003 orchestrated by Chubais and his colleagues. Moreover, Yabloko’s own criticisms of the reforms of Gaidar and Chubais certainly did not help SPS win liberal votes. But there is also evidence for Yavlinsky’s claim that the two parties have had distinct electorates and that many Yabloko voters, including a large number of state professionals hit hardest by the Yeltsin-era reforms, would have been more likely to vote for a party of the left than for a Yabloko-SPS coalition.107 Indeed, talk of a merger by SPS and its predecessors has itself largely been a campaign tactic designed to make Yabloko look uncooperative or to co-opt some of its members.108 Perhaps even more importantly, if one interprets true liberal principles as involving opposition to the second Chechen War and resistance to certain autocratic moves under both Yeltsin and Putin, then the problem for liberalism is not that Yabloko failed to unite with SPS (which unabashedly backed both the war and Putin) but that it failed to stand up for liberal principles consistently in the heat of electoral battle. While attacks from SPS hurt, the Kremlin also played a role in Yabloko’s woes. Yeltsin’s presidential administration and forces close to it no doubt assisted certain parties (like

40

SPS and the Unity Bloc) and hindered others (like Yabloko and the Communist Party) in 1999. These same parties, however, had a great deal of opportunity to influence their own fates between 1993 and 1999, particularly in the field of developing their own reputations during the campaign process. Yabloko, additionally, was surely unlucky. Its alliance with Stepashin was founded on common ideas about governance in the economic and social realms whereas the apartment bombings brought to the fore issues on which the two leaders had long demonstrated dramatically different instincts. But SPS successfully overcame a very similar problem when Chubais made sure that the party leadership convened and decided on a single sharp message on the issue despite major internal disagreement. The Russian liberal electorate went unheard in 1999 not so much because it was nonexistent as because no party, including Yabloko, gave it consistent and clear voice on the most powerful question of the campaign period, the war in Chechnya. In the process, Yabloko left itself open to charges that it was incapable of making bold decisions and governing effectively. Had Yabloko accepted more overtures for partnership among governors and powerful businessmen, adding a substantial stock of administrative capital, it might have been able to salvage a large share of the vote despite a poor campaign, as did Fatherland-All Russia. This option, however, had been ruled out by the party’s “organizational purity” campaign at the regional level during the previous 18 months and by the alienation of many influential Yabloko leaders that this caused. Once Yabloko lost institutional momentum in 1999, too few elites were now willing to stake their careers on Yabloko’s future prospects to make a strategy based on administrative capital viable in 2003.

41

It is, of course, too early to pronounce either Yabloko or liberalism dead in Russia. For one thing, in the wake of their defeat, SPS effectively split into pro- and anti-Putin camps, with the latter talking about joining Yabloko in a broad liberal coalition. Other liberal movements have also jumped into the fray, seeking to become a part of any such political force. Polls also indicate that significant public support remains for key liberal values, including both democracy and a market economy, lending encouragement to liberal political entrepreneurs. While some have been quick to sign Yabloko’s death warrant, it still remains the strongest liberal organization in Russia.

While SPS has split, Yabloko has not and even claims to have

augmented its ranks in the face of Putin’s growing political dominance.109 In the upcoming 2007 Duma elections, however, the threshold for forming a parliamentary fraction will be raised from 5 percent of the vote to 7 percent or a fourth-place finish. Yabloko then faces the question of whether to join a coalition with the anti-Putin SPS breakaways, such as Irina Khakamada, or to try to climb back into the Duma on its own. One cannot exclude that Yabloko might succeed on its own, should it stick more firmly than it has previously done to liberal principles. But one suspects that with Chubais throwing his lot in with Putin and hence ruling the rump SPS out of any opposition liberal coalition, Yabloko has an excellent opportunity to start regaining political influence through a new alliance of truly pro-democracy, pro-market forces. 1

On the perestroika-era proto-party organizations, see:

M. Steven Fish, Democracy from

Scratch (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1995); Michael McFaul, “Party Formation after Revolutionary Transitions”, in Alexander Dallin (ed), Political Parties in Russia (Berkeley, CA, International and Area Studies, University of California at Berkeley, 1993); McFaul & Sergei Markov (eds), The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs

42

(Stanford, CA, Hoover Institution Press, 1993); and Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2001). 2

