Ever-young communists
Photo: Oleg Zhdanov
The first one was the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), an offspring of the defunct Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in a somewhat more aggressive and nationalist form. The traditionalism of the KPRF (unlike the CPSU, modern Russian communists often officially eulogize Stalin, paradoxically coupled with respect for the Russian Orthodox Church, unthinkable in a “classic” communist party until 1988) is widely explained by the advanced age of most of its activists. In 1996, the communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov nearly won the presidential election, and from 1995 to 1999, the communists had the largest faction in the Duma.
“The communists are the only viable political party in the classical sense of the word in Russia,” said Alexey Makarkin, vice-president of the Center for Political Technologies, a Moscow-based think tank. “Their strength lies in a grassroots base, which is represented by the so-called woolen berets, named after a traditional element of a Russian pensioner’s dress. These people distribute the party’s press and do the campaigning work during elections. However, in the mid-1990s, the communists seem to have hit the ceiling of their support—27 to 32 percent of the vote. They have been in decline since then.”
This decline, however, proved much less steep than some anti-communists anticipated. Strangely, leftist movements of the old were reinvigorated by the cynical statements in 1997 of the then Vice Premier Boris Nemtsov: “When the communist voters die out, only the parties of [former liberal Prime Minister Yegor] Gaidar and [his social-liberal opponent Grigory] Yavlinsky will survive, like the Republican and the Democratic parties in the United States.” Labeling the leftists as “political pensioners” Nemtsov unwittingly became one of the godfathers of a powerful new protest force—the Party of Pensioners, which became the second most important initiative attempting to tap into the retirees’ potential.
Nemtsov’s erroneous calculus
Soon after Nemtsov called the KPRF “a party of political pensioners,” Sergei Atroshenko, a businessman from the Siberian city of Tyumen, decided to create a new political party simply called the Party of Pensioners (PP). Besides Nemtsov’s insulting phrase, the inspiration for the new party also came from the Czech Republic, where a party of pensioners managed to split the leftist electorate, luring many voters who would have otherwise voted for the Czech Communist Party.
The party’s performance was not very impressive at first. Despite enjoying reported support from the Kremlin as an alternative to the KPRF, PP took only 1.94 percent during the parliamentary elections of 1999. In 2003, its result was 3.5 percent, which wasn’t bad at all, since even such an old and respected political force as Grigory Yavlinsky’s Yabloko barely passed the five percent threshold. However, the ambitious leaders of the Party of Pensioners wanted more. In January 2004, weeks after the Duma elections of December 2003, the Party of Pensioners held a convention, where Atroshenko was dismissed as the party’s leader. He was replaced by Valery Gartung, an ambitious 44-year-old owner of the Chelyabinsk metal plant, who soon turned the party into one of the country’s best electoral machines.
“What happened was that after the government introduced the controversial social reform bill on replacing the old Soviet privileges by money payments in 2005, Gartung decided to play on the protest mood of the population, making himself autonomous from the Kremlin,” an online resource Politcom comments. “So, the party started a real fight for seats in regional parliaments.”
Riding a wave of dissatisfaction with both the party of power (United Russia) and the traditional opposition (KPRF), PP made considerable progress during local elections in 2005-2006, especially where the passage to the new system of “monetized” privileges was bumpy. In October of 2005, PP beat UR in the Siberian city of Tomsk. PP got 19.8 percent, while UR came in second at 17.85 percent. In Magadan, PP took what could be called a “strong silver medal,” coming in second after UR with 20.75 percent of the vote.
Suddenly, the party’s leader Sergei Atroshenko, who had been quiet up until then, made a comeback. Despite having spent most of his time with his family in Portugal, he filed a law suit against Gartung, claiming that the latter was elected to the party chairmanship illegally. In September 2005, Atroshenko won his case at Moscow’s Taganka court, and Gartung’s electoral machine malfunctioned. Atroshenko’s motivation to this day remains rather nebulous, since he never really headed the party again, spending most of the time in Portugal instead.
What prompted Atroshenko’s sudden comeback? Rumor has it that the Kremlin was preoccupied with PP’s successes, which made the party attractive for local sponsors in many of Russia’s regions. PP was quickly becoming a party of local counter-elites, i.e. the businessmen who had conflicts with local governors, mostly United Russia members. It is believed that Kremlin officials decided, first, to curb the PP’s progress, and second, to merge it with two other leftist parties thus creating Just Russia, an “opposition” party with leftist and patriotic rhetoric loyal to Vladimir Putin.
