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PONARS Eurasia
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  • Policy Memos | Аналитика
  • PONARS Eurasia

The 2000 Presidential Elections: The Political Taste and Aftertaste

  • July 23, 2012
  • Nikolay Petrov

The first relatively free and fair elections to the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR took place on March 26, 1989. These elections gave a strong impetus to the political development of the society and started a period of electoral democracy. Though shocked, the Soviet nomenklatura did not disappear. Adjusting to the changed conditions, the Russian nomenklatura came to the 1993 elections more or less prepared. The unstable array of political forces and the specifics of Yeltsin's regime construction made the 1995-96 presidential elections appear as a kind of political plurality.

March 26, 2000, represented the culmination of an eleven-year-long period of transformation from the Soviet decorative democracy into a Russian manipulative democracy. The circle closed: at the start of a new spiral, society returned to predetermined election results and the practice of approving the appointed leader. To question whether elections were free and fair misses the point, because those criteria are

not applicable here: it is quite a different genre, like evaluating popular American wrestling by the rules of classic Greco-Roman wrestling. The 2000 elections could not be clean regardless of procedure given the tough clash of elite clans on the eve of elections, the negative mobilization of the electorate inspired by the Kremlin and the war in Chechnya, and the early resignation of the former president designed to give the maximum advantage to the new one. […]

Read full text (PDF)

Memo #:
113
Series:
1
PDF:
pm_0113.pdf
PDF URL:
http://www.gwu.edu/~ieresgwu/assets/docs/ponars/pm_0113.pdf
Nikolay Petrov
Website | + posts
Professor, Department of Comparative Politics; Senior Research Fellow
Affiliation

Higher School of Economics, Russia; Chatham House, UK
Links

Higher School of Economics (Bio), Chatham House (Bio)
Expertise

Russia, Politics, Elites, Elections, Regions, Georgraphy
  • Nikolay Petrov
    https://www.ponarseurasia.org/members/nikolay-petrov/
    Expectations for Russia’s September Parliamentary Elections
  • Nikolay Petrov
    https://www.ponarseurasia.org/members/nikolay-petrov/
    As Anger at Ruling Regime Boils Over, Putin Strikes Hard Against Dissent
  • Nikolay Petrov
    https://www.ponarseurasia.org/members/nikolay-petrov/
    Protests in Russia Show How the Political Environment Has Changed
  • Nikolay Petrov
    https://www.ponarseurasia.org/members/nikolay-petrov/
    Russia on the Eve of its Presidential Election: How Long Can Change and Stasis Coexist?
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