Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

Russia is going to the polls on 4 December.  The ‘party of power’, United Russia, will win comfortably.  However, there are some signs of nervousness over the size of the victory.

Four years ago, United Russia went into the election with an opinion-poll rating of 56% and it secured 64.3% of the vote to give it 315 seats in the 450-seat State Duma.  This time, according to the All Russia Centre for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM), United Russia will secure 269 parliamentary seats on 54% of the vote.  This would mean dropping below the two-thirds ‘constitutional majority’ that United Russia currently enjoys.

The reason for this fall-off seems to be falling support in the big cities for United Russia.  While 60% of rural voters say they will vote for United Russia, its support level is 53% in small towns and 50% in medium-sized and big towns.

By Western democratic standards, these are still huge positive percentages, but United Russia apparently doesn’t see it like that and, it is said, “frantic work is being done” to ensure maximum turnout in those regions where United Russia’s support is strongest.

An interesting aspect of the election campaign is the way that new outlets for public opinion are challenging the Kremlin’s stranglehold over the Russian media.  For instance, a number of Russian satirical clips on YouTube have gained over 1m viewers in recent weeks.  One of these was posted by the anti-corruption blogger Aleksey Navalnyy under the title “Let’s remind the crooks and thieves of their 2002 manifesto”.  The video lists United Russia’s broken promises and failures and it concludes: “They haven’t just lied, they have brought the country to such a state that these and other promises seem like mockeries.”  It was posted on YouTube on 7 October and had received over 1m viewers by 28 October.

Another satirist, Dmitriy Ivanov, received 1m viewers for his lampoon of a political debate between leading politicians.  He achieved equal success with a skit based on the science-fiction film Alien in which a clone of Prime Minister Putin invades President Dmitriy Medvedev’s body.  Putin, of course, will be swapping jobs with Medvedev after the election.  A protest song performed by the band Rabfak, called ‘Our madhouse is voting for Putin’, was posted on YouTube on 11 October and has also received over 1m viewers.

None of this will prevent United Russia being re-elected in December, but anti-Kremlin YouTube clips with audiences of more than a million are a new phenomena that are giving the Kremlin pause for thought.  Attempts to counter this with pro-Putin material on YouTube have been abandoned as a failure.  It is possible that Russian public opinion is not quite as supine as it has hitherto appeared.