Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 31, 1993 TAG: 9311030388
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN-THOR DAHLBURG LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: MOSCOW LENGTH: Long
\ His eyes narrowed in a Tatar-like squint, a roguish smile on his lips, the master of the Kremlin could not conceal his mood of triumph. His opponents, he said, had ``reached their last 100 meters after running 3,000'' and were huffing on their last breath.
``Now there is a clear authority, and this authority is acting,'' a hulking Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, in his shirt sleeves, his beefy arms flapping to emphasize a point, assured a nationwide TV audience from his Kremlin sanctum on Sept. 26. ``And it is acting resolutely.''
Five days earlier, he had dissolved the Russian legislature, which then defiantly elected Vice President Alexander Rutskoi as ``acting president'' and holed up in its gleaming white headquarters while supporters by the thousands rallied behind barricades.
It was not until this month that Yeltsin won his long-distance race. His military bombarded the riverside Parliament building with 122 mm tank shells to bring his supposedly winded foes to heel. Like his czarist predecessors, who summoned the Cossacks and their horsewhips to disperse striking workers or restive peasants, Yeltsin's last and best argument for his legitimacy was naked force.
He had been embarrassingly incorrect yet again in his assessment of the politics and social life of this country for which he once seemed to have a mysterious, intuitive grasp. ``It seems we have something in our bloodstream that makes us overestimate our hopes and find ourselves hostages to them,'' the presidential chief of staff, Sergei Filatov, reflected during the siege of the White House. For many Russians, Filatov's words would be an apt summary.
Yeltsin, the 62-year-old son of a Urals bricklayer, had been such a populist phenomenon in 1989 that he won a niche in the Guinness Book of Records under ``highest personal majority,'' for obtaining 5,118,745 of 5,722,937 votes cast in his bid to represent Moscow in the Soviet Parliament.
Yet for months, there had been a pervasive sense that things were going awry, that the experiment with democracy and a supply-and-demand economy was, as Russians say, ``going off the rails.'' Intrigue was replacing governance, and corruption was so rife that government ministers were telling journalists that they had opened overseas bank accounts. And as in the twilight of Leonid Brezhnev's 18-year reign, rumors were flying that the man in the Kremlin was ill, perhaps dying. Yeltsin and his followers put most of the blame for Russia's woes squarely on the uneasy but virulent alliance of rabble-rousing Communists and Western-hating nationalists who had come to control the two-tiered Parliament - the Congress of People's Deputies and the Supreme Soviet - and who were checkmating the president's reform agenda.
But the roots of Yeltsin's predicament go far deeper than a Parliament turned rebellious, and many of his troubles are of his own making. Two years ago, the husky Siberian's courage stirred the world as he marshaled the defense of democracy behind flimsy barricades at the same marble-faced building that he ordered stormed this month. What happened in this powerful country whose stability is vital to the world?
``Yeltsin committed more mistakes than even his opponents could have hoped for,'' says historian Yuri N. Afanasiev, a comrade-in-arms during the early days. Yeltsin's political touch has been wanting, his economic vision blurred.
The president promised his people prosperity, but he now presides over a country where, according to his own government's statistics, half of all families with children live below the official poverty line. A ``reformer'' and a ``democrat,'' he can be as brutal with allies and adversaries as any neo- Bolshevik, and he has created many of his own worst enemies - the leaders of the failed 1993 October Revolution among them. He has an economic dream for Russia that includes the supermarkets that left him slack-jawed with awe on visits to America, but he has lacked an effective strategy for bringing it to life.
The inability to bring off a rapid, if painful, restructuring of Russia's economy has been Yeltsin's worst failing. The president, who as a boy lived in a workers' barracks so cold that he kept from freezing only by sleeping with the family goat, staked his future on achieving a better lot for Russians, and fast. ``I want their lives to improve before my own eyes, that is the most important thing,'' he once said.
