Yeltsin's Next Gamble

...The irony, for Yeltsin at least, is that the Communist Constitution, originally meant to give merely lip service to legislative democracy, has enabled the Congress to exercise real authority in truly democratic Russia...

...the manufacture of cloth is at the 1950s level...

...Estimates of illegal and private Russian dollar deposits in European banks just last year start at 15 billion, a figure representing unlawful export of Russian timber, oil, precious metals, and raw materials like aluminum and copper...

...Yeltsin, in short, has more authority than any of his rivals to chart the way for the country, but he does not have a broad popular mandate...

...He comes out on top, however, as the best of a tainted lot...

...Government statistics show, too, that milk, meat and egg production is about where it was 10 to 20 years ago...

...That loaded the dice...

...In addition, it would give the President authority to appoint his own ministers without much fear of a veto by a two-chamber legislature...

...Thus the generally pro-Yeltsin newspaper, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, says Yeltsin won half a victory...

...If the political deadlock is to be broken before regular parliamentary elections in 1995 and the scheduled presidential election in 1996, Yeltsin must sell his constitution to the Russian people...

...On the one hand, nearly 70 per cent of the politically engaged Russians indicated they are fed up with the interminable squabbles in the Congress and the Supreme Soviet by voting on April 25 for new parliamentary elections...

...No one in the Russian government trying to maintain popular support for a course that has plunged millions of Russians into near poverty can brush aside the 47 per cent figure as if it were a minor protest vote...

...Nonetheless, Yeltsin has seized the moment, acting as if he has won a mandate of the people to pursue his economic and social policies...

...if the Congress lost, there would be new parliamentary elections...

...Most important of all, a Yeltsin constitution would lead to the dissolution of the current obstreperous Congress of People's Deputies and Supreme Soviet...

...The gap between the rich and the poor in Russia has not been so great since the days before the Communist Revolution, even taking into account the Communist Party bureaucracy's concealed privileges in Soviet times...

...Clearly, it is not about to approve a document that would spell its own death...

...Moreover, it is seemingly united only in its dislike of the President...

...Yeltsin being Yeltsin, he already is pursuing the first option...

...Consequently, what Yeltsin in his challenging way hoped would be a clear plebiscite turned out fuzzy...

...The old document is based on the 1936 Stalin Constitution, revised in 1977 during Leonid I. Brezhnev's reign, and amended in 1989 under Gorbachev to provide for the popularly elected Congress of People's Deputies as well as its selection of the Supreme Soviet...

...The average deputy, far from the stereotype of the aging, ill-educated Communist Party apparatchik, is just under 50 years old, has graduated from a university, and holds a degree either in engineering or general sciences...

...The deputies are overwhelmingly Russian and male...

...The referendum results can be read as a victory for the President, who polled a 58 per cent confidence vote and 53 per cent for his reforms...

...Mark Hopkins, a longtime contributor to the NL, is chief of Voice of America's news bureau in Moscow...

...His chief opponents in the Congress, Vice President Alek-sandr V. Rutskoi and Speaker Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, say the referendum has divided Russian society...

...Repeated public opinion surveys during the past year, when Yeltsin ended state management of the economy and initiated slow privatization of commercial trade and small-scale industry, have shown a far higher favorable rating for him than for any other Russian competitor, including the Afghan war hero Vice President Rutskoi and Speaker Khasbulatov...

...Or it can be read as a defeat, because a majority of the electorate did not vote for a new Congress...

...On the other hand, that nearly half of those who took the trouble to register their feelings also declared they were ready for a presidential election could hardly be very comforting to the incumbent...

...Or he could propose a compromise that would combine his version of a basic law with that of the Congress...

...Hostility toward him is so strong that at its last session the Congress almost succeeded in ousting him in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution...

...The Communists say he lost...

...If he can overwhelm the unpopular Congress with a populist campaign, he may just be able to break the present political impasse and come out the winner...

...Yet as number-crunchers have noted, although 53 of every 100 Russian voters backed Yeltsin's troubled economic reforms, 47 did not...

...Now 62, Yeltsin is still taking risks and looking for fights...

...Typically, he offered the antagonistic and conservative Congress of People's Deputies a roll of the dice: If a majority of the people voting backed the Congress, there would be new presidential elections...

