Duma

10 Key excerpts on "Duma"

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  Historically Inevitable?

  Turning Points of the Russian Revolution

  • Tony Brenton(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Profile Books

    (Publisher)

  5 Hundreds of thousands went on strike. The universities had to be closed down. There were uprisings in Poland, peasant violence in much of the countryside and, more ominously for the security of the regime, mutinies in the armed forces. Nicholas was forced into major concessions. The censorship was abolished. Personal and political rights were guaranteed. And, as a surrogate for the Constituent Assembly, Russia was given its first-ever national representative assembly, the State Duma.

  THE Duma

  Russia’s first experiment with giving the people a voice in government faced huge difficulties from the start. The gap between the reformers and the regime was almost impossibly wide. Nicholas was determined to concede none of his prerogatives. The ‘Fundamental Law’ establishing the Duma described him as ‘Supreme Autocrat’, and carefully avoided the explosive word ‘constitution’. In his view the very existence of the Duma depended on his autocratic whim. While the Duma did notionally have some serious powers, notably over government finance, the tsar retained control over the appointment of ministers, the power of veto, the power to dissolve the Duma, and the power to pass emergency laws while it was not sitting. Moreover, the electoral arrangements were rigged to produce a supportive assembly with one gentry vote worth that of forty-five workers or fifteen (supposedly more loyal) peasants. Nevertheless shrewd commentators attached real hopes to it. Sergei Witte, Nicholas’s most able minister (who indeed had pushed the tsar into agreeing to the Duma on the grounds that otherwise there would be revolution), confidently expected to see it evolve over time into a genuine Russian legislature.6

  The elections took place in April 1906. They were boycotted by the left-wing parties, which did much to encourage regime expectations of an acceptable result. The outcome was a huge shock. More than half the members of the new body were ‘semi-educated’ peasants, rough, rude and showing none of the class deference which the smooth Petersburg bureaucracy had confidently predicted. One horrified aristocratic observer described them as ‘A gathering of savages. It seemed as if the Russian land had sent to St Petersburg everything that was barbarian in it, everything filled with envy and malice.’7

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  Executive Leadership and Legislative Assemblies

  • Nicholas D. J. Baldwin(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Bills are submitted to the State Duma and may be initiated by the president, the Federation Council or its members, deputies of the Duma, the government, or the representative bodies of the subjects of the federation. The various courts are also given constitutional authority to initiate legislation in the Duma on matters within their jurisdictions. However, bills relating to taxation, changes in the financial obligations of the state, or expenditures out of the federal budget may be submitted only with the consent of the government. In addition to its blocking powers mentioned above, relating to confirmation of the prime minister’s appointment, expressing lack of confidence in the government, overriding presidential vetoes, and superseding presidential decrees, the Duma can summon ministers to report on their work and answer questions, and it can conduct parliamentary inquiries and hearings relating to government activities.

  The State Duma also has the significant authority to initiate the impeachment of the Russian president. There are several steps in the process. The Duma, following upon an initiative of at least one-third of its deputies and the corresponding conclusion of a special commission, must bring charges, based on the grounds of high treason or another grave crime. If these findings are confirmed by a vote of at least two-thirds of Duma members, if the Supreme Court confirms that the presidential actions constitute a grave crime, and, further, if the Constitutional Court concludes that the established procedures have been observed, then the Federation Council must also vote, within three months, by a two-thirds majority to remove the president from office.

