Is Yeltsin a Wise Investment?
DANIELS, ROBERT V.
FOR RUSSIAN DEMOCRACY Is Yeltsin a Wise Investment? BY ROBERT V. DANIELS George Bush ultimately conceded his mistake in relying too long and too heavily on Mikhail S. Gorbachev as the man to...
...Such a question cuts away all constitutional moorings provided by the separation of powers...
...Part of the trouble is a tendency to make convenient assumptions: Yeltsin the "passionate democrat" versus the "hard-line," "pro-Communist," even "Brezhnevite" Congress operating under an "old-style Constitution...
...Nor can the old Communist Constitution be blamed for Yeltsin's troubles...
...Many other reverberations triggered by the liquidation of the USSR will long contribute to Russia's instability...
...Yeltsin still wants a referendum on whether the people prefer him or the Congress to carry on the reforms...
...He comes down to the wire with implications and threats...
...Parliament...
...It was elected in the spring of 1990, shortly after Gorbachev persuaded the Communist Party to give up its legally privileged position, and should not be confused with the Union Congress elected the previous year with a protected majority of Communist officials...
...But he is stubborn and mercurial...
...American commentaries have made the free market a more important litmus test of democracy than constitutional processes...
...Yeltsin might very well win, but this would not be the first time in history that a country voted democratically to kill democracy...
...Yeltsin has repeatedly demonstrated that he is a fearless politician capable of bold strokes...
...Ethnic minorities within the Russian Federation, resenting Moscow's dominance, are trying to claim "sovereignty" just as the Union Republics did before the dissolution of the USSR, while the Russian majority views federalism as an invitation to anarchy...
...hardly the type to work in tandem with a parliamentary body...
...The centrists now accuse Yeltsin & Co...
...Sticking with "our horse"—to quote ex-U.S...
...Ambassador to the USSR Robert S. Strauss—versus going against all our values and interests...
...At the same time Yeltsin aspires to remain above partisan strife, a posture appropriate only for a figurehead president on the German model...
...Then at the last minute he yields, as when he sacri-ficed Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar this past December...
...In the present disorganized and demoralized state of the Russian economy, aid that is not carefully targeted is all too likely to end up subsidizing corruption, profiteering and capital export...
...One of these introduced the curious "Congress of People's Deputies,'' elected by the voters with the power to alter the Constitution and to choose a smaller working legislature, or Supreme Soviet, from its own membership...
...Free-market reform versus a return to Communist dictatorship...
...Are the alternatives to Yeltsin only chaos or dictatorship...
...Democratic practice might be better served if Russia's President submitted to parliamentary control and a coalition government that could, in the words of Georgi Shakhnazarov, Gorbachev's former press aide, overcome "personal ambitions and considerations of prestige" and do something to ameliorate the lot of the people...
...This is not as serious for the parliamentarians, who have the West European model in mind, as it is for the President, who today could be speaking General de Gaulle's words: "The indivisible authority of the State is wholly conferred on the President by the people...
...Bill Clinton is making the same mistake with Boris N. Yeltsin, but apparently he does not realize it yet...
...Decolonization of the Russian Empire, though certainly overdue, has left 25 million Russians stranded beyond their borders and unleashed a rash of irreconcilable conflicts among the smaller ethnic groups...
...The constitutional standoff of the past year has been over which way to push this awkward animal—toward an American-style presidency with full control of the executive branch, as Yeltsin wants, or toward parliamentary supremacy over the executive, as Speaker Khasbulatov has been strongly demanding...
...Fears of Yeltsin's authoritarian proclivities spread...
...That document called for essentially a West German-style parliamentary republic, but in reality was a charade until Gorbachev started to breathe life into it in 1989...
...Yeltsin's fate is now inextricably entwined with the issue of American aid to Russia...
...None of the contenders in Russia really understands the concept of separation of powers...
...There are practical concerns as well...
