Boris Yeltsin Resigns.
Yeltsin’s grand exit
UNITED STATES–You can call Boris Yeltsin many things, but don’t call him boring. With his customary flair for the dramatic, the former Russian president announced on New Year’s Eve, the last day of the 20th century and the second millennium, that he was stepping down, leaving the leadership of Russia in the hands of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Though Mr. Yeltsin has been shaky both personally and politically for years, the news nonetheless landed like a bombshell amidst the international coverage of millennium celebrations around the world. …
Russia’s first elected president [Yeltsin] was clearly a flawed vessel for all the hopes that were placed on him. Boris Yeltsin was a transitional figure. The question now stands, transition to what?
–Washington Times
January 2, 2000
Russia’s flawed reformer
UNITED STATES–In suddenly resigning as Russian president on Dec. 31, Boris Yeltsin showed once again why he will be remembered as a practitioner of the unexpected political stratagem. Like so many of Mr. Yeltsin’s gambits over the years, the move upended expectations and scrambled Russian politics. It also came with a promise of immunity from prosecution for Mr. Yeltsin for any misdeeds of his government. That will likely roil the coming presidential campaign, a fitting legacy for a courageous but disappointingly erratic man who guided Russia through the first years of a turbulent, still unfinished journey from tyranny to democracy. …
Many Russians will doubtless question the sincerity of the apology Mr. Yeltsin offered for the mistakes he made and the economic hardships that so many of his countrymen have endured. More information will be needed before anyone can judge whether the decision to spare Mr. Yeltsin from possible prosecution was warranted or wise. However, Russians ought not to forget the singular achievements of Boris Yeltsin. For all his maddening weaknesses, he led his nation toward democracy after 1,000 years of tyranny.
–New York Times
January 2, 2000
President putin
UNITED STATES–Mr. Yeltsin obviously felt that the beginning of the year 2000 was an appropriate time to bring on fresh young talent. Mr. Putin distinguished himself in the December parliamentary elections by leading a new “Unity” political party to a surprising showing. Unity gained 16.5 percent of the seats in the lower house, chipping the dominant Communist party down to 24.5 percent from 34.9 percent four years earlier. With Mr. Putin in a position to distribute favors, there is a good chance that Unity will attract enough smaller parties to its banner to have effective control of the legislative body.
Another test Mr. Yeltsin assigned Mr. Putin before awarding him the top spot was to mend fences between the Kremlin and the powerful regional governors, who control the upper house of parliament. If those efforts have at least some success, that further enhances the possibility that Mr. Putin will be able to pass crucial legislation. The Communists in the parliament were so resistant to reform that Mr. Yeltsin was often pushed by his frustrations into extreme measures, the most notable of which was using artillery to smoke legislators out of the Russian White House. …
Mr. Yeltsin proved that he had one last arrow in his quiver. He apologized that he was not able to do more for the Russian people, a remarkable admission for a politician anywhere. Yet, he deserves vast credit for breaking communism and knowing that it was time to leave, so that Russia can turn a corner and put itself in the hands of a new, more liberal generation. He made it clear that he feels that the Communists are finally whipped and that there is no way they can turn back the clock to the “gray, stagnating, totalitarian past.” The Communist party is shrinking as old Soviet hands retire or die.
–Wall Street Journal
January 3, 2000
Democratic act
RUSSIA–No matter what people say about Yeltsin, his last move shows that he makes his own decisions. He quit when he wanted, making sure that his candidate will win the presidential election, his resignation ruining the others’ chances. We don’t know what kind of president Yeltsin’s “heir” will be, but we certainly won’t have a Communist Party candidate for president. That, basically, is Yeltsin’s political legacy.
–Segodnya
January 5, 1999
Yeltsin’s three pillars
RUSSIA–All these years Yeltsin, with a neophyte’s persistence, has upheld new Russia’s three pillars: Democracy, market economy, and freedom of speech, ready to sacrifice power, as well as his own life, to them. In reality, his passions looked quite different from his ideals. That happens to all “firsts.” Yeltsin can rightly be awarded the title of those who mean well but are short of time.
–Vremya-MN
January 5, 2000
This never happened before
RUSSIA–Russia hasn’t seen this happen before–an autocratic head of state, almost “doomed” to a life-long reign, of sane mind and firm memory, suddenly dons his coat and leaves to stay in history.
–Komsomolskaya Pravda
January 5, 2000
Courageous move
RUSSIA–Doubtless, that Boris Yeltsin has given up power on his own is a courageous move. But his New Year’s Eve surprise has its dark side, too. It has virtually deprived Putin’s potential rivals of a chance to prepare normally for the election. As in Soviet times, they now face an election without a choice. That doesn’t look like the triumph of democracy.
–Moskovskii Komsomolets
January 5, 2000
West must change on russia
RUSSIA–Putin faces a very difficult task. He ought to have the West change on Russia and do it fast. For a great power to be virtually isolated is absolutely intolerable. It is a matter of principle to Putin. Of course, Putin has already demonstrated that to ensure Russia’s integrity, he will stand up to the West if he has to. But there must be an end to any quarrel.
–Kommersant
January 5, 2000
Wrestling with the past
GREAT BRITAIN–Mr. Putin has gathered a team of advisers around him and has been articulating his views. He will be forced to reveal even more of his thoughts over the next three months in the run-up to the presidential elections, in which he is the clear favorite. Will he merely reveal himself to be the front man for Russia’s oligarchs, as some commentators have suggested? Or will he prove to be the dynamic, reforming president that Russia needs, capable of charting a third way between communist authoritarianism and lawless capitalism? There remain many doubts about Mr. Putin’s intentions–and ability–to pursue meaningful reforms.
Like Mr. Yeltsin in 1996, Mr. Putin also appears worryingly reliant on a group of financial oligarchs to finance his forthcoming election campaign. They will doubtless expect their reward. Mr. Putin may yet find that national Russian politics resembles less a constructive clash of ideas than a brawl among competing financial-political clans. For some, Mr. Putin appears to be Russia’s best hope. But if he is to succeed, he will first have to repeal what became known as the first rule of Viktor Chernomyrdin, the unsuccessful Russian prime minister of the early 1990s: “We hoped for the best but things turned out as usual.”
–Financial Times
January 5, 2000
Russia’s unknown civilian
GREAT BRITAIN–The fighting in Chechnya has catapulted Vladimir Putin from obscurity to the brink of a four-year presidential term. When Grozny is eventually taken, it is difficult to believe that he will not be in hock to the generals whose campaign has won him such popularity. By the end of March, Mr. Putin will want to have pacified Chechnya and to ride to electoral triumph on that achievement. Only then will we discover the nature of his political platform beyond the relentless prosecution of the war.
–Daily Telegraph
January 4, 2000
Should we fear putin?
FRANCE–Yeltsin’s designated successor presents himself as a reformer of national dignity. A vague program, but which plays on authoritarianism and confrontation with the West. Under the pretext of a fight against terrorism, the war against Chechnya will serve as a launching pad for the Putin rocket.
–L’Express
January 6, 2000
The two putins
FRANCE–Vladimir Putin looks like a two-faced man. According to him, the war in Chechnya would be a rebuilding action. He says Moscow is defending its national integrity against separatists. At the same time, he does not want to break with the West or the trade rules.
On the contrary, Putin presents himself as a supporter of reforms, determined to keep the direction Yeltsin held for the past ten years. He does not want a return match against the United States. Nor does he want to go back to communism by reinstating political dictatorship and a state economy. Putin is consistent: His first challenge is to modernize Russia. But it is not quite obvious that, for the new president, democracy is the best means to do it.
–Le Figaro
January 4, 2000
Expulsion from the paradise of kleptocrats
GERMANY–It was clear that Yeltsin’s daughter had to leave the Kremlin. By firing her, Putin has disposed of one of the worst residual burdens of his predecessor. He made this step immediately after taking office, since there is hardly anybody else in Russia who is considered so much the personification of Yeltsin’s kleptocracy in the Kremlin as [Yeltsin’s daughter] Tatyana.
It creates a good impression to disassociate oneself from such people but Putin has not yet broken with the Yeltsin team. Time will tell whether he will fire them or whether Putin will allow the “Yeltsin system” to continue its work with the well-known figures. But if he wants to become serious with his fight against corruption, Putin must get rid of many of his former mentors.
–Suddeutsche Zeitung
January 5, 2000
Clearing away yeltsin’s legacy
GERMANY–On January 3, the new man in the Kremlin cleared away the personal legacy of his predecessor. This creates hopes that, with the new generation at the top, a new understanding of politics will gain the upper hand. The Kremlin leader is exercising a tightrope act. He is working to improve his reputation but does not want to frighten off the old guard. Thus far he is aware of one fact: He will not be able to gain lasting support in Russia by showing strength only at the battlefield in Chechnya. The Russian people want a strong leader. However, in everyday life, Putin must demonstrate that he is able to show this strength in the fight against crime and omnipresent corruption.
–Sudwest Presse
January 4, 2000
Desire for order and revenge
ITALY–Will the acting president be able to reconcile the contradictory impulses that characterize his rise to power? The future of Russia and the future of its foreign policy will depend on this. But the West, even if it is forced to wait for the outcome of the March presidential elections, cannot limit itself to a superficial analysis amid one mistake and the other. Let’s not forget that if Putin still does not have a consistent policy, the West continues not to have a Russia policy.
–Corriere della Sera
January 5, 2000
The czar is still alive
ITALY–Yeltsin’s government is over, but not “Yeltsinism.” This is not the end of the family and its moguls. As for the war in Chechnya, it is so popular in Russia that even thinking of a defeat represents a betrayal of the Russian homeland. It is clear, therefore, that Yeltsin’s farewell is not the sad farewell of a leader but an able move so that nothing will change.
Even this “white coup d’etat” satisfies a majority of the Russians, like the war in Chechnya and the smart look of the new president. We may not like Vladimir Putin’s curriculum as a KGB man in Berlin but the Russians like him. It is needless to wonder whether this is ridiculous or alarming: Even the Russians have gained a right to have a leader they like.
–Il Sole-24 Ore
January 2, 2000
Putin capitalizes on russia’s mood
AZERBAIJAN–The events in Chechnya can still be used as a pre- election trampoline, and Putin is trying to gain points. His trip to Chechnya was not only the beginning of the pre-election campaign but also showed the mood, aims and methods of the new Russian leader.
These days, as the chauvinistic mood is soaring in Russian society, such behavior is really bringing dividends. However, it will hardly find understanding outside Russia. Instigation of virulent chauvinism is playing with fire. As the West is determined to exert pressure on Russia, Putin may have to deal with the consequences of his own “tough” policies during three pre-election months.
–Zerkalo
January 4, 2000
What will putin bring?
BELGIUM–All eyes are now focused on the new strongman in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, and people wonder whether things will change with this man. His first official acts give the impression that he does not lack decisiveness: on a single day he signed 40 laws which Yeltsin was keeping in his drawer and he fired a key figure of the “family”: Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana.
However, more is necessary than the removal of one Yeltsin clan key figure from power. Yeltsin did not succeed in turning his nation into a genuine democracy and the question is whether his successor will be able to do that. Admittedly, it is not an easy task to lead Russia to democracy after centuries of authoritarian regimes. In this field, the new Kremlin boss does not inspire much confidence. Above all, he is interested in a brutal victory in Chechnya and his entire policy is subordinate to that. He holds the press in his grip like his predecessors did, and human rights is not his strongest suit. In the struggle against the Mafia, no major victories have been achieved since his arrival. In a virtuoso manner, Putin is playing the feeling that Russia is still a superpower, which is attractive to the people. It is very much the question whether that superpower thinking is reassuring for the world–when it is linked to nationalism in a chaotic country.
