09.05.09

The liberal parties of the 1990s are slowly giving up the ghost on the periphery of Russian politics. The SPS and Yabloko both were established when there was a definite need for them, however, and they therefore are still showing signs of life and might even recover.

The contemporary Russian multiparty system has seen many species of parties, near-parties, and pseudo-parties. Most of them did not last long -- a few years at the most, and some lasted only a few months. Many of these organizations existed only on paper and died of natural causes before the next set of elections. The ones that satisfied a real public need, however, have been amazingly viable. Even after they started breaking down and growing weaker, they managed to prolong this process for more than one set of elections.

After being driven to the distant periphery of politics, they occasionally have shown signs of life, even if this tends to inspire annoyance in the general public rather than respect.

This applies above all to the liberals. The remnants of the SPS (Union of Right-Wing Forces), even after choosing under duress to merge with Civil Force and the DPR (Democratic Party of Russia), stubbornly refuse to die even within the Right Cause party, constantly making their presence known with initiatives clearly revealing their wish to revive the rightwing liberal party in the form in which it was active under different names ever since 1990. These include the proposal to cancel the holiday on 23 February and replace it with Freedom Day (commemorating the abolition of serfdom, on 19 February), the return to the SPS idea of eliminating the military draft, the proposal of criminal penalties for Stalinist propaganda, Leonid Gozman's decision to support Boris Nemtsov in the Sochi mayoral election, and the demand for Yuriy Luzhkov's resignation.

Gozman defined the stance of the former SPS members most clearly when he urged his colleagues to "concentrate more on political demands than on economic ones," "be the party promoting a certain policy line rather than the party lobbying for lower taxes," and demand the restoration of political competition, "normally functioning democratic institutions, a free press, and an independent judiciary."

The former SPS members' stance evoked objections, however, from the Right Cause members who ostensibly were delegated from othe parties, but actually came from Business Russia, the Kremlin-controlled corporate businessmen's organization (Andrey Kuprikov and Boris Titov). To spite Gozman et al, they called for a "virtually complete renunciation of the entire legacy of modern Russian liberalism" and a move from the rightwing liberal stance to the righting conservative position already occupied by most of the business community.

We seem to be seeing all the signs of a conflict between two scenarios for the development of the party: 1) as a liberal club and successor to the DVR (Russia's Democratic Choice) and the SPS; 2) as a "compact liberal-conservative party of the constructive opposition, with the medium-range goal of forming one of the three influential parliamentary factions" (as Titov put it). In fact, however, there are no scenarios,and the alternative is only an illusion. The former SPS members are defending their earlier policy line only because they cannot propose anything else. Nevertheless, their option is a completely practical choice, which exists here and now, even if this existence could be more accurately described as a hopeless and gloomy vegetative state.

The option proposed by Business Russia, on the other hand, is a typical retrospective utopia. A "compact liberal-conservative party of the constructive opposition" (i.e., a classic bourgeois party) would have a chance of success only in a democracy requiring voters to meet certain qualifications. After the institution of universal suffrage, all of the "compact liberal-conservative parties" had to adapt to the new conditions and address the voting public at large, promoting either traditional values (the church, the family, and law and order) or the need to counter the socialist (or communist) menace.

In present-day Russia, traditionalism is colored primarily in shades of red, and it probably would be impossible to prevail over the communists in this area. The threat of communist revenge is a card that was played long ago and would be pointless to play again. That leaves only the possibility that the population, which has never felt any affection for the bourgeoisie, suddenly will have complete faith in it and will start voting for the party defending its interests.

In essence, the rightwingers tried to cultivate the imageof a "liberal-conservative party of the constructive opposition" in the 2003 Duma election campaign. It did not pay any dividends then and there is no reason to believe it will pay any now. It is highly unlikely, however, that the Business Russia members and their Kremlin overseers are expecting this. On the contrary, it appears that the Presidential Staff has planned from the start to drive the rightwing liberals into an obviously unfortunate electoral niche.

The former SPS members have made feeble attempts to fight this, realizing that when someone forces you into a dark room, it probably is a storeroom rather than the parlor. The former Business Russia members, on the other hand, are the administration's voluntary helpers, or the "aktiv" -- in the sense in which the word was used in the prison camps.

Whereas the former SPS members were pushed into that storeroom against their will, but without being given no possible way of breaking out and escaping, to the Solidarity movement, for instance, Yabloko did not even have to be pushed: It locked itself in there, has no wish to come out into the light of day, and is driving away anyone making any such suggestions.

When the change of Yabloko leaders took place in summer 2008 and Sergey Mitrokhin became the chairman of the party, it became evident that Yabloko no longer wished to be a participant in federal politics. Mitrokhin is a Moscow City Duma deputy, and all of his tempestuous activity, consisting mainly in a fight against high-density construction, is intended to win seats for Yabloko in the next Moscow City Duma election (on the party ticket, of course, because it would be unrealistic to expect to defeat the United Russia members in the single-seat districts under the mayor's control).

On the federal level, the party has turned into a conglomerate of regional branches, each of which is pursuing its own policy --but only if it has the resources to do this, of course.

For a long time, the St. Petersburg branch, for example, has been more likely to coordinate its actions with those of its colleagues in Solidarity rather than with the federal party leadership, even in spite of the fact that Ilya Yashin, the co-chairman of the Yabloko youth organization, was expelled from the party for this kind of behavior back in December.

As for the central Yabloko leadership, its isolationism has not wavered in the slightest and has actually been taken to absurd extremes instead. When the party bureau was discussing the possibility of endorsing Solidarity candidate Boris Nemtsov in the Sochi mayoral election, for example, the bureau members passed a resolution, demanding that he sign a declaration condemning the "criminal privatization" of the 1990s. They must have been waiting for the right time and place, as the saying goes.

It is not surprising that several prominent Yabloko members, including Maksim Reznik, the leader of the St. Petersburg organization, as well as Sergey Kovalev and Viktor Sheynis, ignored this resolution and announced their support for Nemtsov. If they are expelled from the party, this will be a sign that isolationism has brought Yabloko to the point of outright self-destruction. If, on the other hand, no penalties are imposed, this will only confirm that the party no longer exists as a participant in federal politics.

The former SPS members and present Yabloko members are in vastly different positions now, but there are some similarities as well. In particular, both should have realized long ago that the exit from the dark room is in the same place as the entrance.

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Source: Gazeta.ru