This year, First Rating decided to assess both the State Duma's hardest workers and its less hard working members.
Photo: Mikhail Razuvaev
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Voices Right, Voices Left
Although the United Russia Party has more than two-thirds of the votes in the current State Duma, its members are noticeably less active than members of opposition factions. That was the finding of Kommersant's rating that looked at the number of times members spoke before the lower house of parliament in the 2006 spring session.
One for All
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| Photo: Dmitry Dukhanin |
| Duma member from the LDPR Alexey Mitrofanov surpassed his boss for loudness and causticity in our ranking. |
The institution's traditions have to be taken into account when judging the activity of Duma members. Practically the main one of them began in the mid-1990s. That is the members' habit of handing their voting cards to a single member of their faction who is “on duty” at the moment. Those duty members gradually formed a permanent group whose members vote during discussions of draft laws either for or against a quick run through the chamber to press dozens of voting buttons and regularly express their opinion of the document in question. The bulk of the legislators visit Duma sessions far less often, being busy with matters that are distant from legislation.
Besides the factional duty men, the chairmen, or at least the first deputy chairmen, of the main committees – the ones that most legislation passes through – are usually present at all Duma sessions. Those are mainly United Russia members. Its members head all 29 committees of the State Duma, while members of the opposition – the communists, Fatherland (Rodina) and LDPR – are deputy chairmen of seven committees. They read reports and supplemental reports on the proposed laws, and they are the ones, as a rule, who stand up for the president's position, and that of the government and the party in power, and fend off the onslaught of the opposition. All of that guarantees them a place in the orators' rating.
The Most Responsible
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| Photo: Grigory Sobchenko |
| First Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Education and Science Oleg Smolin is the most active Communist in the Duma. |
For the reasons just indicated, there are four committee chairmen in our rating. They are Pavel Krasheninnikov (the legislation committee), Vladimir Pligin (state-building), Oleg Kovalev (rules) and Vladimir Reznik (credit organizations). None of them are in the Top 10, however. But the deputy chairman of Pligin's committee, Alexander Moskalets is. The reason for that is simple. The committee heads usually present the draft laws introduced by the parliamentarians themselves. But they are comparatively rare, and the deputy chairmen usually present supplemental reports on the high-priority bills introduced by the president, government or subjects of the federation.
Moskalets, former prosecutor of Krasnoyarsk Territory and deputy emergencies minister, is known for his oratorical activeness and his unusual turns of phrase. A brilliant example of his linguistic pearls came in a discussion with the opposition of the relationship between the media and the state. “At the present moment,” he said, “the question of censorship, in my view, is the most unmanifested and has a place even more it was than before.” At that point, the legislators, obviously unable to see their way to the bottom of Moskalets' subtle thoughts, rejected the opposition's proposed amendment to the law on the government giving the Duma the right to hold no-confidence votes on individual ministers.
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| Photo: Dmitry Dukhanin |
| Sergey Glotov is the most ardent opponent of United Russia among the patriots. |
Chairman of the rules committee Kovalev is known for his great expertise on the legal norms that regulate the nuances of the Duma's internal life and legislative activity as a whole. It is his elucidations of those fine points in the course of plenary sessions that earn him his place in the Top 20 Representatives of the oppositions are usually victims of those elucidations. It was Kovalev who had to do most of the work to separate the Fatherland (People's Will – United Socialist Party of Russia) faction from the main Fatherland faction. That was before it decided to become part of the second party in power, Fair Russia.
Chairman of the Committee on Civil, Criminal, Arbitration and Procedural Legislation Krasheninnikov, who was elected to the Duma as a Union of Right Forces candidate, won his place in Top 20 for his stirring and substantive speeches on issues that are significant to regular citizens. He presented the legislative initiatives to extend the deadline for free privatization of housing for two years and to give citizens the right to display the Russian flag at will, rather than only on holidays.
The Most Ardent
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| Photo: Dmitry Dukhanin |
| Nina Ostanina holds women's, family and youth affairs firmly in her hands. |
Nevertheless, those most active are members of the opposition. That is so at least because, in their uphill battle with the majority party in power, they have to be counted by their ability and not their number. That is, they speak as often as possible to compensate for the extremely small number of bills they are able to force through the United Russia strainer.