–De Morgen
January 4, 2000
Putin’s independence
BULGARIA–Putin will have to patronize the oligarchy with one hand and beat up the Chechens with the other. This is the only way he could meet the expectations of the Kremlin elite and the Russian people, on whom he depends for staying in power. The real problem will appear when the new strong man of the Kremlin starts feeling independent enough not to depend on the Kremlin or the people. The constitution that Yeltsin produced could guarantee Putin “great independence.”
–Sega
January 4, 2000
A game with hidden cards
CROATIA–One thing is for sure: Yeltsin picked Putin as his “successor” because of his loyalty. He proved it by signing his first decree as the acting head of state granting amnesty to Yeltsin and his family. However, Putin conceals what kind of policy he will make if elected president. As a former intelligence officer, Putin is making cautious moves, well aware that before the presidential elections he must not displease those who helped him climb the Kremlin Olympus.
–Vecernji List
January 4, 2000
Russia’s development stalled
FINLAND–The immediate reason was not Yeltsin’s collapsing health, but tactics: to provide the best possible starting point for his successor candidate, Vladimir Putin. Yeltsin’s conduct was not entirely in keeping with the purest rules of democracy. But most Russians think that Yeltsin stayed in office for too long. Almost all of his second term was a personal catastrophe.
What kind of a leader Putin will be is a big question mark. Russians see him as a determined and energetic man, a representative of a new generation. Putin declared that the war concerns more than just the fate of Chechnya. His message was that it would mark the end of the disintegration of the Russian Federation. That is a tough goal and may take Russia into many conflicts in years to come. History will remember Yeltsin for his role in putting an end to the Soviet Union and communism and taking Russia on the road to democracy.
–Helsingin Sanomat
January 2, 2000
A huge triumph for democracy
LITHUANIA–The first resignation of a Russian president was a huge triumph for democracy in this country. For the first time in the history of this country, its leader–in a time of peace and without being forced by anyone–resigned from his post. This is a historically important event, before which pale all other circumstances.
–Lietuvos Rytas
January 4, 2000
Clear the way for putin
NORWAY–Boris Yeltsin has led Russia in a very important period in the transition from dictatorship to democracy. The biggest problem with Boris Yeltsin was the lack of predictability. Nothing indicates any big changes in Russian foreign policy in the time to come.
On home ground Putin has a gigantic task of getting the country’s economic situation in order. If it is to succeed, he must also have the will and ability to clean up the comprehensive corruption in the country.
–Dagsavisen
January 2, 2000
Apologist for a ‘third way’
POLAND–If the war in the northern Caucasus does not bring a disaster in the nearest future, then the West will have to accept a representative of a new generation of “enlightened” nationalists ruling in the Kremlin. Putin’s earlier statements indicate clearly that he rejects both Western liberalism and the return to Communism.
Therefore, Putin opts for combining the principles of free market economy and democracy with Russia’s realities. He is then the first high-ranking Moscow official who advocates the so-called “third way” of development.
–Prawo i Gospodarka
January 4, 2000
Russia’s fragile democracy
SLOVENIA–Russia had a historic opportunity. For the first time, the government could have been democratically transferred to Yeltsin’s legally elected successor. Yeltsin’s sudden resignation is some sort of a velvet revolution which was necessary to assure the continuation of the current policy. Thanks to the Kremlin’s present elite, Russia’s fragile democracy has not passed the exam. The government that assures continuity and its victory in democratic elections–as a result of a war and empty promises about a rebirth of the former great country–is very unpredictable.
–Delo
January 3, 2000
The man who dethroned communism
SWEDEN–Boris Yeltsin will be remembered in history as the man who managed to dethrone Soviet communism. And what picture can be more suitable than the one dated August 1991, when Yeltsin on top of a Soviet tank in front of the Russian parliament spoke out against the attempted Communist coup. But by his actions, as the head of the Russian Federation, Yeltsin, time and again, demonstrated that to him power was more important than democracy and freedom. Statesmen can be great in different respects, and Yeltsin’s greatness does not include democratic or liberal virtues.
–Svenska Dagbladet
January 2, 2000
Relations with putin
TURKEY–Using his popularity, Putin is going to reorganize politics and the economy in Russia, which could lead to a more central, authoritarian order. For Chechnya, he will take actions that will “wipe out” the issue, which means he will pursue a more nationalist policy. On foreign policy issues, Putin will not make any changes vis-a-vis Russian-American relations. Russia is opening up, and needs the Western world’s economic and moral support. On the other hand, it will not be a surprise if Putin defies the world on Chechnya or on the Caucasus.
–Milliyet
January 4, 2000
Yeltsin’s resignation
CHINA–Health is not a decisive factor in Yeltsin’s resignation. The media say the real purpose of Yeltsin’s quitting is to create favorable conditions for Putin’s competition in the upcoming elections. It is widely believed that success is already within Putin’s hand.
–Guangming Ribao
January 3, 2000
World jury out on putin
HONG KONG–While Putin’s drive to become Russia’s second democratically elected president looks increasingly rosy, his mission to lead the former socialist nation out of extreme economic difficulty will be challenging. The dilemma is that while foreign aid is vital to Russia’s economy and its reform drive, Mr. Putin’s hardline stance on Chechnya will only make it more difficult for Russia to gain the support. Mr. Putin’s dilemma is also that of the West. If he proves to be capable of keeping the country stable and carrying out reforms, will the West forgive him on Chechnya and provide aid?
–Hong Kong Standard
January 4, 2000
A legacy of freedom
PHILIPPINES–Yeltsin himself, after becoming an icon of democracy, increasingly came to be pictured as an inebriated buffoon. He cultivated a cabal led by his daughter, which reportedly used power for corruption. Yeltsin’s image as a democrat was scarred by his brutal crackdown on separatists in Chechnya. Yet under his watch Russians enjoyed unprecedented freedom and cemented ties with the West. Yeltsin’s legacy in the former bastion of communism is indisputable.
The world may have greeted his departure with little regret, and he may have botched Russia’s transition from strong-arm rule to democracy, but succeeding generations of Russian leaders will find it difficult to undo his democratic reforms. Yeltsin will always be remembered for his precious legacy of freedom.
–Philippine Star
January 2, 2000
Russia without yeltsin
SOUTH KOREA–Yeltsin’s resignation is yet another reminder of how skillfully he practices political strategy, choosing the right moment for his heir, Putin. It remains to be seen how wise his choice of Putin will prove to be. The fact is that Putin’s popularity rests mostly on the success of the military offensive against Chechnya, not on the strength of the heir’s political vision for Russia. No matter how whimsical Yeltsin may have been, he nevertheless is Russia’s hero, who … changed the country’s course in the 20th century. The world will not forget the courage with which he opened Russia’s door to democracy.
–Hankook Ilbo
January 3, 2000 –>
Boris Yeltsin’s Russia: between reform and realpolitik.
Russia under leader Boris Yeltsin has continued to struggle to democratize its social/political life and capitalist economy while coming to terms with its past. Russia’s geographic location in Northeast Asia has enabled it to exert some influence though the nation has ceased to be a power of major regional significance. While Russia aspires to be recognized as a global power such as the US, it is militarily weak, economically in decline and systematically in turmoil. Its options appear to be limited for the foreseeable future.
Since the establishment of the Russian Federation in 1991, Boris Yeltsin’s Russia has been struggling to democratise its social and political life and capitalist economy, while coming to terms with its own past. President Boris Yeltsin’s Russia has been regarded internationally in some respects as the heir of the Soviet Union. For example, it assumed without question the Soviet permanent seat on the UN Security Council. And, like the Soviet Union before it, the new Russia still aspires to be recognised as a global power alongside the United States of America. In this respect Russia still has a nuclear arsenal of superpower dimensions and its military industries can still produce advanced weapons systems.
If Russia has ceased to be a power of major regional significance, it still exercises residual importance by reason of geography in Northeast Asia. Moreover, it could affect immediate arms balances through sales of advanced weapons systems and affect diplomacy in the region. Some Russians, including the Communist leader Gennadi Zyuganov, may think that it is a question of time before Russia would recover from its domestic turmoil and would regain the status of a global power, not just a regional power as the West maintains. Thus there remains, arguably, a gap in perception between the Russians themselves and Western commentators.
Moscow under Boris Yeltsin’s leadership recognises the importance of continuing political and economic relations with South Korea, China and Japan and adheres to the principle of a nuclear-free zone in Korea. Improvement in Russian-South Korean (ROK) relations continued especially after Boris Yeitsin’s November 1992 visit to Seoul and the initialling of a new treaty on basic relations. Russia is committed to a Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons, as reflected in its 1993 military doctrine. As a result, Russian-South Korean trade has continued to expand steadily, from $1.2 billion in 1992 to $1.57 billion in 1993 and $2.2 billion in 1994. In 1995 trade soared to a record of $3.3 billion, with Russia recording a $447 million surplus.
Russia, like China, is committed to a Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons, and is interested in limiting the proliferation of nuclear weapons, as noted earlier. Much of the population of Primorskii is concentrated within a few hundred kilometres of the Russian - North Korean (DPRK) border. Any use of nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula would contaminate significant areas of the Russian Far East. In addition, any serious conflict - nuclear or conventional - could produce a stream of refugees across Russia’s borders and it could exacerbate differences between Moscow and Beijing over how to resolve the crisis, and thus could jeopardise Russia’s amicable ties with East Asia’s dominant power.
Moscow’s foreign policy establishment, therefore, is in agreement on the need to prevent North Korea from developing or utilising nuclear weapons. For example, the Yeltsin government had made clear its opposition to North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons. On this nuclear issue, Russia for the most part has co-operated with the United States and South Korea, because the presence of nuclear weapons on the peninsula threatens the Russian Far East.
Although Moscow, in recent years, appears to have wished to make its policies in the East more dynamic, its initiatives generally did not evoke a strong response in the region, mainly because the Russian initiatives and interests were perceived by the region as being directed more towards the USA and the West, rather than towards Asia.
Forced by the bitter realities of its declining international weight, and with growing domestic dissatisfaction over the results of its economic policies, Moscow declared in late 1993 its intention to correct the pro-US and pro-European tilt in its foreign policy and launched a more active diplomacy in Asia. President Boris Yeitsin visited South Korea and Japan, and met in Moscow with the leaders of China and India. Russia has become much more interested in these countries, especially in view of their role in the evolving security arrangements in the region.
The main directions and principles of Russia’s new foreign policy in the region were stated by then Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev in his speech to the Chinese Association of People’s Diplomacy on 27 January 1994. According to Kozyrev, Russia’s first priority is an active development of business relations with member countries of this economically fastest growing region in the world. As the minister indicated, one-third of the total Russian foreign trade is already with Asia-Pacific states. Secondly, Russia’s Asia-Pacific policy is to be based on the understanding that Moscow does not regard its contradictions with any regional country as irreconcilable, and it will work consistently in favour of having stable and balanced relations with them all. Thirdly, the possibility of a major military conflict in the region is now greatly diminished, thus reducing the importance of military factors in international relations. However, because of still remaining challenges to regional security, Kozyrev argued that there has been a need to respond to them on a collective co-ordinated basis.
The main security threats and risks to Russia in the Asia-Pacific are seen by Moscow in the following trends: ethnic conflict and tension in Russia’s border areas, especially in Central Asia, as well as within Russia itself; potential nuclear conflict on the Korean Peninsula; tension with Japan over the unresolved territorial dispute and fishing issues; military growth of China; isolation from the economic integrational processes in the Asia-Pacific region, and a destabilising increase in the number of foreign migrants in the Russian Far Fast.
