In a Post-Putin Transition, Today’s Tightly Controlled Duma could Evolve as the RSFSR Supreme Soviet Did in Gorbachev’s Time, Quickly and Dramatically, Uvarov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 18 – Under Putin, the Duma has been transformed from a place where regional and bureaucratic interests were fought out in public to a tightly controlled branch of the power vertical; and as a result, many are inclined to write it off as an irrelevancy, according to Aleksey Uvarov.

            The Russian political scientist argues that the Duma has continued to “perform functions invisible if one looks only at vote totals and points out that abstentions rather than voting no have become more frequent but no less important in terms of what happens under today’s tighter Kremlin control (ridl.io/ru/parlament-mobilizovannogo-gosudarstva/).

            Since February 2022 when Putin launched his expanded war against Ukraine, Uvarov continues, “political loyalty has become a standalone criterion for the state apparatus” and for the Duma, which no longer is where policies are debated but where the very real conflicts of interests in the system are addressed more quietly but all the same in very real ways.

            He reminds that “an authoritarian system does not eliminate conflicts of interests: it changes how they are resolved. Ministries still compete for resources, governors for federal funding, big business for regulatory terms, security agencies for powers, and political groups for personnel slots.” But now, those differences must be settled before a floor vote.

            What that means is that it is incorrect to call the Duma today “a purely useless institution,” Uvarov says. On the one hand, it “still performs administrative, legislative, representative and personnel functions and can be a venue for advancing regional or sectional interests” and promoting the advancement of its members.

            And on the other, institutions like the Duma which have been reduced to “performing mainly ceremonial bodies or ratifying the decisions of others can quickly acquire independent political significance when the external environment shifts. The experience of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet is instructive.”

“For most of the Soviet period, the RSFSR Supreme Soviet almost automatically endorsed party leadership decisions, but after competitive elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1990, the situation changed within months,” Uvarov says. The same thing could happen with the Duma during a succession crisis.

And he concludes: “Formally existing institutions should not be written off as definitively dead merely because, under the current political configuration, they are subordinated to the executive. If that configuration changes, ready‑made procedures, offices, and representative structures can again be filled with political content.”