The political success of the Unified Russia party in the 2003 Duma elections took place not so much in the electorate, for its list received a modest 37.6 per cent of the vote, but rather as a result of vote-seat conversion that allowed it to create a super-majority in the assembly. The article identifies several institutional and political mechanisms that made this result possible: a high level of party system fragmentation, with, at that, against all vote practiced, in the proportional tier of the electoral system; a lack of territorial bases of electoral support to opposition parties in the single-member tier of the electoral system; and latent coalition strategies in single-member districts, as a result of which many elected deputies were bound to join the Unified Russia faction.