RUSSIAN POLITICAL SYSTEM
Contents
The Russian political system is one of the more recent notionally to embrace democracy but remains deeply flawed in terms of its democratic credentials, overwhelmingly tainted by corruption, and massively influenced by the power and personality of one man, Vladimir Putin.
The Russian Federation was the largest nation to emerge from the break up of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Following the constitutional crisis of 1993, Russia adopted a new constitution in a referendum of December 1993. Essentially the country is described as a federal presidential republic.
The constitution of 1993 provides strong powers for the President. The President has broad authority to issue decrees and directives that have the force of law without legislative review, although the constitution notes that they must not contravene that document or other laws. Indeed Russia's strong presidency is sometimes compared with that of Charles de Gaulle in the French Fifth Republic (1958-69).
The President's power in practice is underlined by his power to make so many appointments of key officials. It is estimated that the size of the Presidential apparatus in Moscow and the localities is more than 75,000 people, most of them employees of state-owned enterprises directly under Presidential control.
The Law on Presidential Elections requires that the winner receive more than 50% of the votes cast. If no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, the top two candidates in term of votes must face each other in a run-off election. Under the original 1993 constitution, the President was elected for a four-year term but, in November 2008, the constitution was amended to make this a six year term. The President is eligible for a second term but constitutionally he is barred from a third consecutive term.
The first President of the new Russia was Boris Yelsin who was elected in June 1991. He was followed by his hand-picked successor Vladimir Putin. After a term as Acting President, he was elected for his first term in May 2000 and for a second term in March 2004. In accordance with the constitution, he stepped down in March 2008 and was succeeded by his nominated successor Dmitry Medvedev (previously a First Deputy Prime Minister).
In March 2012, Putin was re-elected as President on the first ballot in a widely criticised election in which the opposition candidates were weak, the media was compliant, and there were many electoral irregularities. In March 2018, Putin was again re-elected. His most serious rival Alexei Navalny was barred from the race. The communist candidate came second with 11.8% of the vote; the ultranationalist candidate came third with 5.6% of the vote; and the only candidate to criticise Putin openly - the liberal television star Ksenia Sobchak - won a mere 1.6%.
According to the official figures, in 2012, Putin took 63.6% of the vote on a turnout of 65.3% while, in 2018, he took 76.6% of the vote on a turnout of 67.6%, a significantly larger share on a slightly increased turnout. Putin is genuinely popular among Russian voters but these figures substantially overstate that support because he controls most of the the media and massively limits the scope for opposition.
Originally, after his two four year terms and his two six year terms as president, constitutionally Putin should have been required to step down in March 2024. However, in April 2021, Putin signed a law that will allow him to run for the presidency twice more in his lifetime, potentially keeping him in office until 2036.
Officially, the new law limits Russian citizens to two presidential terms in their lifetime, outlawing the kind of shuffling between the presidency and the role of prime minister that Putin employed earlier in his career, but the law specifically does not count terms served until it entered into force, meaning that Putin's past four terms (including the current term) do not count and he can still serve two more.
The Prime Minister is appointed by the President with the approval of the Duma and is first-in-line to the presidency in the case of the President's death or resignation.
Historically the role of Prime Minister has been very much subservient to that of the President. However, this situation changed in March 2008 when Vladimir Putin stepped down as President - as he was constitutionally required to do - and became Prime Minister while the First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev stepped up to the Presidency.
In May 2012, Putin returned to the Presidency and former President Medvedev became Prime Minister in an exchange of roles. In a surprise move, in January 2020 Putin appointed as Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin. Although little known by the public, his is admired among technocrats, becoming famous within a policy genre that, even for hardcore wonks, has only a niche audience: tax enforcement. This move is viewed by some observers as a pivot toward a new brand of techno-authoritarianism.
The lower house in the Russian Federal Assembly is the State Duma. It is the more powerful house, so all bills, even those proposed by the Federation Council, must first be considered by the Duma. However, the Duma's power to force the resignation of the Government is severely limited. It may express a vote of no confidence in the Government by a majority vote of all members of the Duma, but the President is allowed to disregard this vote.
The Duma has 450 members who are known as deputies. Originally seats in the Duma were elected half by proportional representation (with at least 5% of the vote to qualify for seats) and half by single member districts. However, President Putin passed a decree that from the November 2007 election all seats were to be elected by proportional representation with at least 7% of the vote to qualify for seats. This 7% threshold was one of the highest in Europe and, by introducing this, Putin eliminated independents and made it effectively impossible for small parties to be elected to the Duma.
Following further changes, now the Duma is elected through the parallel voting system that was used between 1993 and 2003. So half of the 450 seats are elected by proportional representation from closed party lists with a 5% electoral threshold with the whole country as a single constituency. The other 225 seats are elected in single-member constituencies using the first-past-the-post system.
Under the original 1993 constitution, elections were held every four years but, in November 2008, the constitution was amended to make the Duma's term five years. The last Duma election was held on 17 to 19 September 2021, so the next one is die in late 2026.
The Duma is headquartered in central Moscow, a few steps from Manege Square.
The upper house in the Russian Federal Assembly is the Federation Council. The Council has 170 members who are known as senators. Each of the 85 federal subjects of Russia sends two members to the Council.
