A Bonapartist bulwark
"I think so far they've done quite well", the International Herald Tribune quoted US President Clinton as saying. The West has unashamedly backed Boris Yeltsin's unconstitutional actions. This is certainly hypocrisy but it is not unexpected. But is Yeltsin perhaps too dependent on
Western backing? His advantage though, is that the opposition is
International Viewpoint #249 October 1993 reform - and the reason why Yeltsin will face new serious obstacles when he tries to cash in on the political gains that he has made in the last few days, no matter how impressive they may look on paper.
These contradictions make themselves felt at the very heart of the Yeltsinite factionalised and heterogenous. Our correspondent reports. POUL FUNDER LARSEN — Moscow, 27 September 1993
N 21 September Boris Yeltsin, in dissolving the Russian Supreme Soviet and suspending the Constitutional Court, pulled off the coup d'etat that his supporters had been calling for since August 1991, and which he stopped inches short of launching in March of this year. According to the Yeltsinites this "presidential rule" where the decrees of the President over-rule any law and elected body, will be terminated by December, when elections to a new parliament with two chambers are to be held. However, as the daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta remarked in an editorial on 23 September: "It is only in fairy tales that democracy returns after three hours of de facto dictatorship. It will take much more time, because if you dissolve one parliament, then what can stop you from dissolving another one - for example, the one to be elected on 3 December."
Yeltsin is trying to retain a facade of legality — as large-scale repression would imperil the unilateral western support for his moves, and might provoke further unrest in the armed forces and the regions - but censorship is implemented ruthlessly in the broadcast media, which have reverted to their pre-glasnost state, and one of the leading opposition papers, Rossiskaya Gazeta, has already been closed down.2
A major shake-up in the state apparatus is underway, as functionaries and elected bodies loyal to the parliament are suspended and replaced.
The Federation of Independent Russian Trade Unions (FNPR - the former "official" trade unions) has also come under attack from Yeltsin. The FNPR issued a strong statement against the coup d'etat, and its chair Igor Klochkov told the newspaper Trud on 23 September : "We have called on the Moscow trade unions to organise actions of protest, including 14 strikes. It is necessary to stop the enterprises and take to the streets to defend the White House." All the trade union's telephone lines were subsequently cut and the government is rumoured to be preparing a decree on a six month "moratorium" on strikes and trade union activities.
### Tatters
Though Yeltsin has emerged stronger than expected from the first round of skirmishes it would be wrong to exaggerate the strength of his position. With the economic reform in tatters — a continuing abysmal drop in production, a sky-rocketing budget deficit far exceeding the targets set by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and inflation at thirty percent a month - Yeltsin had hoped to use his self-proclaimed "victory" in the April referendum to wrestle significant concessions from other political players at the centre and in the regions. But neither the more or less impromptu "constituent assembly" convened in June and July on Yeltsin's initiative, nor the recent attempt to win over the regions by setting up a "federation council" (a quasi-parliament for the regional elites), yielded any clear results.
It was when faced by these economic and political fiascos that Yeltsin decided to dissolve the parliament. However no ingenious political manoeuvres can make the contradictions, inherent in the forced transition from a bureaucratised command economy to some kind of Hobbesian "free market", disappear. No decree can transform the Russian state apparatus — deeply factionalised and rooted as it is in the Soviet past — into a workable bourgeois state overnight.
This — and not any mysterious deficiency in Yeltsin's character — is the reason why the "democrats" could not use the momentum gained in August 1991 to achieve a decisive breakthrough for their alliance: inside the government there is already a rapidly developing conflict between, on the one hand, the "concilliationists" (including Prime Minister Chernomyroin and Yeltsin's adviser on regional affairs Sergei Shakhrai), who want a compromise with the regions, the industrialists, and the moderate opposition in parliament — and on the other, the die-hard monetarists (including Gaidar and Finance Minister Fyoorov). The strategy proposed by the latter group would include a wage freeze in state industry, total price liberalisation, implementation of large-scale bankruptcies in state industry, a cut in social spending and subsidies - and the "appropriate" political measures, of an authoritarian nature, to counteract social and political protest.3
While the various pro-liberal currents have been able to use the presidency as a rallying point and a Bonapartist bulwark for their interests, the opposition has not succeeded in developing any coherent organisational alternative or political programme, which can appeal to broad layers of working people. It remains divided into dozens of endlessly bickering parliamentary factions, fronts and parties, many of which come across as dubious in their commitment to democracy, as they harbour a strong nostalgia for the Soviet past and have made no break with the logic (or even the structures) of the bureaucratic apparatus. Moreover, the credentials of the parliament in resisting the liberal reform are far from impressive: after all, it endorsed Yeltsin and his policies for a long period, opened the flood-gates for the neoliberal Gaider reforms in the fall of 1992, and enthusiastically accepted Chernomyroin, who is now firmly behind Yeltsin, as prime minister less than a year ago.
1. See International Viewpoint, No 244, April 1993.
2. Concerning the complicity of the West. Several Russian papers have reported on consultations between the Yeltsinites and the US administration prior to Yeltsin's move. Khasgulatov cited such reports in his speech to a conference of Soviets on 18 September.
