ABSTRACT
The elections of 1989 and 1990 were the first free elections held in Russia in seventy years, and the legislative bodies that emerged differed radically from their predecessors in terms of both composition and activity. As a result, for the first time since the Duma, political scientists have the opportunity to analyze election results and the debates, coalitions, and voting patterns within the Russian legislatures with the same techniques used in the analysis of Western political institutions. The simultaneous elections to the oblast and city soviets began in March 1990 and, with subsequent runoffs and rounds of voting, they continued for several months. The conventional wisdom within the Moscow intellectual community—fully accepted in the American media—is that the majority of the deputies in the Russian legislature, let alone those in most of the local legislatures, reflect the interests of the party apparatus, who controlled the elections in 1990.
