ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, June 14, 1996 TAG: 9606140024
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
ANOTHER milestone in Russia's post-Soviet evolution is set for Sunday, when voters - 106 million Russian citizens are eligible - go to the polls to elect a president. Expected to lead the field are Boris Yeltsin, the incumbent and Russia's first elected head of state, and Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the resurgent Communists. If, as seems likely, no candidate wins an outright majority, the top two finishers will meet in a runoff election next month.
Neither man, alas, is a model of commitment to democracy and economic reform.
During Yeltsin's turbulent term as president, he has not proved quite the godsend for democracy that some in the West - including the Clinton administration - were counting on. The brutal war in Chechnya tops the list of anti-Yeltsin indictments. As hard times deepened in the difficult transition to an open economy, Yeltsin booted free-market reformers from his Cabinet. He has shown no respect for a free press, instead gaining control of the television media. He recently raided International Monetary Fund loans to Russia for rubles to finance his re-election campaign.
Zyuganov may be a new-style Communist, who declares his commitment to multiparty democracy. But on the campaign trail, in the words of The Christian Science Monitor, he is "a Soviet and partial Stalin apologist, as well as a nationalist deeply skeptical of foreign influence." He is counting on voters who recall the Soviet era as a time of economic security and imperial prestige, never mind the political repression.
American doomsayers, trying from afar to make sense of all this, see in Russia today parallels with Germany after World War I. Soaring inflation, nationalist resentments and the shallowness of democratic roots, the pessimists hold, could spell the same fate for Russia's fledgling democracy that they spelled for the German Weimar Republic, which eventually committed suicide by putting Adolf Hitler in power.
That analogy is seriously flawed. Hitler's ascent came in an era of global economic depression, when the ability of free markets and democracy to deliver the goods was in considerable doubt worldwide. In the 1990s, the economic superiority of market over command economies has been clearly demonstrated. National economies are becoming more interdependent. And the whole world is democratizing.
Besides, neither Yeltsin, for all his faults, nor Zyuganov, for all his Soviet revisionism, is another Hitler. Yeltsin, it should be remembered, is not just Russia's first elected head of state but also the first for whom a second term depends on the will of the people. Zyuganov's campaign, it should be noted, is being run in democratic fashion.
The West has an interest in the election's outcome. For both Russia's sake and the world's, Yeltsin's re-election is to be preferred to a Zyuganov victory. Better than either, but not very likely, would be the election of progressive economist Grigory Yavlinsky, the most ardent reformer in the race.
Americans should not be too disappointed, though, that the road in Russia from totalitarianism to democracy has been bumpy so far. Nor should they be too surprised when the ride proves less than smooth in the months and years ahead.
The lesson for America is not to give up on Russia. U.S. policy should be to act with restraint, and to concentrate on nourishing the underlying forces and institutions of democracy rather than the careers of favored Russian politicians.
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