Russia’s multi‑party system emerged in the 1990s and was initially so free that its chaotic nature hindered rather than helped sound development. Any public association had the right to nominate candidate lists, and in majoritarian districts almost anyone could stand, regardless of their real electoral prospects.
The situation required reform, and at the very start of the 2000s that reform was carried out: with the adoption of the 2002 law “On Basic Guarantees of Electoral Rights of Citizens” the country had everything necessary for consistent and productive party‑building.
Yet beginning in 2004, with the abolition of gubernatorial elections and the raising of mandatory minimum party membership, the executive vertical started restructuring the party system to suit itself — raising the threshold for entering politics, then lowering it depending on momentary political needs. Overall, however, a course toward gradual departisation was maintained. And with the onset of the war against Ukraine, departisation has reached its logical limit: if it continues, the multi‑party system risks turning into a single‑party one.
A big country — big parties
The Federal Law “On Political Parties” No. 95‑FZ of 11 July 2001 established that parties were now the principal form of political organisation and that they were the ones that should participate in elections. In the authorities’ logic this looked like the imposition of order after an institutionally loose decade: large, disciplined, territorially spread parties were to replace the multitude of weak associations. Initially such a model could indeed have appeared rational. Yet we have to acknowledge that for citizens who did not wish to associate themselves with a particular federal party, this meant a restriction of their electoral rights.
To complete the picture let us restore the detailed voting statistics.
Supporters of the law insisted that it would bring order to the political field, eliminate “fly‑by‑night parties” and create conditions for the formation of large, responsible nationwide associations. Left‑wing parties (the CPRF and the Agrarian Group) were categorically opposed, viewing the law as an attempt to establish state control over parties and to limit political competition through strict membership and registration requirements. “Yabloko” criticised the law on other grounds: excessive state interference in the internal affairs of parties and the possibility of their liquidation on bureaucratic grounds; nevertheless, it ultimately supported the law.
Regrettably, the line of consolidating the political space was pursued consistently throughout the 2000s. The 2004 amendments raised the minimum membership of a political party from 10,000 to 50,000 members and tightened requirements for regional branches. The state was thus striving not simply for an orderly party system but for one that was small in number and easy to manage: the objective was to build a vertically integrated regime with a minimum of unpredictable centres of influence. Accordingly, there had to be few parties, and the entry threshold for new players had to be de facto prohibitive.
The third‑reading vote took place on 3 December 2004. It cemented the dominance of United Russia and marked the start of the liquidation of small parties.
United Russia voted in favour almost in its entirety (297 out of 306). The remaining factions, as well as non‑affiliated deputies, did not support the law, voting against or abstaining. As a result, after the law entered into force the number of parties in Russia shrank from 46 to 15 by 2007. Among those liquidated were Vladimir Ryzhkov’s Republican Party of Russia (RPR), Viktor Tyulkin’s Russian Communist Workers’ Party (RKRP‑RPK), “Liberal Russia” linked to Boris Berezovsky and Sergei Yushenkov, Mikhail Gorbachev’s Social Democratic Party of Russia (SDPR) and many others.
Momentary dynamics and the plasticity of legislation
The mass political protests of 2011–2012 forced the authorities to adjust course for a time. Thus, Federal Law No. 28‑FZ of 2 April 2012 radically lowered the minimum party membership to 500 people, and the reform as a whole sharply eased party creation.
The vote passed with overwhelming support from all parliamentary forces, which was a great rarity.
This was an obvious retreat in the face of a political crisis: the system needed to demonstrate an ability to offer an institutional response, reduce tension and show that access to politics was widening. And it worked: the number of registered parties grew, and politically active citizens began to master these new institutional opportunities. In that way the general protest was divided into several disparate groups and ultimately contained.
Let us recall that the mechanism for forming the State Duma remained the same: it was elected entirely under the so‑called proportional system, i.e. by federal party lists, without single‑mandate districts. Parties receiving more than 7% of the vote obtained a corresponding — proportional — number of deputy mandates (with parties receiving between 5% and 6% obtaining one mandate, and those receiving between 6% and 7% — two mandates).
In such conditions the only “new” party created after the 2012 reform that managed to form its own faction in the State Duma was the party New People (we shall return to the history of its emergence). Only at the 2021 elections did the party gain 5.32% of the vote, securing 15 mandates. This was the first time since 2007 that a fifth party had entered the Duma. The party “Rodina” (reconstituted in 2012) and Civic Platform were also represented, but only by one deputy each, elected in single‑mandate districts.
A partial rollback followed as early as 2013, marking a new stage of departisation. Federal Law No. 303‑FZ of 2 November 2013 reduced the mandatory share of regional parliament deputies elected by party lists from 50% to 25%. For Moscow and St Petersburg even this minimum was abolished: the federal law ceased to require of them any mandatory share of list mandates. At the municipal level the mandatory proportional component was also repealed.
The bill was adopted by the State Duma in third reading on 25 October 2013. The vote was marked by a sharp stand‑off between United Russia and the entire remaining opposition.
This time the whole parliamentary opposition — the CPRF, the LDPR and A Just Russia — voted almost unanimously against it, stating that the law was aimed at preserving United Russia’s dominance through the use of administrative resources in single‑mandate districts and at diluting party influence.
