By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW, March 30 — Russians will have the chance on April 25 to vote in a referendum on President Boris Yeltsin's "shock therapy" economic policies. In other questions in the parliament-sponsored poll, voters will be asked whether they have confidence in the president and whether they favour early presidential and parliamentary elections.
The decision to conduct the referendum provided the main new twist on the final day of the Ninth Congress of People's Deputies. The emergency sitting of the 1033-member congress, the full Russian parliament, was called in response to Yeltsin's March 20 attempt to force through a "presidential coup".
In a television broadcast, Yeltsin declared that he would no longer recognise the validity of any decision, by any state body, that contradicted his decrees. This state of "special rule" was to continue for 35 days until a plebiscite in which the population were to be called on to express confidence in the president.
Ten days after Yeltsin's television address, it was clear that his effort to impose one-person rule had failed. The powers claimed by Yeltsin were ruled unconstitutional on March 23 in a nine to three decision of the Constitutional Court. On March 28 the Congress of People's Deputies voted by 617 to 264 to impeach the president; although the vote fell short of the two-thirds of the total number of deputies required for it to be effective, the margin was unexpectedly close.
No sign appeared that the armed forces were prepared to back Yeltsin in his violation of the constitution, and although opinion polls indicated that a majority of the population backed the president's actions, Russians failed to come into the streets to support him in anything like the numbers that would have had an important impact on the struggles inside the Kremlin.
For provincial officials who are wondering which of conflicting instructions — from the president and the parliament — they would be wise to follow, the arguments against siding with the president must now be considered overwhelming. As a result, the decision which precipitated the crisis — a resolution by the Eighth Congress of People's Deputies on March 12 to cancel a deal which granted Yeltsin broad powers to rule by decree while he introduced market-style reforms — now seems certain to take effect.
In a society with more developed democratic traditions than Russia, the crisis would end at about this point. The president would concede that it was possible to rule only in collaboration with the legislature, and would begin consultation aimed at finding areas of agreement. The more idiosyncratic government programs would be dropped in favour of measures capable of winning parliamentary support.
Compromise, however, is not Yeltsin's style, and the political traditions which do exist in Russia — of admiration for effective autocrats — will not induce him to look for it. "I will submit only to the will of the people", the president was still declaring on March 28. "The time of compromise is over."
Consequently, the struggles between president and parliament still have some way to run. The next major development is likely to be the April 25 referendum. The rate of participation in this vote will almost certainly be low, far below the threshold needed for the result to be legally binding. Of those who do vote, a strong majority are expected to express confidence in the president. Supporters of Yeltsin will claim this as a vindication of his decision to act outside the constitution.
At the same time, opinion polls suggest that participants in the referendum will vote heavily to condemn the president's economic strategies. The people, it seems, want Yeltsin, but they no longer want his ill-conceived "reforms", under which average living standards have fallen by around 70%.
In these circumstances, the parliament will almost certainly succeed in its battle to win the decisive say in determining the composition of the government. Yeltsin's Thatcherite economic ministers can expect to be ousted in favour of people committed to a more gradual, less cataclysmic, transition to capitalism.
Yeltsin's own longer term destiny would seem to be that of a German or Indian-style president, possessing influence but excluded from the direct exercise of power. Such an outcome would be bitterly resisted by both the president and his hard-core supporters, but the failure of Yeltsin's key policies has given him little chance of preventing big inroads on his authority.
Contrary to much of the reporting in the Western press, the collapse of Yeltsin's attempt to impose "special rule" has strengthened the democratic tendencies in Russian society rather than weakening them.
Russian democracy has now defeated two coups — one from the Stalinoid left, the other from the neo-liberal right. True, Yeltsin's defeat has been nowhere near as complete as that of the
plotters of August 1991. Nevertheless, the point has again been made that violating the constitution is a perilous step that will most likely end in debacle. Would-be dictators will now be more cautious.
Another development that should encourage supporters of democracy is the fact that the prestige and authority of the Constitutional Court have grown immeasurably during the past 10 days. The court has been subjected to vicious attacks in the Western media, with an article in the International Herald Tribune branding it "a Soviet constitutional kangaroo court". Nevertheless, the court has shown a determination, unprecedented in Russian judicial history, to interpret the law rather than simply endorsing the dictates of the current pretender to autocratic rule.
Also very important is the fact that the failure of Yeltsin's coup has left a series of its main instigators — government leaders in Germany, the US and Britain — to answer the question why they encouraged the Russian president to take steps which obviously violated the constitution, and which did not even have the dubious justification of being successful. The Western powers will not be put off by this experience from interfering in Russia, but the interventions from now on are unlikely to be so crude.
However, the main beneficiaries of the new post-coup alignment of forces will not be the people, but the major sections of the economic elite who have never shared the infatuation of the liberal intelligentsia with Chicago School monetarism. It is these groups within the elite — composed largely of enterprise managers and higher-level officials in the provincial state apparatus — who dominate the Russian parliament.
Far from being communists, these people have a strong material interest in restoring capitalism, and deliberately pursue this goal. More conscious of Russian economic realities than Yeltsin and his circle, they reject the president's kamikaze methods, and as a result have finished up in a bloc with principled democrats and the bulk of labour movement activists in defending constitutional rule. But their key material interests are not those of the masses, and as their control over economic policy expands, they will look more and more to authoritarian means of imposing anti-popular "solutions".
Sadly, the main political struggles in Russia continue to be fought out between factions of the former Communist nomenklatura, with the masses making almost no impact. The largest demonstration in Moscow during Yeltsin's coup attempt was a march and rally of about 40,000 supporters of the president — half of 1% of the population of the Russian capital. Overwhelmingly,
Russians perceive the political process as something acted out within the elite, and which it is futile and dangerous for non-members of the elite to try to influence.
By the time the unpowerful and the non-privileged move into political action, Russia as a unified state may no longer exist. After announcing "special rule", Yeltsin placed intense pressure on leaders of the Russian Federation's provinces and republics to declare their support for his action. The result was a patchwork of pro-president and pro-parliament local administrations. This carried with it the danger that regional army commanders could line up with local authorities, posing a direct risk of civil war.
The incentive is now particularly strong for local economic and power elites to try to seize more control away from the alarmingly erratic central authorities. This process has nothing in common with a democratic devolution of power, and especially in ethnically Russian provinces, is contrary in every sense to the interests of working people.
Even if Yeltsin now fades from the centre of Russian political life, he may already have set in motion processes leading to the break-up of the Russian Federation, along with further economic collapse and increasing bloodshed.