The process of adoption of the law on political parties stretched for almost a decade in the Russian Federation. When Art. 6 of the Constitution of the USSR was annulled in early 1990, it seemed to many that this law would appear in the near future. However, after the final solution of the “CPSU problem”, work on it was suspended. Post-Soviet Russia plunged into the abyss of problems that actually paralyzed the legislative authority. The new State Duma, the successor to the previous parliament, made this act a priority. Nevertheless, the process of agreeing on a practically completed draft law (the Supreme Council of the Russian Federation did the main work of drafting it) was extended to the entire term of the First Duma. When the State Duma adopted a law on parties at the end of its legislature, it was declined by the Federation Council on formal grounds. Russian lawyers and political scientists, commenting on Federal Law “On Political Parties” in force since 2001, as a rule, do not delve into the backstory related to the travails of its formation and adoption. However, this issue may well constitute a separate topic for research. The objective of this study is to answer the question why in the mid-1990s such an important law on parties, much anticipated and favored by certain representatives of the political establishment, was ultimately not adopted. The subject of the article is the political and legal processes associated with the development, discussion and mechanisms of adoption of this normative act in 1994–1995. The research is based on the study of a wide range of sources and applies an interdisciplinary approach, i.e. methodology of historical, political, and legal analysis. The author concludes that the main reason for the failure to adopt the law was not so much its real deficiencies as the strategic interests of the 1990s Russian political elite.

The 1999 elections played an important role in the formation of Russia’s modern party political system. There is an opinion among scholars that two factions of Russian elite clashed in the elections. The first one represented federal power that was puzzled by the plan “Successor”, the other one represented the regional elite, whose members tried to challenge the Kremlin scenario. In line with the logic of party elections, each side formed its own electoral alliances. The pro-Kremlin bloc was represented by the inter-regional movement “Unity”, while the regional governors were represented by the coalition “Fatherland—All Russia”. In a tense contest, the Kremlin party managed to defeat the governors’ alliance, which initially had a much better chance of winning. Analysts explain this victory as being due to the impacts of information wars, the success of the counter-terrorist operation in Chechnya, and the personal popularity of the successor who openly supported the “Unity”. However, all these factors do not fully clarify how an electoral association registered only two months before the elections managed to achieve record results. This article attempts at analyzing the peculiarities of the electoral strategy of the “Kremlin party” during the first stage of the operation “Successor”. The research subject is the mechanism of crisis consolidation which was employed by the presidential power to promote its electoral interests under conditions of political stalemate. The formation of another “party of power” is examined in the context of Russian electoral politics in the late 1990s. This approach led to the conclusion that the key to the “Unity”’s success was the mixed electoral system that the president had fought so hard against after 1993. Fearing party elections, Kremlin spin doctors tried to steer the “Unity”’s election campaign away from purely party agenda towards a single member’s vote in a federal electoral district, where a single candidate with a high personal rating quietly ran for office. Having lost the campaign for abolition of the elections on party lists, the Kremlin managed to partially impose its scenario of “single mandate voting” in the federal constituency .

The Federal Law “On Legal Guarantees of Opposition Activities in the Russian Federation”, which was approved by the State Duma in March 1997, was rejected by the President, who was guided by purely political considerations. However, many ambiguities and gaps of the law, which was thought to regulate and govern the activities of the opposition as an independent legal entity, would have inevitably created serious problems if it had entered into force. In the 2000s, representatives of the opposition factions in the Duma tried several times unsuccessfully to revisit this issue. In this respect, the experience of the 1990s, when the draft law became federal law even if it never entered into force, seems to be the most effective and therefore of the greatest research interest. The Federal Law “On Legal Guarantees of Opposition Activity in the Russian Federation” can be qualified primarily as a kind of historical source reflecting the political situation of the second half of the 1990s. In contemporary literature, the law is considered only in the general context of the large scale problem of providing additional legal guaran tees to the political minority in the Russian Federation. In recent years there has been a sharp decline in the number of scholarly works dealing with the theoretical issues of the legal institutionalisation of the opposition and the adoption of a special statute guaranteeing the rights of “dissenters”. This article examines the problem of the legal legitimation of the opposition, which was actualised in the second half of the 1990s by the representatives of the left -wing forces, on the basis of the complex use of different sources (legal acts and bills, parliamentary materials, data from the periodicals, electronic resources). The subject of the study is the political and legal context of the development, adoption and reasoned rejection of the Federal Law “On Legal Guarantees of Opposition Activity in the Russian Federation”. Its study is relevant because there is almost no analysis of the development and adoption of the Russian law “On Opposition” as a special regulatory act, which additionally guaranteed the rights and special status of the alternative socio-political associations.