“My team was under strong moral pressure,” Gartung remembered three years later. “Some members of the party were threatened. They were told that the authorities would start criminal proceedings against them or confiscate their businesses.”
Here, Gartung’s ill-wishers found his party’s Achilles’ heel. “The Party of Pensioners actually has very few pensioners in its leadership,” said Dmitry Bednyakov, a member of the Federation Council representing the Nizhny Novgorod region. “Most of its leaders are young businessmen, who for some reason could not be included in the local United Russia list.”
Gartung, himself a successful businessman since the late 1980s, when the first Soviet private companies, the so-called cooperatives, were allowed, does not conceal the fact that protecting the interests of pensioners was just one of his party’s aims. “We also wanted to create a competitive environment in politics, we set ourselves the aim of giving the regional businessmen an opportunity to come up with an alternative point of view,” Gartung said.
Experts agree that popular support alone, even from such a relatively active group as pensioners, is not enough for a political party to be successful. Money and, preferably, connections in the government are also needed.
After Gartung’s removal in 2005, the party was headed by Igor Zotov, the head of the party’s Tula branch. Not a very successful campaign leader, he had good connections and got PP involved in a new project which was supposed to give the party not only money, but also the Kremlin’s support. Having met president Putin in mid-2006, Zotov elaborated on the nature of this support: “The president told me that we had too many leftist parties, so it could be a good idea to encourage them to merge with each other,” Zotov was quoted by news agencies as saying. In a few days, Zotov and the leaders of two other parties announced the creation of the new “social-democratic” party Just Russia, headed by Sergei Mironov, the chairman of the Federation Council and one of Vladimir Putin’s closest allies.
Surprisingly, Just Russia failed to repeat some of the PP’s electoral successes in the regions where the PP was most successful. This strange fact (after all, the PP and Rodina, one of the other two parties which made up Just Russia, were the most successful parties of 2003-2005 after United Russia and KPRF) can be explained by the damage to its image that the party incurred with Gartung’s removal from leadership.
“Instead of a protest force, someone at the top wanted to get a pliable party which would be opposition on paper. This did not ring well with the voters, especially those of pension age,” said Boris Nadezhdin, one of the leaders of the liberal SPS party which cooperated with the PP during elections in Magadan in 2005. SPS’s main leader, Nikita Belykh, had to admit that the pensioners were a powerful political force and that his “older party comrade” Boris Nemtsov was wrong to count them off.
“Young people pass the responsibility for their future to pensioners when they don’t go to vote,” Belykh said. “At future elections, we shall target the old even more than young people.” Thus there was at least one positive consequence of Gartung’s activity. Pensioners were appreciated as an electoral force.
As for Gartung himself, in 2007 he was elected to the State Duma on Just Russia’s list (the party got 7.74 percent, having the smallest faction in the State Duma). His relations with Just Russia’s chairman, Sergei Mironov, are reported to be good, despite some bad blood with the party’s other co-chairman, Igor Zotov.
Former PP activists in various regions occasionally make small insurgencies inside Just Russia, coming up with special opinions, particularly on pension issues. It was probably under pressure from them that Just Russia included in its program a special point on the need to make pensions at least 65 percent of a person’s previous salary. This is the highest coefficient among all other parties represented in the Duma. Unfortunately, the real coefficient of pensions to salaries ratio has been falling since mid 1990s, and is presently estimated at no more than 25 percent.
© Russia Profile.org 2008
August 4, 2008
RUSSIA: United, They Are Not Old
The Creation of the Party of Pensioners Led to Elderly People Being Appreciated as an Electoral Force
By Dmitry Babich, Russia Profile
August 1, 2008
MOSCOW (Russia Profile), Edition dated August 4, 2008
“Russia is a unique country. Here, the revolutionary spirit is represented by the old people, and not by the young!” The leader of the Russian Communist Workers’ Party Viktor Anpilov has obviously done this before. He was tying Soviet Pioneers’ scarves around the necks of enthusiastic old women looking at him with genuine adulation. Handshakes, kisses on the cheeks, poems recited by the new Pioneers’ grandchildren.
