Analysts will have another two years to discuss the reasons for the emergence of nationalist, brown and red-brown forces in the 2003 Duma. It is questionable whether the large lead over their competitors obtained by President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party is a real victory for him: The ultranationalist and other small parties have made tremendous gains as well. United Russia is just a bloc of opportunists — the other parties are here to stay, and a shift from liberal values to nationalist tendencies cannot bode well in the longer term.

In the shorter term, a provisional eulogy must be read over the Union of Right Forces (SPS) and Yabloko — the liberal parties of Russia, which are both teetering on the verge of becoming a footnote in history.

The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) lost a great deal of its seats, coming in at about 12 percent, just about tying with the brayingly ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR). This loss probably is due to a significant amount of its electorate having gone over to United Russia and the newly formed bloc Motherland, led by left-wing celebrity economist/politician Sergei Glazyev, which came in fourth place with about 8 or 9 percent. Neither of the “right” parties — Yabloko and the SPS — received enough of the vote to clear the 5-percent barrier necessary to enter the new Duma. As the LDPR usually votes with the Kremlin, and as Glazyev has declared that Motherland will form an opposition coalition with the KPRF, Russia’s political landscape now looks like this: The Kremlin, via United Russia and the LDPR, will have effective control of the Duma, arrayed against a left opposition and no real right opposition. In other words, this will be a very bureaucratic, left-wing and conservative Duma.

The liberals have only themselves to blame. This vote will forever be remembered as a vote against the oligarchs — the bandit capitalists of Russia: United Russia’s gains came as Mikhail Khodorkovsky was casting his ballot from prison. But the most virulent attacks on the tycoons and their business practices came from ultranationalists — as the Communists were also tainted by association with big money. And the SPS and Yabloko were often no more than lobbyists and apologists for the likes of Khodorkovsky. They might as well have named their factions Yukos One and Yukos Two.

The SPS is widely perceived to be — and to a large extent is — the party of the oligarchs in general and of Unified Energy Systems CEO Anatoly Chubais in particular. The overwhelming majority of the population hates the oligarchs, and the SPS has done little to attempt to ameliorate the sense of outrage over the injustice of the privatization Chubais presided over. Saying that, yes, there were “mistakes” made, as Chubais had been repeating in an evidently increasing sense of desperation in the days before the election, is not enough: The privatization process was a criminal enterprise, and the population knows it to be so.

As for Yabloko, which claims to be the only genuinely Western-style democratic party in Russia, it simply had no momentum, as well as a dearth of new ideas and faces. Party leader Grigory Yavlinsky must take full blame. When the SPS suggested that a common liberal bloc be formed to fend off the coming challenge from the left and center, Yavlinsky refused, saying that Yabloko voters and SPS voters have nothing in common. This is correct to some extent: The SPS is a party of big business, and Yabloko is usually thought of as a party of the liberal intelligentsia that did not benefit from the privatization process. It may also be true that Yavlinsky, who has a reputation as a man of principle, did not want to dirty his hands working in tandem with Chubais — the two, infamously, have no great liking for one another, to say the least, and Yabloko in fact has voted with the KPRF at least as often as with the SPS. However, it seems likely that, given the danger facing the right end of the political spectrum — which now has just about dropped off the map —the two parties could have found a common ground and Yabloko’s voters turned up their collective nose long enough to form a common front.

That said, it is a shame that the voices for Russian liberalism have become so marginalized, even if it is in part their own fault. We hope that those on the right end of the political continuum, in the future, find a way to iron out their differences and remain a political force. Their disastrous electoral performance, if anything, may prove to be a wakeup call that they clearly very much need.