By Boris Kagarlitsky
MOSCOW — When Russian voters in December 1995 gave Communists and other opponents of the government a majority in the State Duma, there seemed every reason to expect that if President Boris Yeltsin were re-elected in mid-1996 we would be faced with early parliamentary elections.
For the first six months of its existence, the new Duma functioned as a sort of election campaign team for Communist presidential candidate Gennady Zyuganov. Then, after Yeltsin's victory, the Duma deputies threw themselves into a struggle for survival.
This struggle has been surprisingly successful. At first widely viewed as intractable and destined to be a "short parliament", the present Duma now has every chance of becoming a "long parliament". In any case, if the deputies survive three years without dissolution or a coup, that will already be a sort of national record.
In their efforts to retain their mandates, the deputies have found unexpected allies — the president and the government. If fear at the thought of early elections is making the deputies conciliatory, the authorities have good reasons for preferring to work with today's intimidated and compliant Duma majority than to take a chance on the composition of a new parliament.
The left deputies are ready to buy themselves time through abandoning their principles and promises. For the government, the threat of dissolving the Duma has been more effective than actually dissolving it.
For all its rhetoric, the "opposition Duma" has been exceptionally loyal to the authorities throughout the entire period since the presidential elections. The Duma confirmed the prime minister in office, voted for the budget and, except for a short period during the president's illness when there was no-one to frighten the deputies, has avoided controversial initiatives.
The more concessions the Duma makes, and the weaker its positions, the fewer chances the present deputies have of being re-elected, and the less their wish to hurry with elections.
Nevertheless, talk of early elections has begun to appear in press organs considered close to the government. Along with it has come speculation about changes to the electoral laws and suggestions that proportional representation will be abolished.
If these ideas really come from the Kremlin strategists, one can feel only pity for Russia's rulers. If the voters reject the present deputies, it will be in order to elect more radical ones or, at any rate, deputies who will promise to take a harsher line with the authorities. Many of these new Duma members, of course, will eventually be bought off, but this will need additional time and money, which will not make life easier for the government.
Furthermore, for the authorities under present circumstances to abolish proportional representation would amount to abandoning any attempt to influence the legislature. At present half the deputies are elected from single-member constituencies, and half on the basis of party lists. The government works closely with the Duma fraction leaders, who in turn exert tight control over the deputies — or, at least, over those who owe their posts to the party-list system.
It is enough to analyse the voting on the budget to find that, with only rare exceptions, the party-list deputies voted as their leaders instructed them, while the "single mandate" members included a considerable number of dissidents.
The representatives of the territorial constituencies not only feel a degree of independence of their party hierarchs, but also have to respond to the mood of their electors, and this mood is far from docile.
If the "single mandate" deputies look over their shoulders at anyone, it is usually the local heads of administration in their districts. This, perhaps, is what the analysts who want to abolish the party-list vote are counting on.
Russia's upper house, the Council of the Federation, is made up of the executive and legislative heads of each administrative region. The government's relations with the administrators who are seated in the council are quite stable.
But it should not be thought that the provincial chiefs feel much love for the Kremlin. Most of them, and not only representatives of the Communist-voting "red belt", have thoroughly negative feelings toward Moscow. The only reason these feelings are not displayed more openly is that governors who depend on federal subsidies cannot allow themselves much in the way of defiance.
Becoming senators ex officio, the local chiefs act more cautiously than the lower house deputies from the same regions. There is, however, a certain division of labour. The members of the Council of the Federation request, while the lower house deputies demand. For a cautious governor, a radical Duma deputy can be very useful.
The Kremlin's actions to date show that it has been careful to take all these circumstances into account. Why, then, the present attacks on the Duma?
Despite their fear and servility, the left deputies are finding it hard to agree to the current "sequestration" of the budget — that is, to the introducing of massive cuts to most areas of state spending.
For these deputies to accept sequestration means to confess, before the whole country, to being totally without principles. But the deputies are not resolved on openly saying "no". They want to string the question out, to hold prolonged discussions, to go off on holidays — and so to let the budget year expire.
In essence, this option is also acceptable to the government, which will make its spending cuts whether the deputies agree to them or not. Whatever might be said on television, the threat of dissolution is not being posed particularly sharply.
Nevertheless, the government can count on certain gains if it forces sequestration to a vote, and obliges the deputies to fall in behind the most savage reductions in state spending yet. The deputies, in agreeing to sequestration, would become total hostages of the authorities. The Kremlin could then deal with them as it wished.
To keep this option open, the government needs to pressure and intimidate the deputies, and this is the reason for the talk of dissolution and a new electoral law.
The government may decide to let sequestration drop. The Duma has not yet exhausted its possibilities for the Kremlin. Ahead is a new budget, a tax code needs to be adopted, and elections would do much to complicate life for the authorities.
Nevertheless, it is quite possible that the present Duma will not see out its term. A sufficient number of deputies may reflect that new elections are approaching in any case, and that since a showdown with angry voters is inevitable, it makes sense for parliamentarians to remember their principles.
Russians love victims of injustice, and will be much readier to vote for candidates who go into elections as victims of the Kremlin than for people perceived as its hostages.
If the authorities sense that the opportunities for manipulating the present set of deputies have been exhausted, the Kremlin might also decide in favour of early elections. A suitable crisis would be engineered, and the indignant deputies would be hustled off the parliamentary stage — a development that in many cases would be substantially what the deputies themselves wanted.
Bringing the current Duma to such a close would be the only kindness shown by the authorities in return for all the deputies' concessions. In this case, the Kremlin would then meet with familiar faces in a new parliament.