Liberalism here refers to a political orientation that places a high priority on both individual

rights and a market economy. Some parties might take liberal stands on the market economy but not in politics, as United Russia and arguably the most ardent supporters of former President Boris Yeltsin and current President Vladimir Putin have done. Since the focus of this article is not on these latter parties and personalities but Yabloko, whose liberal credentials few dispute, I leave aside debates as to who else can truly be called “liberal” in what follows. 3

Seminal works in this tradition include Gary Cox, Making Votes Count (NY, Cambridge

University Press, 1997); Maurice Duverger, Political Parties (NY, Wiley, 1954); Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, eds., Party Systems & Voter Alignments (NY, Free Press, 1967); and Rein Taagepera and Matthew Soberg Shugart, Seats and Votes (New Haven, Yale, 1989). 4

Perhaps the most influential such work is Herbert Kitschelt, Zdenka Mansfeldova, Radoslaw

Markowski, and Gabor Toka, Post-Communist Party Systems (NY, Cambridge University Press, 1999). 5

Michael McFaul, “Explaining Party Emergence and Non-Emergence in Post-Communist Russia:

Institutions, Agents, and Chance”, Comparative Political Studies 34, 10, December 2001, pp.11591187; Michael McFaul, Russia’s Unfinished Revolution (Ithaca, Cornell, 2001); Guillermo O’Donnell & Philippe Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions About Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, 1986). 6

See Adam Przeworski & Henry Teune, The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry (NY: Wiley,

1970).

43

7

Most prominently, McFaul, Russia’s Unfinished Revolution.

8

Some, arguably all, of these “contingencies” were partially generated by a major political actor

with an interest in the race, the Kremlin. Nevertheless, not all of these unfolded in exactly the way that would have been predicted by the Kremlin. As far as the non-Kremlin parties were concerned, these events can be treated as exogenous shocks to the preexisting political system. 9

For a well argued piece that borders on such a claim without making it explicitly, see

Alexander N. Domrin, “Ten Years Later: Society, ‘Civil Society,’ and the Russian State”, Russian Review 62, 2, April 2003, pp.193-210. 10

Reddaway & Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms.

11

M. Steven Fish, “The Travails of Liberalism”, Journal of Democracy 7, 2, April 1996, pp.106-

117;

Fish, “The Predicament of Russian Liberalism:

Evidence from the December 1995

Parliamentary Elections”, Europe-Asia Studies 49, 2, March 1997, pp.191-220;

Judith S.

Kullberg & William Zimmerman, “Liberal Elites, Socialist Masses, and Problems of Russian Democracy”, World Politics, 51, April 1999, pp.323-58. 12

Timothy J. Colton & Michael McFaul, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy: The

Russian Elections of 1999 and 2000 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003), p.153. 13

See also Timothy J. Colton & Michael McFaul, “Are Russians Undemocratic?” Post-Soviet

Affairs 18, 2, April-June 2002, pp.91-121. 14

Data are from two waves of surveys designed by Timothy Colton and Michael McFaul and

carried out by a leading Russian agency in the fall and winter of 1999. For a description of their method and aims, see Colton and McFaul, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy. 15

Colton and McFaul, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy, p.10.

44

16

Kitschelt et al., Post-Communist Party Systems; Kitschelt and Regina Smyth, “Programmatic

Party Cohesion in Emerging Postcommunist Democracies: Russia in Comparative Context,” Comparative Political Studies 35, 10, December 2002, pp.1228-56. On superpresidentialism, see M. Steven Fish, “The Executive Deception: Superpresidentialism and the Degradation of Russian Politics,” in Valerie Sperling (ed.), Building the Russian State (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000), pp.177-91. 17

Vladimir Gelman, Transformatsiia v Rossii:

Politicheskii Rezhim I Demokraticheskaia

Oppozitsiia (Moscow: Moskovskii Obshchestvennyi Nauchnyi Fond, 1999). 18

Grigorii V. Golosov, “Who Survives? Political Party Origins, Organizational Development,

and Electoral Performance in Postcommunist Russia,” Political Studies 46, 3, September 1998, pp.511-43. 19

Fish, “The Travails of Liberalism”; Fish, “The Predicament of Russian Liberalism”; Golosov,

