by Clarence
CHAPTER 1
The votes are rolling in. We won’t know for a while the exact seat count, because like any good proportional system, we need to give the Supreme Electoral Court time to count the votes and run the numbers. We are Russians, and Russians do democracy right. It’s been roughly two years since Putin’s overthrow. This is our first election. The 1993 Constitution remains in place, though we’ve amended the hell out of it, and the political system is nearly unrecognizable: the Prime Minister is now the head of the executive and is elected by the Duma. Talk of a whole new constitution is still in the air, and this election may decide it. Whether the Duma will initiate a new constituent process will depend on who wins. I’ve got my eye particularly on the returns from the Chita—Borzya constituency, where I’m running, and Chita—Nerchinsk, where my wife is. I—Agat Gennadiyevich Solovyov—have had a rollercoaster of a career up to now: I field-researched Paranthropines in Tanzania, became a news presenter following the revolution, worked my way up the Channel 1 hierarchy to host Vremya (the biggest evening news program in the country), got married, founded a political party, and ran for Prime Minister. And it appears that I’m winning. Purple, the color of my Democratic Left Party, covers about a third of the vote piechart.
I hear some footsteps in the kitchen. The little apartment is located on the fourth floor of a complex in Chita, and the kitchen is directly behind the living room, separated by what could charitably be called an invisible line. I feel a hand on my shoulder.
I whirl around to see the menacing face of… my wife. “Zinaida! Why are you sneaking up on me like that?” I ask. She smirks.
“It’s not healthy to stare at the TV waiting for election results.”
“These results impact you too! You’re a candidate!”
“In Chita—Nerchinsk. We won the mayorality of Chita in a landslide. Come to bed.”
“Damn it, you’re right.”
“Get in your pajamas.” She’s already wearing a bathrobe and slippers, and I’m still wearing the suit I wore to the election-night debate. I change. Sleep comes quickly as Zinaida untangles her hair and lies down next to me.
CHAPTER 2
The results are in, and they’re good: I won Chita—Borzya. Zinaida won Chita—Nerchinsk in a landslide. The Democratic Left Party has won 203 out of 580 seats in the Duma. The Movement for Unity, which wants to let Putin out of prison, took 209. Smaller parties take the rest, and most of them would much sooner form coalition with me than with the Movement for Unity’s delightful leader, the ever-scowling Filip Filipovich Kozlov, who has been elected to the Federation Council for Khabarovsk Krai. Thank goodness I won’t have to see that odious man in the Duma! (A quick breakdown of our parliament, the Federal Assembly: the State Duma is directly elected by the people and has 280 members elected from single-member constituencies and 300 from party lists. The Federation Council has 301 members. Each federal subject has the same number of members of the Federation Council as it does Duma constituencies, but members are elected by an electoral college of the federal subject’s municipal councils and legislative assembly, and an extra 21 are appointed by the Prime Minister. The Federation Council has fairly limited powers and is mostly advisory, as well as being required to approve any changes to federal subject boundaries.) It’s the first day of the parliamentary session, and the new Duma building has just been opened. No longer do Duma members sit in regimented rows like students in a classroom. Now we have curved benches, a proper European hemicycle. Or a college lecture hall. Still better than a classroom. It’s a bit like the old Federation Council building, but bigger, given that it has to accommodate about four hundred more members. Zinaida and I have seats on the right side of the chamber. First order of business is electing a Chairperson. Somebody nominates, and someone else seconds, Galina Dmitrievna Tomanovskaya, the member for Yekaterinburg B. She’s a non-controversial independent mostly focused on constituency service, so she seems like a good pick. The Chair of the outgoing Provisional Duma administers the vote; Galina Dmitrievna wins with 463 votes. We choose Andriy Grigoryevich Yudin of the Zalesye Electoral District list as her deputy, and now it’s off to the Prime Ministerial races.
To take advantage of our free time in the evening after we elect Galina Dmitrievna, Zinaida and I go out to dinner. We indulge ourselves: the dinner begins with kholodets with grated horseradish root and canapes with salted sprats, over which we discuss the ongoing argument over the broadness of Homo erectus (“Two species. Ergaster and erectus. Georgicus is ergaster”), continues to borscht with dried smelt and meatballs (discussion topic: Zinaida’s book. She’s writing the recent history of Russia with a view to correcting Putin-era propaganda claims), followed by a light vinegret (our impending uncle- and aunthood), pelmeni of mixed beef, mutton, and pork (whether or not a new Constitution is necessary), and concludes with Guryev porridge (our new colleagues in the Duma), all with copious amounts of tea. It’s a celebration of the triumph of Russian democracy. And a nice date night. Back in the hotel, thoroughly stuffed, we game out potential coalitions. With 203 seats to call our own, the Democratic Left Party only needs another 88 to get a majority, which gives us options.
“I won’t form coalition with the Communists,” I tell Zinaida. While they might be sympathetic to many a progressive position I take, they’re also hammer-and-sickle proletarian-dictatorship Stalinist types, and relying on them to pass legislation without radical policy demands seems unlikely. So we look at the other parties. “The Green Alliance, that will work. I have a good relationship with Lyudmila Semyonovna; she will back me.” Zinaida nods.
