ABSTRACT
Political parties and the media enjoy a close, symbiotic relationship in any political system. Although political parties have various ways of communicating with the electorate, no method is as effective as the mass media, particularly television, in the developed world. Certainly, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union recognized this and developed the broadcast media as a way of spreading propaganda about its institutions to the populace. At the same time, parties in democratized countries were relying more and more heavily on television to transmit political ideas and create images that would help them gain or preserve political power. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the creation of the Russian Federation forced both Russian political parties and the media to forge a new relationship in a post-Soviet society. However, evidence suggests that by the Russian presidential elections in 2004 this connection had become closer to the Soviet propaganda model than to one resembling the interaction among parties, candidates, the media and the electorate in developed democracies.
