“Free, But Not Fair”: “Not Fair” for Whom?

It’s not the first time that Western officials and mass media question a “free and fair” character of elections in Russia.  Just 2 years ago, the U.S. “Russian Democracy Act of 2002” (P.L. 107-246) named only two “substantially free and fair Russian parliamentary elections” – of 1995 and 1999 (sec. 2(3)(B)).  Fascinatingly, early drafts of the act extended the same definition to Russian “Presidential elections in 1996 and 2000”.  The U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations struck down the second part of the sentence.  At long last, U.S. Senators got embarrassed to call Yeltsin’s shameful reelection in 1996 “free and fair”. 
Equally significant was omission of two other Russian parliamentary elections - of 1990 and 1993 – among “free and fair” elections, in definition of U.S. Congress.  As a reminder, elections of 1990 were recognized as "the freest ever held in Russia" by such organizations as the U.S. Federal Election Commission and Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.  Nobody doubted “fairness” of those elections either.  Not until President Yeltsin decided to dissolve that very parliament and got assurance of President Clinton that the U.S. Administration supports Yeltsin “fully” in his “consolidation of democratic reform”.
Everything is clear with the 1993 elections too.  “Red brown” Supreme Soviet was burned down.  Dozens (if not hundreds, we’ll never know the exact number) of its defenders were killed.  U.S. Senate voted for .5 billion in “assistance” to Russia and other former Soviet republics in order, as Senator Claiborne Pell (D-RI) bluntly put, to “to show the reformers in the NIS that we are in their corner”.  Believing that the new Duma would be “truly representative”, and “far more democratic and friendly to the West than the previous parliament”, Rep. Gerald B. Solomon (R-NY) called on U.S. President and Congress to “divert from existing programs whatever resources necessary to achieve the objective of ensuring” victory for the “reformers” in Russia.  Yet, ungrateful Russian voters turned their backs on the “reformers”.  How could this kind of elections be “fair”?
However, there is a certain truth in criticism of the last Russian elections as not completely “fair”.  Two groups of people and political forces certainly have a right to say so. 
The first of them is the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF).  Negative campaigning and misrepresentation of CPRF on Russian TV are well-documented.  Analysts of liberal Novaya gazeta and Nezavismaya gazeta (who cannot be accused of being Communist sympathizers) came to the same conclusion that CPRF was “put on ice” by three out of four national TV channels (1st,  RTR, TVTs).  The same channels “ignored or covered neutrally” electoral campaigns of URF, Yabloko and LDPR (1st, RTR) or Yabloko & LDPR (TVTs).  The remaining national TV channel – NTV – didn’t take sides and covered all parties “neutrally”.  Fairness of CPRF’s complaints was recognized in two official letters from the Central Election Commission’s Law Department.  Regardless of our attitude to CPRF, that’s necessary to admit that only once before – during the 1996 presidential campaign - the party and her supporters were an object of similar “black PR”, dirty tricks, open lies, and uncivilized pressure from the government.
The other group of people who can wholeheartedly question “fairness” of the 2003 Duma elections are U.S. AID-funded IRI, NDI and similar programs in Russia.  Millions of dollars and best hopes (who said “wishful thinking”?) were invested into attempts to “help” URF and Yabloko to “strengthen their organizational structures and their role in elections”, and that’s the result?  Even the largest financial contributions and considerable “administrative resource” (from Chubais’s UES and members of Kasyanov’s government) didn’t save URF from a miserable failure in the elections. 
Exploitation of the late Galina Starovoitova’s legacy didn’t help Irina Khakamada to win in the Starovoitova’s district No.209 in St.Petersburg where former State Duma Speaker Seleznev got more than twice bigger number of votes (100,326 against Khakamada’s 45,118).  Chairman of St. Petersburg’s branch of URF Grigory Tomchin did something nearly impossible: he got 32,946 votes in his district No.207 and managed to be crushed by another candidate named “Against All” (who got 46,646 votes).  The fact that two thirds of the URF’s Duma campaign budget (as the URF’s internal investigation reportedly showed) were embezzled is hardly an excuse here. 
Russian “liberal” parties were able to bring only 7 members to the 450-deputies Duma.  And the first thing five of them did after the elections was to switch the sides and join pro-Putin’s Unified Russia.  (Did somebody say “principles”?)
Reproduction of my previous article from Russia Watch (No.9 2003) on Johnson’s Russia List (7314, Sept.6, 2003) caused a fierce reaction of IRI officials in Moscow.  Calling themselves “Americans who work tirelessly in Russia on the very issue of party-building” and praising the IRI program for its “intensive” and “hard” work in Russia “for over a decade”, they denied working with just two main “reformist” parties in Russia (7326, Sept.16, 2003).  Well, the devil is in the details.  Even though the IRI Moscow web site says that IRI works “intensively” with three other parties, including a non-existent “Union of Unity” (what’s that?), the web site provides links only to these three parties: Yabloko, URF, Russia’s Democratic Choice and to these two individuals: “Sergei Kirienko - leader of New Force Party; Boris Nemtsov - leader of Young Russia Party”.  Did anybody expect something different?
Analysis of 8 last issues of the NDI periodical in Russian (Nos.28-35) shows the same picture.  Vestnik NDI is dominated by interviews of federal and regional leaders of URF (5) and Yabloko (4) (with 2 interviews of State Duma deputies from Unity and OVR) and coverage of events in those two parties mainly.   Irina Khakamada was certainly right when criticizing NDI for “somewhat one-dimensional interpretation of events in Russian political life” and for its “tendency to work with the same partners” (Vestnik NDI, No.30, 2001, p.1), even though Khakamada herself was one of such “partners”.
On the positive side, results of the 2003 parliamentary elections in Russia may have an unexpectedly and inadvertently positive effect for American people.  Yet another disastrous defeat of Russian “liberal” parties can make it much more difficult for U.S. AID, NDI, IRI and the like to spend money of American taxpayers under pretext of working with “those political parties that… have significant public support with a potential for expansion” (as the NDI defines one of its goals in Russia) or “working with pro-reform factions in the State Duma” (as the IRI’s “Current Program” in Russia claims), for there are no such parties in the Duma anymore, and that’s clear that URF and Yabloko are rapidly losing any public support in the country. 
The Russian people made their choice.  The U.S. Administration and American programs in Moscow should respect outcome of Russian elections, come to terms with the inevitable reality and drastically reconsider priorities of their work in Russia.