Presidential elections 2024: Is there going to be a change in Russia?

In this interview for REM, a political analyst talks about socio-cultural differences between Russian regions, their effect on the voting results, and why the government in Russia always defeats the opposition. The second part of the interview is available here.

Part I. Russian electoral peculiarities: Why does the government always defeat the opposition?

What should the Western audience understand about the current Russian politics?

It’s necessary to understand that Russia is a very large country. That’s why any attempts to compare the situation in Russia even with countries like Belarus just do not work. A national political organization could be easily created in any average European country, without any problems. Politically active groups could be easily brought together in one day to organize a Maidan in the capital, without any problems. The speed of travel, communication and everything else is completely different there.

Russia's size, Russia’s dimension is a great curse; it dramatically slows down the development of huge territories. Some technologies that are already a thing of the past in the rest of the world are only now emerging in many Russian regions. Different parts of Russia develop with a different speed. Such cities as Moscow and St. Petersburg are European down to the ground, with an established European subculture. European intellectuals would easily find like-minded people in these cities and feel as if they’ve never left Europe. But the rest of Russia turns out to be very diverse: considering not only the speed of development, but also the civilizational aspect. Due to the huge size of the country, different parts of Russia border upon different political and cultural zones. Some parts of Russia are absolutely European – like Moscow, St. Petersburg, Karelia, the Urals. But there is also the region of North Caucasus. And there is the Republic of Tyva. And there is the proletarian Kuzbass knowing no equals in Europe at all. Considering the vast dimensions of the country, its government has never known an opponent with comparable management resources. Only the central government is capable of establishing an operational monitoring system over the whole country. The authorities are the only ones knowing what is going on in Russia, where and how. Some regions are so big that even the regional authorities have no idea what’s happening [in the outskirts]. In Krasnoyarsk Krai or Yakutia there are distant districts which can be accessed by airplane only.

From this point of view, it’s a completely different reality uncommon for European countries. The huge geographical dimensions and dissimilarities in regional political cultures make it difficult to form any meaningful and somewhat strong opposition, because there are no comparable resources for it to be established. This makes any struggle at the national level very difficult. That is, some kind of perfect storm must occur in order for people at power to lose it. Russia has no experience of democratic change of power, it has never happened in the country's history. The Russian voters don’t have the skill of achieving changes by democratic instruments. Changes in Russia have resulted out of cataclysms caused by a negative combination of various factors – economic, geopolitical, military etc. Power transfer has never been peaceful.

What is the fundament of power in modern Russia?

The fundament of power in Russia has two dimensions – economic-geographical and socio-cultural. On the one hand, it is built on national regions and agricultural provinces: rural areas, small towns and national regions dominated by titular ethnic groups. These are mainly regions dominated by Islam and Buddhism. At the same time, they are mainly agrarian. On the other hand, the key groups of voters loyal to the authorities are primarily recipients of state aid. Basically, it’s loyalty in exchange for money. There is a legion of state employees. These are people working in education, health care, social security, public utilities, as well as municipal employees. The second huge group of loyal voters counts people employed by police, army and security services. And the third huge group consists of pensioners, who are entirely dependent on the state. These three groups represent about 30% of the total number of voters, maybe even more. Which is more than enough to maintain control. Additionally, there are national peripheral regions. They are always supporting the authorities at power because of patriarchal traditions: people at power shall be supported simply because they are at power. This is a very stable structure.

Could you give an example of a typical allegiant region?

The Republic of Tyva on the border with Mongolia. It is a poor, depressed, agricultural region. And an absolutely allegiant one. It is one of the few regions that in 1991 voted for [Communist] Ryzhkov, while the rest of Russia voted for Yeltsin [hereinafter in brackets – comments by REM: Yeltsin received 58.5% of the votes in Russia; there were only four national regions where he did not receive a majority of votes – Republic of Tyva, Aginsk Buryat Autonomous District, Gorno-Altai ASSR, and North Ossetia; in Kuzbass, Yeltsin was beaten by local politician Aman Tuleyev]. How deep must the allegiance to those in power be to vote against the changes supported by the whole country?! And six months later, the Soviet Union collapses, and Yeltsin, who was voted against in Tyva, becomes the new leader. In 1993, Tyva suddenly becomes one of the leaders in voting for the new government, fervently supports the new Constitution, and the Party of Russian Unity and Concord, which was one of the two parties in power under Yeltsin, wins the elections there. This party did not win anywhere else besides Tyva. That is, Tyva turned out to be more allegiant than the rest of Russia only two years later. What happened there during those two years? Did the shepherds suddenly become liberals? They were neither communists nor liberals; they had read neither Marx nor Hayek. This is the position of allegiance – they are always supporting those at power. Father the Tsar has changed, so now we are in favor of the new sovereign. And this is a fundamental thing.