  The Russian Parliament: A Ten-Year Assessment

  The 1993 elections to the State Duma produced a parliament divided into three camps: three parties that could be labelled ‘democrats’, three that were centrist, and three that were in the left-wing opposition. The party that received the most publicity, by virtue of coming in first in the party-list vote, with about 23 per cent, was the ill-named Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), an ultra-nationalist party led by the demagogic Vladimir Zhirinovskii. Although the democratic parties captured more than a third of the Duma’s seats, these were evenly split between party-list seats and single-member districts. Subsequent analysis showed that left-wing opposition parties benefited from the proportional representation system, while democratic parties would probably have fared better had all the seats been allocated in single-member districts. Moreover, the democratic parties undercut their opportunities for more district seats by competing against each other. As one study concluded, ‘democratic parties exhibited a higher frequency of internecine competition with detrimental consequences than did opposition parties’.12

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  Institutions and Political Change in Russia

  • N. Robinson(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The view that the Duma is principally a legislative organ was expressed forcefully by Shokhin during the no confidence debate in October 1997: The State Duma is above all else an organ of legislative power and not only representative power. It is precisely from the point of view of the effectiveness of our legislative activity that both our voters and other branches of power evaluate the efficacy of the State Duma as a state institution. (emphasis added, Byulleten’, 124/266: 46) With this perspective comes a critique of the Duma as an excessively ‘politicized’ institution; this is alleged to result in a disproportion in its output between legislation and ‘resolutions’. In the first nine months of 1997, according to Shokhin, the Duma passed 228 laws, yet issued 382 resolutions (Byulleten’, 124/266). A contrary position on the Duma’s role is taken by opposition leaders such as Baburin, who in the same no confidence debate declared: the State Duma of the Russian Federation is not just a mecha- nism for the blind stamping of legislation, but is an organ of popular representation. Popular representation! And this organ has a calling to build for the future, to define principled positions on Russian domestic and foreign policy. (Byulleten’, 124/266: 49) There is a degree of pathos in Baburin’s position, albeit of an op- posite kind to Shokhin’s. The latter’s critique of the Duma expresses the frustrations of one of Russia’s most able first-generation reformers, 58 Paul Chaisty and Jeffrey Gleisner for whom there are no serious views to be represented other than their own. These reformers are, in a certain sense, the ‘state’ to which Shokhin referred in the debate. Whereas Baburin, it seems, is still living mentally in the world of the previous Russian parlia- ment whose deputies thought that, like Lenin’s cooks, they could run the state.

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  Russian Politics and Society

  • Richard Sakwa(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The 1993 constitution abolished the two-tier system of Congress and Supreme Soviet and created a bicameral Federal Assembly: the upper house, the FC, made up (at the time) of 178 representatives, two each from Russia’s 89 federal components; and the lower house, the State Duma, with 450 deputies elected for a four-year term (apart from the first two-year convocation). The establishment of the Federal Assembly marked a decisive break with Soviet traditions. The constitution outlined the functions of the two chambers of parliament, with the powers granted to the Assembly balanced by countervailing powers of the executive. Although the powers granted the Federal Assembly are relatively weak, they are far from negligible. The First State Duma elected in December 1993 was an interim one and lasted only two years. A mixed electoral system was adopted for the first four Dumas, with half the deputies elected by a proportional PL system and half from single-member constituencies; whereas the elections to the Fifth in 2007 and the Sixth in 2011 were entirely proportional, before returning to the mixed system to elect the Seventh in 2016. The composition of the Duma reflects a combination of a stable core membership and a fluid periphery.

  The First Duma (1994–95)

  Elected for a two-year transitional period, this convocation was fragmented and torn between a large nationalist bloc in the form of Zhirinovsky’s LDPR, a liberal group focused in Gaidar’s Russia’s Choice and a Communist bloc (Table 10.1 ).

  The Second Duma (1996–99)

  The Second Duma was less fragmented than its predecessor, and the presence of only four factions dramatically altered its voting dynamics, with fewer smaller factions to mediate and moderate policy-making (Table 10.2 ). The more radical deputies elected from the party lists were diluted by members elected from the constituencies, often without any clear political affiliation, but the cost was a lack of clear political orientation in the Duma itself.2 The Duma contained 157 members of the old Duma (35 per cent), 49 per cent of the new convocation had been legislators at various levels before, 52 had worked in various executive branches, 15 had previously been members of the FC and 29 per cent came from Moscow.3 Although the CPRF did remarkably well, winning 149 seats, the pro-Communist bloc with 45 per cent of the seats failed to obtain the two-thirds required to overturn a presidential veto. The CPRF faction reflected the age profile of the party as a whole, with over one-third over 50, and another 6.5 per cent over 60; workers accounted for no more than 7 per cent.4

