By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — Among television journalists in particular, the practice is quite the norm. You fly in; you get the story; you fly out again. You talk to the people who count, get their statements, frame the interviews with a few key facts and beam the package off by satellite within the half hour.
Sometimes, however, great events can't be reduced to a 60-second video clip. And whether the news segments reflect reality depends, to an alarming degree, on which of the "opinion-makers" you thrust a microphone in front of. News teams working to tight deadlines are also prone to obtain their "key facts" from one another, instead of performing proper research. This is an especially dangerous short cut since there are, regrettably, reporters who have little regard for facts of any kind.
In short, when the mass media report stirring political events, all sorts of myths can proliferate. Here are some of the more egregious ones from the coverage of the current crisis in Russia, together with attempts to put the record straight.
1. Boris Yeltsin has a mandate from the people to carry out his reforms.
Yeltsin was elected president of Russia by 57% of voters in June 1991. The people, though by no means all of them, clearly wanted Yeltsin. But did they want his Thatcherite economic policies? Yeltsin's election campaign was a model of vacuousness, revealing nothing about what he planned to do in office. The chief campaign weapon was simply a large photograph of the smiling leader.
After voting for Yeltsin in the hope of reforms that would improve their lives, Russians received a dose of doctrinaire monetarism that over the past 15 months has cut their living standards by around 70%. In recent opinion polls, the popularity of these economic strategies has varied between 27% (if they are identified with the president) and 14% (if they are described as policies of the government). Most Russians still want market-style reforms — but different ones.
2. Russia still has a Brezhnev-era constitution.
The Russian constitution was originally adopted under Leonid Brezhnev in 1977, but in recent years has been very extensively amended. It has major shortcomings, including a failure to delineate the powers of the president from those of parliament with sufficient clarity. Nevertheless, as chairperson of the Constitutional Court Valery Zorkin stressed recently, the constitution now includes the principle of the separation of powers, a defined relationship between the federal authorities and the regions, and a guarantee of human rights. Love it or hate it, but don't pretend that Brezhnev would have tolerated it.
3. The battle is between Yeltsin and a parliament dominated by former Communists.
Talking about the difference between Yeltsin and former Communists is like talking about the difference between Martina Navratilova and tennis players. No-one in the current Russian parliament rose as high in the Communist Party as Yeltsin, who for a time under Mikhail Gorbachev was a member of the party's central leadership body, the politburo.
To be a member of the old Communist Party indicated little about people's inner convictions; it was simply a price they had to pay for holding virtually any responsible and prestigious job. Far more important than the question of whether deputies once belonged to the party is the line-up of views in the present parliament.
Today about two-thirds of parliamentarians support some variety of market-style reform. Around half of the total number belong to fractions loosely aligned with the "centrist" Civic Union bloc. Somewhat less than 20% declare their support for Yeltsin, down from around 30% early last year. Unrepentant Communists and hard-line nationalists make up about a third of the deputies.
4. The Russian parliament wasn't democratically elected.
People who assert this generally argue that when the Russian parliament was elected in March 1990, the Soviet Union still existed, and the Communist Party was formally in control. But this remained true when the parliament's leader, Boris Yeltsin, was elected President of Russia 15 months later. In any case, one needs to look at the electoral mechanisms that were employed. Here we shall turn to a recent article in the London Guardian, by British journalist and historian Jonathan Steele:
"... the Russian congress was elected on a more democratic basis than its Soviet counterpart in March 1989. There were no reserved seats for special interest groups. Every deputy faced the electorate, and even in rare cases of an uncontested election, the single candidate had to get 51% of the vote.
"The old screening process by which a local electoral commission judged which nominees to put on the ballot was eliminated in 1990. Any candidate nominated by residents or in a factory or institute had their name on the voting paper."
5. Yeltsin declared his "special regime" because parliament stripped him of his powers as president.
The powers at the heart of the dispute were never assigned to the president under the constitution, but were given to him for 12 months by the parliament in December 1991. Yeltsin had argued that virtually unrestricted powers of rule by decree were essential to him if he were to launch his free-market reforms.
When the president's emergency powers expired at the end of 1992, they were extended under the deal that resolved a power struggle at the seventh session of the full parliament, the Congress of People's Deputies. But as the deputies' anger and disillusionment at Yeltsin's ed new heights, the deal, and the powers, were revoked by the eighth congress, on March 12.
Yeltsin's remaining powers are broadly comparable to those of a US president, whose decisions are also subject to legislative veto, and who must obtain congressional approval for his cabinet appointments.