Russia Watch/ "Democrats,"
Young, Cathy
"Democrats" by Cathy Young /s there anything left to add to the obituaries for the Soviet Union? It's too bad the Yeltsin people didn't stick with the original plan of lowering the Soviet flag over...
...as well as an authoritarian who would muzzle the Russian press (so it wasn't Gorbachev who clamped down on Soviet TV and tried to have an editor fired for publishing a poll...
...ex-Soviet Union were after power, not freedom...
...It is a fact that the staff of the Moscow city government has doubled under the democrats...
...But Zhirinovsky's act is more complicated, as the name of his party indicates...
...As might be expected, the American media had a few final gorbasms,1 the most rapturous of these being Pete Hamill's New York Post column of December 26, calling Gorby "the single greatest public man on the planet in the second half of the century...
...Zhirinovsky's swagger indeed borders on self-parody...
...have...
...Democrats with a less compromised background were willing to forgive these reformed Communists the sins of the past as long as the unreformed Communists were in power...
...The DRM," said Batkin, "is a mix of the old Gorbachev nomenklatura—its more progressive wing—and the new people in power...
...that may be changing...
...and Pinsker is not the only one to note that, at this time of galloping commercialization, the officials' control over the leasing and selling of real estate gives them vaster opportunities than their Brezhnev-era predecessors ever dreamed of...
...Most of our 'democrats,'" Pinsker complained, "are essentially hostile to private property and free pricing—they all swear loyalty to the market, but not here and not now—and their one essential quality is a passionate yearning for power...
...T heir fears are embodied in the bizarre persona of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, head of the "Liberal Democratic Party" founded in spring 1990, whose connection to the KGB is not in doubt...
...He noted that Yeltsin was nothing but an ex-Communist (as opposed to Gorbachev...
...Remember, Gorby, when the clock strikes twelve, your tuxedo will turn into a baggy Soviet suit and your limousine will become a sputtering Moskvich...
...and that the new rulers in the 1To ward off accusations of Bidenism, I hasten to add that the term originates with Newsweek...
...Economist Vassily Selyunin, a curmudgeonly admirer of Milton Friedman who can hardly be accused of power lust, having declined a post at Moscow's city hall, was blunt about the foes of sweeping privatization: "They're making sure that, for the next twenty years, they can take bribes and manhandle leaseholders...
...It is likely that the radicals cannot afford to criticize Yeltsin, since there seems no alternative to his leadership...
...t71 The American Spectator March 1992 53...
...Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak was dean of a law school (not that innocent a position), and Popov held a post at the Communist party's central committee before becoming chairman of the economics department at Moscow University...
...n a funny way, Cohen is right, for all the wrong reasons...
...The movie theater where Zhirinovsky spoke in December was packed, but judging by audience response most people seemed to be there out of curiosity and for laughs...
...But that doesn't mean Zhirinovsky is not scary...
...His following can be expected to increase if, as seems inevitable, economic hardships outlast the winter...
...One should add that, for all the talk of Yeltsin being less democratic than Gorbachev, some of Yeltsin's more dubious decrees have been overturned by the Russian parliament or by the courts...
...Why only the second half...
...A lawyer (who reportedly got in trouble for graft in the early 1980s), he talks about reforming the Russian, legal system in accordance with international norms...
...People with no Communist or Gorbachevite sympa thies to whom I spoke in Moscow were bitterly critical of the victorious democrats...
...Stephen F. Cohen, the Gorbophile Sovietologist, haunted the talk shows with knitted brow and worried gaze...
...Piyasheva and others, including the venerable historian and political commentator Leonid Batkin, a co-founder of the Democratic Russia coalition whose support helped Yeltsin and Popov get where they are, 52 The American Spectator March 1992 made the point that the new people at the top were not really new...
...I have them a lot, but in a perfectly normal way...
...At a time when the Soviet regime was hardly hospitable to new parties, the tiny LDP was allowed to hold its first press conference—prominently featured on the very official Vremya—at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses...
...Batkin and others spoke of the emergence of a new "party of power," which has a structure in the Democratic Reform Movement founded last spring by Gorbachev's right-hand man Eduard Shevardnadze and joined by Popov, Sobchak, and then–vice presidential candidate Aleksandr Rutskoi...
