‘More than Half’ of Russian Population Not Represented in Duma, Nikulin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 16 – Just because a country has elections and a parliament doesn’t mean that the latter will include representatives of large swaths of the population. Governments may make arrangements so that groups it doesn’t want to hear from remain “unrepresented,” Andrey Nikulin says.

            That is exactly what the Putin regime has done in the Russian Federation, the Russian commentator says. And as long as it is in power, it will use its forces to keep out the “more than half” of the Russian population which is currently not represented in the Duma and Federation Council (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=62D37BE12793D).

            Among the groups in the Russian population not represented in the parliament, Nikulin continues, are “the tens of millions” who are liberal and pro-Western, nationalists Russian or otherwise, people on the left, federalists, Protestants, Old Believers, genuine feminists, and representatives of counter-cultural groups.

            In any normal country, a government seeing such a situation would rush to correct it. But Russia under Putin isn’t a normal country and is moving instead in exactly the opposite direction, he argues. As a result, whether it is possible to speak about “the chimerical being” on Okhotny Ryad a parliament is something that is far from clear.