Federation Council Speaker and leader of the Russian Party of Life (RPZh) Sergei Mironov during a convention on October 28, 2006 at which the new "Fair Russia" party was created on the basis of the RPZh, the Russian Pensioners' Party, and Rodina. Mr. Mironov will lead the new party.
Photo: Dmitry Dukhanin
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Sergei Mironov's New Party Holds First Convention, Suffers First Split
// Deputy Savyolev Slightly Tarnishes Speaker Mironov's Image
The convention at which the Russian Party of Life (RPZh), the Russian Pensioners' Party (RPP), and Rodina ("Motherland") voted to create the new "Fair Russia: Rodina/Pensioners/Life" (SRRPZh) party took place on Saturday. As organizers had feared, it did not come off without a scandal: Yury Savyolev, the leader of the St. Petersburg branch of Rodina, announced his departure from the party and threatened to take the majority of his Petersburg comrades with him. But that did not stop the rest of the deputies from confirming all of the proposed resolutions and proclaiming the creation of a new party to "defend the interests of the working class."
Fearing that "irregular situations" might arise over the distribution of leadership posts among regional party deputies, organizers closed Saturday's convention to all but a handful of journalists. To the dismay of the new party's leader, Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov, such a situation did in fact arise in the person of Duma deputy and St. Petersburg Rodina faction leader Yury Savyolev, who cast the only votes against all of the resolutions adopted at the meeting. "Rodina was an opposition party," explained Mr. Savyolev. "In the Duma, we have always voted against legislation that is against the interests of the people but which is later approved by Mr. Mironov."
Mr. Savyolev was also dissatisfied by how Mr. Mironov has parceled out leadership posts in the new party. Despite Mr. Savyolov's prominence in St. Petersburg, where Rodina won 13% of the vote in 2003, the leader of the SRRPZh party in the region will be Oleg Nilov (the leader of the Petersburg faction of the RPZh). The position of the SRRPZh's new leader on the issue is understandable, however: the speaker of the Federation Council cannot afford to have one of his key regional deputies be someone who has criticized the conclusions of the parliamentary commission on Beslan. Mr. Savyolev even published an alternative report whose findings strongly contradict the official version of events.
Mr. Savyolev has announced that the council of the St. Petersburg Rodina party will decide today on a collective exit from the party. The deputy himself, however, admits that perhaps not everyone will join him, and a Kommersant source within the party believes that his followers will be few. Still, the threat of losing his new party's Rodina base in St. Petersburg is substantial for Mr. Mironov, who intends to stand at the head of the party list for SRRPZh in the elections for the Petersburg city parliament in March 2007. Rodina forms SRRPZh's base, and the loss of the Petersburg faction's support would mean that the new party would have to rebuild itself almost from the ground up in time for the elections.
The rest of the convention, which Sergei Mironov called "a great historical event," thankfully went smoothly. First, the three parties (Rodina, RPZh, and RPP) convened their deputies to unanimously change the names of their parties to SRRPZh and to give up control of their leadership organs. Then the 118 members of the leadership of RPZh and RPP joined the 169 Rodina deputies in creating the new party. Mr. Mironov was elected leader of the SRRPZh by a vote of 160 to 9.
The new party's central council will be made up of 55 deputies from each party, and its secretary will be ex-RPP leader Igor Zotov. The party's presidium will be made up of 33 members of the central council under the leadership of ex-Rodina leader Alexander Babakov. Some of the regional leadership spots have already been handed out: representatives of the former RPZh and RPP will take 21 positions, while Rodina deputies will receive 29, leaving 14 positions to be agreed upon in the near future. The SRRPZh's flag will have the same design as the Russian tricolor, with the exception that the bottom red stripe will be three times as wide as the other two and will have "Fair Russia" written across it. Mr. Mironov stressed that the color red was no reference to communism, saying that "red has been the traditional color of fairness in Russia since pre-revolutionary times."
Mr. Mironov expects that his new party will easily win the seven percent of the vote needed in the 2007 federal elections to enter the Duma, where its main rival will be the "United Russia" party. He claims to have no plans to take part in the 2008 presidential elections. "We support and will continue to support the course of Vladimir Putin," he said.
Under Mr. Mironov's leadership, the party will adopt a social-democratic ideology: "We believe that there is a great deal of unfairness in our country. That is why we need to start with reforms of salaries and pensions." Mr. Mironov hopes to cut the difference in income between the country's richest ten percent and poorest ten percent from 30 times to 2. He is also concerned about Russia's natural resources, pointing to the exploitation of the country's natural wealth by a limited number of people, "the list of whom we can see every year in Forbes magazine."
Yury Chernega and Mikhail Shevchuk (St. Petersburg)
All the Article in Russian as of Oct. 30, 2006
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