The Riddle of Russian Reform

...They created a society that could be neither satisfied nor controlled by the old methods...

...In actuality, in the course of its long evolution, the Soviet system took the form of a Russified, militarized, and bureaucratized barracks socialism that had little in common with the pre-1917 socialist tradition...

...Indirect planning through state intervention in the market was actually the direction taken by Soviet economic planners in the 1920s, before Stalin destroyed scientific planning during the First Five-Year Plan and replaced it with his irrational and wasteful practices of militarystyle output commands and material allocations...

...After the 1990 parliamentary elections, as the smaller republics started defying Gorbachev's Union government by issuing declarations of "sovereignty," Yeltsin backed them with Russia's own declaration of sovereignty...

...Not surprisingly, privatization proceeded most successfully in the sector of small-scale trade and services, where it had been most irrational to nationalize in the first place...

...Izvestia, now a devoutly reformist paper, began to take the Chernomyrdin cabinet to task for attempting to revive the state planning commission, undertake industrial policy, and—heaven forbid—implement "indicative planning...

...Together with his new deputy prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin plumped for a program of instant marketization, privatization, deregulation, and monetary shock therapy, under circumstances of crisis that usually lead Western governments to resort to more controls and planning, not less...

...Nevertheless, he has dealt with the former Union republics with relative restraint, despite the FALL • 1993 • 493 Toltsin—A Bolshevik in Reverse...

...In direct defiance of the facts of 1990 and 1991, the Russian Congress and Supreme Soviet are dismissed as bastions of totalitarianism and creatures of the Brezhnev era, while Yeltsin is hailed as "Russia's only democratically elected leader...

...Lacking the temperament to work with any parliamentary body on an equal footing, Yeltsin has pursued the popular referendum to legitimize executive supremacy in the style of Charles DeGaulle or even Napoleon Bonaparte, with a slogan paraphrased from the days of the Communist party: "The president and the people are one...

...the trend to corporate concentration and monopoly if it is not curbed by the state...

...Yeltsin's authoritarian instincts were visibly written into his proposed draft of the new Russian constitution...

...In fact, among capitalist countries there is a good correlation between the degree of social-democratic economics and the political performance of democracy...

...It was not long, however, before two events shook the parliamentarians into an adversarial mood that has steadily sharpened...

...But he found that to outmaneuver the CommuFALL • 1993 • 489 Yeltsin—A Bolshevik in Reverse...

...In June 1987 the Central Committee of the Communist party met to ratify some promotions, and Yeltsin as party chief of Moscow and a candidate member of the Politburo was in line for full member...

...Georgi Shakhnazarov, Gorbachev's former press aide, said it was "for a country just having broken out of the clamps of totalitarianism, a straitjacket of a new cut...

...Yeltson's belief that everyone opposed to him is by definition part of a conspiracy to restore Communist totalitarianism does not bode well for the leader's tolerance of political diversity in a future presidential republic...

...Taking Both Sides In the economic realm, in the early months of radical reform, it was easy to forget that for Yeltsin his program was not an end in itself but primarily a way of defining himself and discrediting his enemies...

...As plenty of West European experience shows, the market is not incompatible either with public ownership of enterprise or with planning...

...There appeared to be no limits to how often the president could dissolve uncooperative parliaments...

...This, unfortunately, is the direction of a democracy in name only, a condition that Russians are familiar with...

...Charismatic Enigma Yeltsin is an enigmatic figure, who has done more than his share to becloud the realities of postcommunist Russia...

...At this point, having tolerated Yeltsin's comeback as a counterweight to the conservatives, Gorbachev threw all his weight to stop Yeltsin —or, more accurately, all the weight he could use without violating his own commitment to democratization and reverting to totalitarian methods...

...Politically, as we know, Yeltsin rejected Gorbachev's efforts to reform the Communist party from within...

...When the shell cracked, it hatched a variety of political successors across the spectrum, each camp insisting that it had a lock on political virtue...

...When Mikhail Gorbachev took over, he probably had no great vision of transforming the Soviet Union and thought he could merely reinvigorate it by internal democratization and the power of public scrutiny under glasnost...

...Moshe Lewin has noted ("Russia: Nationalism & Economy," Dissent, Spring 1992) how Yeltsin embraced a model of reform based not on the realities of capitalism as practiced in the West, let alone any objective analysis of Russia's real needs, but on an eighteenth-century utopian vision of the market economy...

...To begin with, Yeltsin himself was as much a relic of the old regime as any of his adversaries under the new dispensation...

...The irony is that from Gorbachev's time on, the erstwhile enemies of democratization have exerted influence only by exploiting the new pluralism and separation of powers, that is, by exploiting democracy itself...

...He stopped short of total price decontrol on food and energy, and after the fall of Gaidar in December 1992 he reached out to the industrial lobby for his new prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, and other cabinet appointments, all the while asserting his devotion to reform...

...He counterposes the Russian center to the minority autonomies instead of extending general and equal federal rights to the Russian provinces as well...

...In place of his former supporters, Yeltsin surrounded himself with a new bureaucracy, distinct from the cabinet ministries, much the same as the old party secretariat, and he staffed this inner circle with many of his old subordinates from the Sverdlovsk Communist party organization...

...His changes are most serious in the political realm, less so regarding the federal principle, and up to now ambiguous as regards the economy...

...Stalin's successors, mindlessly pursuing industrial and military power, brought about an epochal transformation in the nature of Soviet society, above all through urbanization and education...

...His move took the Russian core of the Union out of Union jurisdiction and left the Kremlin a mere shadow...

...explosive problem of the large Russian minorities outside Russia and the political time bomb of Russia's imperial humiliation in the events of 1989-1991...

...Thus Yeltsin endeavored to carry reform back to the earliest and most tentative era of Russia's revolutionary experience under a semi-constitutional monarchy, with a subservient parliament and an executive aspiring to embody the national will...

...He could suspend any act of the parliament or of local government and refer it to the courts...

...It was Gorbachev's amendments of 1988 and 1989, flawed as they may have been, that created the institutions and the processes distinctive to Russia under Yeltsin...

...Indeed, in the choice that Yeltsin has been trying to force between the president and the parliament, only a parliamentary victory could preserve democracy...

...Standoff In the afterglow of the failed August coup, Yeltsin was persuasive enough to bring the Russian Congress and Supreme Soviet along in the service of the free-market reform, and they voted him sweeping powers to revamp the economy by presidential decree...

...Apart from one unexplicated reference to the "right of peoples to selfdetermination," his draft Constitution essentially left the republics and provinces as administrative subdivisions of the central power...

...the vulnerability of the agricultural sector if it is not subsidized and protected...

...From Gorbachev to Yeltsin Entering the year 1990, Gorbachev stepped up the pace of political reform in order to undercut the base of his conservative opponents in the party apparatus and shift the real locus of power to the constitutional structure of government...

...The market, of course, has its place in any economic scheme that is not hopelessly utopian...

...While Gorbachev clung to the end to the "socialist choice," despite his rejection of the old "command-administrative system," Yeltsin repudiated any and all policies associated with the socialism practiced by the old regime...

...He was still mainly concerned to cement his governmental power base against the party conservatives, but in the longer view his failure to risk popular election to the new post proved to be a crucial mistake...

...Stalinist planning was conducted by stupid people (or narrow-minded and terrorized people), in secret, and primarily for military purposes...

...Second—an odd thing to have to remind the Yeltsinites —the Constitution and the parliamentary process had no reality prior to Gorbachev...

...Yeltsin went on to make a virtue out of the abandonment of any rational supervision of the economy, and turned Gorbachev's economic muddle into a selfinflicted disaster...

...One was Yeltsin's peremptory dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991...

...constitution...

...494 • DISSENT Yeltsin—A Bolshevik in Reverse...

...Socialism has never led a democracy to dictatorship, though dictatorships have often instituted "socialism" of one sort or another...

...Nonetheless, he may find himself as a practical matter presiding over the formation of a mixed economy based on strong governmental direction and welfare-state promises...

...In the spring of 1988 he got himself elected a delegate to the special party conference that Gorbachev called for June of that year to approve the democratization of the national constitution...

...Presidential predominance would ipso facto set the stage for dictatorship, as it has in so many countries that have tried to imitate the U.S...

...This was a fait accompli by the time Yeltsin met with Presidents Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine and Stanislav Shushkevich of Belarus in December 1991 and carried out the real coup—to liquidate the Soviet Union formally...

...the election of the thousand-member Congress of People's Deputies in March 1989 after the first competitive campaigning in the Soviet Union since 1917...

...As the party's future was bitterly debated at the last congress, in June–July 1990, Yeltsin demonstratively FALL • 1993 • 491 Utile—A Bolshevik he Reverse...

...He has failed to weld his own supporters into an effective party, just as he has failed to accept the principle of a loyal opposition or the pragmatic virtue of coalition politics...

...Instead, the Russian leadership and their Western advisers undertook to extinguish everything in the revolutionary and socialist heritage, Russian or Western, that had arisen to address the problems created by capitalism...

...Yeltsin's Shifts In my judgment, Yeltsin adopted the extreme positions in reform, namely anticommunism, self-determination, and free-market economics, not as ends in themselves but primarily to advance his personal political objectives...

...The standoff between Yeltsin and the parliament persisted throughout 1992, until Yeltsin finally tossed Gaidar overboard in December in return for an agreement to hold a referendum on his policies, a procedure with which he had become obsessed...

...Risking a direct popular election where Gorbachev hesitated to do so, Yeltsin easily prevailed in the June ballot...

...recent disagreements with Russia's representative bodies in favor of the president...

...I believe that this episode was the root of Yeltsin's break with Gorbachev the following fall and of his determination to settle scores with the general secretary after the new constitutional reforms permitted him to stage his unprecedented political comeback between 1988 and 1990...

...Tragically, the old barracks regime has yielded not to a higher sense of social responsibility but to a pervasive atmosphere of crime, corruption, and greed...

...They confused permitting private enterprise to be initiated again and the disruptive reorganization of recasting state-created enterprise on capitalist lines...

...The French-style prime minister in the previous set-up was retained, but he was to be designated by the president, and the parliament could be dissolved if it did not accept him, while presidential appointments of individual ministers, ambassadors, and military commanders were not subject to parliamentary confirmation at all...

...In the spring of 1991 (just before the August coup), Yeltsin went on to have the Russian Constitution amended so that he could seek popular election as an executive president, thereby extending to the Russian republic the Franco-American principle of separation of powers that Gorbachev had adopted for the Union...

...Like most Russians, Yeltsin does not understand federalism, and confuses it with ethnicity...

...Not surprisingly, the draft spelled out the president's power to call a popular referendum, without specifying the purposes, and it allowed the president to proclaim emergency rule or martial law by merely informing the parliament...

...The other was his decree of January 1992 abruptly freeing most prices and opening up the surge of inflation that still continues to wash away at the foundations of organized economic life...

...Then came the extraordinary series of events spelling the end of totalitarian rule by the Communist party — tthhee "September Revolution" of 1988 when Gorbachev downgraded Ligachev and broke the hold of the conservatives on the top party organs...

...Yeltsin's people were led to overlook all the limitations and problems of the free market that have been the subject of a hundred years of debate and struggle in the West: such matters as the problem of environmental impact of business that the market cannot govern...

...Demonstrating again his instinctive understanding of power, Yeltsin staged a mass rally to turn this narrow escape into a psychological victory, and went on to win the referendum, thereby achieving his strongest political position since the heady days just after the August putsch...

...He replied on March 20 with the preemptive strike that had long been rumored, to institute a "special order of administration" and rule without reference to the parliament until the referendum and new elections could be held...

...and the fiscal and monetary balance wheel that has compensated for the worst of the business cycle...

...Instead, what reform has mostly generated is a parasitical new robber-baron class of speculators and mafiosi...

...From this time on, the desire to destroy Gorbachev and everything he stood for seems to have shaped Yeltsin's choices...

...Yeltsin has never been entirely comfortable with the chaos that he helped to bring about when he dissolved the Soviet Union to get at Gorbachev...

...and French systems, but with a special twist, to resolve all of Yeltsin's FALL • 1993 • 495 Yeltsin—A Bolshevik in Reverse...

...He relishes confrontation and simplifies politics into a death struggle between his democratic loyalists and the totalitarian conspirators...

...The decay of the postrevolutionary dictatorship, and not a long-delayed failure of a supposed utopian experiment, was the setting for Russia's present efforts to remake itself...

...Americans rarely stop to recall that their model of the presidential republic with the separation of powers is not the only viable form of democracy, and that most of Western Europe and the British Commonwealth adhere to the parliamentary model that was followed on paper in the old Soviet Constitution...

...This is particularly true in the United States, not only in the government and the media but among many who should know better...

...He gave up the political monopoly of the Communist party, legalized the variety of noncommunist movements that were springing up under the label of "popular fronts," and had himself elected by the People's Congress to a new French-style executive presidency, replacing the old form of parliamentary government with its executive prime minister and figurehead chief of state...

...public services ranging from infrastructure to culture that cannot be sustained on a market basis...

...Russian centrists responded to Yeltsin's plan with dire warnings...

...Most of Yeltsin's associates from the time of the putsch quickly turned against him, and sought a counterweight to presidential power in the parliament...

...Under this postrevolutionary and truly totalitarian regime Marxist-Leninist ideology became the officially imposed myth or "false consciousness" to legitimize the power and privileges of the dictator and his acolytes...

...Rising tensions nevertheless brought the special session of the Congress in March 1993 to the point of rejecting the December agreement and withdrawing Yeltsin's special decree powers...

...nist conservatives he had to work his way back through Soviet history, first rejecting Stalin's command economy and then dismantling Lenin's party dictatorship...

...Though Yeltsin went along with Gorbachev's "Union Treaty" in the spring of 1991, after the putsch he did everything he could to thwart Gorbachev's efforts to keep the Union together...

...All legislative initiative respecting taxes and expenditures was reserved to the president and the cabinet, while the two houses of the parliament could only "confirm" the budget...

...His success in effect established an independent rival government in Moscow, challenging Gorbachev's authority over the Russian core of the Union and creating what Lenin called "dual power," the mark of a revolutionary situation...

...I trace Yeltsin's hatred of Gorbachev back to an incident that is overlooked by almost every writer on the subject...

...A deeper motive, occasionally expressed by Gaidar, was the promotion of a new sort of class struggle...

...At the same time, Yeltsin has taken an increasingly firm line toward the nationalities of the autonomous republics within the Russian federation, and toward the Russian provinces as well, where the issue is his own authority...

...Yet his record makes one wonder how much he really understands these categories and how much his own turbulent psyche and the deeper authoritarian habits of Russian culture actually shape his leadership beneath the labels of classical liberalism...

...Thanks to this experience, planning became a bad word, and Gorbachev's government denied itself the use of the planning tool to effect a more sensible deployment of the country's resources...

...This assumption is shared both by Russians and by outside observers who have been overly steeped in ideological determinism—they explain everything by putting a negative stamp on the Marxist "master plan...

...They welcomed economic collapse as a scourge of their enemies, much as the Bolsheviks rationalized the economic collapse of the Civil War years as a purge of the bourgeoisie...

...See Mitchell Cohen, "Theories of Stalinism," Dissent, Spring 1992...

...He appears to be having some success in bringing most of the republics of the CIS back into some form of practical cooperation, which he is quite prepared to favor in the absence of any union government headed by his rival...

...Indeed, from the start, the nationality problem was the Achilles heel of democratization in the Soviet Union, threatening either to break up the 490 • DISSENT Yeltsin—A Bolshevik in Reverse...

...There was a novel sort of dialectic at work here...

...Thereby he sought to eliminate Gorbachev's job...

...A clue is the name the Constitution drafters gave the lower house of the parliament— the "State Duma," just how the representative body under Czar Nicholas H was styled between 1905 and 1917...

...Determined to extirpate what they regarded as the social fundaments of the old regime in the nomenklatura bureaucracy, Gaidar and his team aimed to make reform "irreversible" by replacing the bureaucracy with a new entrepreneurial class, even before they put in place the elementary financial and legal foundations for a market economy...

...There is actually a third constitutional model behind these arrangements favoring the executive power...

...The confrontation between Yeltsin and the parliament has been the subject of vast misunderstanding and misrepresentation, fed by the polemical pronouncements of Yeltsin's supporters...

...A Communist past is no measure of a given individual's principles today, which is not surprising if we remember that postrevolutionary communism was not a matter of genuine belief but of superficial conformity...

...The centrist elements as a distinct political force, who reject nostalgia for the communist past but criticize the current reforms and the new authoritarian climate, do not exist for him...

...The conventional wisdom is that a "utopian experiment" in the Soviet Union of some seventy years' standing abruptly "failed...

...But he was passed over, probably because of objections by Second Secretary Yegor Ligachev and the conservative faction, whom he had riled by his aggressive efforts to clean up corruption among the old guard in Moscow...

...A Thrilling Extreme In his struggle to defy his rival and redeem himself, Yeltsin repudiated the three basic principles that Gorbachev had held to in the pursuit of perestroika—namely, reform of the Communist party, salvage of the "socialist choice" in a reformed economy, and preservation of the union of Soviet republics in a reformed confederation...

...Let us hope that this is not the only way that the new Russia can be governed...

...This document was an amalgam of the U.S...

...Not long ago I commented to a Russian historian that Russia had russified communism more than communism communized Russia...

...Furthermore, Westerners' misguided assumptions about Russia, and the self-deceptions they project upon it, make the country seem more of a riddle than it really is...

