South Atlantic Quarterly

A G A I N S T the D A Y

Ilya Budraitskis

The Weakest Link of Managed Democracy:

How the Parliament Gave Birth
to Nonparliamentary Politics

Protest and the Political Abstraction of “Fair Elections”

T
​ he protest movement of 2011–2012 quickly brought Russian politics, hith-
erto isolated and limited, into an international arena, striking a chord with
the events of the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt, Occupy Wall Street in
the United States, and demonstrations against “austerity measures” in Spain
and Greece. Though each was focused on a different matter, these move-
ments all marked the deepening crisis—both political and economic—of
the ruling order. However, in Western Europe and the United States, these
movements cast doubt on representative democracy as the ideology deter-
mining forms of domination and political participation. In Russia, by con-
trast, the previously passive and depoliticized social groups that made up
the diverse composition of the Moscow protests united precisely around a
demand for a return to purer procedures of representative democracy. A
principled rejection of the current political choices was tied to the slogan
“Fairness,” while the dubious tagline, “Democracy is a procedure,” became
one of the most popular expressions among opposition leaders and journal-
ists. People demanded a return of the very right to politics, but they refused
to think about how that right might be realized meaningfully.

The South Atlantic Quarterly 113:1, Winter 2014

doi 10.1215/00382876-2390473  © 2014 Duke University Press

Published by Duke University Press

 South Atlantic Quarterly

170  The South Atlantic Quarterly • Against the Day • Winter 2014

After two post-Soviet decades marked by the violence of “primitive

accumulation,” the degradation and diffusion of the main classes of Soviet
society, and the consolidation of power by a new elite, all the traditions of
social solidarity were almost completely destroyed, and not one institution
capable of expressing collective dissatisfaction remained. In these conditions
only a political abstraction, a principle far removed from social reality, could
become a unifying and mobilizing factor.

“Managed Democracy” and Its Discontents

If the demand for “real democracy” on the squares of Barcelona and Madrid
challenged representative democracy, in Russia the demand for a “fair”
representative system was directed against so-called managed democracy,
a method the new post-Soviet elite used to regulate politics in the years of
its rule.
In Russia’s managed democracy, all the institutions necessary for
representative democracy—including the separation of powers, private
media, a parliament, and a set of basic political parties—are technically
present. However, none of them serves as part of a dynamic mechanism
capable of self-regulation and reproduction. The elements of democracy do
not work of their own accord but are quite openly controlled from above.
The actual center that determines the results of future elections, the media
coverage of given events, and the changes in the internal and external con-
figurations of the political parties is located within the presidential admin-
istration. The location of the center is not mandated by the constitution,
and by a strange coincidence it occupies the very building that once housed
the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the heart of Moscow.
This managed democracy does not simply replace democratic politics, but
it simulates democratic politics. And this simulation is as important to the
government formed by managed democracy as the nontransparent meth-
ods of decision making masked by this simulation.
Thus, Russia’s managed democracy represents something distinct
from other well-known authoritarian models. As noted by Dmitri Furman,
one of the sharpest and most discerning political analysts in Russia, “in con-
trast to other authoritarian systems, power here is not grounded in the ‘phys-
ical power’ of the army, as in military dictatorships, nor on an ancient tradi-
tion, as in non-constitutional monarchies; the democratic camouflage in
this system is a necessary and constituent feature” (Furman 2010: 11).

Published by Duke University Press

 South Atlantic Quarterly

Budraitskis • The Weakest Link of Managed Democracy  171

The post-Soviet ruling class’s particular model of hegemony was not

based on the ideological inclusion of the majority in the institutions bolster-
ing the political order. On the contrary, this model of hegemony emerged as
a powerful and effective instrument for discrediting all forms of political
participation. Elections were held only to inspire disgust for elections among
the majority. The manifold official media successively worked to undermine
the people’s trust.
The different organizations created by the presidential administration’s
stratagems against the opposition, such as the notorious youth movement
Nashi (Ours), in actuality were far removed from the type of conservative
mobilization taking place from below. These expensive propagandistic proj-
ects were supposed to reinforce people’s existing beliefs by providing exam-
ples. This substitute for politics smoothly complemented the worldview that
had gained traction after the shock therapy of the 1990s and the cementa-
tion of the Putin consensus in the 2000s: at its core lay a deep conviction,
grounded in personal traumatic experiences, that no shared interests could
be realized with the help of the government or through the process of
self-organization.
While reinforcing the harrowing political skepticism of the majority,
managed democracy at the same time represented the interests of big busi-
ness and different bureaucratic clans. The lower house of Parliament (the
State Duma) and the upper house (the Federation Council) were filled with
lobbyists, and seats were sold—even within the parliamentary parties—
at prices known to many. It was easy for businesspeople to find places for
themselves here: some saw parliamentary status as a transitional step toward
new career heights, and others simply needed parliamentary immunity to
distance themselves from their own criminal pasts.
The creators of this system legitimized it with lofty justifications.
Thus, one of its main architects, Vladislav Surkov, who played a key role as
deputy head of the presidential administration for many years, preferred to
call it “sovereign democracy.” His terminology depended on the idea that the
democratic experience of every country is rooted in its unique national polit-
ical culture, prohibiting the blind imitation of foreign models. Performing
the role of a sui generis public intellectual, Surkov argued in his many texts
that the “incompleteness” of Russian democracy was linked to its youth, and
for this reason, it had to bear traces of Russia’s despotic history (Surkov
2008). In actuality, the relationship between sovereignty and this managed
democracy was quite different from that proposed by Surkov. Sovereignty

