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The results of the parliamentary and presidential elections of 1999-2000 represented a severe setback to the process of formation of genuinely representative political parties in the Russian Federation (Petrov 2000). In the race for the State Duma in December 1999, the big winner was the hastily thrown together Unity party, a hodgepodge of pliable state bureaucrats and opportunist regional governors that explicitly organized its campaign around a promise to represent no ideology whatsoever. Capitalizing on the wardriven popularity of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Unity attracted nearly a quarter of the party-list vote and an additional nine seats in single-member districts (SMDs)-despite the fact that its policy positions were kept almost entirely vague before (and after!) election day. The performance of an equally opportunistic electoral alliance, the Fatherland-All Russia (OVR) bloc, was surely well below the expectations of its founders Yevgenii Primakov and Yurii Luzhkov-but OVR still took third place with 13.3 percent of the party vote and twenty-nine SMD seats in regions loyal to the party leadership, further demonstrating the electoral advantages of relying on local political machines rather than appeals to political principle. The fourth-place showing of the promarket Union of Right Forces (SPS), which received 8.5 percent of the party-list vote, represented the coordination of a larger number of liberal voters than in 1995. Yet the SPS, too, benefited greatly from its close connections with the Kremlin, which actively supported its electoral campaign. After Putin's election as president, the party continued to function as a" party of power" with direct …