Marching to a different drum

Since December 1993, elections have been ‘the only game in town’ for the legitimate transfer of political power in Russia. That has led politicians – and the Kremlin itself – to targeting specifically the military servicemen as an electorate. The large number of people associated with the military in one way or another in Russia makes it reasonable for politicians to consider the military a particularly important electorate. At the same time, in a political environment characterized by a high level of confrontation, the very loyalty of those representing the state’s coercive power has been seen as being at stake: An assumption underlying many analyses of the Russian armed forces' political sympathies, is that these in the future may be expressed through extra-constitutional military intervention at some level of policy formation.