CERC Public Seminar: 'Roundtable: Assessing the Results of the Russian State Duma Elections'

Tuesday 4 Dec, 1:00-2:00pm
4th Floor 234 Queensberry Street, The University of Melbourne
Room 421

Speakers:

Prof Leslie Holmes

(Deputy Director CERC, Professor Dept of Political Science, University of Melbourne)

Prof Stephen Wheatcroft

(Professor, Dept of History/CERC Principle Fellow, University of Melbourne)

Tony Phillips

(CERC Fellow)

Discussant:

Dr Robert Horvath

(Dept of History/CERC Fellow, University of Melbourne)

Abstract

The elections to the Russian State Duma take place on December 2 2007. They will be followed in March 2008 by the Russian Presidential elections. With President Putin ineligible to again contest the Presidency the results of the December elections to the parliament are expected to be important not just in themselves, but in relation to the Presidential election following. Moreover, these elections are taking place under new rules that have eliminated single member electorates and raised the threshold for Party representation from 5 to 7% of the vote. While more than twelve parties have registered for the elections only three or four are seen as a realistic chance. The elections are also dogged by criticism concerning the fairness of the democratic system in Russia at present. The roundtable will discuss the election campaign and its results and also analyse it in the wider context of the Russian polity.

Profiles

Leslie Holmes has been a Professor of Political Science at the University of Melbourne since 1988, and is Deputy Director of CERC. He was President of the International Council for Central and East European Studies (ICCEES) 2000-2005, and President of the Australasian Association for Communist and Post-Communist Studies 2005-2007. His most recent books are Rotten States? Corruption, Post-Communism and Neoliberalism (Duke University Press, 2006), and the edited collection, Terrorism, Organised Crime and Corruption: Networks and Linkages (Edward Elgar, 2007).

Stephen Wheatcroft is a foremost historian on the Stalin period in Soviet history and has also published on issues of famine and economic development. He travels regularly to Russia.

Stephen has published widely on Russian pre-revolutionary and Soviet social, economic and demographic history and has recently co-authored a major history of the Soviet Famine of 1931-3. He also has a research interest in famine and food supply problems in modern world history, the impact of media on history, and in recent developments in Russian and Ukrainian society. He is one of the main editors of the major Russian publication of archival materials, The Tragedy of the Soviet Village, 1927-1939 in Russian. His major publications in English include: The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913-1945 (Cambridge 1994, with R.W.Davies & M. Harrison); Challenging Traditional Views of Russian History (Palgrave 2002), and The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933 (Palgrave 2004, with R.W.Davies).

Tony Phillips has taught and published on political, social and economic aspects of contemporary Russia, from Gorabchev to Putin. His most recent research production was "Limits to political space – A defining logic of Russia’s transition?" a paper given at the AACPCS Conference in January 2007.

Robert Horvath has written and taught on aspects of Russia and Soviet history for many years. He is a specialist on the history of human rights in the Soviet Union and has taken a keen interest in contemporary Russia's political developments. His contributions on the subjects have been both academic and in the popular press.