By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — Who really has the right to rule Russia — President Boris Yeltsin, elected by 57% of voters in June 1991? Or the Russian parliament, elected more than two years earlier in a vote that was only partly democratic?
That's the way the question is posed in many Western reports on Russia, and by articles in the liberal Russian press. But democratic legitimacy isn't something conferred unconditionally: attack the rights and interests of the people for long enough, and your legitimacy has to be considered lost.
Is this now the case with Yeltsin? The question is becoming impossible to dodge, especially since the publication by Izvestia of the results of a poll conducted in Moscow during January by the Independent Institute of the Sociology of Parliamentarism. In the broadest measure of the president's support, 35% of respondents replied that they took a positive attitude to his actions, while 42% took a negative attitude. The remainder found it "hard to answer".
The closer pollsters came to the Yeltsin economic policies, the more hostile the answers became. Asked whether they thought the president would succeed in leading Russia out of its economic crisis by the end of his term in 1996, only 26% of respondents answered in the affirmative; 59% thought Yeltsin would fail.
Few of those interviewed sought a return to the "command-administer" methods of the Communist Party, and 63% expressed support for a "market economy". But the disenchantment with Yeltsin's neo-liberalism was massive. Only 20% of respondents thought it necessary to press ahead on the course set in 1992, while in the view of 48% it was necessary to develop the market economy through other means.
Neo-liberal policies had even less appeal when associated with the government rather than the president. Only 14% of respondents thought the government's economic strategies were more or less correct, while 48% thought them mistaken.
In the light of these figures, Yeltsin's economic "reforms" appear quite different from those usually depicted in the West. The "reforms", it emerges, are not popular measures thwarted by scheming Communist apparatchiks but impositions on a population that disagrees with them and wants something else.
This situation has an obvious bearing on the struggle between the competing "legitimates" of Russian politics — the president and parliament. Though, paradoxically, much less popular than Yeltsin, the parliament is a stronghold of forces seeking to present alternatives to the president's broadly detested "shock therapy". The main s opponents in the parliament is the Civic Union, a bloc centred on managers of state enterprises and including two large populist-type parties.
During January sociologists in the large industrial city of Nizhny Novgorod conducted a survey in which they asked residents which of Russia's major political blocs they would vote for if an election were held. As reported in the newspaper Rabochaya Tribuna, the overwhelming choice was the Civic Union, attracting more than twice as much support as the pro-Yeltsin Democratic Russia bloc.
Again, the political reality is quite distinct from the version inferred by the Western media. Although the Russian parliament was chosen in 1989, in elections which reflected the undemocratic practices of the past, it is dominated by the forces which Russians now clearly want to see in power.
The Civic Union's ideas are no secret, having been set out in a series of widely published documents. By contrast, Yeltsin in his 1991 election campaign ran almost exclusively on his personal appeal, telling Russians virtually nothing about what he intended to do in office.