Policy Adjustments
These challenges dictate the following priorities in Russia’s policies in the Asia-Pacific region: a military reform and adjustment to new regional security realities; an active diplomacy in Central Asia in order to retain the region in its sphere of influence; a resolution of the dispute with Japan and full normalisation of relations with Tokyo; a continuation of dynamic but reasonable relations with China; a more constructive role in the settlement of the Korean problem; an accommodation of Russia’s regions and ethnic autonomies, and implementation of economic reforms in the Russian Far East with a view to enabling that region to take an active part in Asia-Pacific economic integration.
Russian foreign policy reached a turning point in 1996 when Boris Yeltsin defeated his communist rival, Gennadi Zyuganov, in the presidential election. His re-election demonstrated that democracy triumphed. Although the elections revolved around domestic economic and social issues, the results do have foreign policy implications. Yeltsin’s original foreign policy team, including Kozyrev and Defence Minister Pavel Grachev, were replaced. The appointment of Yevgeny Primakov and General Alexander Lebed as Foreign Minister and National Security Adviser respectively in 1996 heralds a more professional foreign policy. However, General Lebed was removed from this key position, following accusations that he was planning to seize power with the help of the Russian military and Chechen rebels. And Mr Primakov continued to lead the Russian Foreign Ministry until late August 1998 when he became the new Prime Minister of Russia. Divisions within Yeltsin’s administration appear to complicate the task of co-ordinating foreign policy, despite Primakov’s assurance that Russian foreign policy would be effectively co-ordinated under the aegis of his ministry. By the end of 1995, a consensus did emerge among the Kremlin’s foreign policy experts that ‘Russia’s status as a respected great power must be restored.’
Current Situations/Trends
Russia’s position in Asia is circumscribed by its weak economy and endemic political and social crises. The situation in Russia today creates two main fears: economic and political. The economy collapsed, the rouble devalued and thousands of Russians started to withdraw their money from banks. Inflation has risen; imported goods are disappearing from the shops, and the prices of those that remain are rising; people are starting to hoard; worried foreign investors are pulling out, while international financial organisations grow increasingly reluctant to lend Russia more money. So great has been the failure of economic reform that many Russians look back to the stagnation and decline of the last years of communism as being happy times.
The danger is that the successor to President Yeltsin could discontinue reform policy and would only offer false hope. And with Russia still possessing a vast nuclear arsenal, we should all be concerned that it does not fall into such hands. That is why Russia’s economic prosperity is of concern to all of us. The West has an interest in promoting democracy and market economics in Russia. But it would be wrong to assume that it is in the West’s power to bring this about, certainly not through economic assistance alone. In the end, it will be Russians who bring its period of misery to a close. And since late 1997, Yeltsin has been attempting to define a set of concepts, what is usually called the ‘Russian idea’, for the nation itself. Caught between reform and realpolitik, Russia under the consistently ill Yeltsin is an economic mess. This continuous ill health was seen again last month in Jordan when Yeltsin had to fly home in the midst of King Hussein’s funeral.
Industrial production in Russia is down by more than fifty per cent in the last five years; the gross national product has contracted for five years running and life expectancy has plunged to 58 for Russian men. Workers in the coal-mining regions of northern Russia went for months without getting paid. Many pension payments have also been late. These factors, among others, have resulted in criminal activity and the rise of the Russian Mafia.
The process of transition has been beset by difficulties because the real problem has been the weakness of the state which has been unable to consolidate the systems and structures that would ensure both governability and the smooth transition to a market economy.
In Western Europe, the process of democratisation took centuries and did not prevent a series of catastrophic wars. In Russia, which has no tradition of capitalism and participated neither in the Reformation, the Enlightenment nor the Age of Discovery, this evolution is likely to be ragged.
Professor Stephen Holmes of Princeton University observes: ‘Russia’s disorder affects both state and civil society. The system of central control and co-ordination is in shambles. Incumbents are corrupt and incompetent … The government is fragmented, unaccountable and seemingly indifferent to the plight of its citizen.’
In other words, today’s Russia lacks legitimate political authority. Instead of a civil society concerned with influencing the state, Russia has developed an ‘a-civil society’ concerned with insulating itself from the state. It is fair to say that the transformation of the political and economic system in Russia was partly driven by the desire to combine political freedom with improved living conditions. However, Yeltsin’s policies to create a market economy based on private property stimulated the emergence of a new set of economic interest groups and challenged economic groups from the Soviet ancient regime.
To date, a small handful of super-wealthy economic elites have organised politically to pursue their interests, while groups constituting the rest of Russia’s evolving economic and civil society remain weak, disorganised and therefore marginal to political processes and outcomes. Poverty has become a reality among many segments of the population in the late 1990s. This growing gap between the state and society constitutes a real threat to the emergence of a stable and liberal democracy in Russia.
Considerable doubt has been expressed over the ability of the current Russian government to make and implement effective policy primarily because of corruption, ineffectiveness of management and a lack of a stable political structure. The process of transition has been beset primarily by difficulties because of the weakness of the state which has been unable to consolidate the systems and structures that would ensure both governability and the smooth transition to a market economy. Furthermore, the efforts of the President to control personnel appointments through the Council for Personnel Policy and the Civil Service Administration could be seen as an effort to create a household bureaucracy. If that is indeed his intention, however, the likelihood of success is extremely low, with political power being far too fragmented for such an outcome. The evidence appears not to be strong enough to suggest a policy process which is dominated by such relationships.
The reforms of Russia and Eastern Europe depended too much on the West for aid, with the illusion that if they moved closer to the West, they could obtain foreign aid. Therefore, Yeltsin, Gorbachev and other leaders travelled around, begging for aid from the United States, Japan and South Korea. The IMF has provided considerable sums in assistance to Russia, very much as a result of American encouragement. The calculations are more political than economic; the aim is to ensure the continuation of democracy rather than to achieve reform and progress in the Russian economy. However, it was a mistake for countries to rely on foreign aid for economic development. Most countries’ economies began to grow rapidly only after they were independent of foreign aid. China, for example, after the incident at Tiananmen square on 4th June 1989, enjoyed continuing growth even though many aid and credit arrangements were frozen.
Looking into the future, to revitalise Russia’s economy and make it prosperous the following will probably have to be done: 1. Increase political stability. Political stability helps establish the authority of the government, so that the government’s power could be utilised to readjust the dislocation of the economic order. 2. Abandon dependence on the West. A people’s dependence on their own effort is the only way to obtain an affluent life. Russia has a vast territory, abundant resources, a relatively small population, a large number of trained technicians and intellectuals and people of high quality. After the reform of its industrial foundation, Russia could before long operate a normal national economy. The Russian is born intrepid and yearns for national greatness. Russia now is in chaos, but it has broken off the heavy burden of its Republics and East Germany. 3. Continue of reform and build a competitive infrastructure. Yeltsin is viewed generally by the West as the guarantor of market economics and democracy, yet Russia under Yeitsin is an economic mess. The failure to build a competitive infrastructure had devastating consequences for the reform effort. It also affected the operational practices and behaviour of Russian business institutions, which were more likely to view themselves as above the law and the public interest. In China, for example, the rapid growth of new business created a more competitive environment and a more acceptable code of behaviour. This generated the higher level of output and lower level of inflation that a competitive environment brings. Without such initiative, Russia’s economic situation would continue to be at a very critical stage. To be sure, Russia’s economic recovery and reform must ultimately rest on its own efforts.
During the recent Russian meltdown, Boris Yeltsin fired his long-time Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, dismissed his entire Cabinet and appointed Yevgeny Primakov as the new Prime Minister. Mr Primakov declared that his government under Boris Yeltsin would stabilize the economic situation and Russia would not abandon market-style economic reforms, and underlined the stability of its foreign policy, consistency in reforms and the lack of any alternative to market-oriented policies. Although seen as a competent administrator, his field of expertise is foreign relations, not economic policy. Yet his power is growing because of Yeltsin’s illnesses.
To talk of economic resurgence in the near future is to ignore current realities. The export branches of the economy - oil and gas and natural resources - are productive and known reserves are massive. However, this is the only sector of the economy that is subjected to any order. Industrial and electronic operations are destroyed, with no investment forthcoming or likely because of the crippled Federal budget.
Should Moscow’s leaders resolve their pressing domestic problems such as repairing its horribly damaged economy, stabilizing its politics, reconstructing its administration, curbing the activities of the Mafia and reducing government corruption and arbitrariness, improving the welfare of its people, recreating efficient armed forces and designing coherent policies for Asia, Russia could expand its influence in Asia in general and on the Korean Peninsula in particular. Russia needs time to put its house in order. The sudden decline in South Korea’s economy in late 1997 has further complicated Russia’s relations with Seoul. Russia can be expected to remain in a state of political and economic turmoil for the near future.
Yeltsin is viewed generally by the West as the guarantor of market economics, democracy and peaceful international conduct. However, some of his actions in relation to peaceful international conduct are questionable. In pursuit of security, Russia has produced insecurity for its neighbours, and it appears that Moscow attempts to uphold its right of military intervention in countries containing Russian minorities. Two Russian divisions are being maintained in the territory of Georgia, where Russian intervention in a civil war made that country ungovernable until Russian conditions were met.
Russia’s encouragement of the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia has given Moscow a voice in both countries and blackmail potential over Azerbaijan’s vast oil reserves. Russian troops participated in the civil war in Tajikistan in 1996. Russia refuses to demarcate the borders with Ukraine and is pressuring the oil-producing nations in Central Asia to export their oil only through pipelines running through Russia. All of these have happened under Boris Yeltsin.
Today, Russia is militarily weak, systematically in turmoil, and economically in decline. Depending more on the behaviour of others than on its own wishes, Russia’s options appear to be limited for the foreseeable future.
Although Primakov could assume that economic growth may be achieved in the near or medium future, Russia does not seem poised to record the growth rates experienced by China. Even if economic growth in European Russia takes off, the Russian Far East will probably be left behind. And since influence in Asia will increasingly depend on economic strength, Russia would be consigned to a marginal role at best over the next decade.
Sharif M. Shuja is an academic staff member at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. –>
Is this any way to run a country?
Russian president Boris Yeltsin fired his cabinet on Mar 23, 1998. Yeltsin’s advisers feel his unexpected behavior and occasional public mistakes matter less than his ability to govern. Appointing Sergei Kiriyenko, a little-known bureaucrat, to prime minister raises questions about Yeltsin’s judgment.
Boris Yeltsin has sacked his entire cabinet. More bizarre behavior, or a real effort at reform?
Russia’s President had coyly suggested for months that he knew exactly who should succeed him in 2000, the year the country is scheduled to hold its next presidential election. And nearly everyone in Moscow figured Boris Yeltsin would pick Viktor Chernomyrdin, his long-suffering and intensely loyal prime minister. For the past three months, Chernomyrdin had worked to raise his political profile, submitting to fawning interviews in the Russian press and even taking live phone calls on Russian television–a remarkable step for someone as charismatically challenged as his American counterpart, Vice President Al Gore. Chernomyrdin’s unofficial 2000 campaign had clearly begun–by all appearances with Yeltsin’s blessing.
Chernomyrdin should have known better. Boris Yeltsin has never tolerated anyone with designs on his job. Last week–by far the most tumultuous of his second term–Chernomyrdin learned that lesson. On March 23 the Russian president returned to the Kremlin from yet another week of illness and announced that, tired of their political infighting and inability to resolve Russia’s deepening economic mess, he was sacking his entire cabinet. While some ministers were quickly reinstated, two of the cabinet’s most powerful men were decidedly out: Chernomyrdin and economic czar Anatoly Chubais. No one, outside of a few intimates led by daughter Tatyana (sidebar), had seen it coming.
