Since the first genuine multi-party elections in Russia were held in December 1993, party -state relations have followed a path that diverges markedly from the pattern in other post-communist states. As some accounts demonstrate, state capture in these conditions has followed diverse patterns, but the general trend seems to be towards increasing control by parties over the state. In Russia, however, it is the state that is colonizing the parties, rather than vice versa. Especially worthy of attention are the so-called parties of power, which reflect the extent to which, and the mechanisms by which, the state manages party politics and the administrative elites keep politics out of the state in Russia's managed democracy. Recent institutional reforms by the Putin administration point towards more, rather than less, encroachment of the state in party politics, which makes Russia less than a fully-fledged multi-party democracy.In the former Soviet Union and its satellites, the communist party and the state overlapped. Decision making in all spheres of life was in effect done within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), which was effectively above the law and accountable only to itself. 1 Public offices were staffed through the CPSU's nomenklatura system. 2 After the demise of the CPSU in 1991, what remained of the Russian state was left party-less, and after the failed coup of August 1991 Russia was actually a dictatorship. The state itself, legitimized by the people's deputies and the President -not any party -was instrumental in reasserting state power for the people and instrumental in re-creating order in the Russian Federation (RF). The very concept of 'party' was strongly, negatively, associated with the party, namely the CPSU, which Yeltsin and the 'new democrats' (sometimes Hans Oversloot is in the

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