Yeltsin in Trouble at Home
DANIELS, ROBERT V.
FEARS OF A NEW AUTHORITARIANISM Yeltsin in Trouble at Home BY ROBERT V. DANIELS Boris N. Yeltsin came to life on North American television screens when he visited Washington, Kansas and Canada in...
...Where Yeltsin has pushed hardest is in decolonizing the Soviet republics and radicalizing the economic reform, issues that he used tellingly against Gorbachev...
...With a little imagination one can make out a certain resemblance between Yeltsin and H. Ross Perot...
...The Russian President's troubles with the Congress have generally been attributed to a strong bloc of old Communists, but unlike the old Union Congress of 1989, the Russian Congress was elected in 1990 without special privileges for the Party...
...by letting his economics chief, Yegor T. Gaidar, take the slings and arrows of the opposition...
...The two issues, in fact, are a focus of the growing opposition to the Russian President that has developed in the Congress of People's Deputies and the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation...
...Yeltsin is not the type to stand back and allow that...
...and by daring his critics to find another leader and another program, he carried the day...
...Yeltsin, meanwhile, periodically threatens to dissolve the Congress and the Supreme Soviet and submit his own version of a constitution to a popular referendum...
...For the past six months, there has been a running controversy in Russia about the country's ultimate constitutional setup: Should it be a parliamentary or a presidential republic...
...Yeltsin's unpredictability is alarming...
...Views of Yeltsin among Russians support the comparison...
...Today it is highly fragmented...
...The agency has become a particular bete noire for the Russians...
...Yeltsin advisers have been publicly quoted to the effect that the IMF's colD-shower, tight-money requirements would be worse for Russia than the failure to get its aid...
...It battered him in one vote after another for his economic course and his softness toward the other ex-Soviet republics, and nearly passed a motion of no confidence...
...Most of the strong figures who stood with Yeltsin against Gorbachev—Vice President Aleksander Rutskoi, Supreme Soviet Chairman Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, St...
...In Montreal, there was the folksy politician telling his audience of entrepreneurs: "Business people are the flower of all nations, who guard prosperity and transform dreams into reality, who see to the welfare of the people...
...No way...
...Just hours after the Soviet leader returned to Moscow from house arrest in the Crimea, when he joined Yeltsin at the Russian Supreme Soviet only to be humiliated before the world's TV cameras, the Russian President gained the upper hand...
...Internationally, he has simply picked up the lines laid down by Mikhail S. Gorbachev...
...Still the hero who foiled the hardliners' coup last August and brought about the USSR's post-Communist transformation, he demonstrated all the political skills that put him at the head of Russia's new revolution...
...And there was the sensational spur-of-the-moment reference to American prisoners of war in Russian camps, with the promise to do all he could to find them—a gesture that made his honesty seem so different from that of his predecessors, even though the archivists had already said they could not document what he was referring to...
...Robert V. Daniels is professor emeritus of history at the University of Vermont and a frequent NL contributor...
...Everything I did in the last few months, Yeltsin was always opposing it...
...Ideological positions have dissolved into followings of individual leaders...
...Neither the Russian Congress nor the Russian Supreme Soviet manifests the coherent parliamentary and party politics that had developed in its Soviet counterpart under Gorbachev when Yeltsin and his sympathizers formed a clear-cut opposition...
...There was just no way...
...They are repelled by the "Sverdlovsk Mafia" of old Communist associates whom Yeltsin has brought into his inner circle, especially Gennady E. Burbulis, the State Secretary and former professor of "scientific communism" who is promoting a new cult of personality around his boss...
...But the breakup of the Union and the drive to marketize have so far created more problems than they have solved...
...Finally, with ridiculous ease, came the real coup, on December 8, 1991, when Yeltsin met with the Presidents of Ukraine and Belarus in Minsk and proclaimed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics dissolved...
...The opposition naturally prefers stronger legislative control, a position of substantial merit in the light of Third World experiences with presidential dictatorship...
...the Democratic Russia movement that boosted Yeltsin to the top broke up after the Communist collapse, much the way Solidarity did in Poland and the Civic Forum in Czechoslovakia...
