United Russia More Flexible than CPSU and More Sensitive to Threats to Its Position, Yaroshenko Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 28 – There is a widespread notion that today’s United Russia Party is like the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and thus like its predecessor won’t be able to anticipate threats to its power and even to the Russian Federation, according to Aleksey Yaroshenko. But that is a serious misconception and leads to serious mistakes in the conclusions analysts draw.

            In the latest issue of the Russian Journal of Political Research, the Moscow political scientist argues that it is a fundamental mistake to view United Russia as some kind of updated version of the CPSU or that it won’t be able to anticipate and respond to threats. That is simply wrong (naukaru.ru/ru/nauka/article/98110/view and club-rf.ru/interview/548).

            “Russia today,” Yaroshenko writes, “today is encountering unprecedented foreign and domestic challenges and this has given rise to numerous predictions about the further development of the situation and the country as a whole,” including speculation that United Russia and its country will go the same way the CPSU and the USSR did a generation ago.

            But both such comparisons and such predictions fail to take into account the very different institutional arrangements the CPSU and United Russia operate within, the political scientist argues. In Soviet times, the CPSU was defined by the constitution as the chief decision maker and source of ideological guidance for the country.

            Today, however, “there is none of that.” Consequently, United Russia has had to pay far closer attention to what the population wants and has learned to be flexible in how it responds, a flexibility that is all the greater because there is no obligatory ideology like the one that kept the CPSU from seeing where the Soviet Union was heading.

            Unlike the CPSU which “didn’t have to struggle for power, interact with people, compete or adapt” to the society around it, United Russia has to and thus not only is “more adaptive” but “has a greater reserve of firmness which makes it the dominating party under conditions of competition.” There is every reason to think that will continue, Yaroshenko suggests.

            He points out that Putin defined United Russia as “the system-forming party which is at the core of the system” and fulfills two basic functions – “the organization of the political infrastructure of the president” and “the consolidation of representatives of the elite around the President’s strategic course via cooptation.”

            Thus, it is obvious that United Russia is not the CPSU of today and will not respond to challenges in the same way. “Nobody predicted the collapse of the CPSU,” Yaroshenko says; and the misperception of what was happening then is being continued by those who act as if United Russia is imply an updated CPSU.

            That isn’t the case; and as a result, United Russia gives every sign of being able to cope with even the most serious challenges better than was the CPSU, the Moscow political scientist concludes.