Colton Timothy J. Transitional citizens: voters and what influences them in the new Russia

Harvard University Press, 2000. — 337 p. — ISBN: 0-674-00277-6Subjects obey. Citizens choose. The signal accomplishment of the epic “transition” in the former Soviet Union--in Counterpoint to a sorry economic record--is the political feat of having converted so many subjects into citizens. This book takes a look at the people of the Russian Federation as they make democratic choices they could not have dreamed of being allowed to make a few years back. The venue is the electoral arena, where they periodically pass judgment on their governments and would- be governments. Voting is the consummate act of citizenship.
One hundred and nine million strong and straddling two continents, eleven time zones, and eighty-nine constituent regions, the Russian electorate has from the moment of inception been one of the biggest on earth.
Comprehending the way its members stand up and are counted will be critical to debates within political science about mass politics and about regime change and consolidation.
The fascination of this gigantic collectivity lies less in sheer size than in its very enfranchisement, which cuts against the grain of a singularly autocratic past. Russia’s citizens now go to vote in what used to be the citadel of the dictatorship that embodied the main alternative to liberal democracy.
This brave new world of competitive elections is thinly mapped. Peaceful jousting among political parties, seating thresholds and runoff formulas, the arcana of reitingi, politicheskiye konsulêtanty, polstery, fokus-gruppy, press-konferentsii, and imidzh-meikery--all were unheard of not so long
ago. Most exotic of all is the idea that the man or woman on the street can every so often have a voice in picking state personnel and policy. “We are not accustomed to holding the country’s destiny in our hands,” Mayor Yurii Luzhkov of Moscow remarked grandiloquently of his compatriots in the last-stretch drive of the presidential race of 1996.