Word: blocs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...campaign was an enigma. There were few rallies, cross-country tours by party leaders, debates or televised appeals. Instead there was what Russian politicians euphemistically call technology: a stream of invective on state TV. Most of this was instigated by the Kremlin and aimed at discrediting the one bloc thought to present any risk to Boris Yeltsin: the Fatherland-All Russia coalition, led by former Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov and Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov...
...weak campaigner, and they will be able to pitch the contest as a race between the old and the new. The big loser in the election, however, is Primakov. Few now remember his announcement on the eve of the election that he would run for President. Primakov's bloc will end up with a respectable number of Duma seats. But it had much greater expectations: it was supposed to be the second largest group in the Duma, the party of the leader in waiting...
Harassed by the communist regime, the founder of the Solidarity labor union insisted, "We shall not yield to violence." He said his protests, which began in 1981, were "a historic opportunity for a peaceful evolution." In 1989, as the Soviet bloc wobbled, Solidarity took over the Prime Ministership; in 1990, Walesa became President...
...Putin run against Zyuganov rather than Primakov next year. The extreme nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, these days a faithful supporter of the government, is involved in one of his usual publicity-seeking fights, threatening to challenge the election results after losing a dispute with the central election commission. A new bloc trying to make its mark, the Union of Right Forces, led by Sergei Kiriyenko, enjoys Kremlin favor but may not make it into the Duma. Under Russian election laws, a party or movement has to obtain 5% of the vote nationwide before it can sit in the Duma...
...Overall, the election is likely to be good news for both Yeltsin and his appointed successor, Putin. A strong showing by Unity, as well as the pro-Kremlin Union of Right-Wing Forces headed by former prime minister Sergei Kiriyenko, will create a solid pro-Kremlin bloc in the traditionally anti-Kremlin legislature. That's an effect primarily of the Chechnya war, although it also illustrates that Russian politics is something of a funhouse mirror to multiparty democracy. Russia's communist-era nomenklaturacontinue to compete for power among themselves in an ever-shifting series of hidden transactions, in which party...