...Defying what he labeled the "diktat" of the IMF, he told Serge Schmemann of the New York Times, "We have a Russia that the IMF does not know, and a Russian people that the IMF does not know...
...Compelled to resign, Gorbachev said plaintively at his farewell reception, "I just could not go on...
...The failure of the August coup took care of the Communist Party...
...It wants a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution to this effect...
...Exploiting what Lenin in 1917 had called "dual power," Yeltsin paralyzed the central government financially and encouraged the other republics to defy Union authority altogether, thereby making Gorbachev impotent...
...Yet by standing aloof, a la Charles de Gaulle, and not appearing at the Congress until its last day...
...FEARS OF A NEW AUTHORITARIANISM Yeltsin in Trouble at Home BY ROBERT V. DANIELS Boris N. Yeltsin came to life on North American television screens when he visited Washington, Kansas and Canada in mid-June and proved himself one of the world's most dynamic leaders...
...We often hear of the fear that Boris Yeltsin might be replaced by a " Russian Pinochet" if his policies falter...
...One after another Yeltsin then took over the Moscow offices of the Union ministries...
...Both have a knack for the dramatic stroke, along with prickly personalities and authoritarian reflexes...
...It chose the Supreme Soviet that made Yeltsin the leader...
...Ross Perot again...
...Moscow News calls him "nervous, unpredictable, and difficult to understand even for his closest aides," as well as a man of "revolutionary temperament...
...Both are self-made men from the provinces who have had a significant impact on their country's politics...
...Izvestia writes, "He reacts emotionally, sometimes scathingly, which gives the impression of rashness...
...Petersburg's Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, the noted economic reformer Grigory A. Yavlinsky of "Grand Bargain" fame—have turned against the Russian President, over the economy, over the ethnic situation, and over their fears of his authoritarian proclivities...
...Both find their respective nations in serious trouble, yet in terms of domestic policy, apart from scoring the errors of previous administrations, are short on specifics for improving matters...
...Failing that, he could very well maneuver to rescue his failing popularity and disarm his opposition by backing away from the free market, ruble convertibility and the rest of the IMF dream, and then returning to the statist self-sufficiency of his predecessors—doubtless still in the name of reform...
...If the Supreme Soviet blocks one of his proposals, as it recently did, for example, on privatization, Yeltsin puts it through anyway by decree...
...In the run-up to the Washington summit with President George Bush, Yeltsin made it clear that he has no intention of abandoning the great-power role of his country...
...Since last fall the President has enjoyed temporary powers to rule by decree...
...Russian polls show Yeltsin's popularity declining (from 57 per cent in April to 32 per cent in May), as the citizenry loses confidence in all its brawling leaders and in government in general—a familiar state of affairs for Americans...
...More likely, if need be, he would become his own Pinochet...
...It would include a provision granting the President the prerogative to call a referendum at any time on any issue...
...In Washington, there was the bold stroke—nuclear cuts that went beyond everything agreed on...
...Up to now, Yeltsin has identified himself with four basic policies—eradication of the Communist Party, international cooperation, free-market economic reform, and liquidation of the USSR...
...This would appear to explain why Yeltsin, who was by and large staying the course, has lately been backing off a bit—delaying the deregulation of energy prices and the budget balancing demanded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), for instance, and articulating nationalist worries about the 25 million Russians stranded as minorities in various former Soviet republics...
...Yeltsin showed uncanny political skill when the Congress of People's Deputies met last April...
...they count only because they ally themselves with Yeltsin's ultra-nationalist critics on the Right...
...Even the surviving Communists in Russia are splintered...
...Or shades of Napoleon Bonaparte's "plebiscitary democracy...
...His new book, The End of the Communist Revolution, will be published in February...
...Sensing instinctively what his country will and will not tolerate, Yeltsin may be persisting in his reformist commitment only in the hope of gaining Western aid under acceptable conditions...
...Both have achieved their tremendous popularity preaching against the existing system...
Vol. 75 • June 1992 • No. 8
