Introduction
September regional elections hold little intrigue. At first glance, this assessment applies to all Russian election campaigns over the past ten years. At various times, regional elections in the post-Crimea years of 2014, 2017, 2023, the Duma campaign of 2016, the presidential campaign of 2018, and probably many others have been called “most boring in history.” This comes as no surprise; while Russia was becoming more authoritarian, its elections became less competitive.
Yet, maintaining an authoritarian regime (even with some sort of competitive elections, as was the case in Russia before the war) is not easy either. That is why “the most boring elections in history” have been punctuated by excesses: mass protests, as in 2011, because of the parliamentary elections, and in 2019, due to the Moscow City Duma elections, or the unexpected victory of candidates unapproved by the authorities. In 2018, for example, administrative candidates supported by President Vladimir Putin lost gubernatorial elections in four regions. This has occasionally raised the opposition’s hopes for “overturning elections” (i.e., elections that suddenly end in defeat for the government, as happened in Venezuela in 2015), even during the 2024 presidential campaign.
Without going into a discussion about how realistic these expectations were, it is worth noting that until recently, even under dictatorship, the elections could yield unexpected results for the authorities due to a constellation of many constantly changing factors. Nevertheless, it is necessary to single out two main ones. First, there is the relative possibility of fair vote counting in regional and municipal elections (of course, not without the help of a well-developed election observer movement). This made possible, for example, the tactics of consolidated protest (or “smart”) voting, when the authorities had to recognize the victory of an unapproved candidate if they won a majority of votes. Second, there are so-called “systemic parties” that, despite not representing any real opposition to the ruling party, used to enjoy limited autonomy. Yes, formally, candidates still have the option of running as self-nominated independents. Still, the number of obstacles is so incredibly high that the probability of even registering for the election without party backing is extremely low and constantly decreasing. In the last Duma elections, for example, there were half as many self-nominated candidates as in the previous electoral cycle.
The factor of grass-roots monitoring has now almost become obsolete. The Russian Electoral Commission introduced the Remote Electronic Voting (REV) system at various levels of elections, which independent experts consider non-transparent and closed to observers. Thus, while in the elections to the Moscow City Duma in 2019, the REV was tested in three districts only, in this year’s elections in Moscow, it will be a priority voting method: to get a paper ballot, voters must submit a digital application. Experts believe this practice will gradually spread to federal elections, allowing the authorities to get any desired result.
At the same time, to give even such elections a semblance of competitiveness, the authorities will continue to need “systemic” parties. And given that Vladimir Putin is apparently comfortable with the existing set of “systemic” opposition parties, one should not expect any changes in the party system. Although these parties can only be called the opposition by a great stretch, they are still large entities with extensive networks of regional branches, thousands of activists, and a particular electorate. And throughout history, there have been cases when the servile “systemic” opposition became an important actor in democratization.
A Brief History of Systemic Parties: From Parliamentary Majority to Decadence
On 12 July 1990, elected a month earlier as Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, Boris Yeltsin, when giving a speech at the XXVIII Congress of the CPSU (which would be its last), announced his resignation from the party. This is how he explained his decision: “In connection with my election as Chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet and my enormous responsibility to Russia and its people, given the society’s transition to a multi-party system, I will not be able to comply with the decisions of the CPSU only. As the head of the supreme legislative power of the Republic, I must obey the will of the people and their authorized representatives.”
Among the flood of letters of support he received were assurances of readiness to join a democratic party if Yeltsin were to create one. Although he had mentioned such a scenario a few months earlier, Yeltsin would never have a “ruling party,” nor would he join any other. The idea that the president needs to be above all parties will significantly hinder the development of a robust party system in Russia.
The creation of “proto-party” structures unofficially began in the late 1980s based on informal public organizations. It became official in October 1990 with the adoption of the USSR law “On Public Associations.” A year after, in the first presidential elections in the RSFSR, non-CPSU candidates were nominated with party support. Yeltsin, for example, was supported, among others, by the Democratic Party of Russia (formed in May 1990 by Nikolai Travkin, a deputy of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet) and Democratic Russia, while Zhirinovsky was supported by the Liberal Democratic Party of the Soviet Union (LDPSU).
However, according to the hastily adopted law “On the Election of the President of the RSFSR,” trade unions and mass socio-political movements (such as Democratic Russia, which also supported Yeltsin), as well as “labor collectives” could also nominate candidates, provided that 100,000 signatures were collected in their support. That time, all candidates except Zhirinovsky preferred to collect signatures, even the candidate from the communist establishment, ex-Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov; the plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the RSFSR supported him after his nomination.