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  Russia and the Wider World in Historical Perspective

  Essays for Paul Dukes

  • C. Brennan, M. Frame, C. Brennan, M. Frame(Authors)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  In many respects in its short span of existence the State Duma did function as a proper legislature. It emerged as a forum for political articulation, even if for a privileged minority, through its debates, interpellations and questions, all of which were published uncensored and normally verbatim in the press. It did discuss government bills and amend them. Opponents of government projects could and did use the Duma to block or distort them, as was the case, for example, with the provincial landed nobility’s opposition to Stolypin’s local government reforms, or the Orthodox Church’s rejection of greater religious freedom for Old Believers and sectarians. It is true that the Duma’s budgetary rights had been tightly circumscribed by the budget rules of 8 March 1906. The consequence was that in 1907 the legislature con- trolled only 53 per cent of the state budget. Parliament had no say at all in the budgets of the Imperial Household or His Majesty’s Own Chancery, and no control over the government contingency fund. Nevertheless, the State Duma did make some progress as 66 per cent of the budget came under its purview by 1912. The greatest stride was made in parliamentary scrutiny of the budget of the Ministry of War. If, in 1907, a mere 13 per cent of military estimates came within the chambers’ cognizance, by 1912 this had soared to 66 per cent, largely on account of extra appropriations for military reforms and arms pro- grammes. The State Duma, furthermore, began to penetrate the execu- tive’s exclusive sphere of decision-making. The presentation of the annual estimates of the Ministries of War, the Navy, and Foreign Affairs allowed deputies to debate military and diplomatic issues, and express their views, often highly critical of the government’s policies in these areas. The potentiality of interpellations for increasing minister- ial accountability, however, was largely unrealized as over half of all interpellations were left unanswered by ministers.

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  The New Autocracy

  Information, Politics, and Policy in Putin's Russia

  • Daniel Treisman(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Brookings Institution Press

    (Publisher)

  7 To be sure, on important policy initiatives, and when elites are united, the Duma is capable of rubber-stamping bills, with initiatives racing through the legislature with little substantive discussion and no amendments. Yet this does not always happen. Although we suggest a number of reasons why this is the case, we underscore the fact that the Duma serves as an “elite battleground” between ministries, departments, executive agencies, and economic interests. Deviations from the rubber stamp model, therefore, result from intra-elite policy squabbling, rather than signifying opposition to, or influence on, executive policy agendas. Although parliamentary activity reflects a cacophony of elite interests, this plethora of voices is largely untethered from societal concerns, with consequential discussions taking place away from public view.

  We proceed with an overview of post-Soviet Russian parliamentary politics, lay out evidence of rubber stamp deviations, and discuss the causes of these deviant observations. A BRIEF HISTORY OF POST-SOVIET RUSSIAN PARLIAMENTARY POLITICS

  The history of post-Soviet Russian parliamentary politics is not a simple, linear story, moving from chaos to control. To place the Duma’s sixth convocation (2011–16) into the longer story of post-Soviet parliamentarism, we provide a brief overview of this historical context, covering institutional details, the shifting partisan composition of the Duma and the executive-legislative balance of power, and an overview of the lawmaking process.

