Russia in 2003Article Free Pass
|Area:||17,075,400 sq km (6,592,800 sq mi)|
|Population||(2003 est.): 144,893,000|
|Chief of state:||President Vladimir Putin|
|Head of government:||Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov|
A general election to the State Duma, the 450-member lower house of the Russian parliament, was held on Dec. 7, 2003. The result was an overwhelming victory for parties supporting the policies of Pres. Vladimir Putin and a crushing defeat for the opposition. First place went to the pro-presidential United Russia, commonly known as the “party of power,” which took 37.6% of the national vote. The Communist Party (CPRF) came in second with 12.6%—half the size of its vote in the preceding election of 1999. The maverick Liberal Democratic Party came in third with 11.5%, while the nationalistic Motherland bloc won 9%. Neither of Russia’s liberal right-wing parties, Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces (SPS), cleared the 5% hurdle to win seats. No one doubted that these results accurately reflected the wishes of the voters, but the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which observed the election, criticized the misuse of “administrative resources” (state infrastructure and personnel on the public payroll) to campaign for United Russia and media coverage excessively favourable to the pro-presidential parties.
While the parliamentary election was the major formal political event of 2003, the strong executive and legislative powers that the Russian constitution vested in the office of the president meant that the main issue preoccupying the political elite was the presidential election scheduled for March 2004. Opinion polls indicated that Putin’s popularity remained high and he was virtually certain to win a second term. Following the general election, Putin publicly confirmed that he would run for reelection. Throughout the year, however, observers detected increasingly bitter signs of rivalry within the presidential administration, divided as it was commonly believed to be into opposing factions, each determined to ensure that it, not its rivals, would have the president’s ear during his anticipated second term. These groups were popularly nicknamed the “Family” and the Siloviki. The Family represented the interests of those who came to power under former president Boris Yeltsin and benefited (sometimes by dubious means) from the privatization of formerly state-owned assets in the 1990s; they were seen as liberal, pro-market, and Western-oriented. The second group was known both as Siloviki (denoting their roots in state institutions with the right to wield force) and as Gosudarstvenniki (“Statists”). They favoured a strong state role in the economy; they were seen as opposing foreign investment in key areas of the Russian economy and wary of Russia’s rapprochement with the West, especially the U.S. They included the leaders of state-owned industries, the military, and the intelligence and security agencies. Their status had risen sharply since Putin became president, with many of their number having been promoted to top posts in all branches of government and administration. Having missed out during the privatization of the 1990s, they were believed to want both to secure their slice of the pie and to ensure that key sectors of the economy remained under state control. They also called for state intervention to tax the “superprofits” accruing from high world prices and the redistribution of the funds to foster social welfare and Russia’s technological advancement.
The Yukos affair brought the clash between these two groups into the open. It began in early July, when the prosecutor general’s office launched an investigation into the activities of Yukos, Russia’s leading oil company. A Yukos shareholder, billionaire Platon Lebedev, was arrested and imprisoned on suspicion of financial wrongdoing during the privatization of a fertilizer company in the 1990s. Alarm bells rang because similar charges could have been leveled against most, if not all, Russian businesses established at that time. Prosecutors announced that they were also investigating allegations of tax evasion, fraud, and even murder. Police conducted numerous searches of offices belonging to or associated with Yukos. In October, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, chairman of Yukos and the richest man in Russia, was arrested and imprisoned on suspicion of tax evasion. Many commentators believed the case to be politically motivated. Khodorkovsky, they argued, had run afoul of the so-called historic compromise that Putin had struck with Russia’s business tycoons (commonly known as “oligarchs”) after becoming president in 2000; as long as the oligarchs stayed out of politics, they would be allowed to keep the properties they had acquired under privatization, regardless of how these had been obtained, but they were not to use their billions to interfere in the political process.
One of seven bankers who built huge fortunes during the controversial “loans-for-shares” scheme of 1995, Khodorkovsky had had a typically controversial rise to the top of the business world. Latterly, however, he had tried to turn Yukos into a model of transparency. In so doing, he had won the admiration of Western business circles. At the same time, Khodorkovsky began to take an interest in politics. He established a charitable foundation that contributed large sums of money to universities and the arts, sponsored the use of the Internet in the regions, and made financial contributions to Russian political parties such as Yabloko, the SPS, and even, reportedly, the CPRF. According to some reports, Khodorkovsky hoped to ensure that smaller political parties would be represented in the Duma elected in December, which thereby would reduce the chances that the “party of power” would dominate the new parliament. According to more hostile reports, he had been planning to “buy” the Duma and turn Russia into a parliamentary republic in which the prime minister, not the president, played the dominant role. There was general agreement that whatever his aim, Khodorkovsky had violated the terms of Putin’s historic compromise. The affair took a fresh turn in October when prosecutors froze the controlling stake in Yukos owned by Khodorkovsky and his partners. Alarmed, other businessmen called on the Kremlin for assurances that the Yukos investigation did not signal the beginning of a witch hunt against Russian business as a whole. Putin assured them that he was committed to a market economy and that the privatization process would not be reversed.
The Yukos affair provoked tensions between the Kremlin and Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov. Its immediate effect was to lead to a reduction in the influence of the Family. At the end of October, Putin accepted the resignation of Aleksandr Voloshin, as head of the presidential administration the Family’s most highly placed representative. Voloshin had been seen as a counterbalance to the Siloviki. Putin replaced Voloshin not with a representative of the opposing camp but with a young lawyer from St. Petersburg, Dmitry Medvedev, who was seen, like Voloshin, as a supporter of the liberal rather than the statist faction.
Human rights activists accused the Putin administration of curtailing democracy at home, especially as regards press freedom. The U.S.-based civil rights monitor Freedom House downgraded Russia’s media status to “Not Free” after Boris Jordan was forced out of his post as the last independent head of the state-owned television station NTV in January. In June, TVS, Russia’s last private television station with a nationwide audience, was closed on orders of the Press Ministry. These curbs notwithstanding, a wide range of newspapers continued to be published, while growing Internet use allowed people access to alternative views.
June saw the refurbished city of St. Petersburg celebrate the 300th anniversary of its foundation by Peter the Great as his “window on the West.” This was seen as symbolic of Russia’s post-Soviet opening to the outside world. Symbolic also of the Russian people’s reconciliation with its troubled past was the consecration in July of the Cathedral on the Blood in Yekaterinburg, built on the spot where the last tsar and his family were assassinated in 1918.
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