Yabloko and the challenge of building a liberal party in Russia

Abstract

ONE OF THE MOST STRIKING PUZZLES of post-Soviet politics has been the weakness of liberal parties in Russia. With the advent of Gorbachev's perestroika, liberal voices began streaming into the streets demanding more freedoms, civil rights and a market-based economy.' It was not hard for Westerners to imagine that these early outpourings would provide the basis for a strong liberal party in Russia and that the country's defining political cleavage would come to be between this party and post-communist socialists. Nevertheless, those parties with the strongest liberal credentials have remained minor players in Russian elections. At no time was this more clear than 2003, when the 'party of power' (United Russia) effectively won over two-thirds of the seats in the parliamentary elections and the only other parties able to gain enough seats to register delegations in the Duma were self-avowed socialists and/or nationalists (the Communist Party, the Motherland bloc and the famously misnamed Liberal Democratic Party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky). The leading liberal party, Yabloko, gained just 4% of the vote in the nationwide party-list competition that allocated 225 Duma seats and just four of the 225 seats contested in singlemember districts. Russia's party system, therefore, now appears to lack any influential liberal component and to centre primarily around the cleavage between the market statism of United Russia and a leftist camp currently led by the Communist Party, with a significant nationalist current defining a second line of cleavage.2 Comparative political science has developed a number of perspectives by which one can understand the emergence of different kinds of party systems in different countries. The dominant school of thought argues that party systems are the product of deep social cleavages as mediated, channeled and influenced by political (especially electoral) institutions.3 Another important strain of theory focuses on the importance of historical legacies that constrain choices and shape incentives for system creators at critical formative moments.4 Accordingly, explanations of the liberals' fate in Russia have tended to break down along these theoretical lines. To argue that Russian liberals are weak because society, the state and history are all stacked against them, however, is to lend a sense of inevitability to the liberals' current plight that is not warranted. The present article, therefore, follows a third strain of comparative theory that stresses the importance of contingent elite choice and even randomness in societies beginning a transition from authoritarian rule.5 While a focus on social cleavages, institutions and history is certainly helpful for