  Following the constitutional crisis of 1993—which, at base, was a confrontation between the legislative and executive branches of power, and which culminated in the dissolution of the Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet—the new post-Soviet constitution created a new bicameral federal parliament, with 450 seats in the lower house. The 1993, 1995, 1999, and 2003 Duma elections were all conducted using a mixed electoral system, with 225 deputies elected using party-list proportional representation and 225 in single-mandate district (plurality) competitions. By contrast, the 2007 and 2011 elections were conducted using a purely proportional representation system.8

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  Legislative Politics and Economic Power in Russia

  • P. Chaisty(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  64 3 The State Duma In the aftermath of the October 1993 crisis, new parliamentary arrange- ments were devised that addressed the institutional flaws of the previous legislative system. The new parliament, the Federal Assembly, was given a more conventional bicameral structure: two separate, self- governing houses, the State Duma and the Federation Council, were created. In the lower house, the State Duma, political parties were also strengthened by an electoral system that had a proportional compo- nent, and by internal arrangements that conferred special privileges on party members. Furthermore, the powers and influence of the chairman of the Duma and of committee chairs were curbed in significant ways. This chapter examines the impact that the move to partisan rule had on economic policy making in the first three State Dumas: First Duma (1994–95), Second Duma (1996–99) and Third Duma (2000–2003). It explores how the agenda setting power of parties and their procedural control over the appointment and functions of key legislators, in particular the chairman of the Duma and economic policy committees, shaped the decision-making process. New electoral and institutional arrangements aided the formation of more disciplined and cohesive parties. However, these rules and practices also fostered large numbers of ideologically divided parties, whose names and numbers changed from election to election. Over the first three Dumas, the party system hampered coalition building, and dispersed agenda control and lawmaking between a large number of partisan and legislative veto players. Moreover, while this legislative regime was able to deliver some notable achievements in the area of economic policy, the weakness of party control over the direction and content of the economic policy agenda, coupled with the need for policy makers to form oversized coalitions of interests on an issue-by-issue basis, perpetuated indecisive and particularistic decision making.

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  Understanding Russian Politics

  • Stephen White(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  37 All of this meant that there was a very loose association between the popular vote and the composition of each new Duma; the composition of the Duma, in any case, had no obvious implications for the Russian government, which was nominated or appointed by the president and surrendered its powers to a newly elected head of state rather than a newly elected parliament. A series of important changes took place from 2005 onwards, the effect of which was to extend the Kremlin ’ s control over the electoral process still further and convert the Duma into an entirely subordinate instrument of executive authority. They followed a hostage-taking crisis at Beslan in the northern Caucasus at the start of September 2004, which allowed Putin to insist that government structures would have to be ‘ fundamen-tally restructured for the purpose of bolstering the country ’ s unity and preventing crises ’ ; in particular, that there should be a ‘ single system of authority ’ , with governors nomi-nated by the president, and a fully proportional system of elections to the lower house. 38 A new election law was duly adopted in May 2005 that departed in fundamental respects From Soviet to Russian elections 37 from the election laws that had preceded it. 39 The previous law, adopted in 2002, had already provided that the threshold for party-list representation would be raised from 5 to 7 per cent. The 2005 law went much further, in particular by eliminating the single-member constituencies and providing for the election of all the Duma ’ s 450 deputies through the national party-list ballot; this took the electoral process out of the hands of local elites who might have had their own agenda and placed it under the direct control of the Presidential Administration and the national party leaderships, who could be more easily manipulated.

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  Lenin's Electoral Strategy from 1907 to the October Revolution of 1917

  The Ballot, the Streets—or Both

  • August H. Nimtz(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1 “Legal and Illegal Work” The Third Duma

  UNLIKE ITS TWO PREDECESSORS, THE THIRD DUMA completed its full term, from its convening in November 1907 to its scheduled dissolution in June 1912. It proved to be prerevolutionary Russia’s longest uninterrupted experience with parliamentary government and thus Russian social democracy’s as well. Also, unlike its predecessors, it was the product of the revolution’s defeat. That fact more than any other determined its origins and its course. Lenin had to mount an even more vigorous campaign to convince his Bolshevik comrades to participate in a body that offered even fewer possibilities for revolutionary work. Contrary to the claims of a vocal minority, the choice wasn’t either/or—either parliamentary or illegal work. Both, Lenin argued, not only could be done but indeed had to be done in order to make effective the work in each sphere of activity. What Lenin had to do to win the skeptics to his position is the subject of this chapter.

