More and more, I’m getting a sinking feeling about Russian politics. I look to eastern Europe or to Asia, and see the emergence of boisterous democracies, like Poland or South Korea, where genuine multi-party systems have developed. One party governs for a few years, then the population gets sick of them and kicks them out, and a rival party governs.

But in Putin’s Russia, we have seen the triumph of United Russia, this great, fat, dull beast that sits on top of Russia’s young democracy until all the air has gone out of it.

You have to take your hat off to Vladislav Surkov and all the other political technicians who have greased the political machine so well that it runs without uttering a single noise. They have created a democratic one-party state. We can bury Lenin, because his vision of ‘democratic centralism’ has finally triumphed. Just as Lenin wished, Duma officials may discuss policy, but they can’t question it once the Kremlin has decided it, for that is the United Russia way.

How incredibly boring this triumph of United Russia has made Russian political life. What’s on the front pages of the newspapers? Record oil prices, avian flu scares, the occasional philosophical postcard from Mikhail Khodorkovsky. What’s on Channel One news? A five minute story about a dead accordion player. No government reforms, no government policies, no government announcements. Go to sleep Russia! Everything is being done for you.

I really think the Putin government has a strategy to bore all potential critics to sleep. Remember when they were sentencing Khodorkovsky, the last potentially exciting thing to happen politically, and the judge took over a week to read out the sentence. She just went on and on, until people were literally snoring in the courtroom. Well, perhaps they have a similar strategy for the whole country. Just to bore us all into passivity. And who better to do that than Mikhail Fradkov, the most uninspiring, dull politician in Europe. As soon as you see him on TV, you want to change the channel, to Channel One say, to find out about the dead accordion player.

It didn’t have to be like this. The turning point, it seems to me, was the 1996 election. It was decided by the Kremlin that the Communists could on no account get back into power, so the oligarch media devoted all their air-time to promoting Yeltsin. I’m not sure, but it’s a good guess that ballots were also stuffed and election results tweaked. You don’t catch up with a candidate with as big a lead as Zuganov had unless you cheat. The West did nothing, because for the ruling Western politicians of the day it was a choice between Yeltsin or apocalypse. But they were wrong, it was a choice between a genuine multiparty democracy, or a virtual democracy, where the Kremlin controls the media and makes sure its candidates win.

The West should have pressed harder for a fair election in 1996, and let Zuganov win if necessary. He may have re-nationalized some companies. Better then than 10 years later. Yes, free market reforms would have been slowed. Russia’s integration into the world economy and global power structures might have slowed too. But the Communist Party would have had to reform, just as radical socialist parties in Brazil or Slovakia or Croatia have had to reform once they were democratically elected, to become more market-friendly and more moderate in international relations.

Instead, we have United Russia, a party for all seasons, a party whose only principle is the support of Putin, and whoever comes after Putin, and whoever comes after him.

The other parties, meanwhile, are starved of funds. The likes of Yabloko, SPS and the Communist Party can’t get money from oligarchs – that sort of party funding helped land Khodorkovsky in prison. They can’t get it from abroad. So they have to rely on the tiny donations of their dwindling members. United Russia, meanwhile, can rely on the bottomless pockets of pro-Kremlin businesses. And the more companies come under state control, the more cash-flows United Russia has access to. There’s every possibility United Russia could stay in power for 50 years, like the Mexican PRI party.

I’ve never lived in a one-party state before, and I find it surreal. There’s no political dialectic, no open struggle between different forces, besides petty struggles between various Kremlin factions, struggles that no one ever sees. And, outside the Kremlin walls, just this creepy silence.

My unease is probably the product of my own background. I grew up in an open, multi-party system, I’m used to loud and visible political debate, recrimination, conflict. I spent some of last month in the US, and happened to witness president Bush’s worst week in office, as his vice-president’s chief of staff was indicted in the CIA leak case. Now you could say that the events of that week – criminal proceedings against senior staff of the White House, angry scenes, scandals – show the weakness of America’s political system. But to me it shows its strength, its ability to regulate and regenerate itself.

And then I return to Russia, this land of silence, the occasional deafening bomb, then more silence.

The best hope, as I’ve said before, for the emergence of multi-party democracy in Russia is the growth in political consciousness of the business class. They are the revolutionary vanguard of Russian democracy. It was the rise of the business class, the middle class, which helped create real multi-party democracy in the young democracies of Asia, such as South Korea, the Philippines, and Malaysia.

The United Russia team recognizes the potential power of the business class in Russian politics. That’s why Surkov sweet-talked businessmen at the Business Russia conference in July. “Come on, join the party, don’t be shy, there are many worthy people there”, he told his audience of businessmen. The liberal, pro-business wing of the party needed to be strengthened, Surkov said. The left wing of the party was too strong. So now the political struggle in Russia consists of a struggle between two sides of the same party!

But perhaps that very fact will spell the eventual end of United Russia. At the moment, the party is carrying out a spectacular balancing act – it is balancing a pro-business faction with a nationalist, socialist faction. It is trying to appeal both to a Moscow businessman, and to a factory worker in Norilsk, thereby draining support from the liberal parties and from Rodina and the Communist Party.

We shall see if it can continue this balancing act in the years to come, when it no longer has the political skill of Putin to rely on. My sense is that the government will be increasingly pressured to assume a more nationalist and socialist posture, and this will alienate the more cosmopolitan and self-reliant business class from United Russia. The party has successful sat on the fence for several years, but eventually it will have to come down on one side – the left or the right. The increasing polarization of Russian politics is the best hope for the demise of United Russia and the birth of genuine multi-party democracy in Russia.

Julian Evans is a British freelance journalist based in Moscow.

November 14, 2005