Russian Presswatch / In the Name of Humanity
Young, Cathy
I f the Clinton administration is shaping up to look like soap opera, what genre can adequately describe the politics of post-Communist Russia? Theater of the absurd, perhaps. The end of 1992 was...
...In a December 13 poll of 2,257 Muscovites conducted by the All-Russian Center for Public Opinion Research, 28 percent wanted Yeltsin to resign, while 60 percent wanted him to stay in office, with the numbers almost reversed on the question of Khasbulatov's resignation: 57 percent for, 25 percent opposed...
...No relation to Fidel, Veronica is the star of the interminable Mexican soap "The Rich Also Weep," which had millions of Russiansglued to their television screens and thousands of intellectuals wringing their hands over the decline of public taste...
...Thus, 14 percent of respondents in 1992, versus 11 percent in 1990, said that they felt more hopeful than they had a year ago...
...Gaidar ranked second, Rutskoi third, Kazakhstan president Nursultan Nazarbaev fourth, and Veronica Castro fifth...
...bewilderment" was up two points (from 18 to 20), and the number of those who felt more "pride in their country" dropped from 3 to 2 percent...
...A friend from Moscow writes in disgust, "The Supreme Soviet is starting to look like a den of criminals...
...In the December '92 survey, peoplewere asked which recent developments they found most distressing...
...Having thus dispelled in one stroke the notion of the superiority of the Soviet educational system, Khasbulatov goes on to denounce "the attempts to Americanize our economy" and advocate a "socially oriented market economy" of the Scandinavian, Israeli, or Canadian type...
...Sixty-seven percent named inflation and the drop in living standards (down, curiously, from 75 percent at the end of '91—is that evidence of slightly higher optimism, or of resignation...
...So Stephen Cohen's affection for the man is hardly a mystery...
...30 percent, "the disintegration of economic links" (down from 40...
...The end of 1992 was marked by more turmoil, as the Yegor Gaidar government crumbled and career Soviet apparatchik Viktor Chernomyrdin—whose name, for the linguistically minded, is of Ukrainian extraction and means, roughly, "blackface"—took over...
...In an interview with Moscow News, Galina Starovoitova, a widely admired democratic political leader who served as Yeltsin's adviser on ethnic affairs until she was fired last November, denounces the "masculinism" of Russian politics, and, inter alia, has this to say: "I understand how tough it is for female deputies to work in a parliament whose speaker constantly permits himself crude remarks that would have cost him his job in any civilized society...
...Aleksandr Rutskoi, Yeltsin's "conservative" veep, came out on top as well: only 21 percent favored his resignation while 55 percent opposed it...
...And what about Cohen's contention that the Russian parliament (elected in 1990 under an effective one-party system) represents the Russian people...
...0 ther poll numbers paint a picture more hopeful than recent reports about the rise of pro-dictatorship sentiment...
...34 percent favored a compromise between the two sides...
...Back in the States, we have the invaluable Stephen F. Cohen of Princeton University, his face fixed in a worried frown, to explain that the United States is wrong to stake its Russian policy on one man—Boris Yeltsin—to the exclusion of other democratic forces...
...When survey respondents were asked to name the most important events of the year, 19 percent mentioned the Show (while only 11 percent conferred a similar importance on the Communist Party trial...
...Curiously, while it usually takes weeks to cash a money order in Russia, these were cashed in a few days...
...28 percent, "the collapse of the USSR and the weakening of ties between CIS countries" (down from 38...
...In the Clinton era, the number of Americans bothered by such things is no doubt higher...
...and 26 percent, "the country's loss of superpower status" (down from 30...
...Deputies in the Supreme Soviet scuffled in front of TV cameras at the December Congress...
...Some of the data were compared to those of previous years, showing that on some counts, the popular mood may actually have improved slightly since 1990...
...He was known to have a different opinion when the oneman was Mikhail Gorbachev...
...a mere six percent wanted the Khasbulatov people to win...
...In his December 1 speech to the Congress, published as a booklet under the modest title In the Name of Humanity, Khasbulatov—who has a Ph.D...