The framework laws “On Basic Guarantees of Electoral Rights” and “On Elections” were adopted during the 1993-1995 reform, setting the basis for the electoral system in post-Soviet Russia. This reform introduced an alternative vote (for instance, the ballot paper changed — instead of “crossing out” candidates, as had been done in the USSR, the voter now had to put a check mark opposite the candidate’s surname), election funds for candidates, a mixed system for elections to the State Duma, and the principle of equality of candidates in access to the mass media. The basic principles of democratic elections were enshrined, even though today, they exist exclusively on paper. In the following years (1996-2002), according to Russian researcher Alexander Kynev, “work on electoral legislation was mainly aimed at eliminating gaps in legislative regulation and combating negative phenomena that emerged during election campaigns.”
However, all these new laws added little to the regulation of party life. Except for the ban on the CPSU after the August Coup in 1991, there were no serious legislative restrictions on the creation of parties and other associations. This led to a rather motley and fragmented party scene in Russia of the 1990s. Projects such as the “Party of Beer Lovers” are often recalled in this regard. Sometimes, this ease of creating such political projects on the eve of an election is mistakenly taken to be the reason why Russia has never developed strong parties; this argument would later be used to create restrictions in legislation. Allegedly, the ease of creating parties makes it easier for politicians to move from one party to another, not to bind themselves with pre-election obligations (because it is always possible to create a new, untainted party brand). This is partially true, but the reasons why strong parties have not emerged in Russia are political and not legal.
First, we can assume that one of the reasons for this development of the electoral system was the process of elections to the Congresses of People’s Deputies in 1989-1990, which were, in fact, the only elections that met democratic criteria. Deputies were elected under the majoritarian system, which is not conducive to the formation of strong parties. As political scientist Maurice Duverger noted back in the middle of the last century, when voters vote not for parties (as in the proportional system) but for individual politicians, the latter have a much weaker incentive to bind themselves to party commitments; their victory depends directly on the voters, without intermediaries in the form of political parties. It was these elections that largely formed the “political class” of contemporary Russia, and freedom from party obligations was an undeniable advantage at that time. After years of the CPSU’s monopoly on political power, voters associated the very word “party” with the communist rule, which was losing its legitimacy.
All in all, at first, there were no incentives to build strong parties. This could have changed over time, but just after the expiry of the powers of the first convocation of the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies, a much more important factor intervened — the Russian president gained constitutionally unchecked power. Even before the final phase of the constitutional crisis in October 1993, a significant part of the Russian political class had formed an idea of the need for strong presidential power. And according to Russian researchers Mikhail Krasnov and Ilya Shablinsky, it was not just the personality of Boris Yeltsin himself (who, as is well known, believed that “there must be someone in charge in the country”) but the fear that a parliamentary system would slow down reforms, or even make the revenge of the “nomenklatura” irreversible. Without going into the extent to which such risks were justified, it is worth noting that the forceful resolution of the crisis made the adoption of the “super-presidential” version of the constitution inevitable.
The new constitution effectively deprived the parliament of the opportunity to really influence policy. It is not surprising that even though during the following years of Yeltsin’s rule, the opposition completely dominated the Duma, Yeltsin’s opponents in parliament did not seriously affect the structure of the ruling coalition or even the policy pursued by the government. This was aggravated by the fact that much of the political process in Russia in the 1990s took place in the shadow of public institutions. The “fighting bulldogs under the carpet” situation also did not contribute to formalizing the political struggle in the form of party confrontation: the decision-making process was concentrated in behind-the-scenes centers, and personal proximity to Yeltsin played a key role. According to political scientist Lilia Shevtsova, “Yeltsin was forming a different practice of patrimonialism, no longer rooted in the nomenklatura legacy, returning to pre-Soviet traditions.”
It would seem that even if the authorities considered parties as little more than pre-election political-technological projects (all the so-called “parties of power”: “Democratic Choice of Russia,” “Our Home is Russia,” and “Unity” were created based on this logic), the opposition, apparently, was able to form stable party projects like the CPRF (Communists) or Yabloko (Liberals). However, the conditions of a weak parliament and incredibly high stakes in the “winner-takes-all” fight for the presidential seat, led to the embedding of the opposition in the political regime (i.e., the formation of “systemic” parties that do not claim the power) already in the 1990s.