Published by Duke University Press

 South Atlantic Quarterly

172  The South Atlantic Quarterly • Against the Day • Winter 2014

was not the source of this managed democracy; rather, a democratic experi-
ence strictly limited from above exposed the population to a sovereignty
whose source was the timeless elite that created Russian political culture.
Russian sovereign democracy in this model turned out to be quite divorced
from the historical moment of its constitution, when the people’s will to cre-
ate a new order challenged autocracy and the dictatorship of the party. Sover-
eignty was understood first and foremost as an affirmation of that which,
regardless of its character, remains a source of power within a country and
not beyond its borders. Democratic forms have value only to the extent that
they enable this power and do not create impediments.
However, this conservative rationale, with its abundant use of quo-
tations from Fyodor Dostoevsky and Ivan Ilyin, the Far Right ideologue of
the White Russian emigration, obfuscates a much more recent origin of
sovereignty.

A Brief Genealogy of Russian Parliamentarism

The real foundations of Russian sovereignty were laid in the beginning of
the 1990s, when the colossal public property of the former Soviet Union was
divided. Despite the chaos and uncontrolled violence that accompanied it,
the privatization process in Russia initially proceeded within specific bound-
aries and had a clearly expressed political direction. Foreign capital was
almost completely barred from the redistribution of property, and the new
capitalists were recruited from among the former leaders of the Komsomol
(the official youth organization of the Communist Party during the Soviet
period) and other socially active citizens. The new elite was created from
above with decisive, quick, and cruel measures. One of the chief architects of
privatization, Anatoly Chubais, who served as deputy prime minister in the
early 1990s, stated that the goal of the whole process was the creation of a
“new class of property owners” and that in itself “privatization was not a
question of ideology or of some kind of abstract values; it was a question of
the real daily political battle” (Chubais quoted in Ostrovsky 2004). The foun-
dation of the capitalist elite went hand in hand with the foundation of a new
political order and the securing of its supremacy.
Early in 1993, the conflict between Russian president Boris Yeltsin
and the upper house of parliament (then called the Supreme Council) gained
momentum. From the start the conflict had been more than an argument
over the division of power between two branches of government; it was a key
stage in the struggle to establish a new type of sovereignty. On September 21,

Published by Duke University Press

 South Atlantic Quarterly

Budraitskis • The Weakest Link of Managed Democracy  173

1993, acting on his own decree, Yeltsin dissolved the Supreme Council. In
response, the council passed a resolution about the forfeiture of presidential
authority. Between October 2 and 4, a short-lived but bloody and hard-fought
civil war unfolded between the special police forces subordinate to Yelt-
sin and the poorly organized, doomed supporters of the Supreme Council.
During the war, several hundred people were killed and the White House—
where the Supreme Council was then housed—was shelled by tanks. The
result of the action was the establishment of a new constitution, which is still
in place today.
Carl Schmitt observed that the irresolvable conflict of every represen-
tative democracy is the discrepancy between the principle of identity of the
people and the government and the actual realization of the will of the
majority. The principle of a volonté générale, the general will or democratic
form, always remains immutable, even as its content is constantly changing.
And this content is generally unreliable and secondary in relation to its form,
just as the “will of all” remains secondary to the general will. The democratic
process, in this sense, is nothing other than the continuous education of its
participants, who should see voting not as a mechanism for the realization of
their own interests but as a triumph of the principle of the general will—
even if it means that their interests are contradicted. The democratic subject
becomes not the “people,” but the bearers of the principle, who can and
ought to support it by any method. This arrangement, in Schmitt’s opinion,
does not create significant barriers for the implementation of democracy,
which is aided by barbarous violence over the majority (Schmitt 1988).
The new political elite that consolidated power after the collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1991 enduringly assimilated this disciplinary function of
democracy. The bearers of the “democratic principle” clearly wanted to teach
the country, which had no historical experience of democracy, a lesson. Just
as the market economy was to be implemented with the help of shock ther-
apy, a radical method of treatment for the long-endured “illness” of a state-
planned society, democracy could be adopted only with the aid of a political
shock. The presidential side of the 1993 conflict, which gave itself the appel-
lation “democratic forces,” clearly recognized the discrepancy between dem-
ocratic form and content. That side was firmly convinced that it was neces-
sary to suppress the latter in order to exercise the former.
And so Yeltsin, though he had not read Schmitt, nevertheless noted in
his diary: “I understood that this was the only escape from the constitutional
trap, when practically any of our actions can be declared unconstitutional.
The president formally violates the Constitution, takes antidemocratic