3. The financial markets in Moscow reacted strongly negative to Yeltsin's move as the rouble lost twenty-five percent in value to the dollar in two days (one dollar = 1300 roubles).
----- pull-quotes on this page -----
RUsSIA
farce as the liberals are controlling the media and the state apparatus, which they can use as their electoral machine. And anyway, if Yeltsin is not satisfied with the outcome he can just dissolve the parliament again. The risk of an authoritarian turn in the situa-
International Viewpoint #249 October 1993
It is no surprise that this opposition has been unable to wage a determined and consistent fight against the coup d'etat. The trade unions have, overall, acted in a somewhat more determined fashion. But they have been unable to reach their membership base and motivate it for political action.
Meanwhile, the whole leftwing, from the Congress of Democratic Left Forces and the Party of Labour to the various small anarchist and Marxist groups, has come out against Yeltsin. However, due to an acute lack of organisational resources they have been forced to channel most of their efforts through the structures of either the parliament or the trade unions. Many Moscow leftwingers have participated actively in the pickets around the White House, where tens of thousands of people have been convening every day to discuss, listen to news and speeches, and if necessary defend the parliament.
In spite of the dominant Stalinist and nationalist currents (with their large constituencies of pensioners) this permanent picket has attracted many new activists, including quite a few younger people and many women, attending not out of support for the conservatives, but simply to protest some positive developments inside the opposition: faced with the impossibility of a lasting compromise within the apparatus (an aspiration expressed in Khasbulatov's slogan of "a government of national reconciliation"), and given the obvious limitations of the programmes of both centrists and the nationalist-Stalinist alliance, a wing of the opposition, for example trade unionists and some Communists, will look for alternatives.
Revolutionary socialists must participate actively in the broad campaigns of civil disobedience and strikes against Yeltsin, stressing that without a popular mobilisation, overcoming the current apathy among working people, the fight is doomed.
A major task in the coming months will be to fight for an effective boycott of the phoney December elections for Yeltsin's so-called parliament, designed to give the liberals an easy win and lend legitimacy to a continued Presidential dictator-.ship.4*
4. One of the ingenious details in the design of this pseudo-parliament is that half of the members of its "federal chamber" will be the heads of regional administrations appointed by the president!
Party of Labour leader comments on situation against the Yeltsin regime.
ON the Lenin Prospect, a mile and a half from the White House, there is hectic activity in the headquarters of the Russian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (FNPR),
Threat the former "official" trade unions that are now going through a contradictory process of
The "Latin Americanisation" of Russian social and political life over the last
The FNPR was one of the first organisations to condemn Yeltsin's coup d'etat.
few years is evident in the pauperisation of
Alexander Bugalin from the Party of Labour believes the role of the FNPR has been whole layers of society, rampant inflation, positive, but adds: "Even though the leadership expresses quite radical positions the lawlessness, and the permanently lingering bulk of trade union functionaries remain passive, and the calls for action have not reathreat of a coup d'etat. This process has ched the enterprises." Indeed very few workers collectives at the factories have heeded advanced yet another step with the grothe call for strike action (as was also the case in August 1991). Most workers do not tesque "dual power" of two Presidents seem to be prepared to go on strike either in defence of the parliament or for Yeltsin.
denying each others legitimacy, two
The widespread passivity in the population is a striking contrast to the frantic struggle governments, two rival powers struggling going on between, and within, the different parts of the state apparatus. In almost all in nearly all regions, and, in some months, regions the soviets have sided with the parliament (in Moscow for example, thirty out of possibly two parliaments. The political thirty-three local councils have condemned the coup), while the regional administracommentators in Moscow are now discussing whether the development will proceed in accordance with the "Chilean" sce-
These divisions point to the profound crisis of the Russian state as a whole - a crisis accelerated by the failure of the liberal economic reform.
nario, beloved by many liberals, or the
"Tadzjik" and "Azerbadjani" model of
Both the opposition and the Yeltsinite camp are divided into dozens of rival groups and armed insurrection and civil war, which factions. Alexander Buzgalin draws a critical balance-sheet of the opposition's struggle some of the more sinister conservatives against Yeltsin: "Most of these people come out of the apparatus, the old structures, consider to be an option. For the time and they are not ready to work in an informal way, which is necessary now. Moreover, being the latter development is unlikely, the parliament has not proved itself a consistent opponent of liberal reform in the past, but it will eventually be decided in the and it has not won the necessary broad support among the population."
regions — where the confrontation at the
*The price we are now paying for this is the terrible apathy of the people. However, we centre is reproducing itself, centrifugal have to fight with the resources available to us. One main task is to organise a boycott forces gain renewed momentum inside the of the so-called elections Yeltsin has decreed for December. These elections will be a repressive apparatus — in a struggle where Yeltsin is far from certain to prevail in the medium term.
In spite of the real threat of the re-establishment of an authoritarian regime the current situation could act as a catalyst for restructuring.
----- pull-quotes on this page -----
15