...country or to drive the Russians back from reform...

...In some republics the Communists were defeated altogether by national separatists— the inevitable fruit of democratization and a red flag to the Russian conservatives...

...There is no denying his charismatic impact and his boldness in tight situations...

...q 496 • DISSENT...

...Along with many of Gorbachev's reformist friends, he was initially shut out of the new Supreme Soviet (the smaller working parliament elected by the Congress out of their own number) as the conservatives adjusted to the new politics to defend their agenda...

...Oleg Rumiantsev, leader of the Social-Democratic party and chair of the constitutional committee of the Supreme Soviet, called Yeltsin's plan "undemocratic and unrepublican...

...Nevertheless, Yeltsin won the Russian chairmanship—elected by the same Congress that he was later to condemn as a phalanx of communist reactionaries...

...In the elections held in the Russian republic in March 1990—without any privileged assignment of seats to the party and the "social organizations" it controlled as in the 1989 Union election—Yeltsin's followers of the Democratic Russia movement won enough seats in the new Russian Congress and Supreme Soviet for him to aspire to the chairmanship...

...But reformers under Yeltsin rejected the distinction that the Gorbachevians tried to make between the market and private ownership...

...Without any legal authority, he began immediately after the August putsch to appoint provincial governors, and then designated personal representatives to watch over the governors—all reminiscent of central control by the Communist regime over local government chiefs and over the local party secretaries who kept the government people in line...

...The country is far more open than it was, but it makes less sense...

...These steps toward reform were complicated by a bitter personal feud between Gorbachev and his one-time protege Boris Yeltsin, who undertook to eradicate everything that Gorbachev had tried to salvage from the communist revolution...

...But the postrevolutionary system defied all expectations by turning out to be reformable...

...the enactment of constitutional changes to provide a meaningful parliamentary process...

...Yeltsin himself came down firmly on both sides of the economic question, calling in a speech just after the April referendum, for example, for "the formation of a socially oriented market economy," and simultaneously denouncing "irresponsible, inflationary financing of social protection programs...

...Still, he had provoked yet another special session of the Congress, which rejected all compromise and came within seventy-two votes of the two-thirds constitutionally required to impeach the president...

...This phase is now being followed by a little-acknowledged retreat from reform, to one extent or another, in each of these areas...

...Still, he clung to what he called the "socialist choice" of October 1917, as well as to the federal union of the Soviet Republics...

...They thought of privatization of enterprise as a way to create a new middle class that would support 492 • DISSENT Yeltsin—A Bolshevik In Reverse...

...In the name of democracy he forged ahead to write a new constitution legitimizing presidential dominance, if not dictatorship...

...In his campaign for personal vindication he has seized upon the formulas of democracy, market economy, and national self-determination that attract admiration from Westerners...

...In their zeal the radical Russian reformers were encouraged by Western advisers who seemed to be trying to validate, at Russian expense, their own ideological "false consciousness" about the free-market economy...

...and retention of a major share of state ownership in most new joint-stock companies...

...How far back should they go in Russia's revolutionary experience to find new inspiration...

...In his recent constitutional proposals Yeltsin made it clear that threats to the unity of the Russian state—rossiiskoe gosudarstvo— would not be tolerated...

...By mid-1992 he was ready to back away pragmatically from purist economic reform...

...Yeltsin's defiance of the party establishment automatically made him the rallying point for everyone dissatisfied with the pace of political and economic reform...

...the fledgling Russian democracy, while they overlooked the huge existing middle class of professionals, technicians, and white-collar workers...

...On the other hand, he could be impeached on the motion of the lower house only if this were confirmed by the "higher judicial presence" — which he would appoint...

...I will take up these issues in turn...

...The unfettered market was supposed to take care of the very ills that it caused...

...nomenklatura privatization" by the old managers...

...The actual danger, manifested already in the March crisis and highlighted in the draft constitution, is that Yeltsin might become his own Pinochet...

...These details need to be recalled to underscore the absurdity of Yeltsin's contention, after he fell out with the parliamentary forces in 1992, that the Russian Congress and Supreme Soviet were "holdovers" from the Communist past and relics of the Brezhnev Constitution...

...Decay and Change These circumstances of a dying system opened a wide range of choices for Soviet reformers...

...Much nonsense has been disseminated in recent months about the background of the Yeltsin government's reforms and the alternatives to them...

...Ever since the end of the Soviet Union, fears have been aired about the possibility of a "Russian Pinochet," who would promote reform by authoritarian means on the model of the former Chilean dictator...