By the end of the week Yeltsin had named Sergei Kiriyenko, a little-known 35-year-old fuel-industry bureaucrat, to the prime minister’s post. With the choice, Yeltsin made it clear that he, not anyone else, is running Russia–perhaps for years to come. The question now: can a shaky Yeltsin, with an inexperienced No. 2, kick-start a Russian economy that has slipped into a dangerous period of stagnation?
Yeltsin’s erratic recent behavior doesn’t necessarily inspire confidence. For a full 24 hours after the firings, there was nothing but silence from the Kremlin. That day, Yeltsin, the 67-year-old quintuple-bypass recipient, was home alone. “We did not have the slightest idea what was going on, and neither did anyone else,” says one high-ranking Western diplomat. Traveling in Africa, President Clinton dashed off a letter to Yeltsin, urging him to stick to the course of reform. “I’m thinking of you,” the American president told Yeltsin. If Clinton had concerns about the ailing Yeltsin’s decision-making, he had good reason. Last December, on a visit to Sweden, the Russian president seemed to have no idea where he was and announced that Russia was dismantling its nuclear arsenal (Russia’s generals begged to differ). And last month, at a dinner hosted by Pope John Paul II in Rome, Yeltsin in a toast made a lascivious reference to Italian women.
Yeltsin’s advisers say the gaffes don’t matter. Governing does. That’s why even some of his most loyal aides were jarred by last week’s decisions. At his daily press briefing on March 24, a plainly flummoxed spokesman for Yeltsin announced that the president had chosen an “acting prime minister.” It was Kiriyenko, the boyish-looking minister of fuel and energy. The room was stunned. “Sergei who?” bellowed one Russian reporter.
It was a reasonable question. Kiriyenko is a former banking and oil-company executive who had first helped run the deeply conservative fuel and energy ministry as a deputy to economic reformer Boris Nemtsov, then became minister. In recent months Kiriyenko had become one of the Kremlin’s most effective troubleshooters. Just two months ago Yeltsin sent him to the coal fields of southwestern Siberia to quell a revolt from miners who had not been paid in two years. Late last summer he traveled hack and forth to the Russian Far East, where electrical blackouts were increasing. Bespectacled and short, he has the confident manner of an A student fully conversant in the nuances of market economies. With seasoning, he was clearly destined to be a power in a future government.
But prime minister? Now? Last Friday, to the astonishment of everyone, including Kiriyenko (”Believe me,” he told one interviewer, “this is all a bigger surprise to me than it is to you”), Yeltsin submitted his name to the Russian Parliament as Chernomyrdin’s permanent replacement. Kiriyenko quickly did his best to play the new part. He hustled out to the airport to greet French President Jacques Chirac and Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany, in town for a three-power summit with Yeltsin. The sight of the obese, aging Helmut Kohl next to the young, diminutive new Russian prime minister looked like “Grandfather Frost visiting with the children,” said Russian businessman Boris Berezovsky.
It would almost be funny–if it weren’t so serious. Yeltsin said Friday that “professionalism and energy are not determined by your date of birth,” and his defenders believe the moves last week do provide a chance to rev up economic reforms. They argue that Chubais, despite competence as a manager, had become a serious liability to Yeltsin The communists have always hated him, and over the past year he had engaged in a furious, debilitating war over privatization deals with powerful businessmen. And Chernomyrdin was resisting the sort of free-market capitalism that Russia hopes to put into place. Dumping them both could allow Nemtsov to get on with his reforms, with his former subordinate now in the prime minister’s office to absorb the political heat.
Still, the choice of Kiriyenko says less about him than the man who made it. By shedding Chernomyrdin and vaulting an anonymous technocrat over Nemtsov, Yeltsin had effectively cleared the way for his own candidacy in 2000. Chernomyrdin announced last week that he would run anyway. But without the prime minister’s platform it will be an uphill struggle. “This,” says political consultant Sergei Markov, “is all about Yeltsin 2000.” Last November, in fact, Yeltsin’s team asked the constitutional court to review whether he was serving his first or second term. The current Constitution limits a president to two terms. But Yeltsin’s inner circle says he was first elected under the old Soviet Constitution, and thus can run again.
The court will rule in the fall. Meanwhile, it is worth remembering that in the course of Russian history, only one czar has formally abdicated the throne; the rest either died in office or were overthrown. The exception was Nicholas II, who, one March day, stepped aside after deciding he had hung on to the job too long. The year was 1917. –>
When Boris banged the table.
Yeltsin’s dissolution of his government appears incomprehensible, as does his promotion of a 35-year-old junior minister as acting Prime Minister. Yeltsin claims he fired Chernomyrdin so the latter could concentrate on year 2000 elections. Potential consequences of the move are analyzed.
OFTEN unpredictable, President Boris Yeltsin’s behaviour veered this week towards the incomprehensible. Returning to work from a real or feigned illness on Monday morning, he sacked his prime minister of five years’ standing and dissolved his government without appearing to have any very clear idea of why he was doing so. He appointed as acting prime minister a 35-year-old junior minister and former oil executive, Sergei Kiriyenko, who had less than a year’s experience of national politics. He issued a special decree sacking a first-deputy prime minister, Anatoly Chubais, whom he had pledged publicly a month before to keep in the government until at least 2000.
By way of attempted explanation Mr Yeltsin said that the changes were needed “to give economic reform more energy and efficiency”. “It’s a brain bypass,” retorted a Russian newspaper in its Tuesday headline, a ruthlessly unkind allusion to the heart-bypass operation undergone by Mr Yeltsin in 1996.
The varying explanations canvassed for this coup de theBatre had several points in common. They assumed that the government’s dismissal had little to do with its recent record. They concentrated instead on Mr Yeltsin’s failing health, and on Mr Chernomyrdin’s prospects for succeeding him-whether at the next election, scheduled for 2000, or sooner, should Mr Yeltsin be incapacitated. There was also much wondering as to the role played by Boris Berezovsky, a business tycoon and political fixer who claimed some of the credit for Mr Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996. Mr Berezovsky was known to be scheming for 2000; but views differed as to whether this week’s events had unfolded quite as he wished.
Mr Yeltsin himself linked the sacking of Mr Chernomyrdin to the 2000 election: he said he wanted the dismissed prime minister to “concentrate on political preparations for the forthcoming election”, which would “decide the future of Russia”. But then he conspicuously held back from endorsing Mr Chernomyrdin as a candidate. This strange formulation encouraged contradictory readings.
Had Mr Chernomyrdin angered Mr Yeltsin by advancing presidential ambitions of his own? If so, then Mr Yeltsin had sacked him to make it clear that he alone would decide such things. Mr Yeltsin would choose a new dauphin, or even resolve to run again himself. This last possibility was reinforced on Tuesday when Mr Yeltsin’s representative in the Constitutional Court, Sergei Shakhrai, said the Kremlin was ready for the court to consider whether Mr Yeltsin was allowed legally to run again. At present Mr Yeltsin is serving his second term as president of Russia, the maximum allowed by law. But when he was first elected, in 1991, Russia was still only a part of the Soviet Union; perhaps, the bright-eyed speculation has run, he is still entitled to another, Russia-alone term.
The alternative view of Mr Chernomyrdin’s fate was a benign one: that he was being given the time and the freedom needed to mount the strongest possible challenge in 2000. A long spell out of government would help to distance him from the pains and the unpopularity of Russia’s current attempts at reform. Mr Yeltsin would give his endorsement later, when he was no longer quite so sensitive about being seen as a lame duck himself.
When in doubt, be decisive
In fact, as the dust settled, it grew more and more difficult to believe that Mr Yeltsin was doing Mr Chernomyrdin any sort of favour. And Mr Chernomyrdin himself certainly seemed perplexed by the way he had been treated.
A grey ex-Soviet bureaucrat two weeks shy of his 60th birthday, he had served Mr Yeltsin loyally through good times and bad. He had changed policy when told to, rubbed along well enough with opposition leaders, and found coalitions in parliament when they were most needed. Not unkindly, he was said never to have had an idea of his own. Small wonder he looked askance at his rewards-an ambiguous shove that could be either upwards or downwards, plus an Order of the Fatherland (Second Class). Asked at a press conference on Monday for the immediate cause of his sacking, he was unable to give one.
It says much for the tenor of Russian politics that this and other confusions of the moment were swallowed with barely a murmur of disquiet by the financial markets and with no more than a few uneasy gulps by international opinion. The government elected to hold off until Tuesday a DM1.25 billion ($680m) Eurobond issue first planned for Monday. But the Russian stockmarket recovered from an early dip to close on Monday with a marked gain.
Yet Mr Yeltsin had taken a momentous decision in a highly impulsive way, at a troubled time for Russia and a worrying time for a man of his health and temperament. It was a momentous decision in policy terms, because unless the replacement government arrives swiftly and commands immediate confidence hopes of investment and growth in Russia this year will be dashed. Russia will have missed the one “normal” year of the political cycle left to it before the run-up to a parliamentary election in late 1999 and a presidential election due in 2000.
It was a momentous decision in constitutional terms, too. The loss of Mr Chernomyrdin has raised the stakes sharply should Mr Yeltsin die or be incapacitated in office. Power must pass to the prime minister while new elections are organised. At best, the next prime minister will be somebody less seasoned than Mr Chernomyrdin, less able to hold the ring.
Far worse will come if Mr Yeltsin dies before he has persuaded the lower house of parliament, the Duma, to approve a new prime minister, as the constitution says he must. That process could take months, and will certainly do so if the Duma refuses to approve any of the three nominations Mr Yeltsin is allowed, and if Mr Yeltsin then exercises his right to dissolve the Duma. On the passage of power when Russia has no confirmed prime minister, the constitution is silent. Politicians may not be.
These are far from empty worries. Mr Yeltsin has never been quite the same man since his heart surgery. He has been largely an absentee ruler, chairing meetings in the Kremlin but spending weeks on end in his country house outside Moscow. When visiting Sweden in December he thought he was in Finland. Last week he cancelled a summit with 11 other leaders of former Soviet states, claiming a sore throat. The Kremlin fended off stories that he had surrendered to a fit of depression. Mr Yeltsin switched the site of this week’s summit with Germany’s Helmut Kohl and France’s Jacques Chirac from Yekaterinburg to Moscow-a caprice that would have raised fewer eyebrows had Yekaterinburg’s government not just spent $11m doing up the buildings in which the three leaders were to pass less than 24 hours.
Arguably, therefore, mental or physical strain may have played a part in Mr Yeltsin’s decision to dismiss his government. It was an act of obvious haste, and it came just when the government might reasonably have claimed to be doing rather well. Russia had seemed, after all, to be seeing off the winter-long financial crisis afflicting emerging markets around the world. Foreign money was coming back. There were signs of a long-awaited economic recovery: GDP and industrial output both grew last year. Perhaps Mr Yeltsin was recognising such things when he said in a four-minute recorded speech on Monday that “the resignation of the government does not mean a change in our political course.” But that begged the question of what the exercise was meant to mean at all.
The faces in the shadows
To arrive at a robust explanation of why Mr Yeltsin took such a step, Russian commentators have been looking into the shadows beyond him. They have wondered aloud whether a so-called “oligarchy” of bankers and industrialists, credited with controlling much of the economic and political power in Russia, may have given events a shove for reasons of their own.
The notion of a new Russian oligarchy dates back to what happened during Mr Yeltsin’s re-election campaign in 1996. A dozen or so business leaders then pooled their efforts to support him, and more particularly to shut out his Communist challenger, Gennady Zyuganov. They procured the management expertise and media exposure needed to revive Mr Yeltsin’s flagging campaign, and took credit afterwards for his victory. They not unnaturally then claimed favours in terms of appointments, franchises, tax breaks, cheap loans and rigged privatisations.