A comedy? Not quite. All of the seven old women gathered before Anpilov took part in the events of 1993, when several hundred people were killed in Moscow as the confrontation between President Boris Yeltsin and the leftist-dominated parliament turned violent. The innocent-looking babushkas rendered many services to the insurgents during the seige of the White House, a building on the Moscow river embankment where the embattled parliament, then still called Supreme Soviet, was headquartered.
“We sneaked through the police lines carrying food and other items for the White House’s defenders,” remembers Valentina Antipova, 75, at her small apartment near Voykovskaya subway station. “The old people were the most stubborn defenders of freedom. When [a chairman of the Supreme Soviet’s budget commission] Alexander Pochinok defected to Yeltsin’s side, we oldsters surrounded him and chanted in a chorus: “So young and already a traitor! Shame!”
The boyish looking Pochinok, 35 at the time of his defection, headed Yeltsin’ appointed commission on passing the archives of the destroyed Supreme Soviet to the newly elected Duma, and at the end of the 1990s became the minister for labor and social issues. In his new position, he was out of favor with the old people, whom he was supposed to provide with pensions and monetary allowances. Part of the critique stemmed from the pensions being rather modest. The other irritant was Pochinok’s much-publicized second marriage to his student, Russia’s light athletics champion, who happened to be 20 years younger than her high-positioned fiancée.
“This is what I don’t like about today’s young: a lot of them are traitors and conformists,” Antipova commented. “Some of us old people may be somewhat angry and difficult to deal with, but it is our generation that protests against injustice and not the young who are supposed to be maximalist and idealistic. Instead of changing the world, the young try to adapt to it and find their place in the system.”
Antipova agrees that her generalizations may not always be on the mark, since some radical youth groups confront the police with the same resolve as Anpilov’s “old guard” did back in 1993. However, so far the young have been unable to start viable protest movements that the authorities would have to take into account. Pensioners played a crucial role in launching at least two such movements.
Ever-young communists
Photo: Oleg Zhdanov
The first one was the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), an offspring of the defunct Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in a somewhat more aggressive and nationalist form. The traditionalism of the KPRF (unlike the CPSU, modern Russian communists often officially eulogize Stalin, paradoxically coupled with respect for the Russian Orthodox Church, unthinkable in a “classic” communist party until 1988) is widely explained by the advanced age of most of its activists. In 1996, the communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov nearly won the presidential election, and from 1995 to 1999, the communists had the largest faction in the Duma.
“The communists are the only viable political party in the classical sense of the word in Russia,” said Alexey Makarkin, vice-president of the Center for Political Technologies, a Moscow-based think tank. “Their strength lies in a grassroots base, which is represented by the so-called woolen berets, named after a traditional element of a Russian pensioner’s dress. These people distribute the party’s press and do the campaigning work during elections. However, in the mid-1990s, the communists seem to have hit the ceiling of their support—27 to 32 percent of the vote. They have been in decline since then.”
This decline, however, proved much less steep than some anti-communists anticipated. Strangely, leftist movements of the old were reinvigorated by the cynical statements in 1997 of the then Vice Premier Boris Nemtsov: “When the communist voters die out, only the parties of [former liberal Prime Minister Yegor] Gaidar and [his social-liberal opponent Grigory] Yavlinsky will survive, like the Republican and the Democratic parties in the United States.” Labeling the leftists as “political pensioners” Nemtsov unwittingly became one of the godfathers of a powerful new protest force—the Party of Pensioners, which became the second most important initiative attempting to tap into the retirees’ potential.
Nemtsov’s erroneous calculus
Soon after Nemtsov called the KPRF “a party of political pensioners,” Sergei Atroshenko, a businessman from the Siberian city of Tyumen, decided to create a new political party simply called the Party of Pensioners (PP). Besides Nemtsov’s insulting phrase, the inspiration for the new party also came from the Czech Republic, where a party of pensioners managed to split the leftist electorate, luring many voters who would have otherwise voted for the Czech Communist Party.
The party’s performance was not very impressive at first. Despite enjoying reported support from the Kremlin as an alternative to the KPRF, PP took only 1.94 percent during the parliamentary elections of 1999. In 2003, its result was 3.5 percent, which wasn’t bad at all, since even such an old and respected political force as Grigory Yavlinsky’s Yabloko barely passed the five percent threshold. However, the ambitious leaders of the Party of Pensioners wanted more. In January 2004, weeks after the Duma elections of December 2003, the Party of Pensioners held a convention, where Atroshenko was dismissed as the party’s leader. He was replaced by Valery Gartung, an ambitious 44-year-old owner of the Chelyabinsk metal plant, who soon turned the party into one of the country’s best electoral machines.
