Konstantin Gaaze, Artyom Vernidub, Darya Guseva, Mikhail Fishman
It did not turn out to be a frank conversation, a participant in Vladimir Putin's meeting with the heads of the United Russia regional branches held at the Volzhsky Utyos holiday home in Samara complained to Newsweek last Thursday.
"Before the meeting the Secretary of the Presidium of the party's General Council, Vyacheslav Volodin, urged the party members to "brace themselves for a review by the leader."
That is what the meeting turned out to be. The participants expected a conversation about the party's future, he went on, but instead it turned out to be a question and answer session. Newsweek's interlocutor hinted that the questions planted among the party activists were not those uppermost in their minds: they were about the Ossetian people, the Compatriots programme, schools for officer cadets, the Arctic shelf, etc.
Only one question was partly devoted to a theme that exercised its members. A memorandum on the merger of United Russia and the Agrarian Party was signed on September 12.
"In this connection, how will United Russia build its relations with other parties and how will it impact the political system?" This question was asked by Sergei Borodin, the head of the United Russia Party in the Vladimir Region's legislature.
"Political forces with differing points of view must remain on the country's political scene," Putin replied. "Left-wing parties, centre parties... and right-wing parties with liberal economic views..."
It is not by chance that the Agrarians joined United Russia at this point in time. And Putin was not being disingenuous when he said that both left-wing and right-wing forces must stay on the scene. The Kremlin has launched preparations for the 2011 parliamentary elections. The future Duma will be unlike the present one. The so-called one-and-a-half party system - "United Russia and a comparatively strong left-wing - is receding into the past, and United Russia is evolving from a leading party into a "national party". It means that it won't have any rivals to speak of, and it will be ensconced in the centre and not on the side, as it is today. That will streamline the structure.
THE RIGHT
The summer is over and parties are merging. The Agrarian Party has merged with United Russia. The Social Justice Party and the Greens have joined Just Russia. This is the new policy.
"There are as many parties in the Duma as there are on the election ballot," a Kremlin staffer explains.
In the elections last autumn the dwarf parties which failed to make it to the Duma won 7% of the vote between them. Now there will remain three to four small parties, according to the Kremlin's plan, while the 7% will be entirely garnered by United Russia. All the dwarf parties, a Duma deputy claims, face the choice of joining a stronger party or being obliterated. The process of mergers is gathering momentum: Nikita Belykh, the leader of the SPS, quit on Friday. On October 2, the party's leadership will approve its participation in the new Kremlin project.
The fate of the SPS has been decided: it will merge with Civil Force (GS) and the Democratic Party of Russia (DPR). These parties are to announce that they are disbanding before uniting, according to Newsweek's information. The creation of a new right-wing party has been mooted at the Kremlin Internal Policy Directorate (UVP) since spring. Several sources confirm that this has been proposed by Putin, who wants to see loyal liberals in a future Duma and is supervising the creation of a new party through Kremlin managers. The head of UVP, Oleg Govorun, met with Mikhail Barshchevsky, the leader of GS and Andrei Bogdanov of the DPR immediately after the war in South Ossetia, and they discussed organisation matters. The Kremlin is creating "the broadest possible coalition" of GS, the DPR and SPS and intends to bring in "new faces", a Kremlin official said.
So, a new brand is about to appear on the right flank: the new party is to hold its congress before the year is out. Money is also a factor, experts explain: each of the parties that failed to get into the Duma owes the Central Election Commission an average of $7 million for free air time, and creating a new party is cheaper than repaying the debt. The SPS is also in debt and this cannot help but influence the position of the party cadre. Besides, party members want to take part in elections.
"The only way was to hold some kind of negotiations [with the Kremlin]", one of SPS leaders, Boris Nadezhdin, explains the decision to surrender. Over the past year the party has failed to register a single list in elections, and a party without elections is not a party."
In the Kemerovo Region elections are due on October 12, and the leader of the SPS in Kemerovo, Dmitry Shagiakhmetov, cites this example: "I assure you that the quality of signatures was the same as usual. But 63% of them were found to be invalid, and with Sazhi Umalatova's party virtually 100% of the signatures were declared invalid."
Even before the fateful decision, the SPS was aware that there were only two options: either cast in its lot with the Kremlin or be thrown out into the street. If the Kremlin had failed to win the SPS over, it would have been split, an analyst close to the Kremlin confirms. As many as 20 regional SPS branches were ready to join GS and the DPR in any case. One option discussed at the Kremlin was to form an alternative leadership which would have hijacked the brand and control of the party, as has been successfully done to the Party of Pensioners and the DPR when Mikhail Kasyanov made a bid to become its head, but Andrei Bogdanov stepped in and took control of the party.
Eventually Nikita Belykh chose to be thrown out into the street. "He handed in his resignation and left. I don't want to be the Kremlin's favourite democratic wife. Period," he told Newsweek after resigning.
The snag into which the Kremlin project may run is that not all members of the SPS would like to make common cause with Bogdanov and Barshchevsky.
"Bogdanov? In that case I will resign from the party," Shagiakhmetov was telling Newsweek. But Shagiakhmetov does not want to be simply thrown out: "We are withdrawing into the woods": this was not an option supported by any serious large [regional] organisations. In the previous elections Bogdanov's mission was to discredit the SPS, and he was not choosy about his methods. The Kremlin is aware of it: it has been decided that Barshchevsky and Bogdanov will be eased out of their leadership positions in the new party.
THE LEFT
Putin met with all the parliamentary parties, as he had promised (he is to meet with the Communists next), he met with Sergei Mironov's Just Russia, which obviously feels offended. Just Russia feels that Putin has cooled towards it: in the summer, a source close to Mr Mironov recalls, Putin was sharply critical of all the Federation Council's proposals on the future political structure: this is wrong, that is too expensive and so on.
