More than a dozen years have passed since the first political parties appeared in the former Soviet Union during the process of democratization undertaken by Mikhail Gorbachev. At first, the party founders tried to create a multiparty system patterned after that in the developed democratic states, with a similar range of political views (Liberals, Christian Democrats, and Social Democrats). This aim was not realized. During the period of the “August republic” (1991–3), all the political parties consolidated around two main centers of power: President Boris Yeltsin on the one hand, and the first post-Soviet parliament, the Supreme Soviet, on the other. The ideological and programmatic differences between the political parties proved to be of no great significance in the concrete political context of the time. Moreover, almost no “party-clientele” structures with their own leaders took root in Russian politics, even though such structures often emerge in countries making the transition from an autocratic regime to democracy. The only exception was the Liberal-Democratic Party of Vladimir Zhirinovskii.

After the creation of the “super-presidential republic” (December 1993), a new multiparty system began to take shape. Its structure and role in the political process developed under the strong influence of the new electoral legislation, which aimed at speeding up the creation of a strong system of party representation in the new federal parliament, the State Duma.