The federal subjects are the 47 oblasts (provinces), the eight krais (various large territories with the same legal status as oblasts)), the two federal cities (Moscow and St Petersburg), the 21 republics (areas of non-Russian ethnicity), the four autonomous okrugs (various regions) and one autonomous oblast (the Jewish Autonomous Oblast), each category of which has different powers. In 2014, Sevastopol and the Republic of Crimea became the 84th and 85th federal subjects of Russia, although the two most recently added subjects are internationally recognised as part of Ukraine.
One senator is elected by the provincial legislature and the other is nominated by the provincial governor and confirmed by the legislature.
As a result of the territorial nature of the upper house, terms to the Council are not nationally fixed, but instead are determined according to the regional bodies the senators represent.
The Council holds its sessions within the Main Building on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street in Moscow, the former home of the Soviet State Building Agency (Gosstroi).
The main political party is called United Russia and led by Sergey Shoigu who is a General of the Army who has served as Minister of Defence of the Russian Federation since 2012. The party was founded in April 2001 as a result of a merger between several political parties. It describes itself as centrist, but it is essentially a creation of Vladimir Putin and supports him in the Duma and the Federation Council. In the Duma election of September 2021, the party won 49.82% which gave it no less than 324 seats out of a total of 450. According to data analyst Sergey Shpilkin, had the result not been fixed, the party would only have received just over 30%.
The main opposition party is the Communist Party of the Russian Federation led by Gennady Zyuganov. In the election of 2021, it won 19% of the vote and took 57 seats.
The only other parties in the Duma of significance are are the pro-Kremlin A Just Russia - For Truth (led by Sergey Mironov) with 27 seats and the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky) with 21 seats.
THE JUDICIARY
The Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation consists of 19 judges, one being the Chairman and another one being Deputy Chairman. Judges are appointed by the President with the consent of the Federation Council.
The Constitutional Court is a court of limited subject matter jurisdiction. The 1993 constitution empowers the Constitutional Court to arbitrate disputes between the executive and legislative branches and between Moscow and the regional and local governments. The court also is authorised to rule on violations of constitutional rights, to examine appeals from various bodies, and to participate in impeachment proceedings against the President.
Although in theory the judiciary is independent, most observers believe that major elements of the judiciary - together with the police and prosecution authorities - are under the political control of the Kremlin and more specifically Vladimir Putin.
Observers have described the Russian political system as "managed democracy" or "sovereign democracy" or simply as "Putinism". The three political parties not in government are called the "systemic opposition". Vladimir Ryzhkov, a Kremlin opponent and former Duma deputy who lost his seat in 2007 after he was banned from the elections, said of the 2008 extension of the terms for both the President and the Duma: "This is very negative. It's a clear signal that the regime will be authoritarian and autocratic, and control everything. It's all about keeping power. The tsar was constrained by the aristocracy. The party bureaucracy controlled the general secretary. Today the president controls parliament, the senate, regions, the bureaucracy and the security services, as well as oil and gas." In 2011, the last president of the former Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev said of the current Russian political system: "We have everything - a parliament, courts, a president, a prime minister, and so on. But it's more of an imitation."
In fact, the dismissal of Russia's powerful prosecutor-general Yuri Skuratov in 1999, the indictment of Russia's richest oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003 and again in 2010, the unexplained murder of investigative journalist Anna Plitkovskaya in 2006, the death in prison of the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in 2009, the imprisonment of the three Pussy Riot members Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova & Yekaterina Samutsevich in 2012, the expulsion from the Duma of opposition deputy Gennady Gudkov in 2012, the conviction of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2013, the assassination of leader of the opposition Boris Nemtsov in 2015, the poisoning of Navalny in 2020, and the imprisonment of Nalavny in 2021 are but the most dramatic examples of the relentless seizure of political power exercised by Putin and his allies. This had led "The Economist", in its publication "The World Ahead 2022", to describe "the transformation of Vladimir Putin's regime from a consensual autocracy into tyranny". The invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022 has changed so much in both countries. It is widely felt that, since the war started, Russia has switched from being an authoritarian regime to a totalitarian one.
The dominant political clan in Russia is often referred to as the siloviki, veterans of the security and military establishment led by Putin himself. Perhaps to the surprise of external observers, Putin's leadership is still popular among the public outside the major cities, partly because it is seen as restoring Russia's standing after the humiliating collapse of the Soviet Union, partly because it follows in a long historic tradition of strong central leadership stretching from the Tsars and through Stalin. More widely, the political battle lines in Russia are not for or against democracy or corruption; all parties are notionally for democracy but know that it does not exist, while all parties are theoretically against corruption but do nothing to tackle it. The real battle line is between centralisation and regionalism, that is whether all meaningful power should reside in the Kremlin or whether power should be shared with the regions and major cities.
Meanwhile there is an interplay between political and economic forces that is seriously destabilising Russia. The nation's occupation of the Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014 resulted in sanctions from the Western nations. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has led to a huge swath of extra sanctions by the West and the world is moving away from oil which provides half of the country's exports and funds 40% of the federal budgets. In "The Age Of The Strong Man" by Gideon Rachman, the chapter on Putin quotes a Russian liberal as stating: "Politics in Russia is a contest between the fridge and and the television. People look in the fridge and they see there is no food there. But then they turn on the television and they see Putin standing up for Russia - and they feel proud."
ROGER DARLINGTON
Last modified on 13 July 2022
If you would like to comment on this essay e-mail me
For guides to the political systems of other nations click here