Our Home is Russia Party

OUR HOME IS RUSSIA PARTY

Our Home Is Russia (Nash Dom—Rossiya, or NDR) was a sociopolitical movement and a ruling party from 1996 to 1998. Formed in the spring of 1995 according to a plan of the president's administration as one of two ruling parties—the party of the "right hand," with the prime minister at the head—it immediately launched forward. The NDR movement's council, founded in May 1995 with Victor Chernomyrdin at the head, included thirty-seven heads of regions, a few ministers, and heads of large industrial enterprises and banks. The federal NDR list for the Duma elections was headed by Chernomyrdin, the famous film director Nikita Mikhalkov, and General Lev Rokhlin, a Chechnya war hero. Subsequently both the prime minister and the film director renounced the mandates, and Rokhlin, entering the Duma, soon came into opposition against Boris Yeltsin and he then left the NDR fraction; and founded the Movement in Support of the Army. The NDR list received seven million votes (10.1%, third place) and forty-five Duma seats; this was taken as defeat of the ruling party. In the single-mandate districts, out of 108 proposed candidates, ten were elected. In the 1996 presidential elections, NDR backed Yeltsin.

With Chernomyrdin leaving the prime ministership in the spring of 1998, NDR entered a period of crisis. The effort on the part of the young ambitious leader of the NDR fraction in the Duma, Vladimir Ryzhkov, to turn NDR from a party of heads into a neoconservative political party of "values" proved unsuccessful. Discussions of merging with the blocs A Just Cause and Voice of Russia and the movement New Force were fruitless as well. Allies of NDR in the elections amounted to the weak Forward, Russia of Boris Fyodorov and the Muslim movement Medzhlis. The programmatic positions of NDR amount to moderate-reformist ideas and a declaration of conservative-liberal values. The federal list was headed by Chernomyrdin and the Saratov governor Dmitry Ayatskov. NDR did not make it into the Duma, as it received 0.8 million votes (1.2 percent). Nine NDR candidates from single-mandate districts, including Chernomyrdin and Ryzhkov, entered the pro-government fraction Unity and the group People's Deputy. In May 2000, the eighth and last congress of NDR, which at the time had 125,000 members, decided to form part of the party Unity, created on the foundation of the movements Unity, All Russia, and NDR.

See also: chernomyrdin, viktor stepanovich; movement in support of the army; unity (medved) party

bibliography

McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia's Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

McFaul, Michael, and Markov, Sergei. (1993). The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press.

Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracry. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press.

Nikolai Petrov