“And the New Socialist Party?”
“They should be amenable.”
“And add in the Alliance of Social Democrats… that brings us to how much?”
“Phone!” I grunt. I grab my phone and run the numbers. “302… perfect.”
CHAPTER 3
When I wake up, Zinaida is sketching something on a notepad. I lean over. It’s a pencil drawing, perfectly executed, of the new Duma chamber, viewed from her chair. Zinaida is an excellent artist. Over our three years together, she’s sketched our vacations, our apartment, even the demolition of Lenin’s mausoleum in progress (Lenin, if you were wondering, was cremated and interred in the columbarium in Novodevichy Cemetery). Today is set to be the first round of Prime Ministerial nominations. Nobody will be elected today, almost certainly. It’s just a procedure for parties to feel out possible coalitions.
When we arrive at the Duma, the chamber is already packed. I couldn’t eat breakfast; I’m still full of last night’s dinner. Galina Dmitrievna gavels in the session:
“The State Duma will now receive nominations for Prime Minister of the Russian Federation. Is there a nomination on the floor?” Hundreds of hands, holding nametags, shoot up. Galina Dmitrievna calls on a deputy in the middle of the back row. “Mr. Mishin?”
“I nominate Agat Gennadiyevich Solovyov as Prime Minister of the Russian Federation.”
Mishin—Gavriil Valeriyevich—is a deputy of our party. He’s nominating me. Gavriil Valeriyevich is the deputy for Kitay-gorod—Bely Gorod, the constituency of downtown Moscow. Galina Dmitrievna takes it down on a sheet of paper.
“Is there another nomination on the floor?” More raised hands. “Ms. Kuznetsova.”
“I nominate Daniil Denisovich Zabolotsky.”
This is a member of the Alliance of Social Democrats. We go through the motions again and again, until every party leader and a few backbenchers have been nominated. Somebody pitches the new governor of Krasnoyarsk Krai, who surprisingly gets seconded. She’s something of an oddball who ran on the “horseshoe theory” and hard centrism. She won’t be Prime Minister in the end, though. Nobody wants blandness.
The day ends, unsurprisingly, without a Prime Minister, though Irina Eduardovna Nalobina, the leader of the New Socialist Party, nominated me, which bodes well for coalition-forming. Lyudmila Semyonovna invites me to drinks to discuss coalition-forming at her apartment in Solntsevo. Zinaida drops me off. Lyudmila Semyonovna has a very… modernist apartment. White carpet, angular furniture, abstract art. It’s nice, but it all feels sort of sterile. The coffee table has an array of wines laid out. A loaf of French bread and some cheeses, too. A terrine of something covered in cheese sits in the middle of the table.
“What is that?”
“Armoured turnips. It’s a Renaissance-era Italian dish.”
“I’ll try it.” It tastes like cheese and turnips.
“How is it?” Lyudmila Semyonovna asks.
“Eh. It’s cheese and turnips. Not my favorite.”
“Anyway, what would your conditions of coalition-forming be?”
“Not much. You give us employee funds, and we’re good.”
“Deal.”
I call Zinaida. “Done.”
“That was fast,” she comments.
“Yes.” I turn to Lyudmila Semyonovna. “Would you see, ever, a merger of our parties?” She nods.
“Possibly.”
Zinaida drives me home. “Easy to form coalition when your parties are basically the same ideologically,” I remark. She nods.
“She didn’t want anything from you?”
“We already ran on a unified environmental message, and she agreed to employee funds. She even said we could merge in the future,” I reply.
“Cool.”
“I’ll make borscht for dinner; there are supplies in the kitchenette.”
CHAPTER 4
The kitchenette in the hotel room is about the same size as the kitchen in our apartment. Making borscht isn’t too hard: boil beets, marinated kelp, chunks of beef, and some other stuff until it’s borscht. Serve it cold with cream to make it svekolnik. Serve that with hard-boiled eggs if you like them (I don’t). I serve out the borscht with chunks of baguette. Zinaida sits across from me. “I was just thinking,” she says.
“What?”
“It’s just, you’ve come so far. When I met you, you were a paleoanthropology field researcher. Then you hosted a local news program, then Vremya. That’s when we got married. Now, God, you’re almost Prime Minister.”
“You’ve come far, too. When I met you, you were the brilliant revolutionary from within the history department, the genius artist. Now you’re writing the true history of the past of Russia as a historian, and you’re writing its future as a deputy.”
“Here’s to us,” she says.
“Here’s to us.”
The borscht is good. I should think so; I made it. We don’t talk much over dinner; we just hold hands and make eye contact and chatter about random annoyances. We’re just enjoying each other’s presence. When we finish dinner, we lie down and watch the news, my head on her shoulder. When Vremya (no longer hosted by me, obviously) wraps up, I sit down and start writing. I predict the minds of my potential partners. And the coalition agreement is created.