Russia's democracy lags its neighbors'

By Paul Taylor

LONDON (Reuters): From Warsaw to Sofia and Tallinn to Ljubljana, parliamentary democracy has taken root and flourished across formerly communist central Europe in the decade since the Berlin Wall fell.

But in Moscow, at the heart of the former Soviet empire, a different form of government has emerged, with an enduring authoritarian streak despite regular multi-party elections and limited media pluralism.

"Russia is a democracy by default rather than by design. The state is so weak that it cannot harass citizens as the Soviet state did," said Anna Matveeva, a Russian analyst at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London.

"There are authoritarian tendencies, but the state is too weak to enforce them. The power of the shadow establishment is more important than the formal institutions," she said.

In almost all of Moscow's former satellites, the opposition has swept governing parties or presidents from power through the ballot box at least once since 1990. Not so in Russia.

President Boris Yeltsin's resignation last week to shoehorn his handpicked successor, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, into the presidency and boost his chances of winning an early election on March 26 was strictly constitutional. But it did not correspond to most people's idea of democracy.

To its harshest critics, Russia's political system hardly qualifies as a democracy at all. British weekly The Economist recently branded it "the world's leading kleptocracy" because of corruption in high places and the weakness of the rule of law.

To more optimistic observers, such as the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Russia is slowly but surely making the transition to democracy.

"It is a slow process, like watching the grass grow, but as long as it is growing then you are moving in the right direction," Spencer Oliver, secretary-general of the OSCE's parliamentary assembly, told Reuters in an interview after last month's Duma (lower house) election.

While criticizing mudslinging, dirty tricks and heavy bias in state media, the OSCE and the Council of Europe endorsed the Dec. 19 vote as democratic overall.

"The Russians have been given the political freedom to elect their representatives and they have shown their determination to use it. This shows that Russia maintains its democratic course," said Ernst Myehlemann, the Swiss leader of the Council of Europe parliamentary observer delegation.

A senior European diplomat said Russia's flawed democracy reflected its poor state of economic development and the inherent difficulties in holding together a vast country spanning 11 time zones.

"The amazing thing is how far they have come, not how far they still have to go," he said.

But Matveeva said the Duma poll showed how easy it was to manipulate elections in a country where the state has gradually crumbled and public expectations of politics are low.

"When a party that didn't even exist two months ago, made up of candidates most of whom no one had ever heard of, rises from nowhere thanks to the power of money and television, that is a victory for the facade of democracy but a defeat for the democratic process," she said.

Experts differ on why Russia's political system has diverged so sharply from that of its former allies.

Some commentators cite a tradition of Tsarist autocracy, noting that Putin's hero is Peter the Great, the authoritarian ruler who modernized Russia at huge human cost in the late 17th and early 18th century.

Others say the notion of democracy has been largely discredited among ordinary Russians by the impoverishment they endured since the collapse of the Soviet state.

Among Western governments, officials cite the need to prevent an unreconstructed Communist party from returning to power as one major reason why Russia has concentrated so much authority, at least on paper, in presidential hands.

Many other former Soviet republics have retained strong, sometimes autocratic presidents with flawed elections, often because of the weakness of counterweights from civil society after 70 years of communist rule.

But in central Europe, coalitions of the center-left and center-right now alternate in power with constitutions increasingly moulded by the requirements of candidacy for European Union membership.

Even laggards such as Slovakia and Croatia have voted nationalist strongmen out of office.

Figurehead presidencies and relatively strong parliaments have become the general rule across the region, with the sole exception of rump Yugoslavia.