ABSTRACT
Political parties play a fundamental role in modern representative democracy. They connect civil and political society, advance the perceived interests of individuals, groups and social strata while aiming consciously to develop these constituencies, and provide a link between civil society and the state, espousing the claims of the one and enforcing the rules of the other.2 In post-communist Russia parties only marginally fulfilled these functions. The relative independence of government from both parliamentary oversight and party control, and the emergence of a powerful presidential system based on the apparatus of the state, marginalised the political role of organised social interests. Trapped between an ill-formed state system and rudimentary civil society, the nascent representative system was over-shadowed by other forms of social aggregation like the military and security apparatus, oligarchical financial and commercial interests, regional governors, and above all by the regime and its apparatus. Rather than parties generating the political dynamism that formed government, the regime itself tended to take the initiative in party formation. This chapter will examine the tortuous process of party development in Russia, noting that a multiplicity of parties does not of itself demonstrate the existence of a functioning party system. As we will see in Chapter 8, Russia’s electoral politics focuses on parties, and they structure politics in the Duma (Chapter 9). Parties have become an essential element in the Russian political scene, but they remained a subaltern social form.