“What happened was that after the government introduced the controversial social reform bill on replacing the old Soviet privileges by money payments in 2005, Gartung decided to play on the protest mood of the population, making himself autonomous from the Kremlin,” an online resource Politcom comments. “So, the party started a real fight for seats in regional parliaments.”
Riding a wave of dissatisfaction with both the party of power (United Russia) and the traditional opposition (KPRF), PP made considerable progress during local elections in 2005-2006, especially where the passage to the new system of “monetized” privileges was bumpy. In October of 2005, PP beat UR in the Siberian city of Tomsk. PP got 19.8 percent, while UR came in second at 17.85 percent. In Magadan, PP took what could be called a “strong silver medal,” coming in second after UR with 20.75 percent of the vote.
Suddenly, the party’s leader Sergei Atroshenko, who had been quiet up until then, made a comeback. Despite having spent most of his time with his family in Portugal, he filed a law suit against Gartung, claiming that the latter was elected to the party chairmanship illegally. In September 2005, Atroshenko won his case at Moscow’s Taganka court, and Gartung’s electoral machine malfunctioned. Atroshenko’s motivation to this day remains rather nebulous, since he never really headed the party again, spending most of the time in Portugal instead.
What prompted Atroshenko’s sudden comeback? Rumor has it that the Kremlin was preoccupied with PP’s successes, which made the party attractive for local sponsors in many of Russia’s regions. PP was quickly becoming a party of local counter-elites, i.e. the businessmen who had conflicts with local governors, mostly United Russia members. It is believed that Kremlin officials decided, first, to curb the PP’s progress, and second, to merge it with two other leftist parties thus creating Just Russia, an “opposition” party with leftist and patriotic rhetoric loyal to Vladimir Putin.
“My team was under strong moral pressure,” Gartung remembered three years later. “Some members of the party were threatened. They were told that the authorities would start criminal proceedings against them or confiscate their businesses.”
Here, Gartung’s ill-wishers found his party’s Achilles’ heel. “The Party of Pensioners actually has very few pensioners in its leadership,” said Dmitry Bednyakov, a member of the Federation Council representing the Nizhny Novgorod region. “Most of its leaders are young businessmen, who for some reason could not be included in the local United Russia list.”
Gartung, himself a successful businessman since the late 1980s, when the first Soviet private companies, the so-called cooperatives, were allowed, does not conceal the fact that protecting the interests of pensioners was just one of his party’s aims. “We also wanted to create a competitive environment in politics, we set ourselves the aim of giving the regional businessmen an opportunity to come up with an alternative point of view,” Gartung said.
Experts agree that popular support alone, even from such a relatively active group as pensioners, is not enough for a political party to be successful. Money and, preferably, connections in the government are also needed.
After Gartung’s removal in 2005, the party was headed by Igor Zotov, the head of the party’s Tula branch. Not a very successful campaign leader, he had good connections and got PP involved in a new project which was supposed to give the party not only money, but also the Kremlin’s support. Having met president Putin in mid-2006, Zotov elaborated on the nature of this support: “The president told me that we had too many leftist parties, so it could be a good idea to encourage them to merge with each other,” Zotov was quoted by news agencies as saying. In a few days, Zotov and the leaders of two other parties announced the creation of the new “social-democratic” party Just Russia, headed by Sergei Mironov, the chairman of the Federation Council and one of Vladimir Putin’s closest allies.
Surprisingly, Just Russia failed to repeat some of the PP’s electoral successes in the regions where the PP was most successful. This strange fact (after all, the PP and Rodina, one of the other two parties which made up Just Russia, were the most successful parties of 2003-2005 after United Russia and KPRF) can be explained by the damage to its image that the party incurred with Gartung’s removal from leadership.
“Instead of a protest force, someone at the top wanted to get a pliable party which would be opposition on paper. This did not ring well with the voters, especially those of pension age,” said Boris Nadezhdin, one of the leaders of the liberal SPS party which cooperated with the PP during elections in Magadan in 2005. SPS’s main leader, Nikita Belykh, had to admit that the pensioners were a powerful political force and that his “older party comrade” Boris Nemtsov was wrong to count them off.
“Young people pass the responsibility for their future to pensioners when they don’t go to vote,” Belykh said. “At future elections, we shall target the old even more than young people.” Thus there was at least one positive consequence of Gartung’s activity. Pensioners were appreciated as an electoral force.
