UNION OF RIGHT FORCES

Union of Right Forces: translation

(SPS)

Political party. Known in Russian as Soiuz Pravykh Sil, the SPS was a center-right reformist party established at the end of the 1990s. The party was co-founded by a group of well-known economic liberals, many from theYeltsinadministration, includingIrina Hakamada,Boris Nemtsov,Anatoly Chubais,Yegor Gaydar, andSergey Kiriyenko. It also brought together a number of small, liberal parties including the Right Cause, the New Force,KonstantinTitov’s Voice of Russia, and Russia’s Democratic Choice. The party platform was dedicated to fostering liberal values, expanding citizen participation in government, eliminating censorship of the press, and instituting Western-style economic reforms.

During the 1999 legislative elections, the SPS won a respectable 8.6 percent of the vote and gained 32 seats in theState Duma.While the SPS supported the candidacy ofVladimir Putinin the 2000 presidential election, Nemtsov soon emerged as a vocal critic of the new president’s authoritarian policies. In the 2003 parliamentary elections, the SPS narrowly failed to reach the required 5 percent threshold to obtain seats in the Duma. Nemtsov subsequently stepped down, admitting that his dispute with other party members over whether to take a more accommodating line toward the Kremlin had caused the poor showing. The party’s next leader was Nikita Belykh, who, after leaving the party, was appointed governor ofKirov Oblastby Putin. Belykh was responsible for a 2005 deal withGrigory Yavlinskythat allied the SPS andYablokotogether in coalition to contest theMoscowCity Duma elections, where the Yabloko-United Democrats were able to win seats alongsideUnited Russiaand theCommunist Party of the Russian Federation.

Though there were discussions of a merger with Yabloko, these collapsed by the end of 2006. The party’s last leader was Leonid Goizman. The party was dissolved on 1 October 2008. At its height, the party commanded 35,000 members and had a presence in nearly all of Russia’s regions. Many of the party faithful are expected to gravitate to the newly proposed Independent Democratic Party of Russia under the leadership ofAleksandr LebedevandMikhail Gorbachev.