Published by Duke University Press

 South Atlantic Quarterly

174  The South Atlantic Quarterly • Against the Day • Winter 2014

measures, dissolves the Parliament—but only for the sake of the democracy
and legality that will ultimately take root in the country” (Yeltsin 1994: 361).
The representatives of the liberal intelligentsia likewise did not hold back
during the caustic political moment; they called for increasingly repressive
measures. For instance, well-known human rights activist Elena Bonner
wrote, “The main mistake of Yeltsin and the true democrats [working] with
him . . . turned out to be . . . their excessive, nearly fanatical, devotion to dem-
ocratic institutions and to democratic power mechanisms in an undemo-
cratic country” (quoted in Furman 2010: 64).
The shelling of the Russian Parliament became the best illustration
that the spirit, rather than the letter, of democracy was to be consolidated,
and the Parliament’s permanent humiliation became one of the founding
principles of the new Constitution. According to this document, the presi-
dent, regardless of the results of parliamentary elections, appoints the gov-
ernment and can dissolve the Duma if it votes down the president’s candi-
date for prime minister. Moreover, the president has the right to dissolve
the Duma if it does not express confidence in the acting government within
a week. With this new Constitution, the Russian Parliament became the most
powerless and dependent organ of governmental power in the country. Even
its building and budget are now overseen by the Presidential Property Man-
agement Department.
Yeltsin’s reelection in 1996 firmly established the new nature of the
president’s office as the powerful hand guiding the “backward” and “unpre-
pared” society to the market and to democracy. Unpopular at the beginning
of the election campaign, Yeltsin built his strategy on the open assertion that
there were no alternatives. Even when he and the Communist Party candi-
date Gennady Zyuganov went to a second round of elections, the majority of
voters already knew that Yeltsin would win in any case—either with a greater
number of votes or with the help of a new state of emergency. This aggres-
sive presidential campaign proved to be the last in post-Soviet history in
which the results were not fully obvious to everyone in advance. Exactly at
this moment, the principle of consensus around one figure in the ruling
elite was established: de facto, the elections took the form of a plebiscite. The
president, as the source of decisions, became the authority at the edges of the
political battle. And Parliament, deprived of the ability to pass its own deci-
sions independently, became practically synonymous with “politics” for the
majority of the population.
In the elections for the first State Duma in December 1993, the clear
victory (22.9 percent) went to Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic

Published by Duke University Press

 South Atlantic Quarterly

Budraitskis • The Weakest Link of Managed Democracy  175

Party—a semicriminal, unstable coalition around a cynical and unambi-

tious populist prepared to play his role obediently within the framework of
the regime’s managed democracy. Like the successes of the Communist
Party in the following elections, Zhirinovsky’s popularity pointed both to the
population’s displaced discontent with the political administration and its
contempt for the State Duma, which looked more like an arena for a pseudo-
political spectacle than a place where real decisions could be made.

The Social Foundation of Managed Democracy

Despite the hopes of radical leftists, the stabilization of Russian capitalism in
the Putin era did not trigger the reproduction of the classical clashes between
wage workers and the new bourgeoisie. Russian society’s new social com-
position took shape in relation to the traumatic experiences of shock ther-
apy and the mass deindustrialization of the 1990s, when almost half of
Soviet workers lost their jobs and thus their previous class identity (by
1999 the number of industrial workers had fallen 38 percent from 1990)
(Trushkov 2002). The limited growth of the new independent trade unions,
which were organized by several powerful, hard-driving strikes in the mid-
dle of the 2000s, was almost entirely connected with a specific sector of
the Russian economy—with new discrete enterprises created from scratch
by transnational corporations (Budraitskis 2006). These initiatives, how-
ever, looked like excesses in the context of the passive masses of workers in
the large, old Soviet enterprises and the public sector. Despite the nation-
wide resonance of such events as the 2007 four-week strike at a Ford fac-
tory outside Saint Petersburg, there was not one strike of solidarity in Rus-
sia for all the economic growth that occurred during the decade.1
The demonstrations against the so-called monetization of benefits in
the winter of 2005 were the only example of a nationwide social movement
in the 2000s. As a result of aggressive efforts by the government to hasten
the privatization of the public sector and the so-called natural monopolies
(energy, transport, and so on), millions of the country’s residents (pension-
ers first and foremost) simultaneously lost their access to free (subsidized)
transport services and housing subsidies. Unexpectedly for the ruling elite,
which had bargained that the population would “adapt” to a decreasing stan-
dard of living during the years of market reform, spontaneous protests took
over nearly all the large cities in the country (Kleman et al. 2010: 112–48). A
demand to abolish the new reform united a range of disparate groups—
including pensioners, large families, invalids, soldiers, and a few categories