In November 1991, the hour for young, Westernizing reformers sounded in Russia. Moscow's equivalent of the Clinton ``baby boomers'' moved into the former Communist Party Central Committee offices near Red Square. Yegor Gaidar, who became deputy prime minister for economic reforms, and his labor minister, energy minister, social services minister and top official for privatization were all born in the early to mid-1950s. Supreme Soviet Chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov, a brooding economist who would turn into one of Yeltsin's most implacable enemies, scowled and declared that Russia was in the hands of ``kids.'' True enough. Some of the Russian ``thirtysomethings,'' like foreign trade commissioner Pyotr Aven, had done virtually nothing but earn diplomas and push pencils in ivory-tower institutes.
``None of these democrats could have answered how much vegetable oil Muscovites need, when it should be purchased, et cetera'' complained Gavriil Popov, an economist and Yeltsin ally who was then Moscow's mayor. Gaidar knew the scale of the difficulties ahead; he described himself as the head of a ``kamikaze government.''
On Jan. 2, 1992, prices were deregulated on most manufactured goods and foodstuffs. The invisible hand of the market, not an army of bureaucrats, was now supposed to determine the value of things. By November, prices had soared by almost 22 times while wages had increased only tenfold. Privatization, the other pillar of Gaidar's plan, proceeded painfully: at the end of the third quarter, a scant 5 percent (not the anticipated 50 percent to 60 percent) of Russia's small trade and service establishments had been sold into private hands. The year, a chastened Yeltsin said, had turned into the most searing trial his countrymen had undergone since the Nazi invasion.
But the biggest error, Gaidar believes, was precipitated by a mighty force that has so often frustrated ambitions in Russia: the weather. After pitched arguments in the Cabinet, and against Gaidar's wishes, the 1992 price reforms were drafted to exclude oil and other energy sources. ``There was a strong argument against. January in Russia is the peak of the heating season,'' Gaidar explains. ``We were afraid that while producers and consumers were haggling, supplies would be cut off and several cities would freeze.''
Fearing the social and political consequences of depriving millions of Russians of heat, the Cabinet elected to postpone deregulation of energy prices until spring. But when the snows melted, they bared a greatly altered political landscape. A center-right coalition, alarmed at the gap between the reformers' vision and the harm wrought on the Soviet-built industrial complex, had jelled in Parliament, and its leaders warned that freeing prices on energy would make prices across the board soar by another 1,000 percent. Obviously shaken by the first results of ``shock therapy,'' Yeltsin tried to forge a coalition with old-style, Communist-schooled industrialists, appointing some of them to the government. The wide-eyed, confident period of economic reform was over, and a period of half-measures began, which included outlays of huge subsidies to money-losing enterprises, eliminating the need to compete and staying the invisible hand of market economics.
The social and political repercussions from Russians' dashed hopes (they had admittedly been wildly inflated to begin with) were enormous. One could see some of ``shock therapy's'' victims rampaging through the streets of Moscow this month, the confused and angry who want a return to the days of 13-kopeck loaves of bread and labor-camp sentences for ``speculators.'' Many of them elderly, most of them impoverished, these economic losers became the foot soldiers and the sympathizers of anti-Yeltsin politicos as the average salary plummeted in buying power by 41 percent in one year.
But it was Yeltsin's presidency, his authority and credibility, that suffered most from his shock therapy. ``People were just not psychologically prepared for the hardships, for such a dramatic dwindling in living standards,'' admits Igor Kharichev, an aide to the president's chief of staff. ``People naively believed that with the demise of such concepts as communism and socialism, more sausage would automatically appear on the shelves.''
Cast in American terms, what happened politically to Yeltsin over the past two years is the Russian equivalent of a submachine-gun-wielding Vice President Al Gore, the speaker of the House of Representatives and many other highly placed administration officials turning on President Clinton.
That had hardly been envisioned when Yeltsin almost singlehandedly foiled the plotters against former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991. Afterward, when the Parliament adopted a declaration of ``sovereignty'' for Russia by a 544-271 margin, Yeltsin knew, he said, that there was ``no firm democratic majority.'' But how could he immediately provoke another political crisis by demanding early legislative elections or a replacement for Russia's Soviet-era constitution adopted in 1978?