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation faction was the most active last year, and eight of its embers made it into the Top 20. That is unsurprising. Since they are unable to get their bills through the Duma, the Communists have to publicize the unpassed bills well to keep the voters' attention. Those Communists who had even the most minor posts in the Duma had the best chances of being heard. The most active Communist was First Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Science and Education Oleg Smolin, who presented well-argued objections to several majority initiatives on socially meaningful issues, especially educational reform. Communist faction coordinator Sergey Reshulsky was an unfailing critic of United Russia initiatives. He was the one who expressed the Party's opinion on bills when none of his colleagues wanted to, thereby earning a place in the middle of our rating.
There were Communists whose convictions, rather than position, powered their opposition to United Russia. In particular, Viktor Tyulkin, leader of the Russian Communist Workers Party who was elected to the Duma on the CPRF ticket, placed in the Top 5 Duma orators, in spite of the fact that he was silenced for a month for stating his objections to United Russia unacceptably. He was developing on the well-known passage about “Comrade Wolf” in Russian President Vladimir Putin's address to the Federal Assembly when he said that “comrade wolf, comrade bear and a pack of jackals are in the party they call United Russia.” Immediately after his forced silence, he lashed out at United Russia's decision to prohibit Duma members to change parties and eliminating the “Against all” box on the ballot.
The Most Correct
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| Photo: Dmitry Dukhanin |
| Yabloko member Sergey Popov is the most ardent opponent of United Russia among the democrats. |
LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky occupied a special place in the opposition. His faction can only nominally be called the opposition since, while the Liberal Democrats often condemned the authorities, they always distinguished themselves by voting for the general Kremlin line. Zhirinovsky usually speaks on all issues before the Duma (taking advantage of his position as deputy speaker, which gives him the right to lead sessions) and also participates in a wide variety of extra-parliamentary activities. In 2006, he led swimmers into a hole in the ice to bathe on the Feast of the Epiphany, when it was 30 degrees below zero C.
His position as deputy speaker also allows Zhirinovsky to evade ethics charges as well. In February of last year, for example, he got away with saying that the Soviet Union won the Great Patriotic War (that is, World War Two on the territory of the Soviet Union) because it kept its soldiers drunk. In the autumn, efforts came to naught to hold Zhirinovsky liable for the alleged beating of Valery Khramchenkov by Zhirinovsky's bodyguards after Khramchenkov decided to withdraw his LDPR candidacy from Bryansk Region in the Duma by-elections.
First place in our rating goes to LDPR Duma member Alexey Mitrofanov, who tries hard to keep up with his boss's loudness and causticity. At the beginning of the year, he spoke in defense of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, in the spring he was an active proponent of the Duma's request to the British Parliament to extradite Boris Berezovsky and the in fall he demanded that Moscow authorities be held accountable for the traffic jams on the capital's streets. He also makes himself seen at most society event, which is reported on by media of all stripes.
The Most Opposed
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| Alexander Moskalets, former prosecutor of Krasnoyarsk Territory and deputy emergencies minister, is known in the Duma for his unusual way of expressing himself. |
It is much harder for any of the rest of the opposition to get hold of the Duma microphone. The two Fatherland members in the Top 20 were members of the People's Patriotic Fatherland Union (People's Will – United Socialist Party of Russia). The factions deputy chairman Sergey Glotov is in the Top 3. He earned his place through enviously regular attendance at the plenary sessions, at which he gave United Russia hortatory criticism for any or no reason. Faction leader and deputy speaker Sergey Baburin, who fell in the 19th-21st place segment, spent much less time in the Duma, being distracted by election campaigns (in October, he topped the People's Will party lists in six regions) or the defense of Russians in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Neither faction leader Alexander Babakov nor any of the members of Fatherland-1 were among the Top 20 orators in 2006.
Representatives of the democratic opposition, who do not have a faction of their own in the current Duma, were nonetheless able to compete among the opposition at least in number of appearances before plenary sessions. Yabloko-member Sergey Popov, an expert on constitutional law, took a respectable seventh place in the ranking with his untiring opposition to United Russia initiatives concerning voting law. Cochairman of the Republican Party of Russia Vladimir Ryzhkov, elected from Altai Territory, stood up in the Duma for the rights of political parties and the authority of the regions. He would undoubtedly have been much more noticeable if he hadn't been entangled in drawn-out court disputes over the future of his party. In the end, it did not pass muster with the Federal Registration Service, which failed to find the required 50,000-member minimum for the party.