The “Golden Days” of Systemic Parties
The division of the Russian political opposition into “systemic” and “non-systemic” is so common in the media that it is poorly conceptualized in academic literature. Russian researcher Rostislav Turovsky suggests that systemic opposition should be understood as “a type of opposition in an authoritarian regime that has limited access to power, agrees to play by the rules imposed by the ruling elite, and maintains more or less regular and informal ties with it.” Researchers David Armstrong, Ora John Reuter and Graeme B. Robertson call systemic “those parties to which the (authoritarian) regime has granted some institutional accommodation.”
The classification of political opposition found in the works of Spanish political scientist Juan Linz is more recognized. Depending on their goals, he places the parties between semi-opposition (ready to enter the government without changing either the political regime, or its policies) and principled opposition (which will be satisfied only with a complete transformation of the regime), and depending on the methods and readiness to go beyond the legal field—into loyal, semi-loyal, and disloyal. Based on this classification, the “systemic” opposition can hardly be called an opposition at all since it not only accepts all of the game rules imposed from above but also does not claim to be able to enter the government. No wonder that in 2004, against the backdrop of the failure of the liberals in the Duma elections (the Union of Right Forces and Yabloko parties), Russian political scientist Vladimir Gelman, who described these classifications in detail, concluded that the opposition in Russia was “dying out,” comparing it to dinosaurs.
Indeed, following the definitions above, “systemic” opposition arises in authoritarian regimes that, for whatever reason, are interested in preserving imitative democratic institutions. And, even though this was also common in “classical” autocracies, such as Socialist Poland and the GDR, the preservation of such facade institutions is of particular importance in regimes of competitive or electoral authoritarianism. This term was popularized by political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, who, in the early 21st century, tried to classify regimes in which formal elections and competition exist, but the leadership never changes in the elections, as, for example, in Russia. Russian political scientist Grigory Golosov defines electoral authoritarianism as “a political regime that allows the existence of institutions that are democratic in form (such as the multi-party system, elections and parliaments), but remains authoritarian in terms of the basic characteristics of state governance.” It is in this context that the existence of “systemic” parties in Russia should be viewed.
The truly “golden days” for the systemic parties began in the noughties when Vladimir Putin came to power. At first glance, it seems paradoxical: it was the new president who, as is well known, began to form the “vertical of power,” put an end to the fragmentation of elites and, ultimately, formed an authoritarian regime. However, an authoritarian regime is not formed at once. In Russia, it was preceded by many stages, including, among others, the strengthening of federal parties. At one point, this development even raised hopes for the emergence of a truly powerful party system along European lines.
Initially, the new president needed to tackle a very important issue—suppressing the arbitrary rule of the “regional barons,” a system that contemporaries often compared to feudalism. One way to weaken the power of regional autocrats was to strengthen federal political parties. By the end of the 1990s, the “regional barons” had almost wholly subjugated regional parliaments and de facto expelled the federal parties, which they could not control. Thus, the tasks of strengthening regional legislatures and federal parties were interrelated for the federal center.
As early as 2001, the law on parties was adopted, tightening the conditions for party registration. At the same time, the process of forming the “party of power” was taking place. The Unity bloc, the remnants of the Fatherland-All Russia faction (OVR) and Our Home is Russia, formed United Russia (ER) in the same year. Of course, the newly formed party of power was in many ways the main beneficiary of such “supply reduction” on the electoral market. In the 2003 elections, the United Russia Party gained a constitutional majority (largely through defectors from other factions), and by the end of the noughties, it had achieved complete hegemony at the regional level. The party controlled the majority of regional legislatures, and most governors were also members of the United Russia Party.
It would seem that the systemic opposition was the main loser in this situation since the United Russia’s members were taking seats that were not previously empty. The paradox is that each party embedded in the system individually received its share of carrots. By 2007, thanks to the tightening of party legislation, there were only seven registered parties left in Russia. Still, those who remained became the only operators of the remaining political processes in the country, without which it was impossible to become a candidate. One could say that the authorities, in fact, cleared the field for them within their niches and also provided them with good state funding.
This controversial position of systemic parties is an inherent feature of the electoral authoritarianism regime established in Russia by the early 2010s. Systemic parties that are sparring partners of the government in power are as much an integral part of such systems as electoral fraud or targeted repression of the most intractable opponents. By the 2011 Duma campaign, the CPRF, Just Russia (SR), LDPR, and other registered parties represented in parliament, although criticizing the regime, were resting on the laurels that their status as systemic opposition granted them, while their less fortunate colleagues were either subjected to repression or disappeared from the political map.
