Whoever will stand for the presidential election (and I have no doubt that the Putin–Medvedev tandem will smoothly reach that decision and announce it within a few months), national politics are always anchored in society and its political economy. From that perspective, the formation of the Russian People’s Front may have much deeper purposes. Let’s try to decipher these.

       In early May, during a conference of the ruling United Russia party, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin announced the formation of the United Popular Front (UPF). A few days later, after meetings with representatives from NGOs, trade unions, and business, the PM was pleased to see its social base growing. He enthused that “it really permits us to reach the purpose I had previously set while outlining my initiative. Mainly, to attract new people with fresh ideas through means of the United Russia party.” But as his press secretary Dmitri Peskov added, it is “a supra-party that is not based on the party. Rather, it is focused on Putin, the creator of this idea.”

       Immediate reactions are mixed. Some see the new entity as nothing more than a political bulldozer that will push votes for the Duma election beyond fifty-five percent for the ruling party, giving them the comfort of a majority. Indeed, a lot of effort and some luck will be needed to achieve that goal and this mainstream analysis may be entirely right. But at the same time, Mr. Peskov may also be right: this is not only about United Russia’s low popularity, but primarily about the future of the system we have come to know as “Putin’s Russia.” Whoever will stand for the presidential election (and I have no doubt that the Putin–Medvedev tandem will smoothly reach that decision and announce it within a few months), national politics are always anchored in society and its political economy. From that perspective, the formation of the United Popular Front may have much deeper purposes. Let’s try to decipher these.

       The first task for UPF might be to shift dynamics within the state in order to re-industrialize and modernize Russia. Russia has still a lot of quite fundamental problems to solve (ranging from de facto de-industrialization and a poorly diversified export structure, a lack of innovation evidenced by a scarcity of patents and diminishing educational standards, through to deepening social inequality and diminished social services) if she is going to play the role she deserves to play in global markets and politics. All of this is well known, but to achieve it, the Russian state needs to be less autonomous from its own citizens and market. At the moment, the political machine of the United Russia party serves the state, but the state is so independent that it has become nobody’s servant except its own. From traditionally being a vehicle for modernization, the current Russian state has in a sense devolved into a heavily bureaucratized obstacle to further modernization. The United Popular Front might be used to dilute (and maybe even counter) the omnipotent, sovereign bureaucracy.

       The second task is to restore the social power of the political center(s) . A key aspect of power is confidence in obedience. This has very much eroded in Russia in recent years. In the West, we are starting to hear – to our amazement, as we are bombarded by the media with the message that “the Kremlin can do anything it pleases” - laments from the top of the Russian political hierarchy that their decisions are not followed and that rules and laws are ignored. Having power re-centralized by then-President Putin, Russian leaders faced a new question: how much of that power could be effectively deployed for larger-scale, nationally meaningful projects? The answer has turned out to be not too much. So what went wrong? The shortest answer is that the state became divorced from society. Part of the solution is to make the bureaucracy more accountable, but the bigger issue is to re-deploy social power, to re-engage society in, if not outright power-sharing, then at least some semblance thereof. In other words, the ruling group should consider how to move to a social coalition-based system, as history has shown that even the most enlightened “trusteeship” cannot reorganize the system without broader societal support and societal legitimization. Achieving this sort of breadth of buy-in might be, in the long run, another task for the Front.

       The third task at hand is the search for new ideas to feed the policy process. There are two issues involved in this. One is that bureaucrats (and the party) have proved not to be very good at generating them. As society was cut off from the political process, the role of “idea generators” was taken by a few Kremlin’s spin doctors whose task was to develop something that “looked and sounded good,” which was not necessarily what society was looking for. The secondly, more substantial problem, concerns the dominant ideas of United Russia itself. In December 2009, the party labeled itself as a “conservative party.” There are some problems with such a self-assessment as seen from the political economy perspective. Given that Russian citizens seem to be simply the objects of a power game played by the elite (as true conservatives distrust civil society), the party is unable to genuinely mass mobilize Russian society exactly at a time when such mobilization is badly needed. Moreover, conservatives’ dislike of change makes conservatism pretty useless as an ideology for guiding the larger-scale goal of crafting an innovative, modernized Russia. This is especially problematic because conservatives usually react oppressively to any societal upheavals and are thus unable to effectively manage discontent (which is quite natural in a time of economic uncertainty). On top of those liabilities, there is a tangible lack of both coherence and a strategic sense of the future, which is simply a manifestation of the political class’ current (and only current) loyalty to the authorities of the day. For the next Russian President, it will be better to have broader support and less systemic liabilities incorporated in United Russia, and thus the utility of the new Front may come as an important political asset.

       So, if we look at this new political force from a longer-term perspective that goes a bit beyond its “obvious” role as a vote-generating machine, we can see on the horizon that the United Popular Front is formed not for today but for a day “after tomorrow” to prepare the ground for a new Presidential cycle in Russia, on that will be very much different from what we have seen until now.

       Views expressed are of individual Members and Contributors, rather than the Club's, unless explicitly stated otherwise.