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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 36

THE NEW RUSSIA: POLITICS

Holding Russia's Fate In His Hands


In the absence of real democratic institutions, the nation's
politics revolves around one man: Boris Yeltsin

By JOHN KOHAN/MOSCOW - With reporting by Yuri Zarakhovich/
Moscow


    The course of true reform never has run smooth in Russia.
As President Boris Yeltsin prepares to do battle with hard-line
opponents at the Congress of People's Deputies this week,
Russians are braced for another bruising power struggle. After
seven years of political turbulence, the country is highly
sensitized to trouble. Rumors of a coup, a dictatorship, social
upheaval have raced through the capital. But something else has
happened as well. Most of Russia's 150 million citizens are
taking the latest crisis in stride, indifferent to all the fuss
in Moscow. However imperfect their experiment in democracy has
proved so far, they have gained confidence that one day it will
succeed.

    At the moment, their faith is pinned on Boris Nikolayevich
Yeltsin. He is too much the populist President to take
comparisons with King Louis XIV of France very kindly. But
anyone who looks at how power is wielded in Russia today cannot
help seeing that, to paraphrase the boastful French monarch,
l'etat c'est Yeltsin. The Russian leader never aspired to the
role of Sun President, around whom everything in the realm
turns. But he so dominates the political landscape that it would
be no exaggeration to say that as Yeltsin goes, so goes the
nation.

    Under his leadership, Russia has taken major strides
toward becoming a free and open society. The disastrous state
of the economy he inherited has made it exceptionally difficult,
but his reform team is doing much better than many Western
analysts expected. Yet it would be foolhardy for the West to
turn its back on Russia just because the ideological conflicts
of the cold war are over. The burden that Yeltsin must carry is
too heavy for one man. If he should falter, the consequences
will reverberate around the world. Russia, says Gennadi
Burbulis, Yeltsin's chief political strategist, has become "the
prism through which a universal longing for global change has
been focused."

    The trouble is that one year after the collapse of the
Soviet Union, Russia still lacks the kind of political
institutions that would ensure the continuity of reforms without
Yeltsin. Attempts to establish a system of checks and balances
are not faring well. The legislature is paralyzed by unending
battles with the executive branch. The new constitutional court
must work without a proper constitution. The government has to
listen to such a deafening chorus of calls for its resignation
that ministers cannot concentrate on the business of reform. It
falls to the President to keep the operation of state on track.
Says Burbulis: "The majority of Russians have confidence not in
institutions like the parliament and government but in the
person of the President. During a transformation of such
magnitude this kind of personification of power can be positive,
but it is also dangerous."

    Russia is not the only part of the former Soviet Union to
find the transition from totalitarian rule to democracy rocky.
The new states have learned that it is not enough to establish
a presidential form of rule if there are not local democratic
traditions to sustain it. During the past year, new Presidents
have been overthrown in the former republics of Georgia,
Azerbaijan and Tajikistan. In the Central Asian nation of
Turkmenistan, President Saparmurad Niyazov is reviving the
tradition of the communist personality cult, complete with
marching columns of youths dressed in T-shirts emblazoned with
his portrait.

    So far Yeltsin has proved immune to efforts by sycophantic
followers to turn him into an uncrowned Czar. He is a true man
of the people -- a real muzhik, as the Russians say -- who works
in his own garden and loves to eat herring with boiled
potatoes. To maintain the common touch, he often stops his
official motorcade to chat with people on the street. Although
he has an unfortunate habit of making promises dictated by the
feelings of the moment, he has been courageous in supporting
unpopular economic policies that have eroded his standing among
ordinary citizens.

    Yeltsin in his quest to be the kind of strong executive he
thinks Russia needs. After he was chosen chairman of the supreme
soviet in May 1990, he did a stint as parliamentary leader. A
year and one month later, he became the first popularly elected
President in the country's history. He even took on the second
job of Prime Minister for several months in October 1991. None
of these has quite fit the bill. The irony is that Yeltsin is
haunted by the same problem that plagued his rival, Mikhail
Gorbachev, when the former Soviet President was trying to create
a new structure of power to replace Communist Party rule: he has
more authority on paper than in practice.

    The dilemma can be summed up in two questions: Should
authoritarian methods be used to advance the cause of democratic
reform? When is the use of force justified in defense of law and
order? These issues resonate deeply in a nation where
totalitarian leaders used to violate basic human rights as a
matter of course. Gorbachev never resolved the conflict of how
to be a strong President without sliding into totalitarian rule.
Yeltsin is still feeling his way. Whenever he begins to talk
tough in response to turmoil in the ethnic enclaves of the
Russian Federation or the latest challenge from parliament, the
opposition immediately warns of a coming dictatorship.

