Why did Yeltsin send in the troops?
International Viewpoint #263 February 1995 domination. centralise power in the hands of political parties have distanced the task before them is huge.
Rocked in me themel ussia for a long time has been
bloodshed and official arbitrariness. Starting with mass beatings of demonstrators on the streets of Moscow in 1993, the Yeltsin administration finally abandoned all restraint in October of the same year, trampling on the constitution and not only dispersing its own parliament, but also opening fire on it with tank artillery and machine-guns. Tanks on city streets we have already experienced this, a year ago. The people behind that episode were the same Yeltsin, Grachev, Yerin and Co. who are now directing the carnage in Chechnya. At that time, however, they still had with them a number of people who now seem to have regained their powers of sight — people like Yegor Gaidar and Gleb Yakunin. Even Sergei Kovalev, now showing genuine heroism defending human rights in Chechnya, looked on passively in October 1993 as hundreds of defenceless Moscow citizens were murdered, as deputies were arrested and beaten, and as police savagely bashed their fellow citizens.... 18
Both then and now, the violence was no accident. The authorities in Russia have been implementing socio-economic and geo-political strategies which cannot possibly be put into practice through peaceful, democratic methods. These are the strategies of "shock without therapy", which have resulted in a steep decline in output, disorganisation of the economy, government corruption, legal arbitrariness and a terrifying increase in crime. Can a president and government who are incapable of enforcing a minimal degree of order in their own home "restore order" in Chechnya or anywhere else? Is it any surprise that the peoples of Russia should want to take a different road from the one of inflation, decline and disorganisation that is typical of Yeltsin's Russia? And what about the impoverishment of the majority of working people as social inequalities increase? Yes, we are now seeing a rise in average real incomes following their collapse in 1992. But this "normalisation" recalls the "normal" average body temperature of patients in a hospital. One person has already died, is tossing about in a fever, and their average is — normal! So it is in our country. The "new rich" in Russia are bloated with wealth, and have become living legends among the big spenders on the international scene. Meanwhile the "new poor", who include almost half the population, pine nostalgically for the Brezhnev era — which only a short time ago was condemned as a time of low living standards. How could the policies of the present regime fail to provoke citizens to indignation, and the authorities to violence?
And what about the government's policy on the national question? When Yeltsin still needed to oust Gorbachev, he told the republics of the Russian federation: "Take as much sovereignty as you can handle!" Then when he came to power the screws were tightened, and any attempt at independent behaviour was met with the rattle of automatic weapons fire. How are the nationalities and ethnic groups of Russia supposed to see this? As another of the lies of the "centre"?
These questions have a rhetorical
International Viewpoint #263 February 1995 character because power in Russia today lies with socio-political forces that benefit from instability, disorganisation, unjust methods of rule, and violence. Those who make up these forces are the "new Russians", , who unlike "normal" Western entrepreneurs do not aim at stable profits of 10 to 20 per cent, but at rapid enrichment. Their goal is profit rates of hundreds of per cent a year, the superconcentration and centralisation of capital through extra-economic means -speculation, corruption and violence. These people stand to benefit from an atmosphere of arbitrariness and coercion 1
Another sector of these forces is made up of corrupt bureaucrats who can only receive their privileges and bribes in a general context of lawlessness and institutional chaos. The scale of these illicit gains beggars the imagination. Boris Fedorov, sometime finance minister in the Gaidar government, let slip at one point that the market value of the dachas, hunting lodges and other properties at the disposal of the president is close to a billion dollars - that is, to the total loan funds promised us by the world community! The cost of the fence that was erected recently around the House of Government is equal to the price for which a large Siberian oil and gas complex was sold at about the same time....
Unfortunately, very similar processes of economic and social life, the same domination by all-powerful mafia clans, the same inability and unwillingness to solve the differences between ruling oppositions through democratic methods. And of course, there are the armaments. Tanks, artillery, machine-guns, the lot. For the most part they are Russian, partly transferred to the Chechen authorities, partly sold or bartered by our army....
Yes, we now have a ruling layer which unavoidable. The more savagely the Yeltsinite centre behaves, the greater will be the wave of local separatism. The stronger the nationalism in the Russian borderlands, the more powerful will be the great-power Russian chauvinism at the centre, and the more real will be the danger of an authoritarian, semi-fascist regime in our country.
With the developments in Chechnya, this tendency has been manifested to the full. Who are the people supporting Yeltsin today? Zhirinovsky, notorious for advocating an expansionist "push to the south" to create a "Greater Russia"), and Barkashov, the leader of the semi-fascist organisation Russian National Unity. In addition, there are a few jingoist patriots, as well as former members of Yeltsin's administration and government. And that is all.
This is no accident. Four years ago we were shouting at the top of our lungs: "Yeltsin is not an alternative, simply a pedestal for Zhirinovsky and Co. to climb up on!" Then a year ago, after the bloody events of October, the president began openly trying on the cloak of Russian chauvinism, borrowing the vocabulary and slogans of Zhirinovsky. It remained only to be seen when Yeltsin would try his own "push to the south", or begin struggling against a nonexistent "Jewish-masonic conspiracy". The first outburst came in Chechnya. But Russia and its army were in decay, so instead of the hammer-blow of a great-power fist, what we saw was the clumsy groping of fat, blindly spread fingers.
The result was the corpses of our young men, in Russian and Chechen uniforms. The corpses of Chechen and Russian children and old people.... * Notes