...He could try to stage another referendum, hoping a majority of Russian voters is sufficiently disillusioned with the existing situation to accept his constitution...

...The Congress, numbering just over 1,000 members, has a minimum of 14 factions, ranging from the extreme Right to the extreme Left, and is often unmanageable...

...The Russian referendum held April 25 was originally his idea...

...But the approval Yeltsin's policies managed to secure reflects the overwhelming resignation of the Russian people...

...His daring streak later propelled him into the high reaches of the Communist Party, a power struggle with Mikhail S. Gorbachev and—as a "radical populist leader" in Western descriptions—to the post of Russian President in 1991 in the first unrigged Soviet electoral contest...

...Given the present inflation here, that buys a pair of women's boots, or three kilograms of meat, or a month's diet of bread, potatoes and cabbage for one person...

...Rather, he won political breathing space in a country and among a population suffering badly from his initial attempts to do precisely that amid the euphoria of the August '91 coup and the collapse of the Soviet state...

...Thanks to a ruling by the Russian Constitutional Court, only a simple majority of those voting was needed to pass the first two questions, while a majority of the entire Russian electorate was required to adopt the last two...

...They recast the referendum, making it a list of four questions: on Yeltsin personally, on his reform policies, on new presidential and parliamentary elections...

...Indeed, it is this large opposition to the effects of Yeltsin's reforms that has fueled the savage attacks of his enemies in the Congress and its smaller standing body, the Supreme Soviet...

...But Russia's legislators were not so adventuresome...

...This leaves Yeltsin three options...

...Even before April 25, Yeltsin had assembled a team to draft his version of a Russian constitution to replace the one carried over from the USSR...

...Yeltsin's latest political gamble aims to force through a constitution that would allow the Russian President to dissolve Congress and call new elections, along the lines of European systems...

...Those who began enriching themselves following the abolition of government price controls and introduction of a market system are a motley group of former Communist Party apparatchiks, young wheeler-dealers, the "mafiosi" rings, and government officials...

...It is a gamble, but one he seems to relish...

...In this post-Soviet era, dominated by former Communist Party officials (Yeltsin himself, it will be recalled, is a onetime candidate member of the ruling Politburo), a new generation of experienced, authoritative Russian leaders has yet to emerge to seriously challenge him...

...The American, German, British, and French governments, among others with a vested political and financial interest in Russia, are encouraging him to move rapidly now along the market and democratic paths...

...He and his advisers have decided that the only way to break the present political deadlock in Russia is to adopt a new constitution, elect a new and presumably more reformist legislature, and place much greater authority in the office of President—all preferably without having to hold a preterm presidential contest...

...The catch-22 is that the current basic law gives Congress the power to amend the Constitution or adopt a new one...

...Why they tried to remove him has less to do with the essence of his economic or political reforms than with seeking power for power's sake...

...The vast majority belonged to the Communist Party, as did most men of their station at the time they were elected in 1990, including Yeltsin...

...The govern-ment's statistical committee reports that one third of Russia's 150 million people have incomes at the subsistence level, defined as 8,000 rubles a month (approximately $ 10...

...He could attempt to enlist the support of regional Russian political leaders in a constitutional assembly that would override the Congress...

...His supporters say he has a mandate...

...In the light of the referendum's outcome, Yeltsin is now taking still another risk...

...The country's new and ostentatiously wealthy entrepreneurs and criminal fixers, by contrast, have incomes literally in the millions of rubles—enough to provide them and their wives with Mercedes and BMWs, luxurious Moscow apartments and European vacations...

...The wonder is how many voters cast their ballots for reforms that demonstrably have not benefited the average citizen...

...It would be a mistake, though, to think the April 25 referendum gave Yeltsin a mandate to remake Russia...

...Weary of 70 years of the Soviet Socialist state, enlivened by Yeltsin after the abortive August 1991 coup and subsequent collapse of the USSR, most Russians today see no alternative to the direction he has chosen for them...

...His pug nose comes from boyhood days in Sverdlovsk, in the Urals, when he was brawling and someone smashed him in the face with a cart shaft, the first two fingers on his left hand are missing because he and several chums stole some hand grenades during World War II and Yeltsin, showing off youthful courage, tried to take one apart with a hammer...