Moreover, while for some parties, the transition to the “systemic” category was an attempt to ensure their survival in the new system (this, for example, was the path of the CPRF), others were initially created in coordination with the Kremlin for political-technological purposes. This was the case of the Just Russia (SR) party, which was designed to split the “leftist” electorate and weaken the CPRF. One of the decisive factors in all cases was whether the party had a leader willing to negotiate or personally loyal to Putin. If the leaders were less able to negotiate, the party had no chance of becoming a political actor. The most striking example here is the Rodina party created for the 2003 Duma elections, which, according to the presidential administration’s plans, was supposed to split the leftist and patriotic electorate. The party showed remarkable success in the elections, receiving more than 9% of the popular vote. A few years later, party leader Dmitry Rogozin had to resign under pressure from the Kremlin, and Rodina was absorbed by the emerging Just Russia, headed by Sergei Mironov, who had known Putin since his days in St. Petersburg.
It is important to understand that the formation of authoritarianism under Putin was not an irreversible process; up to a certain point, this regime could transform under the pressure of democratic forces. The protests of 2011-2012 were a serious test for Russian electoral authoritarianism. The complete domination of the political arena by parties controlled by the authorities naturally led to the “vote for any other party” strategy in the Duma elections in the winter of 2011. This won the “non-systemicists” many mandates, and President Dmitry Medvedev was forced to initiate political reform: direct gubernatorial elections were returned, and the registration requirements for new political parties were drastically reduced.
These changes, however, failed to shake the system substantially. The protests soon died down, the authorities adopted a number of repressive laws (including the foreign agents law), and held the first public political process in a long time. The opposition was nevertheless ready to try its hand in the electoral field. The politicization of a number of social groups, primarily in large cities, was most vividly expressed during Alexei Navalny’s mayoral campaign in Moscow. Technologically, it was something fundamentally new (for example, the electoral cubes, which no campaign can now do without, appeared at that time), and it brought results — Alexei Navalny won more than 27% of the vote, almost forcing Sergei Sobyanin into a second round.
Who knows how the opposition’s organizational capacity would have grown and how the authorities would have responded to it if the annexation of Crimea had not turned the game upside down in 2014. The annexation, which caused a “rally around the flag” and brought the authorities immense popularity, seriously affected the nascent potential of the opposition even without repressions. The systemic parties seemed to have lost their autonomy altogether. Constrained not only by the increasing rigidity of the regime but also by the desire not to lose their electorate, they had only to radicalize the authorities’ rhetoric.
However, the competitive nature of the regime was generally preserved. The effect of the “Crimean consensus” quickly began to fade and probably finally disappeared by 2018, especially against the backdrop of highly unpopular pension reform. The general public fatigue with Putin and disbelief that he could “lead the country out of its deteriorating economic situation” also had an impact. As a result, for example, in January 2019, Putin’s approval rating, even according to the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (RPORC), which is close to the government, fell to a record low of 33.4%.
It was at this time that Alexei Navalny, who could neither be a candidate himself, as he had been five years earlier, nor register his own party, proposed to “hack” the electoral system using “Smart Voting,” primarily for candidates from systemic parties. Not only did this strategy really erode United Russia’s monopoly, but a side effect of Smart Voting was to increase the autonomy of the systemic opposition, which, albeit sometimes against its will, became a beneficiary of this strategy. The authorities were forced to respond in two directions: repressive and technological. On the one hand, they had to intensify repressions both against the non-systemic opposition (the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) and Smart Voting were recognised as extremist, and their leaders and supporters were either jailed or expelled from the country) and against the assets of the systemic parties (the Furgal case, the Rashkin case). On the other hand, e-vote (REV) was deployed to make “hacking the system” impossible.
The authorities had something to worry about. For example, candidates supported by Smart Voting in the 2021 Duma elections won in the majority of Moscow constituencies in “paper” polling stations. Without the REV, it became increasingly difficult for the government candidates to win, even though they were increasingly mimicking self-nominated candidates. As the regime found it increasingly difficult to win even staged elections, it gradually changed structurally toward a personalist dictatorship. The beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine accelerated this movement many times over.
The Future of Systemic Parties
How is the position of systemic parties changing in this regard? And is there a chance that the “systemic opposition” parties, which have reached such a state by 2024, will still have a role in the future? There is no simple answer to this question.
At first sight, the same thing happened to the systemic parties as in 2014: their leaders are competing with each other in hawkish rhetoric (except for, perhaps, the New People party) and unanimously passing new packages of repressive laws. And yet there is a fundamental difference—the “Donbas consensus” (the term Sergei Kiriyenko tried to promote in 2022 by analogy with the “Crimean consensus”), no matter how much the Russian authorities try to prove otherwise, has failed to emerge: as the latest study by the Public Sociology Lab (PS Lab) shows, “Russian society remains politically demobilized and de-ideologized.”
