Kremlin Steals Another Election

Tyrants have never fared well in Russian elections. The country’s first parliamentary poll in 1906 was decisively won by the Constitutional Democrats, who ran on a platform of political and social reforms; pro-czarist parties failed to win a single seat. In the Constituent Assembly election of 1917, with Lenin’s Bolsheviks already in control of government and the armed forces following their October coup, Russians flatly rejected the emerging dictatorship in favor of the pro-democracy Socialist Revolutionary Party, by forty to twenty-four percent. In the first-ever direct election for Russia’s head of state in 1991, Communist candidate Nikolai Ryzhkov, backed by the Soviet state apparatus, managed a meager seventeen percent of the vote to fifty-seven percent for Boris Yeltsin, the face of the country’s democratic opposition.