    Russia desperately needs a new constitution to codify the
nation's guidelines. The project has been caught in a dispute
between Yeltsin and the parliament over what kind of state
structure to enshrine in the new basic law. Yeltsin wants a
strong President, who will have a free hand to organize new
government structures and appoint ministers. His whole approach
is anathema to legislators who want to give parliament the power
to control government appointments and to make the head of state
a figurehead that Yeltsin supporters claim would be akin to the
British Queen.

    Western governments operate successfully on both models.
But the particular state of politics in Russia tilts the
balance in favor of Yeltsin. Far from being a driving force for
change, the current two-tier parliament, made up of a
permanently working supreme soviet and a larger Congress of
People's Deputies that meets at least twice a year, has turned
into a major bastion of communist and conservative opposition
to reform. The legislature is a cross section, frozen in time,
of political forces active in the Soviet Union back in 1990,
when the last elections were held and Communist Party influence
remained strong.

    As things now stand, Yeltsin is saddled with what he views
as an obstreperous bunch of foot draggers until their terms
expire in 1995. He could try to use the the special powers that
the parliament granted him after the abortive coup attempt in
August 1991 to disband the legislature altogether and impose
direct presidential rule. But many fear such a risky step, and
parliamentarians were quick to call Yel tsin's bluff by
summoning the People's Deputies into session -- over his heated
opposition -- on Dec. 1, the very day his mandate to rule by
decree expires.

    Yeltsin may talk tough, but he has left the door open for
compromise. The government reached an accord, of sorts, last
week with the Civic Union, the opposition group representing the
interests of powerful Russian industrialists. Yeltsin agreed to
restore some state controls over the economy during the
transition to a free market. In another move aimed at defusing
political tensions, Deputy Prime Minister Mikhail Poltoranin,
an archenemy of the hard-liners, stepped down. He wanted, he
said, "to protect the President from mounting attacks from an
opposition bent on revenge."

    On the eve of the congress, the Yeltsin team also floated
a plan for a "constitutional agreement" with parliament. The
scheme called for a 12-to-18-month "stabilization" period during
which the powers of the President, the parliament and the
government would be redefined. Since Yeltsin would undoubtedly
have to impose limitations on the parliament to make the plan
work, rebellious deputies seem unlikely to buy it, even if the
President agrees to shake up his Cabinet in the bargain.

    Yeltsin has already tried to outmaneuver the parliament by
setting up extragovernmental agencies that are answerable only
to the President. Yet even Yeltsin's democratic supporters were
concerned when he established a new security council to oversee
defense, security, police and foreign-policy issues, with Yuri
Skokov, an elusive apparatchik from the military-industrial
sector, as chief of staff. It reminds too many people of the
party's old secret Politburo. Yeltsin has also set up special
commissions that report to him personally to deal with the
agricultural crisis and the growing crime rate. Such moves have
prompted the conservative daily Pravda to warn that the
President was creating "a supreme authority in the country whose
decisions cannot be questioned."

    The Yeltsin team has been toying with other options to
break the deadlock between the rival branches of power. One
would be to turn directly to the people, as Gorbachev did in
March 1991 when he held a national referendum on a new Soviet
Union. Radical democratic groups have long been prodding Yeltsin
to put the parliament-or-President question to a similar vote.
Another referendum topic that some economists believe to be
absolutely crucial to the success of Yeltsin's reforms is
whether land ought to be bought and sold: without private
property laws, capitalism cannot flourish. The President says
he is considering putting both questions to a plebiscite by the
spring of 1993.

    But Russia is not Switzerland, a small country where
public referendums have a long tradition. Such calls to let the
people make decisions directly illustrate the troubles that
democratic forces have had in moving Russia toward the kind of
multiparty system that is at the heart of Western-style
representative democracy. The collapse of the Communist Party
created a vacuum that none of the multitudinous new movements
and parties has been able to fill. Many of the fledgling parties
are identified with the personalities that lead them rather than
any real programs to meet the needs of Russia's emerging
society. Since no elections are scheduled for the near future,
they are all in effect lobbying groups, vying for the
President's ear.

    In many ways, Yeltsin is a master politician, determined
to get politics off the national agenda so that Russia can
finally buckle down to work. Many of his tactical moves appear
to be prompted by a desire to hold the forces of reaction in
check long enough for a new society to emerge, where economic
self-interest will prevail over the political passions of the
past. He also seems to be sincere in his intention to devolve
power from a small group of players in Moscow out into the vast
reaches of the country. But the paradox Yeltsin must ultimately
resolve is whether he is willing to use his own political power
to the full in order to one day give power back to the people.