...A nd what of the Russians' famed egalitarian passions...
...The news for Yeltsin is mixed: while his popularity rating for December was only 37 percent (up 10 percent from October), he still emerged as the most popular public figure (Khasbulatov ran a distant sixth...
...Slightly fewer people (42 vs...
...These numbers, concludes sociologist Yuri Levada, are another sign of the "normalization" of society, a shift in focus away from politics and toward private life...
...The starkest example of such a model is the economic policy of the United States of the post-Roosevelt period...
...Price controls on food staples were reinstated and then almost immediately rolled back...
...p erhaps Cohen's sympathies might be cooled by strong evidence of far more disturbing misconduct...
...This should not be read as an unambiguous statement of support for reform...
...71...
...in economics from Moscow State University and used to be the dean of the international economic relations department of the Plekhanov Economics Institute in Moscow—gives his colleagues a little lecture on economic theory and history: The so-called neoclassical liberal model .. is based on the complete rejection of state ownership and, accordingly, the absolutization of private ownership, which presupposes a drastic reduction of the social functions of the state...
...44 percent) said they felt more "tired and indifferent,", and the number of those who reported feeling more "embittered and aggressive" dropped from 48 to 40 percent...
...Just 10 percent named "growing economic dependency on the West...
...Thirty percent thought that a victory for the Yeltsin side would be the best way to resolve Russia's political crisis...
...According to Levada, the numbers of those favoring dictatorship (22 percent) and those unambiguously opposed (53 percent) have remained fairly stable over the past two years...
...The director of the Moscow branch of the Central Bank, Georgi Shor, happens to be the other co-owner of Style-Bank...
...On the other hand, the number of those feeling more "scared" than the previous year went up from 15 to 22 percent...
...Actually, surveys show that while Yeltsin's popularity is not what it used to be, the parliament and its leader are even less popular...
...In January, two democratic members of parliament, Lev Ponomarev and Pyotr Filipov, were roughed up by protesters from "Working Moscow" (a hard-core Communist group headed by Viktor Anpilov, in his previous life a Soviet TV correspondent in Nicaragua), who were picketing the White House...
...The weekly Stolitsa also reports that the speaker may have had a hand in a bank fraud operation that cost the Russian Central Bank between 35 and 116 billion rubles...
...As often happens, however, Khasbulatov's dislike of unbridled capitalism appears far more theoretical than personal: in addition to having moved into Leonid Brezhnev's old quarters, he is said to be extensively involved in real-estate speculation through his cousin, a co-owner of the Style-Bank real-estate firm...
...Most of these changes are well within the margin of error, but some sort of wobbly trend does seem to emerge...
...Cohen points to Yeltsin's falling popularity and urges Americans to be more respectful of the democratically elected albeit imperfect Russian parliament and its chairman (speaker) Ruslan Khasbulatov, the former Yeltsin sidekick who has emerged as a leading opponent of "free-market extremism...
...and "a pox on both your houses" was the attitude of 22 percent...
...Meanwhile, in a poll last November, 66 percent of Russians said that their country could regain superpower status by pursuing faster economic reform, and only six percent said that an armed forces buildup was the way to go...
...The operation, uncovered in the spring of 1992, consisted of fictitious firms getting cash from the Moscow branch of the Central Bank by using fake money orders from Chechen banks (Khasbulatov is from ChechenoIngushetia) and dissolving before the deception could be found out...
...They fight, they swear—pretty soon they'll start attending the sessions armed with bike chains and knives...
...The ban on the Communist party, which distressed a mere 6 percent of Russians at the end of 1991, seemed even less upsetting a year later—it was mentioned by two percent of the respondents...
...A few days later, the evening news reported that a certain deputy had used "language we cannot repeat in our program" in a speech at the Supreme Soviet...
...T he Center conducted a far more extensive nationwide end-of-the year survey, whose results were published in the January 3 issue of Moscow News...
...Well, only 19 percent put the "growing gap between rich and poor" on the list of their top peeves (down from 26 percent in December '91...
Vol. 26 • April 1993 • No. 4
