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Legislative elections were held in the Russian Federation on 12 December 1993. At stake were the 450 seats in the State Duma (Gosudarstvennaya Duma), the lower house of the Federal Assembly of Russia (The legislature).
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The new election law adopted for the 1993 Duma election stipulated half the 450 Duma members were elected by a party-list system of proportional representation, and half were elected as individual representatives from single-member districts. Every Russian voter thus received two different ballots. The proportional representation ballot compelled each voter to endorse an electoral organization or vote against all of them. By contrast, the single-member district ballot required a voter to endorse an individual, whose party affiliation, if any, could not be given on the ballot.
In order to nominate a list of candidates in the proportional representation ballot, a party or electoral organization had to gather 100,000 signatures from the electorate, of which no more than 15 per cent could be from any one region or republic. The method used to calculate the number of seats won by each party was the Hare method, with a threshold of 5.0 per cent of the valid vote, including votes cast against all, but excluding invalid ballots. To secure a place on a single-member district ballot, candidates had to gather the signatures of at least 1.0 percent of the constituency electorate. The winner in each single-member districts contest was simply the candidate with plurality of votes, regardless of the number of votes cast against all.
The 1993 general election was taking place in the aftermath of the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis, a violent confrontation on the streets of Moscow which resulted in the dissolution of the previous Russian parliament by military force. Yeltsin hoped to resolve the political turmoil by decreeing for the election to the new Russian parliament and the constitutional referendum to take place on 12 December 1993.
The results of the polls proved to be disappointing for the Kremlin: the two competing pro-government parties, Russia’s Democratic Choice and the Party of Russian Unity and Accord, gained 15.5 percent and 6.7 percent of the vote respectively and occupied 106 out of 450 seats in the State Duma. Neither party was able to control the parliamentary agenda nor impose the will of the president on the Duma. Lacking legislative success, both parties rapidly lost membership.
while the sensational first place with almost 23% of votes was taken by the populist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia.
The turnout at the polls was one of the lowest among Russia's general elections, with a quite high number of blank and invalid votes.
| Parties and coalitions | Party list votes | % | List seats | Single constituencies | Total seats | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Liberal Democratic Party of Russia | 12,318,562 | 22.92 | 59 | 5 | 64 | |
| Russia's Choice | 8,339,345 | 15.51 | 40 | 24 | 64 | |
| Communist Party of the Russian Federation | 6,666,402 | 12.40 | 32 | 10 | 42 | |
| Women of Russia | 4,369,918 | 8.13 | 21 | 0 | 21 | |
| Agrarian Party of Russia | 4,292,518 | 7.99 | 21 | 16 | 37 | |
| Yavlinsky-Boldyrev-Lukin | 4,233,219 | 7.86 | 20 | 7 | 27 | |
| Party of Russian Unity and Accord | 3,620,035 | 6.73 | 18 | 4 | 22 | |
| Democratic Party of Russia | 2,969,533 | 5.52 | 14 | 0 | 14 | |
| Russian Movement for Democratic Reforms (RDDR) | 2,191,505 | 4.08 | 0 | 5 | 5 | |
| Citizens' Union for Stability (Grazhdanskiy soyuz) | 1,038,193 | 1.93 | 0 | 10 | 10 | |
| "Future of Russia - New Names" | 672,283 | 1.25 | 0 | 2 | 2 | |
| Ecological Movement "Cedar" (Kedr) | 406,789 | 0.76 | 0 | 1 | 1 | |
| "Dignity and Charity" | 375,431 | 0.70 | 0 | 3 | 3 | |
| Independents | 130 | 130 | ||||
| Against all | 2,267,963 | 4.22 | ||||
| Invalid votes | 3,946,002 | 6.84 | ||||
| Total (turnout 54.81%) | 58,187,755 | 450 | ||||
| Registered voters | 106,170,835 | 100.00 | ||||
The use of the mixed system for the election of the Duma produced a large number of deputies which were unaffiliated with any electoral bloc. By joining other parliamentary groups or forming groups of independent deputies, they could significantly influence the balance of power in the Duma. Hence, the parliamentary groups in the first two-year term of the Duma showed lack of stability and its numbers may be given only with approximation.
Parliamentary groups in the Russian Duma, 1994-1995
| Parliamentary group | Leader | Seats | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Liberal Democratic Party of Russia | Vladimir Zhirinovsky | 53-64 | |
| Russia's Choice | Yegor Gaidar | 47-78 | |
| Communist Party of the Russian Federation | Gennady Zyuganov | 45-47 | |
| Women of Russia | Yekaterina Lakhova | 20-24 | |
| Agrarian Party of Russia | Mikhail Lapshin | 50-55 | |
| Yabloko | Grigory Yavlinsky | 27-28 | |
| Party of Russia's Unity and Concord | Sergei Shakhrai | 12-34 | |
| Democratic Party of Russia | Nikolay Travkin | 8-15 | |
| Liberal Democratic Union of 12 December | Irina Khakamada | 11-38 | |
| New Regional Politics - Duma-96 | V. Medvedev | 30-67 | |
| Russia | I. Shichalin | 34-38 | |
| Stability | A. Leushkin | 34-40 | |
| Russian Way (unregistered) | Sergei Baburin | 11-14 | |
| Strong State (Derzhava) (unregistered) | V. Kobelev | 4-5 | |
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