Published by Duke University Press

 South Atlantic Quarterly

176  The South Atlantic Quarterly • Against the Day • Winter 2014

of civil servants—that were immediately affected by monetization of bene-

fits. The reform thus became a catalyst for general social discontent.
The parliamentary parties (including the Communist Party of the
Russian Federation) and the “official” trade unions were caught off guard
by the quickly established movement and thus did not play a significant role
in either the organization of the protests or their political representation.
Vladimir Putin, whose popularity took a blow, quickly found a solution: he
transferred responsibility for the unsuccessful reform to several ministers
and essentially abolished its provisions. The excess profits from oil exports,
which were being funneled into special government accounts, made it pos-
sible to supplement the extrabudgetary funds and to extinguish all the hot-
beds of social tension. The local “coordinated councils of united action”
that were formed in the groundswell of the protests against monetization
were not able to build up a regular nationwide network in the period that
followed. Some of these councils dispersed, while others concentrated on
local conflicts, primarily in housing services.
The activists who began appearing in the 2000s made up a minority
that could act only on the level of individual enterprises, neighborhoods, and
smaller cities. A veritable abyss lay between the passive mass discontent and
local activist praxes. Polls found respondents highly ready to take part in
strikes or protest actions. Thus in 2005, following a wave of protests against
benefits monetization, up to 57 percent of those polled spoke about wanting
to take part, but only 2 percent actually did so. In 2008, 27 percent of polled
workers expressed a desire to take part in the strikes, and 55 percent spoke
approvingly about the strikers, despite the fact that the records show only
eleven strikes taking place during that period in the whole country (Kleman
et al. 2010: 42, 57). 2
Neoliberalism became not only the unquestioned creed guiding the
politics of the ruling elite, but it also served as the organic ideology of a soci-
ety in which brutal competition and the drive to capitalize on one’s own
social position had been transformed into “material practice,” to use Louis
Althusser’s term (Althusser 1971). The people’s sharp sense of alienation
from the state worked in concert with a general readiness to put up with
the lack of personal rights.
Some liberal researchers described the condition of Russian society in
the 2000s as a consequence of post-totalitarian syndrome, a peculiar variety
of the “escape from freedom” model in which the majority of the population
turned out to be unprepared for independent decision making in the new

Published by Duke University Press

 South Atlantic Quarterly

Budraitskis • The Weakest Link of Managed Democracy  177

market economy and was ready once again to shift the responsibility for its
own fate to the state (Gudkov and Dubin 2007: 8–64). This contention,
which revealed more about the worldview of liberals than about the actual
state of affairs, is usually linked, in those intellectual circles, to a perceived
dichotomy between the 1990s and the 2000s, the eras of Yeltsin and Putin.
The Putin era was characterized as a “strike back” on the part of the gov-
ernment bureaucracy, which once again aspired to dominate economic and
social life. However, another important component of managed or sovereign
democracy was to define the new epoch, associated with the restoration of
the state, against the collapse and degradation of the wild 1990s.
In essence, however, the logic of privatization simply expanded to the
machinery of the state itself and to its role in economics and society. In
Violent Entrepreneurs Vadim Volkov calls the period of transition from Yelt-
sin to Putin beginning in 1999 “the fourth stage of privatization”: the state,
replacing the mafia in the specific market of “protection services” in the
previous years, began actively taking its place (Volkov 2012: 298). That pro-
cess did not restore the state to the position of a regulating institution above
society, but instead transformed the state’s machinery and power struc-
tures into an active market subject. The state did not regain control over
the market but rather rapidly became a part of it.
In the economic sphere, this meant that the practical right to prop-
erty was now guaranteed not through an informal agreement with private
providers of protection services but exclusively through the assistance of the
police and other power structures. As a result of the “fourth phase of priva-
tization,” hundreds of conflicts involving government departments ended
with redistribution in favor of the property owners who had the closest ties
with the police, special forces, or courts. (In Russia the courts have their
own independent power structure.)
On the level of social politics, Putin’s Russia began to resemble a pecu-
liar variant of what David Harvey calls the “neoliberal state”: that is, the
nearly total reduction of the state as an instrument for redistributing social
welfare in favor of its exclusive reinforcement as an instrument supporting
open class rule. The “restoration of class power” meant that the state grew as
a bureaucratic machine, continuously consolidating power in order to wage
politics that openly go against the interests of the majority. As Harvey
emphasizes, this kind of frontal attack necessitates a new type of hegemony
based on the consolidation of a ruling class ready for open confrontation
(Harvey 2007: 64–87).