Managed representation
In 2014–2015 the authorities continued to fine‑tune managed representation. Another novelty was the law on elections of State Duma deputies, signed in February 2014: it restored a mixed system of forming the chamber (225 deputies by party lists and 225 by single‑mandate districts) and set a 5% threshold for the proportional part. For the parties this turn had an ambivalent meaning: on the one hand, lowering the threshold from 7% to 5% looked like moderate liberalisation; on the other, the return of single‑mandate districts diluted the role of parties as the main channel of representation and strengthened the importance of locally managed, personalised campaigns.
The vote confirmed the split between pro‑government forces and the left opposition — only the Communists voted against.
In the same 2014 year state support for parties was increased: the amount of budget financing per vote received at State Duma elections rose from 50 to 110 roubles. This concerns the system of annual federal budget payments to parties that achieve the legally prescribed result at Duma elections — i.e. a mechanism that was supposed to reduce their dependence on private donors. But in practice it simultaneously strengthened their financial integration into the state system. The authorities were not merely keeping the key parties within the system; they were increasing their material dependence on the state, turning the budget into yet another instrument for regulating the party field.
This vote passed with the full consent of all factions, as the measure directly increased the budgets of all parliamentary forces.
Thus, after the formal expansion of the party environment in 2012, already in 2014 the regime solved two tasks at once: first, it weakened the exclusive role of parties in representation through the return of single‑mandate deputies, and second, it embedded the systemic parties more deeply into the state financial infrastructure.
In 2015, as part of preparations for the 2016 Duma campaign, the construct was fine‑tuned: Law No. 272‑FZ was adopted, shifting State Duma elections from December to September. The election campaign was thereby moved to summer, which created additional advantages for already‑embedded players and complicated the campaign for those parties that depended on signature collection, which now had to be gathered in the summer period.
United Russia, the LDPR and A Just Russia co‑sponsored the bill. The main arguments were the need to combine the elections with the single voting day in September and the convenience for the new Duma composition of working on the federal budget. The CPRF voted against, considering the shift unconstitutional and aimed at reducing voter turnout because campaigning would be conducted in the August “dacha” period. That said, in June 2015 the Russian Constitutional Court confirmed the possibility of such a shift in time, provided it is done sufficiently in advance and for exceptional purposes.
Administered democracy
The next important developments occurred in 2018. The pension reform hit United Russia’s rating, and the 2018 regional elections showed that the old configuration of power was no longer risk‑free: in several campaigns candidates backed by the authorities failed to win in the first round, while opposition contenders achieved notable successes. The regime’s reaction was a controlled diversification of the party field. In 2020 the Ministry of Justice registered four new parties at once: New People, “For Truth”, the Green Alternative and the Party of Direct Democracy. According to many analysts, these projects were technologically built into the preparations for the 2021 Duma cycle: designed to divide and disorient the opposition without creating a serious threat to the regime. The authorities’ logic after 2018 was thus not one of liberalisation but of renewing the controlled range of party offerings.
Law No. 414‑FZ of 21 December 2021 was the next step in departisation. It removed the federal requirement, in force since 2003, to allocate part of the mandates in regional parliaments under the proportional system. Federation subjects were now free to decide for themselves how many deputies would be elected by lists — or to dispense with party lists altogether, leaving only majoritarian elections in districts. In a number of regions the share of mandates allocated by party lists was reduced immediately. Local authorities thus gained the opportunity to adapt the party environment to their specific local interests.
The vote was along party lines: the pro‑government factions and New People supported the vertical, while the left opposition stood consolidated against.
In 2022 Federal Law No. 255‑FZ was adopted — a blanket law on “foreign agents” which, among other things, prohibited persons included in the relevant register from being members of election commissions, participating in election campaigns and donating to the funds of candidates and parties.
As can be seen from the voting results, the law was passed by the votes of United Russia, the LDPR and A Just Russia, while most CPRF deputies did not take part in the vote and New People predominantly abstained.
A crisis of participation
At the 2024 presidential elections one could observe what experts have called a “crisis of participation” — under “managed democracy” the Kremlin was finding it increasingly difficult to ensure that a staged electoral picture, with an inarticulate set of contestants, appeared convincing.
Against this backdrop the function of the parties themselves is changing and is being largely neutralised. If in the 2000s and even the 2010s the authorities still needed them as instruments for integrating elites, distributing loyalty, channelling discontent and imitating limited multi‑party politics, after 2022 the need for any kind of living party environment is noticeably shrinking. Imitative party politics is now giving way to undisguised administrative control, direct prohibitions and a demand for overt political loyalty.
In 2023 the Kremlin gathered the leaders of the parliamentary parties, at which Gennady Zyuganov (CPRF) and Sergei Mironov (A Just Russia) asked that the importance of party lists in the electoral system not be reduced further. After that, the process of departisation was de facto suspended. Thus, the systemic parties are for the time being permitted to figure on the political stage, albeit without any clear guarantee of an expansion of their real role.
Russian politics over the past twenty‑five years has been a matter of regulating the party system to suit different regime tasks. Since the start of the war in Ukraine the departisation tendency has intensified to such a degree that we may be witnessing a transition to a new political model, in which parties will lose even the function that remains to them — to serve as a residual decorative element amid the dominance of administrative control and political repression. And, as the history of the voting shows, the political parties themselves have played no small part in this process.