RUSSIA: IT ISN'T JUST POLITICS AS USUAL

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, March 25, 1993                   TAG: 9303250592
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-14   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
RUSSIA: IT ISN'T JUST POLITICS AS USUAL
IF RUSSIA'S economic and political institutions were firmly imbued with the democratic spirit, the power struggle between President Boris Yeltsin and the Russian parliament might well be viewed as simply the inevitable give-and-take contentiousness of an open society.
But the world, including the American government, is right to see the struggle in Russia as more serious than that. It is possible the outcome will determine whether fledgling Russian democracy can endure.
In some ways, to be sure, events in Russia merely echo events in other nations with presidential forms of democratic government.
Americans, for example, are hardly unfamiliar with the idea of presidents clashing with Congress. Indeed, "gridlock" between Republican presidents and Democratic congresses became a watchword of the 1992 elections.
In France, for another example, sweeping parliamentary victories this past Sunday by an alliance of conservative parties are expected to isolate Socialist President Francois Mitterand, and have led to calls for Mitterand to resign before his seven-year term expires in 1995.
But White House-Congress gridlock was not seen as cause to fear for the immediate future of American democracy, nor is Mitterand's fate tied to the immediate survival of French democracy. In Russia, by contrast, there can be no such confidence.
The economic misery afflicting the Russian people accentuates the negative. It strengthens fears that the nation, in its desperation, might abandon the democratic experiment, might choose to cede the liberty of choosing. Desperation could make too many Russians forget that a command economy produced the crisis in the first place, and that economic reforms have proceeded too slowly to have made more than dents in the old system.
On this score, the struggle between Yeltsin and the parliament looks less like an echo of everyday democratic politics than like the disarray of the ill-fated Weimar Republic, the democratic German government after World War I that eventually gave way to the Third Reich.
On this score, too, it would pay the Western democracies - who have much to gain with a democratically stable Russia, and much to lose without one - to dig deeper into their pockets to assist Yeltsin (assuming he stays in power) and Russian democracy in a very tough transition from imperial communism.
Economic conditions in Russia would stress many an established democracy. Preserving democracy under such conditions is doubly difficult in a country where the legitimacy of many procedures and even of the basic constitution is uncertain, where concepts like shared power and loyal oppositions are novelties, where there is no thriving private sector to provide multiple unofficial reins on official public-sector authority.
The new Russia has many of the forms of democracy. But so did the old Soviet Union, with its nominally independent court system, its nominally representative congresses and its nominal elections that the Communists always won with 99 percent of the vote.
Without democratic ways of thinking, democratic habits, a democratic spirit, the forms of democracy are empty vessels. What the world is anxious to learn about the new Russia is how much of the substance of democracy has been poured into those vessels.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB