By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW, March 25 — On the fifth day after Russian President Boris Yeltsin decreed "special rule" throughout the country, the local administrations in Russia's provinces and republics were splitting into supporters of the president and backers of his opponents in the parliament. The likelihood was increasing that the rule of a single national government in Russia would be restored only through armed force.
The republic of Chuvashia, and the regions of Vorkuta, Novosibirsk and the Kuban, are reported to have declared their support for the president. The republics of Karelia, Sakha, Dagestan, Tuva and Komi, and the regions of Chelyabinsk and Khabarovsk, have called for the constitution to be respected — that is, for Yeltsin's claims to be rejected as illegal.
The important Siberian industrial region of the Kuzbass is also likely to favour the parliament.
As the power struggle continues, the prospect is increasing that military units stationed in various republics and provinces will line up with the local authorities, on both sides of the political rift. The danger that the armed forces will split in this fashion, and civil war ensue, is likely at some point to impel the military high command to come down decisively on one side or the other.
In making his March 20 television broadcast, Yeltsin defied numerous warnings that an attempt to impose presidential rule might well result in the break-up of the Russian Federation.
In the last few years there has already been a drastic weakening of central control. Local administrative machines in the republics and provinces have expanded their powers as the Soviet-era industrial ministries have been dismantled. The local authorities have taken over many of the planning and regulatory functions which the centre has abandoned; a great deal of Russia's internal trade, for example, is now conducted on the basis of barter deals between regions.
Both the president and parliament in recent months have courted the local authorities, promising them increased autonomy in exchange for political support.
Nevertheless, most of the republican and provincial administrators have strong cause to side with the parliament. Acting more and more as leaders of sovereign states, these administrators are suspicious of Yeltsin's attempts to rebuild a strong executive in Moscow.
In addition, industrial regions such as Chelyabinsk and the Kuzbass, with their dependence on military-related production, have been hit hard by the president's defence cuts and "shock therapy" economic strategies. Trying to stop production from collapsing, economic managers in such areas are far more sympathetic to the parliament's paced market-style reforms than to the president's "crash through or crash" neo-liberalism.
Since March 20, Yeltsin has pursued several tactics aimed at forcing provincial administrators and other holders of influential posts to declare their support for his actions.
One tactic was to delay releasing the text of the decree referred to in his initial broadcast. This was aimed at putting off the date when the Constitutional Court would, almost inevitably, declare the president's actions unconstitutional; in the meantime, Yeltsin and his supporters had the chance to apply heavy pressure to waverers.
The Constitutional Court was forced to base its ruling on the text of the president's television address, finding in a nine-to-four decision on March 23 that Yeltsin had violated eight articles of the constitution. The president's decree was finally published on March 24.
Yeltsin's second tactic has consisted of crude threats that officials who do not carry out his orders will be sacked. In a March 23 decree he stated: "I warn officials ... who do not carry out their duties, or who block legislative acts of the Russian Federation, of their personal responsibility before the President".
The officials who have had most success in resisting Yeltsin's demands include those of the "power" ministries — security, interior and defence. Like other members of the Russian government, the ministers responsible for these areas signed a statement supporting the president's decree. But when summoned before the parliament on March 21, defence minister Pavel Grachev pledged the army's neutrality in a speech that drew a rebuke from parliamentary speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov for its vagueness.
According to the March 25 issue of the English-language Moscow Times, Yeltsin has told the parliament that he will ignore an impeachment vote. With no sign that either the president's supporters or opponents can put large numbers of demonstrators in the streets, the pressures are growing for the armed forces to settle the question of power by giving unequivocal support to one side or the other.
The military's critical concern will be to prevent any split within its ranks. For this reason, a decision will not be made quickly, and will involve exhaustive consultation with regional commanders. That suggests the stand-off could last for some time yet.
A second major concern of the armed forces will be to provide themselves with an ironclad legal and constitutional justification for any step they take. With no particular wish to take power themselves, the members of the general staff have no desire to spend years "sleeping on bare boards" as a result of breaching the law.
The only course which answers these needs of the military is to act in line with the finding of the Constitutional Court that Yeltsin's actions were illegal — that is, to support the parliament. The fact that the successor to the presidency if Yeltsin is impeached will nder Rutskoi, a former air force pilot who is popular in military circles, will simply make the decision easier.
Faced with the near certainty that the armed forces, if pressed, will throw their weight behind the parliament, Yeltsin might now be expected to seek a compromise that would allow him to remain president while placing the supposedly undemocratic parliament before the population for judgment. Such a compromise would logically involve an agreement that early elections would be held both for the presidency — which Yeltsin would almost certainly retain — and for the parliament.
At a press conference on March 22, Russia's largest trade union body, the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia, demanded strict adherence to the constitution and called for early elections. According to ITAR-Tass, Khasbulatov has also said that he sees early presidential and legislative elections as "inevitable". But Yeltsin is reported to have rejected this proposal.
The president's reasons are not so mysterious. In elections for the parliament in particular, Russians would be required to choose not just between personalities, or even institutions of government, but between political and economic programs.
If debate were concentrated on specific policies reflecting the interests of particular social groups, then Yeltsin's neo-liberals, whose policies have led to economic collapse and a huge increase in social inequality, would fare miserably. The new parliament would still be hostile to the president — and could no longer be dismissed as an undemocratic relic of Soviet times.
Yeltsin's decision to spark an intractable crisis, accelerating the break-up of the Russian state and giving the armed forces a blooding in national politics, is ultimately an attempt to avoid such debate on concrete policies, and the political education of the masses that would flow from it.