“Who Survives?” Colton and McFaul, in Popular Choice and Managed Democracy, also stress the importance of campaigns. One might also mention Herron’s suggestion that Yabloko did not appear to have responded well to institutional incentives to invest in district candidacies in the 1999 elections. See Erik S. Herron, “Mixed Electoral Rules and Political Strategies: Responses to Incentives by Ukraine’s Rukh and Russia’s Yabloko,” Party Politics 8, 6, November 2002, pp.719-33. 20

This should not be confused with the notion of ideology, since ideology is only one potential

form of ideational capital. On ideology, see Stephen Hanson, “Ideology, Uncertainty, and the Rise of Anti-System Parties in Post-Communist Russia,” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 14, 1-2, March-June 1998, pp.98-127. 21

Kitschelt et al. 1999, pp.47-8.

45

22

For more details on the early history of Yabloko and the evolution of its platforms and ideas,

see Gelman, Transformatsiia v Rossii, and Oleg Manikhin, Rossiiskaia Demokraticheskaia Partiia Iabloko: Kratkii Istoricheskii Ocherk (Moscow: Integral-Inform, 2003). The latter book, while informative, is generally sympathetic to Yabloko and was handed out for free by the party during the 2003 Duma campaign, whereas Gelman presents a more rigorous analysis. 23

Argumenty I Fakty, no.44, November 1993, p.2.

24

Juliet Johnson, A Fistful of Rubles (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2000), p.117.

25

This account draws on extensive interviews among members of each of these groupings at

different levels during 1998-2000. For a published account which is largely accurate (although cites a source disaffected with the party), see Nezavisimaia Gazeta, 15 July 1999, ISI Emerging Markets. 26

Interview with a person well informed of Viacheslav Igrunov’s thinking, 20 October 2000;

Head of the Political Council of the St. Petersburg branch of Yabloko, interview, 9 April 1999. 27

Head of the Yabloko fraction in the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg, interview, 24

March 1999. 28

Head of the Yabloko fraction in the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg, interview, 24

March 1999. 29

For biographies and descriptions of their organizations, see Yabloko’s website, accessed 8

January 2003:

http://www.yabloko.ru/Union/Program/yab-93.html#“Блок:%20Явлинский-

Болдырев-Лукин”. 30

Laura Belin & Robert W. Orttung, with Ralph S. Clem and Peter R. Craumer, The Russian

Parliamentary Elections of 1995 (Armonk, NY, M.E. Sharpe, 1997), p.39. The one major

46

defection that it suffered between 1993 and the 1995 Duma vote was that of Boldyrev, the party’s former number-two man. 31

For a convenient source of Russian election statistics of many kinds through 2000, see Russian

party

specialist

G.N.

Belonuchkin’s

elections

website:

http://www.cityline.ru:8080/politika/vybory/vybory.html. Other election results presented here during this time period come from this source. 32

For example, Ted Brader and Joshua A. Tucker, “The Emergence of Mass Partisanship in

Russia, 1993-1996”, American Journal of Political Science 45, January 2001;

Timothy J.

Colton, Transitional Citizens (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2000); Colton & McFaul, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy. 33

Grigory Yavlinsky, “Russia’s Phony Capitalism”, Foreign Affairs, 77, 3, May/June 1998,

pp.67-79. 34

Nezavisimaia Gazeta, 2 October 1998, ISI Emerging Markets.

35

The Russia Journal, 18 April 1999, Johnson’s Russia List (hereafter JRL).

36

Interfax, 28 September 1998; Igor Malashenko, deputy president of the council of directors of

Media-Most, interview, Vlast’ (Kommersant Weekly), 15 June 1999, ISI Emerging Markets. 37

Argumenty i Fakty, no.18, April 1999, p.15, ISI Emerging Markets.

38

Argumenty i Fakty, October 1998, JRL no.2435.

39

Michael McFaul, “Time Ripe for Yabloko,” The Moscow Times,18 September 1997, p.8.

40

Peter Rutland, “Grigorii Yavlinskii,” Problems of Post-Communism, v.46, no.5,

September/October 1999, pp.48-54. 41

Sergei Mulin, Segodnia, 30 August 1999, p.1, cited in Colton & McFaul, Popular Choice and

Managed Democracy, p.140.