...I have normal sexual relations...
...They speak of radical reform, but what unites them is the desire to retain many elements of the old socialist system, mixed with quasi-capitalist features...
...Fortunately, Zhirinovsky shifts gears so rapidly that no one can be fooled for more than a few minutes...
...At a press conference/meeting last December, he spoke in favor of abolishing the death penalty—a surprising statement given the working-class, authoritarian-minded audience to which he appeals...
...Jewish activists in Moscow told me he had tried to get involved in one of their groups in 1989...
...Cathy Young, our regular Soviet Presswatch columnist, is the author of Growing Up in Moscow (Ticknor & Fields...
...There was a Kremlin New Year's Eve bash scheduled for that night, and I mentally drew a cartoon: Gorby as Cinderella being told by a fairy godmother (a Karl Marx lookalike...
...Yet none of the disillusioned radicals I spoke to were giving up on Yeltsin, even though he had held a far higher post under the old Soviet system than anyone else among the new people in power...
...On Western ambassadors to the Baltic republics he intends to abolish: "They're going to leave the same way they came...
...He denounces Communism and insists that he is a supporter of the free market and civil liberties...
...they had all worked within the old system, though mostly in minor roles...
...He declared that if the West continued to support the independence of republics, Russia would retaliate by supporting violent separatist groups in Canada, Spain, and Northern Ireland, and that as president he would restore the ruble to equivalency with the dollar overnight by "selling lots of weapons to whoever wants to buy...
...No one else even comes close...
...On his opponents looking for dirt: "They can't say I'm an addict...
...His wife, weary of battling "democratic" city leaders determined to block her program and substitute longterm leasing, remarked that all these ex-Communists had probably turned rebels "because they didn't have a big enough slice of the pie in the old system...
...Asked about his attitude toward the Jews, he stated that while he was no anti-Semite, it was an unfortunate fact that slanderous articles about him were always signed by Jewish names and that Russian Jews were generally not very loyal to Russia.2 Just how much of a following does he 2 What makes this especially piquant is that Zhirinovsky is widely believed to be of Jewish background...
...He is seen as willing to learn and to listen—and as sincere...
...One might say that these two had an axe to grind...
...And the threat of a new reactionary onslaught, though under a more imperial than Communist guise, is still very much on people's minds...
...The formal dismantling of the Communist party and the KGB apparently has not affected the sources of his funding...
...On December 7, the Moscow evening news showed a Zhirinovsky-led rally demanding the release of the jailed coup plotters...
...It's too bad the Yeltsin people didn't stick with the original plan of lowering the Soviet flag over the Kremlin at midnight, December 31...
...I did run into two real live Zhirinovsky voters: a silly, well-intentioned young woman who had fallen for his "liberal democratic" platform, and an intellectual who despised Yeltsin as an ex-Communist and cast a protest vote for Zhirinovsky...
...Or a pervert...
...The rather small rally was accompanied by a Soviet Army marching band...
...Lest the Pete Hamills of the world get all choked up, the socialism they have in mind has less to do with protecting the poor than with protecting privilege—a cozy union of the new big business (run by the old nomenldatura) and the new big government (with plenty of old officials in it...
...that never happened to Gorby...
...For example, Yuri Luzhkov, deputy mayor of Moscow and head of the municipal government—the man who some say really controls the city—headed the Moscow Agro-Industrial Committee of the old, Communist Moscow City Council...
...The fortyish, macho Zhirinovsky ran against Yeltsin in the 1991 race for the Russian presidency, on a platform that included cutting the price of vodka and abolishing all republics to restore the pre-1917 Russian empire—Finland included...
...Among them were Larissa Piyasheva, the hard-core free-market economist who is trying to privatize Moscow's trade and service sector as an assistant to Mayor Gavriil Popov, and her acid-tongued husband and fellow economist Boris Pinsker...
...Lowering his voice to a near-whisper—surely not out of fear but perhaps because he didn't care to hear his own words—he added, "The democrats have turned out to be such damned leeches, they may be bigger thieves than the Communists...
...yet what they were saying rang true...
...And there is always the military...
...He did get seven percent of the vote in last June's election, though at least part of that came from such places as KGB training academies...
Vol. 25 • March 1992 • No. 3