Published by Duke University Press

 South Atlantic Quarterly

178  The South Atlantic Quarterly • Against the Day • Winter 2014

Putin’s authoritarianism was founded in a firm consensus among the

ruling elite that the methods and results of privatization were unquestion-
able; the elite hurried to transform this position into the key thesis of silent
social agreement about the political regime. It is worth noting that some Rus-
sian and Western leftists (e.g., Gusev 2012; and Jones 2000) mistakenly char-
acterized Putin’s regime as “Bonapartist,” referring to its repressive actions
against individual oligarchs (such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky) and its tendency
toward populist rhetoric. But, in fact, the type of neoliberal consensus that
was settling on the ruins of society did not intend to achieve the classical
Bonapartist relative autonomy of the government from the interests of the
ruling class or to maneuver between the low and the high, let alone to appeal
directly for mass support through the plebiscite. On the contrary, the Russian
version of the “neoliberal state” to an even greater extent than American or
Western European models was inextricably intertwined with the ruling class,
of which the government bureaucracy itself became an integral part.
Such a state, whose repressive power grows proportionally as the
economy is deregularized, feels all the more assured as a regime of con-
tinual political advance. The corpus of anti-extremist laws that proliferated
throughout the 2000s, the strengthening of the special forces and special
police departments, and the endless and even more structurally necessary
antiterrorist operations in the Northern Caucasus, all stemmed from the
fact that a permanent state of emergency had become the principal founda-
tion of the ruling elite’s sovereignty.
Even the very term “power” (vlast), which participants in the opposi-
tion movement of the 2000s used to define their opponents, suggests as
concisely as possible the indivisible interconnections between the economic
corporate class, antisocial politics, police violence, and authoritarian mea-
sures that make up the total composition of the governing post-Soviet order.
One can come to terms with power and find a place in the existing relations;
one can endure a dull and politically unexpressed discontent; or one can take
on an active position of active resistance. But power’s totality inescapably
leads the smallest conflict to the level of a conflict with the system as a whole.

Democracy Becomes Unmanageable

On September 24, 2011, at the United Russia Party congress, Dmitry Medve-
dev proposed putting Putin forward for a third presidential term in the March
2012 elections. Even though many had predicted this turn of events, Putin’s
decision to run looked like an open provocation, even within the framework

Published by Duke University Press

 South Atlantic Quarterly

Budraitskis • The Weakest Link of Managed Democracy  179

of managed democracy. One of the foundations of managed democracy’s sta-

bility and reproducibility was adherence to the 1993 Constitution, the letter of
which banned anyone from serving in a higher post for more than two terms
in a row and the spirit of which intended to keep the top-heavy presidential
power from overreliance on one concrete personality. If the letter of the law
was formally honored—since Putin had given up his place in the Kremlin to
Medvedev after the end of his first two terms in 2008, his return did not con-
tradict the law—an obvious problem arose in relation to the spirit.
When Boris Yeltsin retired in 1999 after naming Putin his heir, he
established a tradition of handing over power through an elite consensus
around a chosen successor. This mechanism not only made it possible to
preserve the imitation of democratic procedures necessary to the system but
also ensured that various groups within the ruling class remained equidis-
tant from power. Even in the 1990s, it was clear that to break this order in
hopes of securing personal power meant to risk an abrupt reversal vis-à-vis
the influences of those power structures (or clans within those structures),
by means of which the president could be bound by a power contrary to the
law. The Russian Constitution itself reflected not a real balance between the
branches of government or societal forces but the consolidated opinions of
the ruling class, an established model of its political hegemony after the cri-
sis of 1993.
Putin’s return meant that the future of that political system was now
explicitly tied to his person; the logic of that decision implied that the next
two presidential terms were now inevitably decided. In other words, Putin’s
reign now must continue until the year 2024 (since the presidential term
was extended from four to six years in 2008).
This event, however, did not inspire serious protests but only increased
the general pessimistic indifference and depression of the middle class,
whose representatives began to speak ever more frequently about the lack
of perspective in the country and about emigration. Putin’s new term would
have probably gone through without serious opposition from below had the
decision demanded approval only through a direct plebiscite. But the system
of managed democracy contained an essential element of “complicated poli-
tics,” distinguishing it from direct authoritarian rule. The key mediating fac-
tor of this complication was the Russian Parliament.
The tradition established through years of managed democracy pre-
ferred a sequential relationship between the elections to the Duma and the
presidential elections: the first always took place in December and preceded
the second, which took place in March. The parliamentary elections in that