The Most Unheard
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| Photo: Pavel Smertin |
| Viktor Ryzhkov's indefatiguable activity in the Duma was curtailed last year because of drawn-out court disputes over his party. |
The list of the least noticeable Duma members is almost exclusively made up of United Russia members. That is unsurprising if we consider that there are ore than 300 people in the faction, of whom only the most trusted warrior, such as the committee chairmen and their deputies mentioned above, are given the right to speak. The majority of the most silent United Russians entered the Duma through party lists, as is the usual practice with backbenchers.
Also on the bottom of the list were LDPR-member Oleg Skorlukov and independent parliamentarian Leonid Ivanchenko. Skorlukov, a former customs officer in Moscow, was elected from the LDPR's Ural list. There is nothing in particular to say about him. Ivanchenko was deputy chairman of the Central Committee of the CPRF and headed the Duma Committee on Regional Policy in the previous Duma and was a top orator. He was excluded from the Communist Party for attempting to create a schism in it and now, with no Duma or Party positions, he seems to have lost interest in his work.
Other parliamentarians who do not distinguish themselves just have no time for it, being occupied elsewhere. Igor Dines, for instance, is the chairman of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry committee on lotteries and gaming and rarely appears in the Duma unless the discussion there touches on the gaming business. Stepan Shorshorov, who, before being elected, was head of OAO Don Beverages, one of the largest financial and industrial groups in South Russia, prefers to spend his time in his native Rostov-on-Don. That at least was the conclusion reached by the road police last summer, when they discovered that his car in Moscow has forged license plates. The real plates, with the privileged Russian tricolor on them, were on his car in Rostov, where they were more needed.
It should be mentioned that there were significantly more than 13 Duma members who did not speak at all. Only those who were never even searched on the Internet are included here. That distinction thinned those ranks of several Duma members who did not participate in the workings of the Duma on principle. Alexander Nevzorov, for example, elected to the Duma in 2003, attends only the first and last plenary sessions of the year. But his place in the rating is bolstered by his exposure as a television journalist.
Top-20. Key Orators of the State Duma
| Place in rating |
Member |
Faction |
Points* |
| 1 | Alexey Mitrofan | LDPR | 155 | | 2 | Oleg Smolin | CPRF | 121 | | 3 | Sergey Glotov | Fatherland (People's Will – United Socialist Party of Russia) | 110 | | 4 | Vladimir Zhirinovsky | LDPR | 108 | | 5 | Viktor Tyulikn | CPRF | 107 | | 6 | Nina Ostanina | CPRF | 94 | | 7 | Sergey Popov | Independent | 89 | | 8-9 | Anatoly Lokot | CPRF | 83 | | 8-9 | Alexander Moskalets | United Russia | 83 | | 10 | Vasily Cheremukhin | United Russia | 76 | | 11 | Oleg Malyshkin | LDPR | 73 | | 12 | Sergey Reshulsky | CPRF | 69 | | 13 | Oleg Kovalev | United Russia | 68 | | 14 | Kibirev Boris | CPRF | 67 | | 15 | Pavel Krasheninnikov | United Russia | 66 | | 16 | Vladimir Ryzhkov | Independent | 65 | | 17 | Vladimir Pligin | United Russia | 64 | | 18 | Vladislav Reznik | United Russia | 61 | | 19-21 | Sergey Baburin | Fatherland (People's Will – United Socialist Party of Russia) | 60 | | 19-21 | Vladimir Kashin | CPRF | 60 | | 19-21 | Nikolay Kondratenko | CPRF | 60 |
| *Corresponds to the number of speeches (including turns leading sessions, replies from the gallery, replies from place and so on) at plenary meetings of the spring 2006 session of the Russian State Duma.
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Least Noticeable Russian State Duma Members*
| 1 | Anatloy Baboshkin | | 2 | Rinat Gubaidullin | | 3 | Igor Dines | | 4 | Nikolay Zalupukhin | | 5 | Leonid Ivanchenko | | 6 | Vener Kamaletdinov | | 7 | Vladimir Karetnikov | | 8 | Asanbuba Nyudyurbegov | | 9 | Viktor Opekunov | | 10 | Alexander Orgolainen | | 11 | Franis Saifullin | | 12 | Oleg Skorlukov | | 13 | Stepan Shorshorov |
| *All members except Independent Leonid Ivanchenko are members of the United Russia faction. To appear on the list, the Duma member had to meet two criteria: a) not speak at a session of the 2006 Duma at all and b) his name was not entered into an Internet search engine in 2006.
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Yury Chernega
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