The leader of the re-election effort was Mr Berezovsky, who had made a fortune in a career that had begun its rocket-like ascent in the business of car-dealing. Mr Berezovsky spoke afterwards as though the government was in debt to himself and his friends, and should behave accordingly.
This year Mr Berezovsky has been saying that “Russian business” should ensure an acceptable successor to Mr Yeltsin. At least until this week, the obvious man for that role would have been Mr Chernomyrdin. The former prime minister embodied the status quo, he spoke the tycoons’ language, he was very nearly one of them himself. From 1989 to 1992 he had run Gazprom, the state gas monopoly, which he helped turn from a government ministry into the country’s biggest firm. He has been accused ever since of emerging from Gazprom with a huge secret fortune. He has denied all such suggestions.
Mr Chernomyrdin may lack charisma. He does poorly in the opinion polls. His political movement, Nash Dom Rossiya (”Our Home is Russia”), was a poor thing pumped up merely by its self-importance at being the “prime minister’s party”. He would need plenty of help were he to run for election. But help-in supplying money and media coverage to him, and in denying it to others-was precisely what the oligarchy could provide.
The oligarchs may, however, have had some lingering doubts about Mr Chernomyrdin. As prime minister, he was powerful enough to deal with them as equals. At best, they would be trading favours with him rather than dispensing them. Only if Mr Chernomyrdin were obliged to seek power without the patronage of the state at his disposal would the oligarchs have him at their mercy. They could then bind and compromise him in ways that made him securely “their man”. As of this week, they have their chance.
Did Mr Berezovsky engineer Mr Chernomyrdin’s dismissal in order to take control of him? It is a possible reading of events. It would help to explain why Mr Berezovsky was calling Mr Chernomyrdin “unelectable” on Sunday but on Wednesday was praising him to the skies. Mr Berezovsky may have prodded Mr Yeltsin into action by arguing that Mr Chernomyrdin’s government was not doing enough to deal with social problems, such as wage arrears. Such issues are known to preoccupy the president. Mr Berezovsky would have had plenty of channels through which to relay his views. He is an “adviser” to the president’s chief of staff, Valentin Yumashev, whom he used to employ. And the president’s daughter and adviser, Tatyana Dyachenko, is a close friend.
I saw you, he exclaimed
There is, however, another view of Mr Berezovsky’s role in the events that reached their climax on Monday. He may indeed have been attempting to control the succession, but his scheming may have gone badly wrong. By this reckoning too, Mr Berezovsky identified Mr Chernomyrdin as “his candidate”. But the two moved too quickly and carelessly. Worried by Mr Yeltsin’s failing health, they-and others in positions of power-began planning for a transition well before 2000. At this point, the second interpretation of events takes a different turn. It argues that Mr Yeltsin, having got wind of what Messrs Berezovsky and Chernomyrdin were up to, struck back.
For the moment this version ranks as the more plausible. It helps to explain the incoherence of Monday’s outburst: the truth behind the whole business was something to which not even Mr Yeltsin could admit. It helps to explain why Mr Yeltsin wanted to lie low last week: he was making a big and painful calculation. It helps to explain, too, why Anatoly Chubais, the most bitter of Mr Berezovsky’s political opponents, was looking so cheerful when he was sacked on Monday. It was not merely that Mr Chubais had been promised a “golden parachute” in the form of the chairmanship of UES, the national power company. It was also that events seemed to be unfolding to Mr Berezovsky’s disadvantage.
How can these conflicting theories be tested? One way will be to watch the ebb and flow of political appointments in the days ahead. The key figure here may be Mr Yumashev, given his ties to Mr Berezovsky. If he loses his job in the next few weeks or months, that will be the outward sign of a serious reversal for Mr Berezovsky. If, to take a counter-example, Mr Chubais is denied that job at UES, that will be a signal of Mr Berezovsky’s renewed strength.
The choice of a new prime minister, though a far more conspicuous affair, may be less revealing. Mr Kiriyenko may perhaps be allowed to keep the job precisely because he is too slight a figure to give offence. Weak government is much to the oligarchy’s taste. Weak governments are easier to dictate terms to, and there is still much wealth lurking within the Russian state that the charmed circle would like to grab.
One part of that wealth is Rosneft, the last big state-owned oil firm, for which a partial privatisation by international tender opened this week. A stake of 75% is on offer, valued at more than $2 billion. Bidding stays open until May 26th, and will give another outward sign of the covert balance of power. If the fairness or openness of the sale is frustrated in any way, that will signal a victory for the oligarchy, which would be revealing its preference for having Rosneft cheaply to itself.
Either a miracle, or . . .
Such indicators may fairly quickly help to clear the uncertainty about Mr Yeltsin’s motives. But the political uncertainty his actions have set in train may endure much longer. It is not merely that the personnel and the policies of the new government are in doubt. Many ministers will doubtless be reappointed, but key ones-Mr Chernomyrdin, Mr Chubais-have been lost. It is more a question of competence. Russia is, and always has been, alarmingly short of effective administrators. The best of them in the outgoing government was Mr Chubais, which makes his dismissal an especially extravagant gesture.
Any new prime minister, however good, will need months to learn his job, and Russia has no smooth-running civil service to carry ministers along while they learn, or fail to learn. On the contrary, public service is a mire of indolence and corruption. Politicians and bureaucrats who try to shake things up face pressure and temptation everywhere. Boris Nemtsov, a first-deputy prime minister who looks set to survive the upheaval, explained last week what a struggle it was to make honest decisions. “Everybody seems supportive,” he said. “But when it comes to signing, nobody signs.”
So it will be something of a miracle if the pieces that Mr Yeltsin has thrown up into the air this week do fall to earth as a well-formed and well-functioning government. If they do, another miracle may ensue: the new ministers may find the rudiments of an economic recovery in place. A successful sale of Rosneft would offer a model for future privatisations. A desperately needed new tax code is almost ready to go to parliament. A workable bankruptcy law has been passed. Some big foreign direct investments are being made this year, notably in the oil and motor industries, which could help to revive the manufacturing base. Portfolio investors still have a fair degree of confidence in the Russian central bank and in the rouble, making further reductions in domestic interest rates a fair hope.
Against that possibility, however, must be set another, at least as great. The black prognosis is that this upheaval has put Russia on a slippery slope of uncertain government and continuing crony-capitalism that leads straight into the elections of 1999 and 2000, when demagoguery and popular discontent will again take charge of public life. It may even be that, if Mr Yeltsin dies without having installed a heavyweight prime minister, constitutional order will give way. In Mr Chernomyrdin, Russia has lost its second-best constitutional safeguard. His going from government may yet come to be regretted far more than his presence there was ever admired.
Countries with strong artistic traditions often promote their culture by sending exhibitions of paintings and sculpture abroad. But there is more to a nation’s culture than mere art, and London’s Science Museum believes that it has spotted a gap in the market. This week saw the opening in Japan of an unusual travelling exhibition: a display of pioneering British technology. Among the old masters sent to Kobe are Henry Bessemer’s original converter for making iron into steel, John Logie Baird’s first television, and George Stephenson’s “Rocket”, the steam locomotive that ushered in the age of mass transport. –>
Make them truly democratic: Yeltsin’s elections.
Elections in Russia, which President Boris Yeltsin has set for December, will be conducted according to the government’s script, under the government’s control and by the government’s rules. The Central Election Commission, appointed by Yeltsin and composed mainly of turncoat former deputies, is denying the right to participate in its work not just to representatives of the opposition but to anyone with any degree of competence.
Throughout October, the commission was concerned mainly with mapping out electoral districts. This was done in such a manner that regions that had voted against Yeltsin in the April 1993 referendum had an average of 590,000 voters per electoral mandate, while in pro-Yeltsin districts the corresponding figure was only 456,000. On the scale of the country as a whole, this means that millions of votes cast for opposition candidates will simply not count.
In any case, Western election observers will watch only the people actually putting their ballots into the box. The preparation for the elections and the formation of local election commissions, which will determine the registration of candidates locally and are supposed to create a level playing field, are now under way, but without outside scrutiny. Foreigners, to use a Russian saying, will see how we gobble the porridge, but now how it was cooked up. The independence of international observers will be severely restricted. They must register with the election commission, which may at any time strip them of their authority or even deport them.
The present lack of oversight is, in itself, sufficient reason to refuse to participate in the forthcoming elections, just as democratic circles in Russia refused in 1905 to participate in the rigged “Bulygin Duma.” But a boycott would make sense only if the majority of the opposition were united. On the contrary, almost all opposition forces, from the Centrists to the Communists, which criticized Yeltsin’s plans to elect the “illegal parliament,” have already announced their willingness to take part in the vote. Only the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia, the Party of Labor and the left-wing faction of the social democrats are boycotting. All this reflects the weakness of legal and civil consciousness in Russia. But what else can one expect in a country that, after more than seventy years of Communist dictatorship, shifted with hardly any interim stage to authoritarian “presidential rule”?
In such a context Western political activists could still take some initiative. I am not talking about those people who made demagogic pronouncements of “support for democracy” while simultaneously endorsing the assassination of the first and only freely elected Parliament of Russia. Rather, I am talking about those who sincerely desire to see a free Russia. There must be international control over the preparations for the elections and over the work of the electoral commissions. And this must be done immediately, not in December when it will be too late to have any effect.
ALEKSANDR LIKHOTAL
Moscow
President Boris Yeltsin’s repudiation of his promise to submit to early presidential elections somewhat cooled the West’s enthusiasm for him. Although Yeltsin later said that his decree on constitutional reform, which had set presidential elections for June 12, 1994, still stands, his earlier statement inspired fears abroad: If he violates his own promises in internal politics, will he be an unreliable partner in foreign policy matters? For us in Russia there are many other questions that for some reason remain barely touched upon by the Western media.
After the events of October 3 and 4, which ended with Yeltsin’s tanks crushing the Parliament, we live in a different Russia. The extremism of the authorities has removed moral constraints from politics and has split society. Imposed revolution is winning out over reform. What can be done to keep Russia from sliding further into the abyss? There are many possible prescriptions, but I am interested in a way out of the current crisis that preserves the momentum of democratic development; only a democratic perspective can insure a worthy future for Russia. Proposals to creep toward democracy through authoritarianism are illusory because they are politically untenable and because of Russian traditions and experience. Those who say “Well, we’ll just repress the opposition and then build a society based on the rule of law” are naive.
Examining the course of events, one begins to wonder whether Russia should have begun the reforms at all. What was the point? To replace the all-powerful Communist Party with a single guiding and ruling (or “democratizing”) party? Or to prove that we cannot get by without an unchanging and all-powerful nomenklatura entrenching itself in the legislative and executive branches? I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard Sergei Filatov, the head of Yeltsin’s administration, declare that Yeltsin’s proposed constitution provision allowing a minister to serve simultaneously in the legislature was not in and of itself undemocratic. This principle would be fine under a parliamentary form of government. But Yeltsin’s constitution calls for a presidential republic, and in such a republic any attempt to implement this principle would lead directly to the usurpation of power by a small oligarchic group and the establishment of a dictatorship.
Riding a wave of euphoria after the “October victory,” the authorities have practically eliminated the opposition, although they have tried in every way possible to prove just the opposite. With typical Bolshevik confidence in their own infallibility, they again want to convince us that they will use undemocratic methods temporarily because they have no other choice. How many times has that already happened in Russian history. We all know how it ends.
How legitimate can parliamentary elections be at all when they are based on a presidential decree and not on the 1989 Law on Elections? Can such elections really give the government a mandate to carry out enormous, complex reforms when only 25 percent of registered voters need participate for them to be declared valid, as allowed by the new and hastily adopted rules? Theoretically, a candidate could win with less than 10 percent of the vote.
More generally, why was it deemed necessary to hold elections so quickly? So that the opposition would not have time to regroup? This would explain the Yeltsinites’ clever plan to allow two large and well-organized opposition forces, the People’s Party of Free Russia and the Communist Party, to participate in the elections, but only well after the campaign had already begun. In fact, the government’s delaying action stemmed not from the October events but from the “Polish syndrome”–the fear that like the Poles, Russians might vote out the current government in favor of the leftist opposition.
Why did the Yeltsin leadership take complete control of the work of the commissions that are to supervise the elections? Where else in the world does the executive branch do this? It’s like a soccer game in which the captain of one of the teams is referee. The Yeltsinites can argue that the executive must take charge because there is no legislative branch at the moment. But the absence of the latter only makes it that much more important to preclude all possible suspicion of ruling-party abuse of procedures and vote-counting.
The Yeltsinites should understanding that the October events were not a rear-guard battle against the forces of yesterday; they reflected a wave of social discontent that adventurists tried to harness. Russia needs a search for agreement that takes into consideration the interests of all the various social groups, not a “war against the opposition.” If the President continues to listen exclusively to the “democrats” around him, the authorities will soon find themselves in conflict not only with their opponents but also with all of society. What then? Another state of emergency?
For this reason, it is extremely important to get back to the rule of law, to the constitutional field of politics. Outside this field, the only game possible is one without any rules, in which the basic argument will always be force.
Conclusion: Elections must be so free and so democratic that the authorities cannot set up a new one-party model. It does not matter how many parties compete in the elections so long as a real opposition is able to operate. What must be done to guarantee this?
[section] Elections should be postponed for a month or two to allow all political parties sufficient time to prepare for them. Sources of campaign finance must be publicy disclosed and discussed.
[Section] For the elections to be legitimate, the repuired level of participation must be raised to 50 percent of registered voters, as it was before.
[Section] The Central Election Commission and its local affiliates should give equal representation to all political forces. Otherwise the governemnt will be suspected of following the Stalinist precept that “it’s not important who votes, it’s important who counts the votes.”
[Section] No one should be allowed to hold posts in both the executive and legislative branches. The principle of separation of powers was one of the most important achievements of the young Russian democracy since the late 1980s. And considering the catastrophic state of the economy, ministers should be working twenty-five hours a day rather than getting involved in election campaigns.
[Section] All political forces participating in the elections must be guaranteed equal access to the media, including state-controlled television. Let’s hope the authorities will allow this–if not on their own initiative, then at least under the pressure of world opinion.
DANIEL SINGER
“The United States does not easily support [’e suspension of parliaments. But these are extraordinary times.” Thus spoke Secretary of State Warren Christopher in October in Moscow, where the announced President Clinton’s proposed mid-January visit. The step was clearly designed to Signal U.S. approval of the Russian elections scheduled for December 12, even though under the best of circumstances those elections will be terribly biased. Why did Christopher enact such a comedy? Because, he said, President Clinton is full of admiration for the “courage” of Boris Yeltsin in his struggles for “democracy” and “free-market reform.”
The shelling of the Russian Parliament is not the only thing our “democrats” have to swallow. They must not cover up or rationalize actions by the Yelstin government that have, to put it midly, a very remote relationship with democracy:L seizure of total control over telvision, management of the other mass media, bans on political parties and newspapers. Freedom, it would seen, depends on the whim of the master. Thus Pravda and Sovetskaya Rossivya were graciously told that they could resume publication–if they charged their names and their editors!
The manner in which the new consititution is being introduced is even odder. The draft produced by a special conference spfonsored by Yeltsin has now been rewritten by his servants to make it even more to his measure. It will become law if it is approved by half the electorate, but whatever happens, it will not be debated by any parlimentary assembly, neither the old Supreme Soviet nor the new Federal Assembly provided for in the draft. In announcing thsi procedure, Yeltsin revealed he no longer intends to hold a presidential election next June. Sergei Filatov, head of his administration, explained that the original promise to hold an election was no longer binding. Once you have sent in the tanks, who cares about a broken pledge? (Yeltsin’s later statement implying that the election was on after all was even less binding.)
If you are unconcerned about constitutional niceties, you may be shocked by the “ethnic cleansing” in Moscow. The emergency laws have enabled police in the capital to carry out mass raids against Causcasians, who are being beaten up and deproted by lthe thousands. (In Russia “Caucasian” refers to a denizen of the Caucasus-Armenians, Georgians and other Chechens–whom Russians regard as drakies.) Yeltsin’s advocates defend the crackdown on the grounds that the “Caucasian mafia” dominated the food market and the a majority of Muscovites approve. Yet was it necessary to attack only one of the many mafias, selected on the basis of ethnicity and thus pandering to the lowest instincts of Russians? While the police raids do not go unreported in the Western press, they fail to provoke the worth of our editorialists, once so full of moral indignation over brelaches of democracy in Eastern Europe.
Do I hear voices from the right jeering at the cheek of someone of the left preaching against double standards in the coverage of Russia? There is, alas, an element of historical truth in the charge. For many years, a good section of the Western left, for all sorts of reasons (the end justified the means, the future was being forged in the Soviet Union, etc.), turned a blind eye toward, or even glorified, crimes committed in the name of socialism. Though the sin is an ancient one and the number of unconditional supporters of the Soviet Union dwindled in the last quarter-century, the left is still paying a price. For many people, and not only in Eastern Europe, socialism is still associated with Soviet repression, with the gulag.
What is exasperating is that indulgence for Stalin’s crimes ran directly counter to what the left stands for. If socialism is a movement from below, if it means a gradual conquet by the people, changing themselves as they change society, then domocracy is the very air it breathes. Freedom is “always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently”; “without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every pubic institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.” Those quotations are from a text written by Rosa Luxemburg seventy-five years ago, when to use the term “democratic socialism” was like saying buttery butter.
But didn’t genuine socialists mock bourgeois democralcy and its formal rights? They did and, since the value of a freedowm is most appreciated when one is deprived of it, they mayt well have altered the emphasis after Russia’s bitter experience–the emphasis, though not the criticism itself. They had described bourgeous constitutional rights as formal because they were insufficiently democratic. The did not propose to abolish them but to give them a full meaning by filling them with social content through economic justice and equality. Even today you cannot define democracy as one person, one vote and postulate the equality of voters in a society where, say, financier Geroge Soros claims he pockets more than $1 billion in a week of clever speculation–an amount an American on the minimum wage would earn only after working for more than 100,000 years (no the printer did not make a mistake), provided she was lucky enough to work a forty-hour week each year.
Differing analysis of our society, and the political consequences drawn from them, will always separate the socialist from the liberal. But that does not mean lthey cannot stand together, on the same platform or on parallel ones, in the struggle for basic freedoms. Indeed, in the campaign against repression in Russia, such an alliance is indispensable for the prosaic reason that the liberal voice carries more weight both in Washington and in Moscow. Let the true beleivers in the rights of humankid stand up and be counted. Let them condemn police programs in Moscow and violations of the elementary rights of the opposition. Let them send honest observers at once to monitor this electoral campaign–paticularly to places far from Moscow–to prevent the vote from being a total farce. To claim that observers sent by the National Endowment for Democracy, as was proposed by the U.S. government, will keep the Yeltsin boys in check is like sending fellow travelers to insure the fairness of the poll in stalin’s time. As to the propagandists, high and low, who are determined to present apparatchik Yelstin turned Czar Boris as the apostle of freedom, if they carry on much longer, “free market democracy” will join “the white man’s burden” in the lexicon of capitalist cant. –>
Czar Boris awakes.
Yeltsin abruptly fired his entire cabinet, apparently in attempt to bolster his rule and to prevent any coup attempt. Top officials maintain that the sudden decree will not bring any change to Yeltsin’s policy.
Yeltsin fires his ministers, but can he rule alone?
MOSCOW–Only a few close advisers, huddled at Boris Yeltsin’s country residence, Gotky 9, were in on the secret. And in the crucial hours leading up to his bombshell decree dismissing the entire cabinet, extraordinary steps were taken to keep it a secret. The special telephone lines between key government offices were shut off, preventing ministers from sharing information or rallying political support. Immediately after his TV address to the nation, Yeltsin met with the heads of the military, the domestic intelligence service, and his bodyguards to secure their loyalty.
In fact, Yeltsin’s move had all the hallmarks of a pre-emptive strike to prevent a coup. There is no public evidence that former Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin or any other cabinet member actually was plotting to take power. But Yeltsin, who has been sick, seems to have been both irritated and alarmed that his ministers were increasingly ruling in his name, sapping his authority and prestige. Chernomyrdin, in particular, had unofficially begun a campaign to succeed Yeltsin in the next elections in the year 2000-relegating Yeltsin to the status of lame duck. The former prime minister also had immodestly let it be known during a recent meeting with Vice President Al Gore in Washington that he, rather than Yeltsin, was really running the show in Moscow. “As soon as Chernomyrdin started to act like a successor to the president, he started to acquire power from the president, and he became a real danger,” says Russian political scientist Nikolai Petrov.
Fresh approach. In his TV speech, Yeltsin said he was firing the entire cabinet because it was “lacking in dynamism and initiative, fresh approaches and ideas.” But Foreign Minister Yevgeni Primakov and other top officials stressed that Yeltsin was not making any radical shift in policy. The president’s own comments and demeanor indicated that the real purpose of the mass firing was to demonstrate that Russia’s political universe still revolves around him and him alone. With boyish delight in his caprice, Yeltsin chose the youngest, least experienced, and least well known member of his old cabinet to be the new prime minister. Taking 35-year-old Sergei Kiriyenko by the arm on Friday, Yeltsin ceremonially ushered him into Chernomyrdin’s old office in front of TV cameras and pointed to a portrait of himself. “Don’t knock it off the wall until 2000,” Yeltsin said.
Yeltsin also warned the obstreperous State Duma, or lower house of parliament, not to fight against Kiriyenko’s appointment. If the Duma rejects Yeltsin’s nominee three times, the president can dissolve the parliament. “Save time,” Yeltsin told lawmakers in a commanding tone. “Approve the new government as soon as possible, and off we go!”
Reformers generally agreed that the change presages no departure from Yeltsin’s overall policy of reform. But as a particularly flagrant exhibit of Yeltsin’s penchant for one-man rule, it has dismayed many liberals. “This pattern of action is very far from the dreams and expectations of the second generation of liberals in Russia,” said Moscow constitutional lawyer William Smirnov. “The reality is that these actions are very much in the tradition of the authoritarian personalized style of leadership. It’s very reminiscent of the Soviet style, or the personal regimes of Latin America.”
Yet the reality of Yeltsin’s predicament is that, at 67 and chronically ill, lacking his old endurance, far below the peak of his popularity, and never very solid in his grasp of free-market economics, he cannot possibly govern alone. He may have been moved to humiliate his subordinates precisely because he is so dependent on them.
Kiriyenko’s main advantages to Yeltsin are that he has no power base and that he is a nonpolitical technocrat–just as Chernomyrdin was five years ago. A protege of popular First Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, Kiriyenko was appointed as minister of fuel and energy, his first government post, just last year. Before that, he ran a bank and an oil company in his hometown of Nizhni Novgorod, to generally high acclaim. “The company was foundering when he came here,” says Maksim Krokhin, an official at the Norsi Oil Co. “He stabilized the situation and worked out a strategic program to get us out of the crisis.”
No pay. Russia’s economic problems, of course, will be harder to fix. The worldwide drop in the price of oil, Russia’s main export, has cut state revenues. Wages owed to public employees, from soldiers to teachers, are once again growing at an unnerving pace (6.5 billion rubles at the end of January, 7.6 billion rubles a month later). Duma Speaker Gennadi Seleznyov, a leader of the Communist opposition, charges that Kiriyenko “lacks the economic experience that would enable him to be in charge of the huge Russian economy.” And even liberal observers are inclined to agree. “The work of this [new] government will depend on the ability and the readiness of the president to give Kiriyenko daily support in his dealings with the Duma and the regional governments,” says Andrei Kortunov, president of the Russian Science Foundation, a Moscow think tank. “Kiriyenko by himself won’t be able to do it. He just doesn’t have the advice, the contacts, the status that Chernomyrdin did.”
Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev and Primakov, the influential foreign minister, are among the few top officials that Yeltsin said he would reappoint. But Kiriyenko’s ascent may presage one change in Russian foreign policy: In January, he was one of the few Russian officials to criticize Primakov’s friendly line toward Iraq. Kiriyenko argued that pressing to lift sanctions on Saddam Hussein would only depress oil prices further.
Kiriyenko’s appointment was also claimed as a political victory by Boris Berezovsky, a millionaire Moscow financier who formerly served as secretary of Yeltsin’s security council and has been battling for influence with Chernomyrdin and other ministers. Recently injured in a snowmobiling accident in Switzerland, Berezovsky rose from his sickbed, rushed back to Moscow on the night before the president’s announcement, and predicted in a TV interview that the government was about to be dismissed. But press reports may have exaggerated his role. “My personal impression is that Boris Berezovsky didn’t know anything specific. I watched the broadcast several times, and I could see no evidence that he knew the decision was going to be taken the next day,” says Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist who studies the Russian business elite.
Chernomyrdin’s fate is unclear. Yeltsin said he had “instructed” the former prime minister to “concentrate on political preparations” for the presidential election in 2000. But Chernomyrdin’s firing weakens his chances to succeed Yeltsin. The centrist party that he heads, Our Home Is Russia, received 10 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections when he was prime minister and “won’t even get half of that if he doesn’t have the prerogatives of office,” predicts Kortunov.
Besides Chernomyrdin, possible successors to Yeltsin include the reformer Nemtsov, Moscow’s powerful Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, charismatic retired Gen. Alexander Lebed, and Communist Party leader Gennadi Zyuganov. But Kiriyenko also has time to grow into his post and develop a following-as long as he does not try to take that presidential portrait off his wall prematurely.
Yeltsin’s surprises
JULY 1990: Yeltsin quits Communist Party and walks out ot its congress.
AUGUST 1991: Rallies opposition to har-line Communists who staged coup against Gorbachev.
DECEMBER 1992: Fires Acting Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, taps industrialist Victor Chernomyrdin.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1993: Dissolves legislature and calls new elections. Hard-line legislators barricade themselves in parliament. Troops storm the building.
JUNE/JULY 1996: fires best friend and bodyguard Alexander Korzhakov. Reappoints economic reformer Anatoli Chubais to manage his administration.
MARCH 1998: shakes up cabinet, names a neophyte as prime minister, and fires Chernomyrdin (shown with Yeltsin at a presidential hunting lodge in 1996).
With Bruce B. Auster in Washington –>
Boris in Autumn.
Pres Yeltsin’s failing health fosters uncertainties about the future of Russia’s political reforms and its relations with the US. US dealings with Yeltsin over NATO and the former Yugoslavia and Yeltsin’s possible successors are discussed.
BORIS YELTSIN CALLED IT “THE best meeting, the friendliest meeting, the most understandable meeting” he had ever had with Bill Clinton. But history may judge last week’s summit in Hyde Park, NY., differently. After Yeltsin collapsed in the Kremlin Thursday morning and had to be choppered to the hospital with an acute heart condition, it seemed possible that the two presidents’ meeting on Franklin Roosevelt’s old estate may have been their last. Aides hastened to describe Yeltsin’s condition as “less serious” than the heart attack last summer that kept the Russian president holed up in a sanitarium for a month. But they say it will be the end of November before Yeltsin picks up a normal work schedule. Even his saturnine aide Viktor Ilyushin, in the long tradition of Kremlin trusties who hate to reveal anything about their bosses, admitted that “the president’s condition does not inspire great optimism.”
Doctors were releasing little information about the Russian president’s condition, except to reassure reporters that he’d never lost consciousness. But a Kremlin source told Newsweek that Yeltsin had briefly blacked out, slumped on his desk, before a doctor revived him. just as worrisome, the only people allowed into his hospital room are his immediate family and bodyguards, some of whom have been known to double as political advisers - and not liberal ones.
There’s never been a good time for the president of Russia to collapse, and this isn’t one of them, either. Even if nuclear Armageddon no longer looms, there are still some deals Washington would like to do with Yeltsin. Most pressing is the peacekeeping force for Bosnia. Though the two president failed to work out details, they at least agreed the Russians should participate in some way. Deciding exactly how will grow more urgent if the three warring parties in the former Yugoslavia reach a peace agreement at talks scheduled to open in Dayton, Ohio, this week. Despite Yeltsin’s tough anti-NATO talk, he has accommodated the Clinton team on most issues they care about: economic reform, arms control, nuclear proliferation. “If you look back over his career, you have to say that Yeltsin is a Westernizer,” says Nikolai Andreyev, an editor at the weekly Obshchaya Gazeta.
If Yeltsin goes, does reform go with him? It’s a familiar question to those who remember the final days of Mikhail Gorbachev, and it’s just as relevant now as it was then–maybe more so. Back in 1991, Boris Yeltsin was an outspoken liberal, and the reins of power fell right from Gorbachev’s hands into his. This time round, it won’t be so simple. The former communists appear likely to win parliamentary elections slated for Dec. 17. Gen. Aleksandr Lebed, a gruffspoken nationalist with his own Congress of Russian Communities, has been stirring up big support on the campaign trail. If his slate of candidates does wen, Lebed will be even better positioned for presidential elections next June. Meanwhile, the candidate Washington quietly prefers, the businesslike Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, recently declared that he wouldn’t nm for president (not everyone believes him), and his party, Our Home Is Russia, performed limply in a recent provincial by-election. Should Yeltsin die in office, Chernomyrdin would succeed him -but must call presidential elections within three months.
If some combination of Communists and nationalists–what Russians call a “red-brown coalition” — were to come to power in December, it’s not clear what that would mean, even if Yeltsin were still in the picture. The nationalist demagogue Vladimir Zhirinovsky terrified the West, and the Yeltsin regime, too, when he won a plurality in the Duma two years ago. His wild rhetoric forced Yeltsin to take a more conservative bent but didn’t fundamentally alter Russia’s direction. Similarly, the young capitalist class in Moscow believes that former communists, despite their talk of slowing privatization and reinstalling government control over the economy, have actually bought into reform–even literally. Plenty of old communist managers are now shareholders themselves, and they like it that way. They may talk of rejecting cooperation with the West, but Russia simply doesn’t have the strength to reassert its former empire.
Still, Russia has clearly fallen out of love with the West, and that coolness (as in all failed romances) seems permanent. As ever, Russians still assume Western products are superior to theirs and that life in Western countries is easier; emigration remains high. But the sweeping euphoria about all things Occidental–a hallmark of the Gorbachev years–has long passed. So has the assumption that Western policies toward Russia are founded on good faith and good sense. Russian leaders suspected of pro-Western leanings now have to work doubly hard to counteract that perception. Yeltsin himself–the man U.S. policy is wrapped around- said in September that NATO expansion “will mean a conflagration of war throughout all of Europe, for sure, for sure.” This is the fellow who, on his first-ever trip to the Statue of Liberty in 1989, was moved to declare, “When I circled her twice in a helicopter, I felt twice as free as when I started.”
Weird friend: In truth, despite all the backslapping between the Russian and American presidents last week, the White House has always found Yeltsin to be a weird friend. Even as they watched the mutual hilarity, one Clinton aide confessed later, “we were wondering what Yeltsin might do next.” Maybe grab a baton and start conducting, as he did at a military ceremony in Berlin last year. And with a serious heart condition, the unpredictable Russian president becomes even more so. “There’s the possibility of political illness as well as physical illness,” says a Kremlin official. “He’s too divorced from reality. His statements are contradictory and it’s making things worse.”
Yeltsin’s very unpredictability makes it dangerous to count him out. He’s staged more than one successful comeback. But as a man who’s eaten too much fatty food, drunk too much vodka and suffered far too much stress on the job, Yeltsin has already outperformed the actuarial tables. He’s 64, and the life span of the average Russian male is only 57. “A man must live like a great bright flame and burn as brightly as he can,” Yeltsin once declared. “In the end he burns out. But this is better than a mean little flame.” That’s the kind of rhetoric that beguiled the Russian electorate in the first place. The idea that Yeltsin might die now, or at least pass from the scene, makes a lot of Russians nervous — they’ve had enough instability to last a lifetime–but his flame doesn’t burn very brightly for anyone anymore. This, it seems, is the autumn of Yeltsin. It may be a long Russian winter ahead. –>
A presidential portrait.
Boris Yeltsin heads the largest country in the world. The decisions that he makes affect us all, directly or indirectly. But what is he like personally? We offer you a glimpse of President Yeltsin, through the eyes of his staff, his family, and himself.
This piece is a composite from a series of interviews by freelance journalist Olga Kuchkina with officials who work closely with President Yeltsin. All of the people interviewed insisted on remaining anonymous, since the details they discussed are of a rather personal and subjective nature.
Q: The president has said that he wants to expand his sources of additional information. What does he mean?
A: He means that it is necessary to involve experts outside the Kremlin, who would provide him with independent information, even if it’s displeasing. Of course, he also reads many newspapers in order to gain first-hand information.
Q: It’s rumored that the president once came across something very uncomplimentary in one of the newspapers, threw it aside, and said he would never have that rag on his desk again. Is that accurate?
A: Something like that did happen once with Pravda. It’s very like him. He gets angry when he comes across abuse in the press — but he always asks for the next issue, all the same.
Q: Was he born that way, or does he owe his short temper to his years as a Communist Party functionary?
A: That’s the way he was born. He’s very vulnerable to criticism.
Q: If a citizen sends the president a letter, does it get through to him?
A: A team sorts out Mr. Yeltsin’s mail and summarizes it for him. Only the most serious and interesting letters reach him. He sometimes asks specifically to see the abusive ones — but letters consisting entirely of bad language are thrown in the wastebasket, of course.
Q: During the putsch attempt on October 3 and 4, 1993, one commentator said over the radio: “Thank you, Mr. Yeltsin. You’ve done your bit. Now go — to a monastery or wherever you like.” What did he feel in those days?
A: I don’t think the president had ever gone through anything so hard. When he used the word “tragedy” to describe it on television, he meant it. He felt involved in the public disorder and bloodshed. He did feel that he had sinned, and the idea of a monastery may in fact have occurred to him. He’ll never get away from the burden of his part in the tragedy. “I’m not a religious man, but I think I’ll come to God,” he said the other day. He feels the victims’ blood on him. That’s his cross.
The decision to order the assault on the parliament building was a terrible one to make, for him and for the people around him. We knew that as long as the rebels were there, they were able to pursue their ends. Some part of the army might have joined them — and the country would have plunged into civil war. Some of the documents from that time have yet to come to light, but we know for sure that the anti-reformers considered last autumn to be the moment to act (a sequence of actions was to build up, to be crowned by the reinstatement of Soviet rule on November 7). But we hoped that no blood would be spilled. The president stressed this again and again. We felt we could prevent it. That turned out to be impossible.
Q: Yeltsin is a good man who sees things on one level, and so events sometimes turn out differently than he expects. Maybe goodness isn’t enough, and one needs the gift of analysis — or an expert to stand by and say what can be expected of people of a different mentality?
