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

Alexander N. Domrin

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.

     Àëåêñàíäð Äîìðèí.  'Ñâîáîäíûå, íî íå ñïðàâåäëèâûå' âûáîðû: 'íå ñïðàâåäëèâûå' ïî îòíîøåíèþ ê êîìó?  Îïóáëèêîâàíî â: Russian Election Watch (John F.  Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University), Vol.3, No.5, February 2004; Johnson's  Russia List, No.8062, February 12, 2004. 

Âåðñèÿ äëÿ ïå÷àòè. URL: http://www.pvlast.ru/archive/index.219.php