Published by Duke University Press

 South Atlantic Quarterly

180  The South Atlantic Quarterly • Against the Day • Winter 2014

particular cycle were a necessary step, revealing fully Parliament’s status

as a mere simulation of politics. In keeping with the scenario continuously
taking place, at first the ruling party would win the repellent speculative
fight, and then, already as a form of triumphant legitimization, the president
would affirm his rightful power above even the political sphere, and above
society as a whole. And if the first part of the cycle was supposed to confirm
the discredited and marginalized role of civic political participation in Rus-
sian society, the second underscored the autonomy of that suspicious partici-
pation from the actual consummation of sovereign power.
United Russia, defined as the “party of power” among media, soci-
ety, and the broader political field, fulfilled an important function in that
scheme. That structure, which is hard to relate even to the typical electoral
parties, served as a barometer of loyalty to the bureaucracy and allied corpo-
rate business interests, as well as their ability to support the type of hege-
mony characteristic of Russian capitalism. The absolute victory guaranteed
in the parliamentary elections contained an affirmation of fidelity to the
regional elites, who answered for the “correct” distribution of votes in their
areas, as well as the readiness of large and midsized businesses to supply
financial support, guaranteeing any future advantages with government bod-
ies. The United Russia election campaign also included a peculiar oath of
loyalty from the entire public sector; those who served it, from the teach-
ers to those in housing services, had to participate in the campaigning and
work of local election commissions and, if need be, to “correct” the election
results. In this manner, some degree of fraud was included in this model
from the start. Hence, in the 2007 elections, when United Russia set a rec­
ord with 64.3 percent of the vote and 315 of 450 corresponding deputy seats,
inspectors reported numerous infractions.
The role of the other parties included in the roster of managed democ-
racy remained quite minor. In the 2011 Russian elections, only seven politi-
cal parties retained the official status that allowed them to issue the nation-
wide list for participating in the elections—and only three of those had seri-
ous chances of meeting the 7 percent voting threshold necessary to form a
parliamentary group. The composition of these parties did not change for
many years and represented the result of a painstaking selection process
through the president’s administration. Each party had to represent a spe-
cific sector of passive social discontent and then to compose a worthy part
to play in the false orchestra of the coming Duma “symphony.” And so,
Communists and the left-of-center Just Russia group represented the pole of
social protest, granting them a monopoly on the (nonthreatening) critique of
neoliberal governmental policy (although under no circumstances, of the

Published by Duke University Press

 South Atlantic Quarterly

Budraitskis • The Weakest Link of Managed Democracy  181

president personally). Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party drew the votes

of cynics, whose sole motive was to reduce to absurdity the senseless and
boring parliamentary debates.
Absenteeism, one of the central problems of Western representative
democracies, in Russia was completely organic to the political mechanism
of managed democracy. The 60 percent voter turnout at the parliamentary
elections reflected not only the real activity of the voters but also the mobi-
lization of independent groups brought out to the elections (for example,
all those serving the public sector or military). In order to achieve the pre-
determined result, the authorities were invested in having a high percentage
of participation from those groups of voters whose choice was most pre-
dictable. However, the circumstance of these electoral procedures in Rus-
sia, which had to reinforce the political alienation of the absolute majority
of the population from participation in politics, turned out to be the politi-
cal school that enabled a significant portion of the voters to study the sys-
tem’s weak points.
In the summer of 2011, even before Putin’s run for a third presiden-
tial term was made public, the popular opposition figure Aleksei Navalny
called in his blog for people to vote for “any party at all other than United
Russia” (Navalny 2011). That strategy was principally directed toward those
who found no real choice among the meager offerings of parties repre-
sented in the electoral bulletin. From the start, the idea of voting against
United Russia suggested that the main political challenge of the elections
was to wreck the symbolic victory of the ruling party, which was anticipat-
ing the triumph of its candidate in the following presidential elections.
Navalny only voiced what millions of people understood intuitively.
Many began to support practically any candidate who had come forward as
an opponent to the party of power. The steadily sinking ratings of United
Russia drove the entire cumbersome loyalty machine, from bottom up, to
work at a feverish pace to meet the task set from above. Governors were
afraid that results below 50 percent for the ruling party in their regions
would lead to lowered federal subsidies or might cost them their positions
entirely. City and regional powers fearfully awaited reprimands from the
governors. School principals, responsible for the work of local election com-
missions, hurriedly tried to lead their collectives away from the danger of
cutbacks in positions and salaries. The entire “vertical of power” (the cen-
tralization of power shared between federal and regional governments),
which the parliamentary elections had seen earlier as merely the affirmation
of unspoken obligations and relations of dependence, now became a key
political test.