A: Yeltsin is a huge and complicated person. Many of us have been working with him for years, every day, but we still don’t really know him. Here we have been talking about Yeltsin the man, but there is also Yeltsin the politician, with his cool mind and great foresight. Every moment, he is conscious that he is president of a vast country. He feels this responsibility with his heart and mind. But whatever his gift of calculation, practical politics aren’t a game of chess; there are always surprises.
Q: So the image of Yeltsin as mere resolution-signer is a false one, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s reference to the president’s advisers as “the king’s retinue” was unfair?
A: Zhirinovsky was trying to whip up public dissatisfaction. The president has an enormously complicated job, and he couldn’t do it without assistants. But experts are not the president. He might have made some wrong decisions, but Yeltsin is a man who knows when he has bungled, and says so — unlike Mikhail Gorbachev, for instance, who twists his way out of any predicament.
Yeltsin has an orderly mind and a rare memory. He can take up a new text and read it in no time, focusing on the center of the page — he sees the right and left edges in passing. Then he says, “I’m through.” Nobody believes him, and he recites the whole thing, word for word, to prove himself.
The practical side of the market reform came as quite a surprise to him. When Yegor Gaidar had just come to office as prime minister, he saw how quickly Yeltsin found his feet in the situation. Admittedly, Gaidar knew more about economics, as a scholar should — but in a matter of six weeks, the crew accepted Boris Yeltsin as their informal leader.
Q: Many people hate him like poison — some to a pathological degree. Why?
A: It’s hard to he indifferent to people like Boris Yeltsin. If he is hated, that means the haters are aware of his strength.
Mr. Yeltsin is very outspoken and can offend people at times. And then there are other reasons, which are beyond his control. Yeltsin became president during a time of trouble, when the Soviet Union fell apart. Many people felt robbed; they could no longer see themselves as citizens of a “great power.” And they blame the president for that.
Q: Well, how does he feel about the breakup of the Soviet Union?
A: It is a very painful thing for him, but he knows that he was not to blame for the breakup. It was the result of an objective crisis in the system, which was stronger than any individual.
Q: What are the president’s most important strategic tasks?
A: The main thing is to strengthen the Russian economy. This can be done only via a free market. Consequently, this country needs market reform. Then there’s the outdated Soviet communist system, which has to be coped with. There are other tasks, too. He sees his presidential mission as a paving of the way. This has to be done so that our successors can continue the job. –>
The Yeltsin Legacy.
Two days before Boris Yeltsin resigned on December 31, a retired captain in the Russian navy, Alexander Nikitin, was acquitted of espionage in a St. Petersburg courtroom and released from custody. Nikitin’s alleged crime was passing information about Russian nuclear submarines to a Norwegian environmental group. The judge ruled that the suit had been brought under an ex post facto law in “direct violation of the constitution.”
As far as anyone, including Nikitin’s lawyers, can gather, this is the first time in Russian history that the secret police–the FSB, successor to the KGB–has been forced to release a person it had accused of treason. Indeed the mere fact that the trial was open to the public is a miracle. A five-minute sentencing before a troika of KGB officers and a bullet in the back of the head in the basement of the Lubyanka prison, or a slow death by starvation in a faraway labor camp would have been Nikitin’s fate under the Soviet regime. This time, the FSB released a statement acknowledging that the ruling had been “reached on the basis of the law.”
Astonishing as it is, the Nikitin case is not an exception but part of a trend. In 1998, over 100,000 lawsuits were brought by ordinary citizens against government officials for illegal administrative actions, and in 80 percent of them, the courts ruled for the plaintiffs. Since the constitution requires that all capital cases be heard by juries, and only a few Russian provinces have begun to experiment with jury trials, capital punishment has been, in effect, abolished in Russia–a country that, along with the United States, China, and South Africa, led the world in executions just a few years back. The courts also have been throwing out–by the dozen–the Army’s cases against “deserters,” on the ground that the Army has violated their constitutional right to alternative service. And the courts have dismissed numerous suits against foreign religious “sects” brought by local authorities under the restrictive and xenophobic Law on Religious Freedom passed by the Duma over Yeltsin’s veto in 1997.
Peter Solomon of the University of Toronto traces these developments to the 1992 Law on the Status of Judges, which established life terms for judges and made the self-governing Congress of Judges the sole arbiter of judicial behavior, banning interference by state authorities. He calls the law “revolutionary.”
Russia’s legal revolution, virtually unnoticed in the West, is just one manifestation of the tectonic shift that took place during the eight years of the Yeltsin presidency. Boris Yeltsin shaped, inspired, led, and sustained atleast three revolutions at once: a political revolution, which established some key principles and institutions of democracy (freedom of speech and of the press, freedom of political opposition, free legislative and parliamentary elections, and the separation of powers); an economic revolution, which introduced private property and a market economy; and an anti-imperial revolution, which, for the first time in history, separated the state of Russia from its empire.
All great revolutions, in the end, fall short of their initial supporters’ hopes and take decades, sometimes centuries, to reach maturity. But perhaps no other great revolution has ever dismantled so crushing a legacy from the ancien regime with so little violence and ushered in a freedom so complete. The weight of the Soviet legacy, along with Yeltsin’s own obvious blunders and the efforts of a well-organized and determined opposition free to work its will, account for the tortuousness of Russia’s transition out of communism.
But to say that a revolution has failed to live up to its original promise is not to say that no revolution has taken place. The traditional ills of the Russian state–militarism, brutality, corruption, xenophobia, authoritarianism–have not been extinguished in Yeltsin’s eight years, but the barriers erected against their recurrence are stronger now than at any time in Russian history.
That this epochal accomplishment passed largely unmentioned in the reports and analyses of Yeltsin’s resignation is due, in equal measure, to Yeltsin’s own contradictory persona and the peculiar predilections of those who write about him. There have been two Yeltsins in the public eye. One, Yeltsin the politician, was the avid and competent greasy-pole climber, obsessed with power and its gaudy trappings, petty, jealous of competitors’ popularity, often crude and rude to subordinates, tolerant of (if not indeed complicit in) corruption. In many ways he ran the Kremlin like a Byzantine court (or a provincial party committee, where he spent 17 years), rife with intrigue, back-stabbing, favoritism, sudden firings, demotions, and promotions.
Co-existing with that Yeltsin–occasionally overlapping, sometimes clashing and retreating, but always distinct and resilient–has been Yeltsin the leader, a revolutionary and a visionary. In the fall of 1991, he, like Lincoln or de Gaulle, took over a nation in the midst of a mortal crisis and held it together. Not only did he cope with chaos and decay, but he forged, from scratch, a new state: proto-democratic, post-imperial, demilitarized, decentralized, and federalized; a new proto-capitalist economic system; and a new country, post-Soviet Russia.
It is the first Yeltsin that has dominated the news–an object of almost obsessive attention by those whom the great British philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin called “glass and plastic” historians–to whose ranks I would add journalists, editorialists, and sundry experts. These sages, Berlin wrote, “regard all facts as equally interesting,” and the result is “craven pedantry and blindness.” Most of what Americans know about Yeltsin they have learned from the writings of the glass-and-plastic crowd, works informed by the historical awareness of a fruit fly.
When all facts are treated as equal, Yeltsin’s credit card bills allegedly paid by the Swiss construction company Mabetex are the equivalent of the Treaty of Friendship he signed with independent Ukraine; his daughter’s Kremlin job is as momentous as his slashing of the nuclear arsenal by 60 percent and halving of the armed forces; his drinking and “erratic behavior” are as significant as Russia’s critical assistance in brokering a Serbian retreat from Kosovo and an end to NATO’s air war against Yugoslavia; and the “immunity” granted him upon retirement (hardly worth the paper it is written on) is as important as the departure of the last Russian soldier from the Skrunda radar base in western Latvia in October 1999, ending almost 300 years of Russian occupation of East-Central Europe.
But history is notoriously parsimonious and does not treat all facts as equally salient. Only a few years from now, the clutter of secondary and tertiary developments, which appear all-important today, will fade from memory, and what will be left standing is the towering edifice of Yeltsin’s achievement. Its fundamental elements not even professional Yeltsin-haters in Moscow and Washington can deny: Boris Yeltsin inherited a decaying, bankrupt, thoroughly militarized, and just as thoroughly corrupt Communist totalitarian empire and created the freest, most tolerant, most open state in Russian history–the first ever that is neither a monarchy nor a dictatorship. He will be remembered as the man who ended Soviet communism, dissolved the Russian empire, led the country while it coped with the enormous, painful shocks of a new economic, political, and social reality, and prevented a Communist restoration–without abrogating human rights and political liberties.
He will be remembered, as well, for forging an entirely novel national consensus on the rules of the game. As hundreds of polls of Russians, and Russian elites, across the ideological spectrum confirm, this consensus holds personal and political freedoms vital, dictatorship unacceptable, and government legitimate only if freely elected.
Great leaders do not leave under fire. De Gaulle resigned not during the 1968 crisis but 11 months later, after he had pulled France through. Yeltsin left not in August 1998–when the ruble collapsed and the Communist press in Russia and elite press in Washington and New York were announcing the end of the “Yeltsin regirne”–but 16 months later. A year ago, he was offered immunity (in exchange for surrendering most of his constitutional power to the Communist-dominated Duma) by prime minister Yevgeny Primakov, at a time when the country was reeling from the August shock and the Kremlin was extremely vulnerable. Yeltsin rejected the deal publicly and indignantly, and dared the Duma to impeach him. (The Communists, supported in the Duma by Grigory Yavlinsky’s Yabloko, tried to do this and failed.) It is laughable to think that a man for whom power and politics are lifeblood–who stood up to two tank divisions in August 1991 and delivered his first speech outside the besieged parliament building in an open squa re after he had been warned that enemy snipers were deployed on the roofs of the high-rise buildings around him–could be bullied out of power by “ultimatums” or pushed into retirement by anyone.
With their trademark disdain for the freely expressed opinions of ordinary Russians, the glass-and-plastic experts (who for years have been telling us that Yeltsin would never leave the Kremlin, would cancel elections, would call in the military) have ignored a crucial factor in the timing of the resignation: the results of the December 19 legislative elections. The Kremlin spokesman called these elections a “peaceful revolution,” and he did not exaggerate by much. For the first time since the end of the Soviet Union, pro-reform parties, blocs, and independent candidates have come close to a majority in the Duma. For the first time, all the major parties (including the Communists) have accepted the chief planks of Yeltsin’s economic agenda: privatization, integration into the world economy, lower inflation, tighter budgets, and a steady reduction of state control over the economy.
As in legislative elections in any other democracy, the electoral success of the administration was not an accident. In 1999, Russia’s economy is likely to post its first significant GDP growth, with industrial-sector growth as high as 8 percent. Last year, 12 million Russians traveled abroad. The incidence of car ownership has almost doubled since 1990. At the end of the Soviet regime, 1,200 new books were published; last year, there were 12,000. As Michael McFaul of the Carnegie Endowment reminds us, for 10 years pollsters have been asking Russians whether they and their families have “adjusted” to the new economic reality. Until last year, “yes” responses never exceeded 30 percent. In November, the figure was 55 percent.
At no time in the last eight years has the “de-Bolshevization of Russia”– which Boris Yeltsin embraced as his paramount goal in September 1991–seemed so secure. Unlike Yeltsin the politician, who is old, sick, and deeply unpopular, Yeltsin the leader has retired undefeated.
Leon Aron is Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, in Washington, DC. He is a frequent commentator on Russian affairs on national radio and TV programs. His new biography, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life, will be published in March by St. Martin’s Press, and will be available through Access Russia.
