Paul Goble
Staunton, Sept. 23 -- In Soviet times, Western analysts gleaned enormous insights into the attitudes of various non-Russian peoples in the USSR by analyzing small variations in the level of support voters in the various union republics gave to the always unopposed CPSU list of candidates.
In a 1968 American Political Science Review article, Jerome Gilison described this effort in an article often familiarly and sometimes slightingly referred to as “The Missing One Percent” (cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/soviet-elections-as-a-measure-of-dissent-the-missing-one-percent/DBF1CB977BA60CC6DFBDBED7E0BCD096).
Now, a half century later, analysts in both Russia and the West are moving back toward to analyzing Russian elections in a similar way, considering relatively small, albeit larger than in Soviet times, variations in levels of participation and support for Vladimir Putin among different ethnic and regional groups.
The differences in the share of the vote opposition parties and candidates show now, of course, reflects not just differences in actual support but also variations in the amount of manipulation and falsification of results by officials in different places. But the variations are still striking among groups that lost but received very different support in different places.
The People of Baikal portal surveyed the results of opposition figures across Russia east of the Urals as well as offering suggestions about why the division of votes for United Russia and for other parties was so different elsewhere, even though overwhelmingly United Russia won (baikal-stories.media/2026/09/23/gde-zhivut-samye-protestnye-izbirateli/).
“As usual,” the portal says, “as usual, the least votes were won by United Russia in large cities, and most of all in poor rural areas.” It did least well either when KPRF candidates offered an anti-war message as well as a left one and did especially poorly in rural regions where the government has pushed development over the objections of local people.
The Barents Observer portal noted that United Russia lagged behind the all-Russ Duma figures in many votes for legislative assemblies, doing least well among these bodies in Karelia (ru.thebarentsobserver.com/novosti/hudsij-rezultat-edinoj-rossii-na-vyborah-v-zaksobranie-karelii/458588).
But the Kremlin party of power did less well in these votes in other regions where such elections were held, including Vologda, Kirov, Tomsk, and Novgorod in particular, all places where local grievances overwhelmed government-promoted support for United Russia candidates.
And the Horizontal Russia portal focused on the place in the Russian Federation where United Russia did the worst and opposition parties the best, elections in a Buryat village where United Russia succeeded in garnering only 15 percent of those taking part in the election (semnasem.org/news/2026/09/21/edinaya-rossiya-nabrala-15-na-vyborah-v-buryatskom-sele-gde-hotyat-dobyvat-mineraly-protiv-voli-zhitelej).
People in that village and those in neighboring ones voted against United Russia because that party backs the development of an apatite deposit there, something people in the region have been opposing without success for more than a year. Not surprisingly, the republic governor, Aleksey Tsydenov, explained this patter by the work of “outside agitators.”
This recrudescence of the “one-percent” phenomenon does not obscure the fact that United Russia won overwhelmingly and almost everywhere, but it does show that variations in the voting for it as opposed to other parties and candidates are important signs of where anger about the regime is greatest and thus the willingness to protest is as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment