Russia's Democratic Dilemma

...Both Yeltsin and Zyuganov broke with Gorbachev's reform Communism, albeit in opposite directions: The former opted forthe Western democratic and capitalist model...

...Chernomyrdin has suffered these slights patiently...

...He legitimized his powers in the Constitution of December 1993 (fraudulently adopted, because the referendum turnout was really less than the required 50 per cent, but accepted by most Russians...

...But Yeltsin and his personal entourage (dominated by presidential Security Chief Aleksandr V Korzhakov and other former KGB types) have instinctively seen Chernomyrdin as a threat—especially when the latter actually outdid his boss in the popularity polls after the 1993 crisis, and again when his name was floated as a possible presidential candidate early this year...

...Yeltsin's advocates have tried to scare anti-Yeltsin reformists into voting for the President to stop the Communists, yet this would not be a danger in the first round unless the democrats splintered so badly that Zhirinovsky edged out Yeltsin for second place—a very unlikely scenario...

...Gaidar fell afoul of the holdover Parliament in December 1992 because of the pain of his shock therapy, and a compromise was found in the person of Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, then Minister of Energy...

...On top of all that, the majority of regional governors are appointed by the president, not elected...

...Those lower down who only knew propaganda work pursue their old political business, with demagogic appeals to misery and nostalgia...

...That is one of the great ironies of Russia's presidential contest: If Communist Gennadi A. Zyuganov should win the runoff that at this writing seems almost certain after the initial June 16 balloting, it would be the first democratic transfer of executive power in Russia's history—and maybe, for some time to come, the last...

...Russia represents "collectivism," "community solidarity," "statehood," "goodness and justice," he asserts, citing everything from the Bible to Tsar Nicholas I. The West represents "the war of all against all...

...Thus it is hard to comprehend how the nation, having only emerged from the long shadow of totalitarianism with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991...

...The shock therapy program urged on Russia by the West was based on the questionable premise that free markets and democracy go together...

...The CPRF economic program is a compromise among the party's factions that offers protectionist remedies for Russia's underproducing industry and agriculture, but promises inflationary benefits to others and hints at a return in the future to state planning...

...One suspects that both seized upon their respective ideologies as rationales for their political choices, though once adopted each man's belief became an obsession...

...So Yeltsin has kept his Prime Minister on a short leash, sending him on vacation or foreign missions when he seemed too uppity...

...Although cheered on by Americans who have failed to understand the parliamentary alternative, the system Yeltsin installed gives the President the power to work his will in every area of domestic and foreign policy...

...BORIS YELTSIN has never understood the political role of the chief executive in a democratic system...

...Yeltsin has said he will "do anything" to prevent a Communist victory, hinting at totalitarian measures to forestall a democratic victory by the totalitarian enemy...

...could give the Communist Party a serious chance of returning to power in a democratic election...

...The top two vote-getters will face each other in a runoff on a date to be set after the Central Election Commission certifies the results of the initial ballot (another invitation to hanky-panky...

...How it would play out under a Zyuganov presidency is sheer guesswork, but clearly the Communist camp, while more cohesive than that of the democrats, is far from monolithic...

...After the Russian Constitutional Court overturned the ban on the Communist Party, most of its remaining members regrouped as the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) and picked Zyuganov to lead them...

...Village-born, they both chose careers as provincial Party apparatchiks...

...Zyuganov promises to introduce the principle of legislative supremacy, yet if he won he would certainly be tempted to retain the substance of the existing setup...

...Yeltsin followed suit when elected President of the Russian Federation...

...The Yel-tsinites draw on the young, the urban and the adventurous...

...Perhaps it is a saving grace of Russian politics these days that laws and orders are honored more in the breach than in the observance...

...Chagrin over the loss of empire and superpower status feeds the nationalist and Communist opposition, raising the specter of Weimar Germany...

...His bid for re-election to head the now sovereign Russian government has become a referendum on his record of anti-Communist reform...

...In the late 1980s Gorbachev, to counter the Party's conservative bureaucrats, took over the nominal presidency and infused it with power...

...and then the president could call new parliamentary elections...

...Logically, what Russia seems to need is some kind of a centrist, SocialDemocratic coalition, but everyone who tries his hand at it—lately including Gorbachev himself—manages only to create one more splinter group...

...THE COMMUNISTS would not pose quite the danger they currently do if Russia did not have a superpresidential constitutional structure...

...In the October 1993 crisis, when Yeltsin's tanks shelled the obstreperous Russian Parliament into oblivion, Zyuganov kept aloof and chose to work within the system...

...Armed with a democratic choice, electorates in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the former Soviet republic of Lithuania have balked at the rigors of reform and have turned to sanitized versions of their old Communist tormentors to find a kinder, gentler destiny...

...Russia has a prime minister, but he is definitely the president's man: It would take three votes of nonconfidence to force him out...

...Finally, there are the reformists around Communist organizational chief Valentin Kuptsov, who seems to lean toward Social Democracy a la the reform Communists in Poland and Hungary...

...For all its potential inefficiency and instability, a parliamentary system with a prime minister and cabinet responsible to the legislature is a much greater guarantee of a democratic transition...

...In her forthcoming work...

...Clearly he would have been a stronger rallying point for the anti-Communist forces in the presidential election than Yeltsin is...

...Meanwhile, he has co-opted the nationalist line, growling about nato and restoring ties to some of the other former Soviet republics...

...Asked how Yeltsin gets away with so much, one Russian political scientist explained: In Russia "legality" and "legitimacy" are not the same thing, and a bold leader—even if he is disliked—can achieve legitimacy while legality is in tatters...

...The "proletarian" approach of Lenin and Stalin, it maintains, was traitorously subverted by the "bureaucratic line" of such improbable bedfellows as Leon Trotsky, the purged police chief Lavrenti P. Beria, Nikita S. Khrushchev, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin...

...Under their tutelage, he embraced the Orthodox Church and the old Slavophile notions of Russia's uniqueness and moral superiority over the West, translating those beliefs into terms that were patently racist, anti-Semitic and imperialistic...

...ZYUGANOV first achieved prominence in 1990, when he was included in the leadership of the newly formed Russian Communist Party, set up as a conservative counterweight to Gorbachev's reformers in the overall Communist Party of the Soviet Union...

...The CPRF then did respectably in the December 1993 parliamentary elections, placing second behind the misnamed Liberal Democratic Party of the fascistic Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, and marginalizing the extremist Communist splinter groups who boycotted the voting...

...Building on this success, the CPRF scored a smashing victory in the December 1995 parliamentary elections, winning almost 40 per cent of the seats in the Duma and installing their own man, Gennadi Se-leznyov, as speaker...

...After the August coup, Yeltsin took the title for himself and made free-market reformer Yegor Gaidar his "acting" prime minister...

...This is bound to be a two-round election, since it would indeed be surprising if one of the 11 candidates in the first round on June 16 won more than 50 per cent of the ballots cast...

...Polls have shown that Yavlinsky would be a surer bet than Yeltsin to overtake Zyuganov in the second round, but there is no chance that he could mobilize all the disillusioned center groups, head off Yeltsin and make it into the runoff...

...Mass poverty, corruption and blatant inequality upset virtually everyone...

...Hammer, Sickle and Book, Joan Barth Urban of Catholic University in Washington describes Zyuganov as a "national Bolshevik" being pulled three ways by differing Communist factions (a fact little noted in most Western reporting...

...In these circumstances, the relations between Yeltsin and his prime ministers have of course always been uneasy...

...He missed his chance to form a broad-based democratic reform party after the August coup, when his popularity was at its height...

...In 1992 he was chosen to head the National Salvation Front, an umbrella outfit that gave form to the "Red-Brown coalition" of orthodox Communists and extreme nationalists...

...Most cabinet ministers are not subject to parliamentary confirmation at all...

...Yeltsin rose to the post of Party boss in Sverdlovsk Province, then was brought to Moscow by General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1985, at the age of 54, to head the city's Party organization with the status of alternate ROBERT V. DANIELS, professor emeritus of history at the University of Vermont, is a frequent NL contributor and the author of 20 books on Soviet and post-Soviet affairs...

...In the runoff, in all probability, the people in the middle will vote for the man they hate—Yeltsin—over the man they fear—Zyuganov...

...CPRF statements have reflected a constant tug-of-war among these conflicting tendencies...

...A dead giveaway is the party's mythical version of Soviet history...

...And he has in general pitted his advantage in new capitalist monetary support against the Communists' vast grassroots organization...

...Strictly speaking, Yeltsin fashioned a hybrid of the American presidential model and the French one introduced by Charles de Gaulle in 1958...

...Technically, there is one other possibility, as Moscow News has noted: If enough voters choose the ballot option, "Against all the candidates," and defeat both Yeltsin and Zyuganov, a new election with new faces would be required...

...He has lavishly promised everything from new churches to compensation for duped investors, paying no more heed to the matter of inflation than the Communists...

...There are the nationalists like the CPRF leader himself, who verge on fascist ideology and compete with Zhirinovsky to bear the standard of the Russia-first nostalgists...

...member of the Politburo...

...As Latin America has demonstrated, strong presidential governments of this kind too often end up dictatorships...

...Nevertheless, now his hopes reside in the constitutional provision that in the event of the president's death or disability, the prime minister is to succeed him—Yeltsin having abolished the office of vice president when the incumbent, Aleksandr Rutskoi, defected to the opposition in 1993...

...Yeltsin's methods, especially his resort to force in Chechnya, alienate the democrats...

...One way or another, Yeltsin will almost certainly prevail in the end...

...Despite their present differences, Yeltsin and Zyuganov have remarkably similar Communist backgrounds...

...He has taken the initiative when openings appeared, as in negotiating with the Chechens, but refrained from any direct challenge to his superior that might have cost him his job and his political future...

...The impressive showing made Zyuganov the obvious challenger of Yeltsin as the now polarized country headed into the 1996 presidential contest...

...Avoiding involvement in the failed coup of August 1991, which resulted in Yeltsin's attempt to ban Communist activities, Zyuganov built organizational and ideological links with the ultranational-ist groups that had mushroomed during glasnost...

...Zyuganov is a classic example of the quasi-intellectual in politics who accumulates a grab bag of second-hand, half-baked, inconsistent, and often paranoid ideas to legitimize his ambition...

...The wonder about post-Communist Russia, considering its stormy heritage, is not that it is unstable but that it has not sunk into systemic violence—the ethnic secession of the Chechens excepted...

...Yeltsin is faulted by his critics on three main grounds: promoting the breakup of the Soviet Union, convulsing the Russian economy with ill-prepared free-market schemes, and compromising the country's new democracy with his authoritarian style of rule...

...Russia's present dangerous concentration of presidential power came about more or less accidentally...

...Boris N. Yeltsin's current five-year mandate commenced in June 1991, when he had the Constitution of the Russian Federation—then merely the largest state within the USSR—amended so that he could run for direct election as its president...

...Zyuganov has attempted to articulate his own views in a stream of books and speeches arguing Russia's betrayal at the hands of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and poisoning by Western injections of capitalism and mass culture...

...Ever since, he has left electoral politics to his prime ministers—first Gaidar with his Russia's Choice Party and subsequently Chernomyrdin with his Our Home is Russia Party, a top-down aggregation of government officials and beneficiaries contemptuously referred to by Russians as the "party of power...

...Higher officials and those in industry jumped at the chance to turn themselves into new capitalists through "nomenklatura privatization...

...Zyuganov came to Moscow from the rural town of Orel in 1983, at the age of 3 8, to be a mid-level propagandist...

...He also has frequently governed by decree, ignoring parliamentary attempts to countermand his edicts (as in the recent extension of privatization...

...They are backed by the far-Left parties, who ran as a bloc last December and almost reached the 5 per cent threshold needed to get into the Duma...

...Now Russia is on the brink of the same sort of decision, but its Communists are much less sanitized and its democrats have yet to learn how to operate a democracy...

...the latterjoined the so-called "conservatives" who reaffirmed traditional Communist economics and anti-Western nationalism...

...the Communists attract the elderly, the rural and the fearful...

...Next, there are the real Stalinists of the Lenin Position, led by the old agitprop specialist Richard Kosolapov, an admirer of the disciplinarian General Secretary Yuri V. Andropov, successor to Leonid I. Brezhnev...

...These contrivances have resulted in the rest of the democratic political spectrum becoming totally fractionated among petty competing egos—the most successful of whom, Grigory Yavlinsky, head of the Yabloko Party, is the most uncompromising...

...witness Hungary and the Czech Republic...

...He has shamelessly manipulated television coverage of the campaign and reports by most of the other media...

...Naturally, they back Yeltsin...

...The bulk of the Communist officialdom, the nomenklatura, divided similarly...

...This extends beyond the preponderance of purely presidential power, for Yeltsin has steadily built up an inner administration exclusively responsible to him, and has kept the "power ministries" —defense, interior and security—in his own hands...

...He wants to remain above the partisan fray like a ceremonial head of state, yet exercise commanding personal power like a Tsar and override the legislative branch at will...

...Historians will readily recall the plots, coups and uprisings that marked England in the late 17th century or France in the mid-19th...