The new Russian Federation, under the Constitution it adopted in December 1993, was to be a ‘democratic federal law-based state with a republican form of government’. What kind of form of government this might be took some time to establish, but from the outset it was a state in which the right to rule was based on regular elections to a new parliament, whose lower house was called the State Duma.

Parties, however, remained very weak, elections were increasingly controlled by the authorities themselves, and under Vladimir Putin, from 2000 onwards, the Kremlin itself became the dominant player, acting through a ‘party of power’ that it had itself established and subordinating the country as a whole to a top-down ‘executive vertical’. Law-making authority, formally speaking, was still in the hands of the State Duma, but the Kremlin controlled the party that held two-thirds of its seats, and the more political power was centralised, the more the parliament became a marginal participant in the policy process.