  Preparing for the Third Duma

  Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin’s new electoral law, just as Lenin had forecasted, was crafted to render a Duma more to his liking or, as its chief architect put it, to “tear the State Duma from the hands of the revolutionaries, to assimilate it to the historical institutions, to bring it into the state system . . . To try, on the basis of a new law, to distil from Russia’s chaos those elements in which there lived a feeling for the Russian state system, and from them to create the Duma as an organ for the reeducation of society.”1 Once most Bolsheviks were won to taking part in the rigged elections for the Third Duma, the next task was to achieve clarity about what was expected of revolutionary social democracy in a decidedly more reactionary legislative arena.

  Against Boycott

  “In June 1907 they were the majority among the Bolsheviks. But Proletary campaigned continuously against the boycott.”2 That most Bolsheviks, especially those in Moscow, didn’t want to take part in the Third Duma required that Lenin be at his persuasive best. His key weapon in the campaign was a 32-page pamphlet, Against Boycott. Central to his argument, presented in a very pedagogical and nonpolemical tone, was context and historical contingency. Simply put, the boycott was a tactic appropriate in some situations and not others. In the specific context of Russia’s first revolution, the boycott of the regime’s proposed Bulygin Duma was a necessity. As long as it was possible to “set up representative institutions of a purely revolutionary type—Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, etc., in place of the representative institutions of the police-liberal type,” everything, including the boycott of the latter, had to be employed to ensure the institution of the former.3

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  A History of Education in Modern Russia

  Aims, Ways, Outcomes

  • Wayne Dowler, Jonathan Smele, Michael S. Melancon(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  6 From Revolution to Revolution: The Duma Period

  Bloody Sunday set off a spring and summer of strikes and peasant disorders that culminated in a nationwide general strike supported by nearly the whole of society in October 1905. Reluctantly, Nicholas II was forced to concede to demands for an elected representative parliament. The October Manifesto offered a lower house, the Duma, elected on a broad franchise, and an upper chamber, the State Council, partly elected by conservative groups and partly appointed by the emperor. The concession split the opposition forces. Workers, supported by various revolutionary factions, continued their resistance, especially in Moscow, but were brutally crushed in December 1905. Peasant unrest intensified as well after the manifesto and continued into 1906. Petr Arkadevich Stolypin was named minister of the interior in April 1906 and prime minister in July. He was a highly capable politician, statesman, and staunch patriot. He adopted a two-pronged policy of repression of unrest in the countryside and partnership with center and right forces in the new Duma to advance a cautiously progressive agenda. The repression, especially in the western provinces and the Baltic provinces, was brutal. Stolypin followed rural pacification with a major land reform that allowed peasants to consolidate their communal holdings into single blocks of land to form individual farms. Some peasants embraced the offer, but the commune remained the dominant form of peasant land tenure. He also opened crown lands for sale to peasants and encouraged peasant resettlement in Siberia and Central Asia to relieve land hunger in the European Russian provinces.

  Elementary Schools

  Between the granting of constitutional government in the October Manifesto and the convening of the First Duma in the spring of 1906, the government promulgated the Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire. The Fundamental Laws blurred the distinction between a fully constitutional order and the supremacy of the law on the one hand and the absolute authority of the autocrat on the other. The left-leaning liberal Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) formed the largest faction in the First Duma, which convened in May. There were several groupings to its left. The delegates were in an uncompromising mood. A leading member of the Kadets declared that the Fundamental Laws made the law in Russia a “joke.”1 On education, nearly all sides agreed on the need for universal elementary schooling. Progressives of various stripes wanted the removal of religion from schools, teaching at the elementary level in the language of the student, and a unified school system. Opposition to the Fundamental Laws soon led to prorogation of the Duma and new elections. The Second Duma was nearly as radical as the first. It produced a bill for free universal primary education. Under its provisions local authorities were to take responsibility for opening the needed schools and managing them under Ministry of National Enlightenment supervision. Schools were to be located within a radius of three versts

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