Three Cheers for Russian Democracy

...In the 30 to 44 age bracket, Yeltsin led Zyuganov 57 percent to 36 percent...

...Among Most's holdings (which include the popular Time-like weekly Itogi...

...With Grigory Yavlinsky's pro-market opposition party and swing votes from the center/center-left Fatherland-All Russia (OVR) bloc joining the new pro-reform plurality on some issues, a more or less reliable pro-reform majority in the Russian parliament Leon Aron is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...

...This time, the center-right vote was largely consolidated in Unity (14.5 million votes) and SPS (5.5 million...

...In 1995, 9.6 million votes—14 percent of the total—were cast for pro-reform and pro-government parties that failed to meet the 5 percent threshold for representation in the Duma...

...A non-Communist speaker is almost certain to replace the former Pravda editor, Gennady Seleznyov (who prudently ran for governor of Moscow province...

...doubled its share of the party-list vote...

...Ideology aside, they are drawn to the parties and candidates closest to them in age and experience—and their experience has been profoundly different from that of their parents and older brothers and sisters...

...With his newspapers no match for Luzhkov's or Gusinsky's in popularity or circulation, the vicious campaign against Luzhkov and his party was conducted mostly on the ORT television channel...

...People who were children or young questions from Kisilev and each other, the guests fielded queries from a live audience in the studio and calls from outside...

...Among the political leaders to appear on the show were Grigory Yavlinsky, Nikita Mikhalkov (NDR), Sergei Kirienko, Irina Khak-amada (SPS), and Anatoly Chubais...

...But American journalists and politicians—many of the latter chosen by turnouts well under half the voting-age population—should notice these elections and begin to develop an informed, multidimensional vision of Russia that is not easily dislodged by the scandal of the hour...

...As one expert in the Carnegie Endowment's Moscow Center put it, there has occurred "a sharp turn to the right of all leading parties and blocs" since 1995...

...Allied with Luzhkov against the Kremlin and Unity was Russia's largest media empire, the Most group, owned by the "oligarch" Vladimir Gusinsky...

...There will be no apology, of course...

...the generally nonparti-san NTV...

...That last was created explicitly to campaign for OVR and against its opponents...

...by Leon Aron The December 19 Russian parliamentary elections marked a remarkable shift to the center-right—toward acceptance of capitalism and market reforms—across virtually the entire Russian political spectrum...

...Indeed, they have abandoned their core demand for a blanket renational-ization of privatized industries, and now favor "guarantees" to the new owners and "defense" of shareholders' "rights...

...The SPS undoubtedly profited from the clear signs of economic revival: Industrial output grew almost 8 percent between January and November 1999 compared with the same period last year...

...Russian democracy and Russian capitalism— whose death from popular "disillusionment" was so confidently diagnosed by U.S...

...In addition to the few more or less objective media outlets, there were hundreds of brutally partisan ones...

...Russian voters were daily exposed to every imaginable angle on the campaign...

...and the radio station Echo of Moscow), the most aggressively anti-Yeltsin-administration outlet was the daily Segodnya...

...This generation first made its mark in the 1996 presidential election, when exit polls showed 71 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 29 voted for Boris Yeltsin and only 23 percent for the Communist candidate, Gennady Zyuganov...

...and in the short run, such wars greatly boost the leaders' standing, as Grenada did for Reagan and the Falklands for Thatcher...

...In the economic programs of all major parties and blocs including the Communists, tight budgets and low inflation have replaced socialist-populist calls for printing money to meet the demands of an ever-expanding state...

...In addition, the SPS benefited from the last-minute endorsement of its economic program by the popular prime minister, Vladimir Putin—and, even more, from a critical development in Russian politics: the coming of age of the perestroika generation...

...Mutatis mutandis, everyone is now for tax cuts and a shift of the tax burden from the producer and employer to the consumer...

...Gone as well are the calls for protectionist import tariffs and high customs walls...

...Even in democracies, of course, there are such things as popular wars believed by the majority of people to be just...

...This time, almost one-third of the legislature's seats are going to new parties led by men and women in their thirties or forties...

...If Unity, SPS, and independent pro-reform deputies manage to unite, theirs will be the single largest bloc of votes...

...As in 1995, campaigning was unrestricted, producing innumerable leaflets, door-to-door canvasses, television ads, and political billboards...

...Communist chairman Zyuganov and the leaders of the Fatherland-All Russia bloc, Yevgeny Primakov and Yuri Luzhkov, were repeatedly invited to participate but declined...

...It broke the Communists' controlling plurality in the Duma, brought forth a new generation of political leaders, and forged the first truly post-Soviet legislature...

...Another promising development is the end of the self-disenfranchisement of the center-right electorate...

...But the best news about the 1999 Russian parliamentary elections is hardly new: Nothing is ever lost permanently, so long as ordinary men and women have a choice and can exercise it freely...

...Their combined share of the party-list vote more than doubled, from 17 percent in 1995 to 37 percent (comprising 23 percent for Unity, 9 percent for the Union of Rightist Forces [SPS], and 6 percent for Yabloko...

...It is in these media that Luzhkov purveyed a seemingly inexhaustible stream of allegations of corruption and money-laundering by the president, his family, and friends...