...In starkly contrasting Yeltsin and the Congress, we seem to forget that the Russian Congress is no more of a "Communist holdover" than President Yeltsin...
...To begin with, the Russian Congress is not an antidemocratic monolith...
...Just when the Clinton Administration has accomplished what James Fallows calls a new "paradigm shift" in domestic policy, from laissez-faire to government responsibility, it proposes to go on underwriting a 19th-century Utopia in Russia...
...BY ROBERT V. DANIELS George Bush ultimately conceded his mistake in relying too long and too heavily on Mikhail S. Gorbachev as the man to preserve peace and stability in Russia...
...A second amendment added an executive presidency, creating a French-style system with all its ambiguities in the distribution of powers among the President, the Prime Minister and his Cabinet, and the Robert V. Daniels is professor emeritus of history at the University of Vermont and a frequent NL contributor...
...It is as if Bill Clinton, without any authority in law, decided to call a national referendum on his economic program and ask voters whether they wanted him or Congress to carry it out...
...The Congress is plotting to restore Communism, he charges, and he will take resolute—albeit unspecified—steps to prevent his reforms being derailed...
...Breaking up old trading relationships has compounded the economic crisis...
...The conventional wisdom, pitting Yeltsin against the forces of darkness, calls for an all-out, unconditional U.S...
...Today's constitutional struggles mainly stem from the amendments Gorbachev introduced in the Union Constitution—tracked by Yeltsin's amendments to the Constitution of the Russian Republic...
...This is naturally the way his supporters and the Russian Embassy want us to see the choices...
...Last summer, for example, when Yeltsin gave his new Security Council unconstitutional powers, the liberal weekly Moscow News described the move as a "quiet coup" and warned: "From now on, a very narrow circle of officials will make decisions related to Russia's security (which essentially means all decisions...
...Yeltsin's embracing the economic reforms urged by the West is riddled with ironies...
...Then two events shook up Yeltsin's followers: the liquidation of the Soviet Union in December, and the decision to decontrol most prices in January '92...
...Another constitutional problem is the misunderstanding of federalism, a notion that continues to be confused with ethnicity in Russia...
...I would suggest that Russian democracy, left to the Russians themselves, has more potential than the call for emergency aid to one man implies...
...Both surprises intensified ambitions of Yeltsin's former lieutenants and resentment of his personal entourage...
...Afterward he disappears from view to sulk, or—as many in Moscow believe—to drink...
...Similarly, in the longer run, they defy the realities of a modern economy, marked by corporate concentration, government intervention and managed markets in everything from agriculture to health care...
...Yeltsin equates criticism of the reforms with treason to the state, even though a host of observers ranging from Nikita S. Khrushchev's son, Sergei, to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn have faulted the dogmatic extremes of the privatization program...
...Yeltsin still tries to control local politics by appointing provincial governors, and afterward sending out Presidential representatives to watch them...
...Nevertheless, the argument can be made that Yeltsin's intransigence only plays into the hands of the Communists and nationalists by weakening the center...
...It more or less reflects the country, with a Yeltsinite reformist wing, a wing of Communist and nationalist conservatives, and a center counting perhaps 40 per cent of the deputies...
...His new book, The End of the Communist Revolution, will be published this spring...
...In the short run, Russia's policies run counter to the state controls that all Western governments have turned to at comparable moments of crisis in wartime or depression...
...effort, though some of its advocates blanch a bit at the prospect of his imposing a Presidential dictatorship in the name of democracy...
...of beginning to plot the dissolution of the Union right after the August coup, in order to eradicate the rival Gorbachev government...
...His influence reached its peak in the fall of 1991, when the Russian Supreme Soviet voted him the authority to reform the economy by Presidential decree...
...Headed by Yeltsin's erstwhile proteges, Speaker Ruslan I. Khasbulatov and Vice President Alek-sandr V. Rutskoi, as well as the industrial leader Arkady Volsky, the center is the unsung element in Russian politics where most American observers are concerned...
Vol. 76 • March 1993 • No. 4
