PRESS RELEASE

MOSCOW, FEBRUARY 8, 2001

DECLARATION OF NIKOLAY KHRAMOV, RUSSIAN COORDINATOR OF THE RADICAL PARTY:

"Yesterday's examination in the State Duma of five drafts of the law on parties (and in fact - of the only one draft, the president's one) demonstrated very well "who is who" in the question of support of the antiliberal president's bill destined to kill the freedom of political associations and to create a partocratic system regulated by the government and coalescent with the state.

In the course of the debates it became clear that one of the most important provisions of the bill (though its significance is carefully masked by its authors!) is the state financing of the parties. This provision was supported not only by Zhirinovsky who declared with the straightforwardness of a Roman that the parties should be financed from the budget simply because they exist in the wide world and that the scanty volume of state financing provided in the bill later - when the passions calm down - can be increased by means of corresponding amendments. Even the Union of Right Forces, as it became clear, isn't against the state financing in principle (read - against the law on financing the process of substitution of the democracy by the partocracy). The right-wingers who oppose the state financing are confused only because there are other budget priorities in Russia at the moment. It's just like that: what everybody (or almost everybody) has in the back of the mind - Zhirinovsky is itching to say.

Strange as it is, the almost solitary faction that occupied a really principled, democratic and legal stand (and voted jointly against the president's bill) were the communists. Is it possible that the opponents of the "regulated partocracy" will have to get support from them and only from them?

And - last but not least - I am completely solidary with the position of the leader of "Russia's Regions" Oleg Morozov: to discuss and to adopt the law on political parties - is a vain and harmful venture. The parties should be put in such conditions that they were compelled to fight for each vote, that they represent the citizens of Russia and not the interests of partyist bureaucracy within the limits of Sadovoye Koltso. For that it is necessary to discuss urgently the amendments to the election law that would provide the increase of the quota of the one-mandate deputies in the State Duma (complete removal of its proportional part and transition to a entirely one-mandate Anglo-Saxon election system - add we, the radicals).

Now we, the opponents of the antiliberal and partocratic law - both more than hundred deputies that voted yesterday in the evening against it and several hundreds of citizens outside the Duma that signed the appeal of the Radical Party - have about two months before us to try to awake the public opinion in this country and to launch the campaign of protest against the adoption of this law and in the first hand, against its most significant provision - the state financing of the parties".

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