47

42

Head of the Yabloko fraction in the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg, interview, 24

March 1999; Duma deputy, chair of the St. Petersburg Yabloko organization, interview, 2 February 1999; Head of the Political Council of the St. Petersburg branch of Yabloko, interview, 9 April 1999. 43

RFE/RL Newsline, v.2, no.173, Part I, 8 September 1998.

44

RFE/RL Newsline, 24 June 1999.

45

Grigory Yavlinsky, interview, Komsomolskaia Pravda, 18 September 1998, JRL no.2403.

46

This was too late to be picked up in the August 1999 VTsIOM poll reported in Figure 1, which

measured public opinion 20-24 August. 47

Sergei Stepashin, interview, Izvestiia, 14 October 1999, ISI Emerging Markets.

48

Advertisement aired 24 November 1999, on the NTV network, 2030 Moscow time.

49

Polit.Ru, 27 August 1999, 18:02.

50

Vremia MN, 18 October 1999, ISI Emerging Markets.

51

Person familiar with the thinking of Nikolai Travkin, interview, 13 September 1999.

52

Polit.Ru, 2 December 1999, 17:01.

53

Person familiar with the thinking of Ivan Grachev, interview, 16 March 1999; Yabloko

strategist and scholar close to Igrunov, interview, 17 March 1999; Nezavisimaia Gazeta, 15 July 1999, ISI Emerging Markets. 54

Nezavisimaia Gazeta, 15 July 1999, ISI Emerging Markets.

55

Nezavisimaia Gazeta, 15 July 1999, ISI Emerging Markets.

56

Yabloko strategist, scholar close to Igrunov, interview, 17 March 1999.

57

This account is based, in large part, on interviews with a person familiar with the thinking of

Grachev (16 March 1999) and one of Igrunov’s close advisors (17 March 1999) as well as

48

Nezavisimaia

Gazeta,

15

July

1999,

ISI

Emerging

Markets;

and

Elections.Ru,

http://elections.ru/duma/yabloko/, accessed 2 December 2000. 58

Nezavisimaia Gazeta, 15 July 1999, ISI Emerging Markets.

59

Person familiar with the thinking of Igrunov, interview, March 1999; Person familiar with the

thinking of Igrunov, interview, 20 October 2000. 60

On the killing, see RFE/RL Newsline, v.2, no.109, Part I, 9 June 1998.

61

Senior official in the Yabloko Party’s Bashkortostan organization, interview, 22 April 1999.

62

Vremia MN, 11 June 1999, ISI Emerging Markets; Person familiar with the thinking of

Igrunov, interview, March 1999. 63

Nezavisimaia Gazeta, 15 July 1999, ISI Emerging Markets.

64

Grachev’s Tatarstan connection accounts for his eventual coalition with Fatherland-All Russia

since one of the latter’s leaders was Tatarstan President Mintimer Shaimiev. 65

Person familiar with the thinking of Travkin, interview, 13 September 1999.

66

Itogi, April 20, 1999, ISI Emerging Markets.

67

Person familiar with the thinking of Sergei Stepashin, interview, 15 March 2000.

68

Vremia MN, 11 June 1999, ISI Emerging Markets.

69

Except where otherwise noted, this account was constructed through interviews (often multiple

interviews over time) of a wide range of Yabloko officials and activists in Bashkortostan during the spring and fall of 1999 as well as key figures in the central party organization dealing with this case; all significant sides in the dispute were interviewed. 70

This law required the president of the republic to speak Bashkir, a language that the census of

1989 found only 17 percent of the region’s citizens spoke, thereby violating equal opportunity clauses in the Russian Constitution.

49

71

For a brief account of these elections, see Floriana Fossato, “Rakhimov’s Re-Election in

Bashkortostan No Surprise”, RFE/RL, 16 June 1998, in Turkistan Newsletter, v.98-2:120-07July-1998. 72

RFE/RL Newsline, v.2, no.119, Part I, 23 June 1998.

73

For more on this situation, see Author.

74

Person familiar with the thinking of Travkin, interview, 13 September 1999.

75

Person familiar with the thinking of Igrunov, interview, 19 November 1999.

76

Person familiar with the thinking of Igrunov, interview, 19 November 1999.

77

For example, see the aid aired on 22 November 1999, at 21:00 Moscow Time on one state-run

channel. 78

Person familiar with the thinking of Stepashin, interview, 15 March 2000.

