The predicament of Russian liberalism: Evidence from the December 1995 parliamentary elections

imagination. Liberal parties-defined here as those that stand for the advancement of civil rights and democratisation, political pluralism and tolerance, non-militaristic approaches to the solution of foreign and domestic conflict, and economic liberalisation and de-statisation-captured a combined total of just 16.2% of the vote in the party-list portion of balloting, through which half of the seats for the Duma, the lower house of parliament, were allotted.1 In the elections for single-member mandate seats, by which the other half of seats in the Duma were filled, liberals, including those who ran without formal party affiliation, fared somewhat better but still modestly, winning roughly one-quarter of all seats. Just four years after the events that swept the Communist Party regime out of power and ushered in a new era of open politics, the agents of the ideals that inspired and guided the revolution of 1991 found themselves unequal to the challenges of electoral competition. Unlike their counterparts in many Central and East European countries, Russia's liberals cannot take comfort from the knowledge that their opponents have appro