Published by Duke University Press

 South Atlantic Quarterly

182  The South Atlantic Quarterly • Against the Day • Winter 2014

In the end, the question of the future Duma served to focus the passive
mass discontent that not only could find its political expression but also, out-
side the parameters of the electoral process, could become the general foun-
dation for active protest. Thousands of citizen activists, until then involved
in disparate local initiatives, small political groups, and nongovernmen-
tal organizations, purposefully signed up as independent voting observers
in the fall of 2011. On election day (December 4, 2011), the numerous video
materials and witness accounts of these groups brought the facts of unprec-
edented infractions all across the country to a large audience.
The next day, when the official results were announced (49.3 per-
cent for United Russia), thousands of people came out to the center of Mos-
cow to protest. Even though the parliamentary parties whose votes had been
stolen directly (and the first among them, the Communist Party of the Rus-
sian Federation) nearly immediately accepted the election results and took up
their places in the new Parliament, the demand for “fair elections” became
the unifying call across the most varied street demonstrations.
Many observers, early in the mass protests, began to make active com-
parisons between the Russian phenomenon and the “color revolutions” of
the 2000s in Eastern Europe and in other post-Soviet places. And in fact, the
changes of power in Serbia, Ukraine, and Georgia all came about as a result
of oppositions challenging election results and through street mobilizations
that demanded the re-examination of those results. The general dissatisfac-
tion with the ruling regimes that had been growing for years found expres-
sion in the public questioning of election results. However, the repeated sce-
narios behind the “color revolutions” presupposed a split inside the elite in
addition to the street protests—in which the latter never played an indepen-
dent role and served as the main argument in the closed negotiations about
the redistribution of power. In all these cases, the mass protests, frequently
independent of the common participants’ real motives, transformed into
manifestations of political support for the opposition leaders (themselves
members of these elites) bidding for power.
Even at the start of the 2000s, the Russian liberal opposition lost its
place in the system of managed democracy. The overwhelming majority of
its leaders came from Yeltsin’s retinue, as former or current experts on gov-
ernment structures or representatives of the younger generation, inclined
to take their places in the existing political system. Just like the ruling group,
they questioned neither the results of 1990s privatization nor the regime’s
political foundations, which had been secured by the legislation of the early
1990s and the 1993 Constitution. Their political expectations during the
entire Putin era were limited at first to dreams of repeating the color revo-

Published by Duke University Press

 South Atlantic Quarterly

Budraitskis • The Weakest Link of Managed Democracy  183

lution scenario, and then by the more humble aspiration to liberalize the
system. The rise of street protests in December 2011 proved no less unex-
pected for this opposition than for members of the presidential adminis-
tration, who to the very last moment smugly presumed their continued
control of the situation.
The street protests in Russia were in no way connected to the deep
schism in the ruling class. Those lines of separation, which had evidently
already existed between the various political forces surrounding Putin and
Medvedev, never went so far as to engage in the open conflict that served
such an important role in the mass mobilizations.

Urgent Issues of the New Political Reality

During the brief but rowdy history of the new Russian protest movement,
which took shape between December 2011 and June 2012, liberal leaders
attempted to become the political “voice” of that spontaneous movement,
which was directed against the system of managed democracy and lacked any
common alternative program. The bewilderment that many felt in the face of
the movement’s political and social cacophony—open neoliberals took part in
some demonstrations, critiquing the government for increasing budgetary
expenses; the extreme right wing participated in the same demonstrations,
suspecting a plot to populate the major Russian cities with migrants from
central Asia; and leftists and anarchists came out against racism and exploita-
tion in the very same streets—reflected the confused political consciousness
of the majority of its participants, united only by the shared sense of alien-
ation from the possibility of influencing one’s own life. The movement’s slo-
gan, “For fair elections,” was the right strategy, capable of activating the inter-
nal contradictions of the political system and of becoming a rallying point for
a disintegrated society. This slogan not only did not suggest a unifying pro-
gram for making radical changes, but as a strategy, it turned out to be limited
to a specific political moment, as well as to the socially geographic active
minority of the large cities (primarily Moscow and Saint Petersburg).
At the same time, regardless of the fact that through a serious expen-
diture of forces, the ruling elite successfully “normalized” the situation on a
surface level and pushed its plans through, ensuring Putin’s third term, the
political system of managed democracy had been dealt a fatal blow. Not one
of its constituent parts is capable of continuing to function as before. United
Russia, finally discredited in the eyes of a significant part of the electorate,
can no longer ensure a triumphant majority of votes in nationwide elections.
In 2012 and 2013, the party machine has been coming apart at the seams,