As for Gartung himself, in 2007 he was elected to the State Duma on Just Russia’s list (the party got 7.74 percent, having the smallest faction in the State Duma). His relations with Just Russia’s chairman, Sergei Mironov, are reported to be good, despite some bad blood with the party’s other co-chairman, Igor Zotov.
Former PP activists in various regions occasionally make small insurgencies inside Just Russia, coming up with special opinions, particularly on pension issues. It was probably under pressure from them that Just Russia included in its program a special point on the need to make pensions at least 65 percent of a person’s previous salary. This is the highest coefficient among all other parties represented in the Duma. Unfortunately, the real coefficient of pensions to salaries ratio has been falling since mid 1990s, and is presently estimated at no more than 25 percent.
© Russia Profile.org 2008
Ever-young communists
Photo: Oleg Zhdanov
The first one was the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), an offspring of the defunct Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in a somewhat more aggressive and nationalist form. The traditionalism of the KPRF (unlike the CPSU, modern Russian communists often officially eulogize Stalin, paradoxically coupled with respect for the Russian Orthodox Church, unthinkable in a “classic” communist party until 1988) is widely explained by the advanced age of most of its activists. In 1996, the communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov nearly won the presidential election, and from 1995 to 1999, the communists had the largest faction in the Duma.
“The communists are the only viable political party in the classical sense of the word in Russia,” said Alexey Makarkin, vice-president of the Center for Political Technologies, a Moscow-based think tank. “Their strength lies in a grassroots base, which is represented by the so-called woolen berets, named after a traditional element of a Russian pensioner’s dress. These people distribute the party’s press and do the campaigning work during elections. However, in the mid-1990s, the communists seem to have hit the ceiling of their support—27 to 32 percent of the vote. They have been in decline since then.”
This decline, however, proved much less steep than some anti-communists anticipated. Strangely, leftist movements of the old were reinvigorated by the cynical statements in 1997 of the then Vice Premier Boris Nemtsov: “When the communist voters die out, only the parties of [former liberal Prime Minister Yegor] Gaidar and [his social-liberal opponent Grigory] Yavlinsky will survive, like the Republican and the Democratic parties in the United States.” Labeling the leftists as “political pensioners” Nemtsov unwittingly became one of the godfathers of a powerful new protest force—the Party of Pensioners, which became the second most important initiative attempting to tap into the retirees’ potential.
Nemtsov’s erroneous calculus
Soon after Nemtsov called the KPRF “a party of political pensioners,” Sergei Atroshenko, a businessman from the Siberian city of Tyumen, decided to create a new political party simply called the Party of Pensioners (PP). Besides Nemtsov’s insulting phrase, the inspiration for the new party also came from the Czech Republic, where a party of pensioners managed to split the leftist electorate, luring many voters who would have otherwise voted for the Czech Communist Party.
The party’s performance was not very impressive at first. Despite enjoying reported support from the Kremlin as an alternative to the KPRF, PP took only 1.94 percent during the parliamentary elections of 1999. In 2003, its result was 3.5 percent, which wasn’t bad at all, since even such an old and respected political force as Grigory Yavlinsky’s Yabloko barely passed the five percent threshold. However, the ambitious leaders of the Party of Pensioners wanted more. In January 2004, weeks after the Duma elections of December 2003, the Party of Pensioners held a convention, where Atroshenko was dismissed as the party’s leader. He was replaced by Valery Gartung, an ambitious 44-year-old owner of the Chelyabinsk metal plant, who soon turned the party into one of the country’s best electoral machines.
“What happened was that after the government introduced the controversial social reform bill on replacing the old Soviet privileges by money payments in 2005, Gartung decided to play on the protest mood of the population, making himself autonomous from the Kremlin,” an online resource Politcom comments. “So, the party started a real fight for seats in regional parliaments.”
Riding a wave of dissatisfaction with both the party of power (United Russia) and the traditional opposition (KPRF), PP made considerable progress during local elections in 2005-2006, especially where the passage to the new system of “monetized” privileges was bumpy. In October of 2005, PP beat UR in the Siberian city of Tomsk. PP got 19.8 percent, while UR came in second at 17.85 percent. In Magadan, PP took what could be called a “strong silver medal,” coming in second after UR with 20.75 percent of the vote.
