By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — Imagine that in your country, every sixth vote supposedly cast in recent national elections was shown to have been fraudulent. Imagine, further, that the same expert study showed the constitution to have been improperly adopted, with the result that the institutions of government were without legitimacy and their decisions without legal force.
The almost inevitable result would be political convulsion, with huge outcries from the press and public, and very likely, the resignation of the government.
Russia is different. Early in May, precisely such revelations appeared in a leading national newspaper — and that, for practical purposes, was the last that was heard of the matter. Legitimacy or illegitimacy, democracy or blatant fraud — for Russian public life, one might conclude, it's all the same.
On May 4 the pro-government daily Izvestia carried an extensive article based on a study of the December 12 elections by "a special expert group ... attached to the presidential administration". The December 12 polls included elections for Russia's new parliament, and a referendum on President Boris Yeltsin's controversial draft constitution.
The Izvestia article, by journalist Valery Vyzhutovich, began by spelling out the conclusion of the research group that about 9 million votes of the 58.2 million supposed to have been cast in the elections were fraudulent, and described some of the ways in which the fraud appeared to have been carried out.
The article then noted the group's conclusion that the number of people who had voted was not 54.8% of registered electors, as reported by the Central Electoral Commission, but only 46.1%. Regulations decreed by President Boris Yeltsin after his September coup last year decreed that 50% would need to take part for the referendum result to be valid.
Unexploded dynamite
"These figures are political dynamite", the article continued, "because if only 46.1% of electors voted, the Constitution was not adopted ... The actions of the president and the government, of the Duma and the Council of the Federation [the two houses of the new parliament] ... are all invalid!"
The "dynamite", however, failed to explode. More precisely, none of Russia's established political forces has been prepared to detonate it, and the population has been too ill informed and alienated from the political process to be able or willing to try.
Despite the sensational nature of Izvestia's revelations, it can safely be said that no more than a tiny minority of the Russian population is aware of them. The Izvestia editors did their best to bury Vyzhutovich's article, putting it on an inside page and giving it an off-putting headline. The rest of the Russian media have left the issue strictly alone; the only exception has been a number of articles in the English-language Moscow Times.
The failure of the Russian media to take up the research group's findings is especially reprehensible because the group is clearly competent and, by the standards of Russian public life, unusually honest. The group has worked for the presidential administration since 1991. Its leader, Alexander Sobyanin, is known as a Yeltsin supporter.
To estimate the extent of malpractice, the researchers made intensive studies of voting returns at all levels in selected regions, before going on to extrapolate the results to the elections as a whole. The methodology used was that developed by the eminent Italian sociologist Wilfredo Pareto. The group also studied phenomena such as variations in the proportion of invalid ballots and major apparent variations in voter turnout.
Three frauds
According to Sobyanin and his colleagues, the election fraud was of three main kinds. First was "classic" fraud, conducted at the local level and consisting largely of stuffing ballot boxes with fake votes. The group estimated that the Communist Party of the Russian Federation gained about 1.8 million votes from this practice, and the Communists' allies in the Agrarian Party about 1.7 million. Pointers to abuses of this type included supposed voter turnouts in Amur and Penza provinces of almost 100%, with very few spoiled ballots.
Most of the falsification, however, was of a type uncommon in past elections in Russia. This fraud took place mainly at the level of the regional electoral bodies, and consisted essentially of writing in fictitious tally results. In the past, this practice was limited by the existence of an intermediate link — district and city electoral commissions — whose vote totals were required to be published in the local press. This link was abolished in the new election regulations which Yeltsin decreed after his September coup.
As a result, Izvestia noted, regional administrative chiefs were given "the freedom, which they were by no means loath to take up, to 'edit' the reports from the local polling stations to their political taste". A typical method, detected repeatedly by Sobyanin's group, was to switch vote totals between winning and losing candidates. The big winner from such practices, according to the sociologists, was Vladimir Zhirinovsky's ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, estimated to have fraudulently gained as many as 6 million votes. The pro-government Russia's Choice bloc probably lost 2 million.
A third area of fraud consisted of "errors" and "omissions" by the Central Electoral Commission in totalling figures from the regional commissions. The researchers found discrepancies of as many as 135,000 votes between central figures and the corresponding regional totals.
Yeltsin's role
Although the above figures do not alter the general picture that emerged from the December elections — that of a massive popular rejection of Yeltsin's policies — it is clear that the president's supporters lost many deputies' positions as a result of fraud. It may therefore seem surprising that much of the fraud was made possible by deliberate decisions taken by Yeltsin himself in framing his new election regulations.
As Izvestia noted in its May 4 article, Yeltsin in the autumn was seeking support, above all in the regions. "The pay-off for this support was to give the governors the right to independently determine electoral procedures in the provinces."
Not only was fraud expedited through the abolition of the district and city electoral commissions, but tallying was allowed to be carried out by special "working groups" of two to four members, answering not to the Central Electoral Commission but to local administrators. In return for supporting Yeltsin in September and October, local potentates were given the right to send their own people to the new parliament — whether voters agreed or not.
Yeltsin also guaranteed that conditions would be ideal for vote-stealing by allowing an impossibly brief period — less than 12 weeks — for new electoral structures to be set up and for the polls to be organised. The resources assigned were woefully inadequate. Sobyanin's group estimated that the Central Electoral Commission would have needed at least twice as many staff to deal properly with the general list results flooding in from 95,000 polling stations.
Multiple cover-ups
If the Russian electoral scene is a cesspit of fraud, each of the major players in Russian politics has a reason to try to cover up the fact. As Izvestia noted, if the new constitution were declared void, a series of leaders of the so-called "irreconcilable opposition", including former vice-president Alexander Rutskoi, would likely go back to jail; they were freed in February under an amnesty voted by the new parliament on the basis of provisions in the new "basic law". The Agrarian and Communist parties profited handsomely from the vote-rigging. So did Zhirinovsky's LDPR, which in addition supports Yeltsin's constitution in the hope of one day winning the "presidential dictatorship" for its own leader. Yeltsin's supporters have no reason to want to expose their power to popular judgment in clean elections.
And so, the scandal has been quelled without even erupting. According to Vyzhutovich, Sobyanin's research group has now been sacked from the presidential administration, though Sobyanin reportedly will not confirm or deny this. Presidential chief of staff Sergei Filatov has been quoted as arguing lamely that the research group's findings "smell like a good provocation".
In a democracy, of course, burying developments such as these would be impossible; public outrage would compel redress even if the politicians were unwilling. The lack of any popular outcry in Yeltsin's Russia shows with startling clarity how little progress has been made toward building a democratic society.
Popular wisdom in Russia has traditionally held that those in power will rule as they choose, using demagogy, deceit and violence; that there is nothing much ordinary citizens can do to change the situation; and that it is dangerous for them to try. Yeltsin's years in power, with their intimidated media, crooked elections, stage-managed referenda and periodic excursions outside the constitution, have done nothing to change this mood of apathy and cynicism.