Published by Duke University Press

 South Atlantic Quarterly

184  The South Atlantic Quarterly • Against the Day • Winter 2014

with prominent functionaries abdicating from their positions one by one

and attempting to find work in other governing structures. Putin meanwhile
openly manages the creation of the parallel United Russia political monster,
the All-Russia People’s Front, in which he is now ready to invest his own, and
thus far still sufficiently high, personal political capital.
During 2012 and 2013, the Russian Parliament committed a record
number of odious repressive acts, from raising the fines for participation
in “unsanctioned” demonstrations and imposing harsh limits on NGOs, to
the darkly absurd laws against “offending the rights of believers” and “homo-
sexual propaganda.” Thanks to the majority established in the previous
year, Parliament also pushed through Russia’s entry into the World Trade
Organization and passed the neoliberal law on educational reform. That
aside, and for the first time in the history of Russian parliamentarism, six
deputies—mainly from United Russia—were stripped of their positions
within a year (most of them were major businesspeople who hid their prof-
its and property from tax authorities and illegally continued to work in
commercial activities).
Surkov, whose name until recently was considered a synonym for the
entire system of managed democracy, removed himself from posts in the
presidential administration and cabinet. The clumsy machine of open
repression replaced the more complexly balanced system for managing
political processes. The Investigative Committee of Russia—a structure
created in 2011, which possesses enormous authority and is subject to the
president personally—plays an increasingly important role.
Managed democracy seems to have been left behind. Despite the vis-
ible return to order and the decline in street activism, Russia has already
entered a new political period. Against the backdrop of the expected eco-
nomic stagnation, the characteristic traits of this new era most likely will
include growing political unmanageability, increasing and unsystematic
brutality from the ruling class, and the aggravation of the entire array of
contradictions that led tens of thousands to the streets in December 2011.
The epoch of managed democracy leaves a problematic legacy—the Rus-
sian Parliament and discredited elections, which might still play an impor-
tant role in the birth of authentic politics from below.
—Translated by Marijeta Bozovic and Katharine Holt

Notes
1 The history of the Russian workers’ movement in the 1990s is beyond the scope of this
article. During that decade, dozens of collectives opposed privatization and reconstruc-

Published by Duke University Press

 South Atlantic Quarterly

Budraitskis • The Weakest Link of Managed Democracy  185

tion measures, and in the summer of 1998, the “rail-track war” was initiated by the
mining unions. In this protest, strikes were held at the largest railroad arteries of the
country, and strikers demanded reimbursement of the salaries owed to them.
2 It is important to note that the enumerated given official Russian statistics usually
undervalue the real number of strikes, so that they count only those that took place
“legally,” that is in accordance with the fairly difficult list of demands stipulated by
Russian labor laws.

References
Althusser, Louis. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster.
New York: Monthly Review Press.
Budraitskis, Ilya. 2006. “Korporativnye predpriiatiia v Rossii I vozrozhdeniie profsoiuzov”
(“Corporate Enterprises in Russia and the Revival of the Trade Unions”). Neprikosno-
vennyi Zapas, nos. 4–5: 48–49.
Furman, Dmitrii. 2010. Dvizhenie po spirali: Rossiiskaia politicheskaia sistema v riadu drugikh
system (Spiral Motion: The Russian Political System alongside Other Political Systems).
Moscow: Ves mir.
Gudkov, Lev, and Boris Dubin. 2007. “Post-totalitarian Syndrome: ‘Managed Democracy’ and
Mass Apathy.” In Pathways of Russian Post-Communism, edited by M. Lippman and
A. Ryabov, 8–64. Moscow: Carnegie Center.
Gusev, Alexei. 2012. “The Return of the Russian Revolution: Nature of and Perspectives on
the Wave of Social Protest in Russia.” New Politics, 14, no. 1. http://newpol.org/content
/return-russian-revolution-nature-and-perspectives-wave-social-protest-russia.
Harvey, David. 2007. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jones, Rob. 2000. “Putin’s Putsch.” Socialism Today, no. 45. www.socialismtoday.org/45/
putin.html.
Kleman, Carine, et al. 2010. Ot obyvatelei k aktivistam. Zarozhadioshieisia sotsial’nye dvizheniia
v sovremennoi Rossii (From Philistines to Activists: Emerging Social Movements in Contem-
porary Russia). Moscow: Tri kvadrata.
Navalny, Alexei. 2011. “For Any Party, against United Russia.” Blog, July 6. http://navalny
.livejournal.com/603104.html.
Ostrovsky, Arkady. 2004. “Father to the Oligarchs.” Financial Times, November 13.
Schmitt, Carl. 1988. The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, translated by Ellen Kennedy.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Surkov, Vladislav. 2008. Teksty 1997–2007. Stat’i i vystupleniia (Texts, 1997–2007: Contribu-
tions and Speeches). Moscow: Evropa.
Trushkov, Viktor. 2002. “Sovremennyi rabochii klass Rossii v zerkale statistiki” (“Contem-
porary Working Class in the Mirror of Official Statistics”). Sotsiologicheskie Issledova-
niia, no. 2.
Volkov, Vadim. 2012. Silovoe predprinimatel’stvo XXI vek. Ekonomiko-sotsiologicheskii analiz
(Violent Entrepreneurship in the Twenty-first Century: Socioeconomic Analysis). Saint
Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Evropeiskogo universiteta.
Yeltsin, Boris. 1994. Zapiski prezidenta (President’s Notes). Moscow: Ogonek. Accessed via
www.yeltsin.ru/upload/iblock/fa7/zapiski_prezidenta.pdf.

Published by Duke University Press