Mironov still sees his own party as the country's second largest, says another party member, but the question that hangs in the air is: "let us make up our minds about who we are?" It is less a question than a plea to Mr Putin and President Medvedev. No fruitful relationship has emerged with Medvedev, who has been sending no signals, the party members admit.
The Kremlin believes that two left-wing parties in the Duma is one too many. It is to fill the gap that the need arose for a right-wing party. Neither the CPRF nor Just Russia fully satisfies Kremlin managers: Mironov's Just Russia is unpopular, the Communists are not always loyal, especially in the provinces. The future is uncertain: shutting down Just Russia, one of the options discussed, according to Newsweek, will have the effect of strengthening the CPRF. And it is not that easy to affect a marriage between Just Russia and the CPRF. "They would not disband as a prelude to joining us," a Mironov supporter sighs. Just Russia has another reason to feel slighted: it wasn't allowed to absorb the Agrarian Party, although Mironov asked about it twice: Putin in early 2007 and Medvedev this summer, a Kremlin source says.
Everybody is waiting for a political decision. In its absence both the Mironov party and the Communists are nervous. Gennady Zyuganov nearly lost his party four years ago as a result of the same scheme that was used to replace the leadership of the Pensioners' Party and the DPR. A group of influential Central Committee secretaries rented a ship to hold a parallel congress and elect a new leader. The whole exercise was supervised by businessman Gennady Semigin, currently leader of the Patriots of Russia Party. Now the Zyuganovites are afraid of an attempt to trip them up on the eve of the November party congress.
"One suggestion was that the first secretary should not attend [the congress] as a delegate. But I said: you know, guys, at other times I would have gladly yielded my place to some rustic type, but not in the current situation," says First Secretary of the Arkhangelsk Region Party Committee Alexander Novikov.
Novikov has good reason to be jittery: in any case, a Kremlin official says, the question will have to wait until next year: the Communists and Just Russia will not be touched just yet. He predicts that the Kremlin will tread warily and will first bring about a merger of Just Russia with Semigin's Patriots of Russia.
"This will be done to see how much like the CPRF it would turn out to be," says a member of the Kremlin staff. He says another option is to "split the CPRF into parts and create a new party with Just Russia. So far, apart from the withdrawal of several prominent deputies from the CPRF, the most dramatic rift within the Communist Party occurred in the Kemerovo Region, thinks the party's Central Committee secretary Oleg Kulikov. In the October election of the local legislature prominent Communists, including secretary of the City Party Committee, sided with Governor Aman Tuleyev. The local Communists were left without their headquarters in Kemerovo, but in exchange for the number two slot in the election ticket Dmitry Kachadze, a businessman from Novokuznetsk, offered them premises and the CPRF was accused of sympathising with the Georgian president, says Duma deputy Nina Ostanina.
So far the Kremlin has been unable to get rid of the CPRF or at least its leader, Zyuganov, but that is becoming possible today, experts think: "Replacing Zyuganov [as party leader] is a possible task," says political analyst Mikhail Vinogradov, "after all, Yavlinsky [of the Yabloko Party] was replaced without anybody noticing."
Ilya Ponomaryov, a former Communist and currently Just Russia deputy, is sure that Zyuganov is just "waiting for compensation and it would be enough to offer him the post of Ambassador to Cuba for him to renounce his party. But sociologists have long pointing out that the CPRF electorate is used to Zyuganov, who symbolises the party for them and it is by no means certain that they would follow a new leader and the splitters.
THE CENTRE
So, among the smaller parties only Vladimir Zhirinovsky's LDPR can relax as it occupies its proper place and is not in anybody's way. Bringing Putin's party plan to fruition in practice may prove to be more difficult than hoped (the left is the main problem), but so far things have been going rather smoothly. Not only are the right-wing parties merging, but the Agrarians have quickly resigned to being included in United Russia. It was a delicate operation as the Kremlin had always felt uneasy about the pugnacious farmer representatives from the APR. So Putin talked with them separately at the Volzhsky Utyos in Samara last Thursday after a meeting with United Russia.
The meeting of the APR Plenum on Friday was delayed by an hour. "People were tired [after a meeting with Putin], one of the participants in the meeting told Newsweek. There were plans to bring in one of the Agrarian Party leaders - Vyacheslav Volodin or Oleg Morozov - to try to persuade the party activists to disband and join United Russia. But in the end their services turned out to be unnecessary as the Agrarians went along with the proposal. The APR is the most important among the dwarf parties. In the latest election it won more than 3% of the votes, practically all these votes having been won over from United Russia, the Kremlin policy planners concluded. It turned out that last December rural people voted mainly for United Russia, and not for the Communists as before.
The absorption of the APR apparently completes the process of the United Russia expansion. It was huge even without the APR. Sources within United Russia and the Kremlin confirm that the party is riddled with conflicts. The chairman of the Supreme Council, Boris Gryzlov, is at daggers drawn First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office Vladislav Surkov, who is his supervisor, and local branches have inundated the Executive Committee with complaints against their bosses in the region. There are more than 600 such complaints pending before the Executive Committee. The chaos of internal party life was highlighted by the elections in Nizhny Tagil, where five party members are simultaneously running for mayor.
The party system in Russia has already been brought to its logical conclusion, says political scientist Vinogradov: the parties have become meaningless as institutions and the Duma has become less attractive: being a deputy confers no benefits other than the status of an MP. Experts do not see where new personalities can be found to match the new party brands and why the current system should be tampered with if it works.
"The one-and-a-half party system humiliates Putin", a Kremlin source hazards an explanation. He believes that Putin's speech to the party congress in November will be devoted to the "new role of the United Russia Party in Russian society."
