ABSTRACT
The Council of Factions failed to get an official status and its influence was on the decline. Its Chairman, Vladimir Novikov, although holding the rank of a committee's deputy chair, had to work practically without staff. The story of "voucherisation" highlighted the unhappy relations between the President and the government, on the one hand, and the parliament, on the other. In the absence of clear procedures to regulate the interrelations between the branches of power, each sought to gain at the expense of the other and showed no intention to abide by strict constitutional provisions. The collision between the parliament and the President was thus a collision between two different embodiments of "the popular will". Multipartyism in its classical form is alien to the Russian political culture. In real life, however, what was called "the Russian parliament" deviated substantially from the classical model of parliamentary institutions.
