What happened? The answer seems to be the FSB. In 2000, the controversial and
heavy-handed KPRF governor, Ivan Shabanov, was pushed out in the first round of the
gubernatorial elections by the head of the local FSB, Vladimir Kulakov (echoing
Vladimir Putin’s first-round victory in the presidential elections several months before).
This conflict seems to have coincided with a kind of a melt-down of the party system. I
met with Galina Kudryavtseva, an ex-KPRF deputy in the city duma who told how much
she’d accomplished since she was kicked out of the party (which happened before
Kulakov was elected, actually), which she criticized for living in the past and exploiting
nostalgia (Interview Kudryavtseva, 2004). She in fact had also run for Governor against
Kulakov’s re-election effort in March of 2004, getting a respectable 14%, just behind a
KPRF deputy speaker of the oblast duma, Sergei Rudakov, who got 20%. Of course,
Kulakov was not going to be forced in a second round, and got 52% to avoid this. Not
only has the KPRF had problems, though. The union of the local branches of OVR and
Unity went poorly, and the popular head of Unity, Boris Skrynnikov, was kicked out so
that Yuri Titov could run United Russia (Interview Skrynnikov, 2003). Skrynnikov
managed to get himself elected speaker of the oblast duma, nonetheless, in a turn of
events that shocked even himself, according to local editor Aleksandr Uspensky, was
elected mayor of Voronezh in early 2004 when the oblast administration’s preferred
candidate, backed by United Russia, and another leading candidate turned off the voters
with their negative attacks (Interview Uspensky)
5
.
Voronezh certainly seems nowadays to have improved from its late-1990s
reputation for being an undemocratic link in the “red belt” of KPRF strongholds
(McMann & Petrov, 2000). But the presence of marginally popular FSB general as
5
A United Russia secretary later told me they’d lost the election because they should have had more
candidates, so that the preferred candidate wouldn’t have to make all the attacks himself.
Convention