Suddenly, the party’s leader Sergei Atroshenko, who had been quiet up until then, made a comeback. Despite having spent most of his time with his family in Portugal, he filed a law suit against Gartung, claiming that the latter was elected to the party chairmanship illegally. In September 2005, Atroshenko won his case at Moscow’s Taganka court, and Gartung’s electoral machine malfunctioned. Atroshenko’s motivation to this day remains rather nebulous, since he never really headed the party again, spending most of the time in Portugal instead.
What prompted Atroshenko’s sudden comeback? Rumor has it that the Kremlin was preoccupied with PP’s successes, which made the party attractive for local sponsors in many of Russia’s regions. PP was quickly becoming a party of local counter-elites, i.e. the businessmen who had conflicts with local governors, mostly United Russia members. It is believed that Kremlin officials decided, first, to curb the PP’s progress, and second, to merge it with two other leftist parties thus creating Just Russia, an “opposition” party with leftist and patriotic rhetoric loyal to Vladimir Putin.
“My team was under strong moral pressure,” Gartung remembered three years later. “Some members of the party were threatened. They were told that the authorities would start criminal proceedings against them or confiscate their businesses.”
Here, Gartung’s ill-wishers found his party’s Achilles’ heel. “The Party of Pensioners actually has very few pensioners in its leadership,” said Dmitry Bednyakov, a member of the Federation Council representing the Nizhny Novgorod region. “Most of its leaders are young businessmen, who for some reason could not be included in the local United Russia list.”
Gartung, himself a successful businessman since the late 1980s, when the first Soviet private companies, the so-called cooperatives, were allowed, does not conceal the fact that protecting the interests of pensioners was just one of his party’s aims. “We also wanted to create a competitive environment in politics, we set ourselves the aim of giving the regional businessmen an opportunity to come up with an alternative point of view,” Gartung said.
Experts agree that popular support alone, even from such a relatively active group as pensioners, is not enough for a political party to be successful. Money and, preferably, connections in the government are also needed.
After Gartung’s removal in 2005, the party was headed by Igor Zotov, the head of the party’s Tula branch. Not a very successful campaign leader, he had good connections and got PP involved in a new project which was supposed to give the party not only money, but also the Kremlin’s support. Having met president Putin in mid-2006, Zotov elaborated on the nature of this support: “The president told me that we had too many leftist parties, so it could be a good idea to encourage them to merge with each other,” Zotov was quoted by news agencies as saying. In a few days, Zotov and the leaders of two other parties announced the creation of the new “social-democratic” party Just Russia, headed by Sergei Mironov, the chairman of the Federation Council and one of Vladimir Putin’s closest allies.
Surprisingly, Just Russia failed to repeat some of the PP’s electoral successes in the regions where the PP was most successful. This strange fact (after all, the PP and Rodina, one of the other two parties which made up Just Russia, were the most successful parties of 2003-2005 after United Russia and KPRF) can be explained by the damage to its image that the party incurred with Gartung’s removal from leadership.
“Instead of a protest force, someone at the top wanted to get a pliable party which would be opposition on paper. This did not ring well with the voters, especially those of pension age,” said Boris Nadezhdin, one of the leaders of the liberal SPS party which cooperated with the PP during elections in Magadan in 2005. SPS’s main leader, Nikita Belykh, had to admit that the pensioners were a powerful political force and that his “older party comrade” Boris Nemtsov was wrong to count them off.
“Young people pass the responsibility for their future to pensioners when they don’t go to vote,” Belykh said. “At future elections, we shall target the old even more than young people.” Thus there was at least one positive consequence of Gartung’s activity. Pensioners were appreciated as an electoral force.
As for Gartung himself, in 2007 he was elected to the State Duma on Just Russia’s list (the party got 7.74 percent, having the smallest faction in the State Duma). His relations with Just Russia’s chairman, Sergei Mironov, are reported to be good, despite some bad blood with the party’s other co-chairman, Igor Zotov.
Former PP activists in various regions occasionally make small insurgencies inside Just Russia, coming up with special opinions, particularly on pension issues. It was probably under pressure from them that Just Russia included in its program a special point on the need to make pensions at least 65 percent of a person’s previous salary. This is the highest coefficient among all other parties represented in the Duma. Unfortunately, the real coefficient of pensions to salaries ratio has been falling since mid 1990s, and is presently estimated at no more than 25 percent.
© Russia Profile.org 2008
