Origins of United Russia and the Putin Presidency: The Role of Contingency in Party-System Development, The

Demokratizatsiya, Spring 2004 by Hale, Henry E

The desire of people to be led, more than any support for the particular policies Putin pursued, is further manifested in a series of questions asked about media coverage of the war. Many observers characterized public support for the war as growing out of biased coverage. This may be true to some extent; however, we must not underestimate the sophistication of the Russian citizen. People clearly did not believe leadership claims, broadcast throughout the state-owned media, that the war would be over quickly.57 A VTsIOM poll taken in January 2000 asked people to estimate how long the war would last, and only 14 percent predicted that it would end in victory by the end of March 2000. Some 39 percent thought it would last more than a year, as opposed to 38 percent who thought it would end before a year had elapsed.58 As of February 2000, just one month before Putin won a landslide electoral victory, another poll found that only 27 percent of Russian citizens averred that they believed Putin's statements about the war, although only 7 percent replied that they did not believe him.59

Despite their vastly unformed views on precisely what needed to be done, the public quickly mobilized around the dynamic leadership that Putin offered them. This is evident in his skyrocketing approval ratings during the months following the apartment bombings. While just 2 percent would have voted for him for president in August 1999, this figure had risen to 51 percent by December. While 31 percent had generally approved of his performance in August 1999, this figure had catapulted to 80 percent by November. Asked in a different way, 44 percent of the population said that their opinion of Putin had changed for the better by November, with another 46 percent claiming they had assessed him correctly all along. Only three percent said that their evaluation of him had worsened during this time.60 Putin was by far the most popular man in the country.

A Political Decoy: The Unity Bloc

With the emergence of United Russia as a major nationwide structure during Putin's first term, it is sometimes assumed that this was what the Kremlin had planned all along in creating the Unity Bloc in fall 1999 to contest the Duma elections of that year. To many, Unity was simply the successor to Russia's Choice, Our Home is Russia, and other attempts by Kremlin insiders to promote a party to support the president in the parliament and in regional elective organs.61 Writing in the warm glow of victory, Yeltsin recorded in his memoirs that he had carefully planned such a victory all along.62

The most interesting things about Unity, however, are the ways in which it was fundamentally different from these earlier efforts to build a party of power. From the beginning, Russian observers, insiders, and even Unity's leaders clearly saw that the main purpose of this bloc was not victory for itself in the parliamentary elections but the sabotage of the prospects of the leaders of a rival party (Fatherland-All Russia) for an entirely different set of elections: the presidential ones, scheduled to be held the following year.63 Its primary aim was negative rather than positive, presidential rather than parliamentary: to subvert the Luzhkov-Primakov presidential project rather than to gain parliamentary representation for presidential supporters. With Putin firmly in place as a "counter focal point" and with the enemy's rallying points disintegrating under Dorenko's heat, Unity was important as an electoral counter-coalition of governors that could "outbid" Fatherland-All Russia for the support of enough governors to keep the latter from finishing strongly in the Duma race. Observers believed that a poor Duma showing by Luzhkov and Primakov would weaken their presidential bids. And the presidency is where real power lies in Russia.