Yeltsin's choice to live with a querulous body that became the citadel of his irreconcilable enemies seems admirable. ``Of course, I have had many temptations,'' he said in June. ``For example, after sitting at the 9th Congress, to sign a decree on the abolition of the Congress, the Supreme Soviet and all the councils from top to bottom. There was such a temptation, and I had more than one sleepless night thinking about it. But then, that would not have been democracy.''
Two months later, during an appearance in the very Kremlin chamber once used by the Soviet legislature, Yeltsin was asked what he considered his greatest error during the past two years. He immediately replied that he should have proceeded right after the 1991 putsch to do away with the Congress and Supreme Soviet. Finally, on Sept. 21, he swallowed his democratic misgivings and ordered the Parliament dissolved, after Khasbulatov, with a flick of the index finger instantly comprehensible to Russians, intimated on television that the president was drunk. The standoff between the executive and legislative branches escalated into the Parliament-directed attack on Moscow's Ostankino broadcast center and the storming of the White House.
By his own admission, Yeltsin miscalculated the danger to his policies posed by an assembly in which most members were Communist-schooled factory and farm bosses or local potentates. But there is yet another error attributable to the president. When he chose to ,maintain Parliament, Yeltsin was bound by the logic of self-interest at the very least to seek some sort of modus vivendi with it. This he didn't even try to do. Even friendly lawmakers were ignored.
It was virtually impossible, even for an important member of the Supreme Soviet, to penetrate Yeltsin's inner sanctum. ``And yet deputies are like house pets, they need care. They should be stroked gently, given food and water,'' Ambartsumov says. Yeltsin never took the time to try to forge a working majority among the 247 Supreme Soviet members, never invited them to his country residence for a glass and a Russian-style chat ``from the soul.''
Given the rush of events, is it any wonder that the last two years turned into a succession of advances, retreats and confused wanderings? The job of leading the world's largest country fell to the former construction engineer whose chief claim to political success was being victimized by an elite he once belonged to.
``Yeltsin's understanding is a tabula rasa,'' says Vitaly Tretyakov, editor of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, one of Moscow's most respected newspapers. ``In economics, his knowledge is nil. Nil. In how to construct a state, zero. It's really the same in all fields. It's not his fault, of course. To come to power, he had to contest everything. But leading is a different matter.''
By blotting out the Parliament that has stymied him for 18 months and then banning Russia's Constitutional Court proceedings until the country had a new constitution, Yeltsin has made his second political comeback. But what will he do with it? Yeltsin has proved to be two persons in one body, simultaneously the Stalin-era shock worker and Vanya the lazy Russian peasant, whiling away the over the 1991 coup attempt, then vanishing for a holiday on the Black Sea.
This October's battle with anti-reform forces also should be seen through the prism of Yeltsin's uncanny ability to squander the fruits of his victories. After winning a 58 percent approval rating in a nationwide referendum in April, he ignored advice from Presidential Council members that he convene an emergency session of the Russian Congress and demand a new constitution, instead focusing his energy on a semiofficial ``constitutional assembly.'' In four months, according to one opinion poll, the boost given by the referendum to Yeltsin's prestige had evaporated.
Sick of uncertainty and disorder, many Russians welcomed Yeltsin's show of toughness this month, including the banning of some 50 extremist newspapers and those political groups that preach the gospel of ``communo-fascism.'' But that alone will not solve Russia's problems, or the president's.
``Whether Yeltsin has won the Big War or not is still very much unclear,'' says Vladimir Berezovsky of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Russian History. ``It is wrong to think that because Parliament has been taken over and the deputies have been arrested, the war is over and there are no more problems. Resolution of those conflicts requires severe repressive measures, dictatorship and temporary autocracy. To be frank, this is common in politics, but it requires additional resources. And as far as we can see, Yeltsin is very likely to run out of resources pretty soon.''
by CNB