Now, unlike in 2014, the decisive factor in the systemic parties’ support for the ongoing personalisation of the authoritarian regime is not the desire to please their electorate but the fear of repression. Moreover, the situation began to change long before the war: as Carnegie Berlin Center analyst Andrei Pertsev wrote back in 2019, the authorities “offered the systemic opposition a new contract: comply with all the old requirements, but if you accidentally win or create problems, sorry, but we will punish you.” The cases of Pavel Grudinin and Sergei Furgal, who were extremely systemic and tried to avoid any conflicts but still created problems for the authorities, were only the most vivid.
This fear is evident in the numbers: according to the regular reports of Golos, recent election campaigns regularly break historical anti-records in terms of the number of people willing to take part: for example, in the last presidential election, 15 people submitted documents to the Central Electoral Commission; in 2018, there were 36. This happens at all levels of elections—even for spoiler candidates, the risks are constantly increasing, but the potential benefits are almost non-existent.
These factors lead to the fact that the previously low ratings of the systemic opposition begin to sag: people simply do not understand why they should vote for the candidates. The systemic parties cannot ignore this, yet they cannot expand their electoral base by criticizing the government’s policy: under wartime conditions, any criticism has become too sensitive for the authorities, even if it is not directly related to the war. As a result, even propagandists note the “general atmosphere of unity within the Duma,” attributing it, however, to the non-existent “Donbas consensus.”
The authorities also realize that all this makes the parties of the systemic opposition actually unnecessary, neither for the voters nor for their most flamboyant activists and leaders. Nevertheless, they remain necessary for the government itself, which is not interested in radically changing political institutions—for instance, in creating one single “National Union,” as it was in Salazar’s Portugal. Therefore, we are likely to see more frequent use of REVs to falsify votes for “opposition candidates,” as was the case, for example, with Vladimir Ryzhkov in the by-elections to the Moscow City Duma in 2019. If this practice becomes widespread, the parties of the “systemic opposition” risk transforming into what analyst Tatyana Stanovaya calls “administrative parties,” which, unlike the systemic parties, are not in a state of unfavorable bargaining with the presidential administration but are directly controlled by it (the New People party, for example, can be classified as such).
This party evolution will constantly reduce the role of “systemic opposition” parties as possible actors of “democratic transit.” Political scientists often recall the National Action Party in Mexico, the People’s Bloc in Malaysia or the Democratic Party of Indonesia, which played a significant role in transforming the political regime in their countries, although for many years, they remained “sparring partners” for the parties in power. In all these cases, however, the autocracies were quite strongly institutionalized, and decision-making did not depend on one person’s will.
And yet, for the time being, such a possibility remains. For example, political scientist Vsevolod Bederson compares the Polish Catholic party Znak, which in the late 1980s played an important role in negotiations between the opposition and Polish communists, with the Russian CPRF, which can also play a similar role. The fact is that the CPRF still has a fairly broad structure and is perceived as “our people” by the existing regime, but it also has contacts with the non-systemic opposition. This is evidenced by Gennady Zyuganov’s demands to co-partisans to “break the umbilical cord with Navalnyatina” and numerous speeches against the war by both rank-and-file members of the party and members of CPRF factions in regional legislatures in February 2022. However, it is unlikely that such ties will remain after the large-scale purges in the party following the outbreak of the war.
The role that systemic parties will be able to play not during the transit but directly in post-Putin Russia (if, of course, it moves towards democratization, which is not at all obvious) is a separate story. For example, according to Russian political scientist Grigory Golosov, “institutional legacy, even a bad one, should be valued”: any elements that emerged before the reconfiguration of the political system will, by virtue of this, have greater autonomy, and the existing party structures will be easier to rebuild for democratic political struggle. As long as Russia’s “systemic opposition” continues to degenerate, which is inevitable under a personalist dictatorship, its chances of surviving and playing a role in the future will be constantly decreasing.
At the same time, the disappearance of the systemic opposition, and thus of a legal channel for expressing dissent, will move the system further away from sync. This may lead to unpredictable results, such as clearing the way for the emergence of new political organizations, including left-wing, that are not discredited as systemic parties. Of course, under conditions of immigration and repression, the non-systemic opposition is experiencing enormous difficulties. On the other hand, as the “systemic” pillars of the regime are weakening, the real opposition needs to think about how this can be used to achieve its goals and repoliticize Russia’s people.