Almost all of the regions that we now consider as national outskirts or, in other words, strongholds of power – Kabardino-Balkaria, North Ossetia, and so on – they all voted for the CPRF in the mid-1990s. The so-called “Red Belt” [the regions voting for the Communists against Yeltsin in the 1990s] consisted of the same agricultural provinces or national regions that are now the backbone of Russian power. What does this tell us? It means that they have always been in favor of those in power. It's just that there was a period when the old power was gone and the new power had not yet settled down. And with the new authorities having settled down, the first to turn their coats were the national regions, soon followed by the agricultural provinces. At that moment, support for the Communists meant support of nostalgia for the power gone. People in these regions voted for the Communists out of habit. It was their phantom pain. The identity problem has instantly disappeared as soon as the new authorities came to power, people immediately rushed into their arms. So if for some reason Putin decides to resign tomorrow, sets Navalny free from jail, and Navalny triumphantly enters the Kremlin, these very regions will vote for Navalny.

What are the opposition-minded regions of Russia?

The opposition in Russia is popular mainly in the regions sharing the value of individualism. That is, where people have a critical approach to any government, where they are not used to marching in formations, where personal freedom matters. Large cities, metropolis, territories without serfdom in the past – the Russian Far North, Far East, all territories beyond the Urals. The Russian “Wild West”, so to say. Of course, there are also some exceptions, but to a large extent independent behavior is typical for these regions.

Why do the authorities always get more votes at elections than the opposition?

In terms of numbers, there are more areas of independent voting than areas where the authorities have electoral dominance. Approximately one third of voters live in the regions supporting the government. However, according to ballot results reports these regions always have the highest turnout – 70-90%. At the same time, the turnout in protest regions is usually low because the population is disunited and individualistic. The turnout of 40% in Moscow or Irkutsk opposing to 99% in Chechnya during the State Duma elections is hardly surprising. So it turns out that 1/3 of the regions provide over 50% of the votes. That’s why pretty much all federal electoral campaigns in Russia have roughly speaking followed the same scenario for the last 20 years: to mobilize the voting in the electoral domains of the authorities, on the one hand, and to artificially decrease the turnout and demoralize the protest electorate in opposition-minded regions, on the other hand. Generally speaking, that’s how the authorities in Russia manage to stay at power. Their main groups of supporters are stable, consistent and easy to mobilize. Whereas the opposition, which theoretically could have gained a majority of votes, never finds a way to get united – it just lacks a consolidated force. In some regions a temporary coalition based on the “against”-principle happens from time to time. However, there is no coalition “for” something, because there is no common positive agenda.

Do you see any changes in this relation over the last few years?

The situation is changing. Urbanization is gathering pace; the share of urban population is growing. Step by step people tend to move to large cities. The number of people living in the province is decreasing. On the long run, this is a positive trend. Therefore, at some point it will become impossible for the authorities to implement the same old electoral technology. This technology is a dead end, it can’t be used forever. Apart from that, in the national regions the situation also gets more complicated. There are almost no changes in the political elites, therefore a generation gap. Young people can’t find a niche there, because all the jobs have already been taken. So youth protests often merge with Islamic protests in the regions of the North Caucasus. This becomes a way to struggle for a certain restructuring of power, new equality, justice, new opportunities, and so on.

The problem is that in order for the situation to develop, there must be certain institutions representing different groups. But the authorities have done everything to ensure that such institutions do not exist.

Is it a calculated strategy of Putin to destroy such institutions?