79

Information on activities at this, Yabloko’s Seventh Party Congress, comes from personal

observation by the author, who attended this event. 80

This

platform

can

be

found

at

Yabloko’s

website

at

http://www.yabloko.ru/Union/Program/prog-99.html. 81

Advertisements aired on RTR, 23 November 1999, 08:15 Bashkortostan Time; and on a state-

run channel, 22 November 1999, 21:00 Moscow Time. 82

See Laura Belin, “Yabloko Plays Up Concrete Achievements,” RFE/RL Newsline, December

7, 1999. 83

Interviews with people familiar with the thinking of Igrunov and Stepashin.

84

See, for example: RFE/RL Newsline, 4 October 1999; Polit.Ru, 5 October 1999, 20:00;

Polit.Ru, 10 November 1999, 16:11. 85

Polit.Ru, 5 October 1999, 15:57; Polit.Ru, 29 November 1999, 10:27.

50

86

Manikhin, Rossiiskaia Demokraticheskaia Partiia Iabloko, p.96.

87

Polit.Ru, 5 October 1999, 16:57.

88

Polit.Ru, 1 November 1999, 16:25.

89

Person familiar with the thinking of Stepashin, interview, 15 March 2000.

90

Polit.Ru, 9 November 1999, 11:25; Manikhin, Rossiiskaia Demokraticheskaia Partiia Iabloko,

p.98. 91

Polit.Ru, 10 November 1999, 16:11.

92

Manikhin, Rossiiskaia Demokraticheskaia Partiia Iabloko, p.99.

93

Henry E. Hale, “The Origins of United Russia and the Putin Presidency: The Role of

Contingency in Party-System Development,” Demokratizatsiya 12, 2, Spring 2004, pp.169-94. 94

Manikhin, Rossiiskaia Demokraticheskaia Partiia Iabloko, p.99.

95

Colton and McFaul, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy, pp.156, 290.

96

Ibid., p.159.

97

Polit.Ru, 18 October 1999, 10:21; Polit.Ru, 27 October 1999, 12:49; Person familiar with the

thinking of Stepashin, interview, 15 March 2000. 98

Polit.Ru, 8 December 1999, 17:11; Polit.Ru, 13 December 1999, 11:55.

99

See the assessments reported in the St. Petersburg Times, 21 December 1999, ISI Emerging

Markets. 100

On the debate, see Belin, “Yabloko Plays Up Concrete Achievements”.

101

Belin, “Yabloko Plays Up Concrete Achievements”.

102

Colton and McFaul, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy, p.150.

103

Interviews with senior regional Yabloko officials.

104

Ibid., pp.152-3.

51

105

Ibid., p.156.

106

For Yabloko’s poll ratings between 2000 and 2003 as well as the tracking of its campaign, see

Henry E. Hale, “Bazaar Politics: Prospects for Parties in Russia,” Russia Watch, no.9, January 2003,

pp.5-7,

http://bcsia.ksg.harvard.edu/publication.cfm?program=CORE&ctype=paper&item_id=367; and the

2003-04

issues

of

Henry

E.

Hale

(ed.),

Russian

Election

Watch,

http://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/publications/rew.html. 107

Colton and McFaul, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy.

108

Gelman, Transformatsiia v Rossii, pp.167-8.

109

Galina Michaleva, head of Yabloko’s regional directorate, interview, 17 March 2004.

52

at:

Figure 1: Percentage of People Who Say They Would Vote for a Given Party, May - December 19991 40

35

30

25

20

KPRF Unity FAR SPS Yabloko LDPR

15

10

5

0 May-99 1

Jun-99

Jul-99

Aug-99

Sep-99

Oct-99

Nov-99

Dec-99

The VTsIOM polls reported here were taken during the last third of each month, each with a different set of 1,600 respondents across Russia. Reported figures are the total percentages of interviewees who say they will vote and would vote for a given party were the election held the Sunday following the interview. All poll data are as reported in Russian Election Watch except for the final December 17-20 poll, which is reported in Richard Rose and Neil Munro, Elections Without Order (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2002) p.128. The “SPS” figures code parties led by Gaidar prior to the founding of SPS in August 1999, when Kirienko decided to join with the forces co-led by Gaidar. The “FAR” figures refer to Fatherland prior to August 1999, when it merged with All Russia to form Fatherland-All Russia.