Giles Prendergast

Virtual Politics p. 125:

Yeltsin’s victory in 1996 convinced the presidential administration to play for higher stakes in the 1999 Duma elections. This time the dual-shot strategy was a big success, both for the Unity project and the highly successful relaunch of the liberal right as the Union of Right Forces (URF). Unity’s apparent leadership had an excellent public image (despite the party being mainly financed by the likes of Berezovskii and Aksenenko); the URF used Irina Khakamada to front its campaign instead of the highly unpopular Chubais (whose United Energy Systems provided much of the real finance) [reference to Mukhin's Информационная война в России с. 216], and the so-called ‘Aluminium Party’ oligarchs such as Oleg Deripaska of Siberian Aluminium whose representative on the party list, Konstantin Remchukov, became surprisingly protectionist for a liberal politician once he was ensconced in the Duma. Before the 1995 elections Yeltsin had privately declared that ‘Chubais means minus 10 per cent for Our Home is Russia’ [Mukhin p. 223] now he and the others were kept safely in the background. Although not so closely linked to the Kremlin, Yabloko (6 per cent) was much more tightly integrated into the pie system than its public positions suggested. (Given its traditional prominence on economic policy committees, it was particularly targeted by Russian banks.) According to Aleksei Mukhin, Yavlinskii ‘in fact sold his political image to at least two groups – to Gusinskii’s [Most] Group and Khodorkovskii’s [Yukos] Group – obviously. They appeared as sponsors of his election campaign in 1999 and, accordingly, later received the Yabloko faction in the capacity of a group lobbyist for their interests in the State Duma.’ [p. 6] Yabloko was also increasingly dependent on Sergei Zverev’s PR development company for its campaigning technology, which was closely linked to the Most Group. As Gusinskii also backed Fatherland-All Russia and was soon out of favour with the Kremlin, Yabloko became increasingly close to Khodorkovskii. Indeed, in the Duma the powers-that-be sought to turn the URF and Yabloko into ‘interchangeable twins’, forcing them to compete for the Kremlin’s favour. It was relatively easy to ignore the fact that the two had different electorates; that they had different sponsors, however, would create trouble in the years ahead.

Интересная глава в биографии нынешнего главного редактора «Независимой газеты» Ремчукова (найти его в книге по индексу нельзя).