...and 21 percent of Russians tell pollsters they are "getting along well...

...As a result, although the right as a whole received only 4 percent fewer votes than the Communist-led left, the latter ended up with 35 percent more deputies...

...A colleague noted a "growing" and "striking" convergence of positions on economic policy, producing a consensus "on the necessity of a market economy...

...Also gone is the Communists' stranglehold on the legislature, which either killed key reforms outright (land privatization, foreign banks, the rights of foreign shareholders) or diluted them to the point of meaninglessness (housing subsidies, tax code, corporate governance, bankruptcy...

...His Boris Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life will be published in February by St...

...Martin's Press...

...editorialists, experts, and politicians only a few months ago—have been shown to have strong and vibrant roots...

...GDP is showing its first significant growth in ten years...

...Even the Communists no longer insist on state control of the economy...

...Putin's astronomical approval rating—just over 70 percent—is tied to his prosecution of the Chechen war, deemed just by most Russians, no matter how appallingly brutal and deplorable it looks to us...

...These changes in the composition of the legislature reflect momentous shifts below the surface of Russian politics...

...The voters, however, hardly needed a Chubais-Zyuganov (or Yavlinsky-Primakov) debate to figure out the difference between the Union of Rightist Forces and the Communists...

...Dick Armey's calling this struggling democracy "a looted and bankrupt zone of nuclearized anarchy...

...teenagers in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, are now in their twenties and thirties...

...Grigory Yavlinsky got most of his financial support from another "oligarch," Mikhail Khodor-kovsky...

...The Russian voters' choice was an informed one...

...Although the Communists, with 25 percent of the party-list vote, remain the largest single party in the Duma, the leftist alliance they led has lost its plurality...

...Arrayed on the president's side were media owned by the mogul Boris Berezovsky...

...The 63 million Russians (61 percent of the registered electorate), old and young, who trudged through snow and sleet in the dark and cold of a Russian December, often pulling small children on sleds, to vote at 94,000 polling stations scattered across 11 time zones deserve a collective apology from the American editorial writers, columnists, news-writers, and congressmen responsible for the disgraceful hysteria over "Who Lost Russia...

...Around 470 Communist and Communist-influenced national and local newspapers reached a daily readership of well over 10 million, and the nationally televised Parliamentary Hour provided another outlet for the Communist party's views...

...In addition to may very well emerge for the first time since March 1990, when the Duma's predecessor, the Congress of People's Deputies of Russia, was elected...

...The media war was conducted in the spirit of East European, Italian, Israeli, or 19th-century American politics...

...The most startling result of the elections is the growth of pro-reform parties of the center-right...

...At the same time, the Yeltsin administration and its allies like Unity were being raked over the coals daily by the Luzhkov media group, with its brash muckraking tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets, the popular evening daily Vechernya Moskva, and the national channel TV tzen-tr-Moskva, known as Luzhkov's TV...

...Each of the 26 parties that fielded candidates received 3 hours and 20 minutes of free air time on the three television networks and 2 hours and 30 minutes on four national radio stations...

...The only issue untouched so far by this remarkable center-right consensus is privatization of land, which the legislature has blocked since 1992...

...In the last eight months, one had to be blind and deaf in Russia to miss even the smallest detail of the credit card bills allegedly paid by the Swiss construction company Mabatex for Yeltsin and his daughter Tatyana Dyachenko...

...Every week Russia's highest-rated television host, Yevgenyeny Kisilev of NTV, conducted debates between invited guests on his live, prime-time show, People's Voice...

...And democracies can be quite ruthless in prosecuting wars on the periphery, especially "colonial" wars or wars against secessionist guerrillas, even while remaining democracies, as witness India in Punjab, Turkey in Kurdistan, France in Algeria, Israel in Southern Lebanon in 1982, and the United States in Vietnam...

...To the extent that the war played any role at all, it did so indirectly, through Prime Minister Putin's rather understated eleventh-hour endorsement of Unity...

...Paradoxically, though the war in Chechnya was going on full tilt during the campaign, it was hardly a factor in the elections, since all the major parties, and public opinion generally, supported it...

...Although the Most properties portrayed Primakov in a very positive light, Gusinsky's favorite party was Yabloko, in support of which Most deployed its enormous resources...

...The gap between the pro-reform majority in presidential elections and the go-slow majority in parliamentary elections has narrowed dramatically...

...Such national newspapers as Kommersant-Daily, Izvestia, and Vremya MN, as well as the private NTV television channel, provided extensive (often exhaustive) and almost always objective coverage of parties' platforms and candidates...

...If anything, the nationalist left, especially the Communists, who for years have bemoaned the dissolution of the Soviet Union and advocated recentralization of the Russian state, should have profited the most...

...Its leaders are those who engineered and sustained the capitalist transition: former prime ministers Yegor Gaidar (43 years old) and Sergei Kirienko (37), former "privatization czar" and inflation-slayer Anatoly Chubais (44), and former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov (40...

...The latter—the unapologetic, true-blue, Hayekian free-marketeers, whose motto, in their previous incarnation as Russia's Choice, was "Liberty, Property, Law...

...epitomized by Rep...