...This set the scene for Yeltsin's bold response to the attempted coup of August 1991...

...Once this was accomplished, he seemed to lose interest in matters economic, while the political confrontation with the parliament absorbed his attention...

...Such was "the catastrophic policy conducted by `Gaidar's Team,' " in the words of the chairman of the centrist Civic Union (Megalopolis-Express, 21 April 1993...

...At the same time, in the spring of 1990, Gorbachev extended the representative principles of 1989 to the fifteen union republics, holding elections that were more fully democratic than those to the Union Congress the year before...

...He surrounded himself with a cadre of youthful academic economists entranced by the British and American freemarket theory that glasnost had permitted them to study...

...In the campaign to pass his referendum in April 1993 Yeltsin outdid his rivals in populist promises of economic benefits, despite indications of even worse inflation...

...In short, they were sowing the seeds of their own destruction...

...However, he backed off four days later in the published version of his decree, evidently having found that he lacked enough political and military support to make this extraconstitutional gambit stick...

...Yeltsin's own political comeback, and the independence of his parliament, were measures of the reality that Gorbachev had injected into representative government in the Soviet Union...

...the role of the labor movement and social-democratic legislation in achieving advanced living standards, a welfare state, trade-union rights, regulation of business in the public interest...

...He talked of a social safety net and he indexed minimum wages and pensions to the rate of inflation, though in practice the main safety-net program was the inflationary credits accorded to industry by the Central Bank to avert unemployment...

...walked out and quit the party altogether...

...They targeted the nomenldatura of Communist-appointed bureaucrats, but confused the productive nomenklatura of managers— indispensable in any modern society — wwiitthh the "controller" nomenldatura of the party apparatus...

...As president of the Russian republic, even before the August coup, he did everything he could to curb Communist activity on Russian territory, and after the coup he quickly and arbitrarily banned the party and seized its property...

...Thus they unwittingly abetted the revolution of rising expectations, in politics no less than in economics...

...In economics, as in politics and the national question, Yeltsin was bent on total destruction of the old system, where Gorbachev was trying to clean it up...

...Probably he did not anticipate how totally the Union would collapse, or the severe economic consequences of its breakup...

...and the wide-ranging debate in the Congress when it met in May 1989 that so entranced the nation watching it on television...

...Recent events show, I think, how far he is capable of modifying his stands as circumstances alter the agenda and lead him to back away from those original extreme positions...

...Reform in Russia after the 1991 putsch, as I see it, was a politically motivated lurch toward extreme positions in politics, in nationality relations, and in economics, based on democratization, decolonization, and desocialization...

...There is something here of the classic Russian tendency to borrow radical foreign ideas and carry them to a thrilling extreme—a sort of Bolshevism in reverse...

...Indeed, the analogy can be pursued further: the youthful and impassioned Bolsheviks, rallying around their charismatic leader and their uncompromising doctrine, become intoxicated by power and self-righteousness and condemn the older and more cautious Menshevik-Centrists as tools of the reactionaries (a role now played by the "Red-Brown coalition" of diehard Communists and ultranationalists...

...However, another deputy's withdrawal enabled him to join the Supreme Soviet after all...

...Seeds of Destruction At the outset we need to understand just what it was that Russia has been trying to reform from...

...He agreed, but added, "The same thing will happen with capitalism...

...Taking the lead of the opposition was parliamentary speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov, an obscure economist until Yeltsin installed him as his successor in that post when he moved up to the Russian presidency in June 1991, and the president's staunch ally at the White House during the putsch...

...Naturally the Yeltsinites echo the Western notion that free enterprise is the basis of democracy—despite the evidence that large enterprise is inherently undemocratic unless constrained from outside, and the frequency in this century of dictatorships presiding over capitalist economies...

...Privatization of larger enterprises through a complicated voucher system took unexpected forms—buyouts by workers' collectives...

...Yeltsin does not seem to appreciate the function of political parties in a democracy, and prefers to remain above the fray...

...Yeltsin, running in a Moscow constituency with the backing of a protoparty calling itself "Democratic Russia," overwhelmingly won election to the Congress...

...In nationality affairs Yeltsin's animus toward Gorbachev was particularly obvious...

...It is true that the "conservatives" —former Communists and others wishing to go slow in economic reform and social change and above all lamenting the dissolution of the Union—found a haven in the newly enlivened representative bodies, but this does not mean that the latter had been turned into instruments of neototalitarianism, as Yeltsin and his team have alleged...