Putin hails from the intelligent services, and he feared the regional elites gaining more power under Yeltsin. In his fight against the parliament Yeltsin put a stake on the support of regional parliaments and heads of the regions. After Yeltsin’s election as parliamentary speaker, national movements came to power in several regions of the USSR – primarily in the Baltics, Moldova, Ukraine, etc. And at that moment, as a maneuver against Yeltsin, Gorbachev invited the heads of Russian autonomous republics to negotiations of the Union Treaty. He tried to provide them with an equal status with the Union Republics [apart from the Union Republics, which later became independent states, there were so-called Autonomous Republics in the USSR. There were 15 of them within the RSFSR].

That was a point of no return. The Union collapsed, but the ambitions remained. Yeltsin needed support of the regions in his struggle against the parliament. At that moment, he did a lot to win over the regional elites. He told them: Make sure that I’m elected – then you can do whatever you want. Until the late 1990s, Russian binding laws were very loose regarding the regions. Regions could do almost anything they wanted; they introduced their own taxes, some regions even tried to introduce their own systems of residence permits. And Yeltsin was getting weaker. In the late 1990s, the regional bureaucracy ventured so far that it began to struggle for the creation of gubernatorial blocs. At that time, [Moscow Mayor Yuri] Luzhkov was leading the movement. And there was a chance that he, as leader of the regional opposition, would become the next president. The federal elite got so scared that – as a result – Putin has emerged as an antithesis [to the strengthened governors]. He set a course for tightening the screws meaning to return the regions to where they were.

Putin's presidency began, in fact, with “bringing order” and canceling everything that governors had gained during Yeltsin's presidency in the 1990s. Their seat in the upper house of parliament was taken away from them, along with their immunity. And eventually, in 2004, the gubernatorial elections were eliminated. This regional evolution could have followed a different scenario. But at that moment there was no force that could effectively resist the beginning process of building the vertical of power.

The vertical of power has been developing for 20 years leading to even more unification. Russia is a culturally diverse country, the behavior of the regions remains different, but the administrative elites are arranged according to the principle of parallel verticals – every governor is de facto just a manager. And even the key deputy governors – for finance, for education, for natural resources – must be approved by the federal ministry. They have their own bosses in Moscow. In other words, there is not just one vertical of power. There are many verticals, and they are parallel to each other. No mutiny can happen in such a system, because there is no consolidated regional nomenclature. Regional elites have been forced out of the administration.

Are there no political leaders left in the regions?

There are, of course, some people in the administrations with a certain authority, which theoretically can be transformed into a political capital of some kind. Provided that the situation in the country changes. But this is merely a theory. In fact, all the elites have mostly shifted to the regional parliaments. If a consolidated voice of local notables can be found at all, it will be in regional parliaments. There are regions with very strong regional parliaments, which can dictate some real terms. For example, not to approve an official or reject a budget. The strongest regional parliaments we have today are in the Irkutsk Region, the Novosibirsk Region, and Primorye. In these regions, the authorities realize that it is necessary to negotiate with deputies.

Can anything happening in real life – i.e., economic difficulties faced by a significant part of the population – somehow affect the voting results?

It depends on the region. The power in the agricultural province and national regions is consolidated; there is no opposition in there, so the real spirit and the election results are two parallel worlds. Let’s take Bashkiria, for example. Bashkiria is one of the leading regions in terms of protest actions this year, but there is no trace of them in the election results. Judging by the election results only, everything seems to be fine in the region. Because the vertical of power is quite stable.

However, regional revolts are possible even in regions under control. A revolt might be organized by local elites if an unpopular governor has been appointed by the center. The elites can cause some troubles from time to time, but there must be a reason for that. The governor not having the situation under control might be considered as a reason. And if everything is fine with the governor, there is no reason to cause trouble.

In some regions lacking a strong vertical structure where the elections usually are quite fair, the results may show significant fluctuations. In competitive regions, real electoral campaigns are possible. Of course, if the authorities realize that there is a certain problem in the region, some deviations may come up. In this case, the authorities can send a “landing force” to the region, a reinforced team of political technologists, a brigade from Moscow, which will intimidate and oppress everyone there. But this team from Moscow will not stay in this region forever. They will leave at some point, and everything will get back to business as usual.