By Doug Lorimer
"We are witnessing the beginning of a populist dictatorship", wrote British historian Sir Michael Howard, commenting on Russian President Boris Yeltsin's assumption of control over the machinery of Soviet state power.
As the coup by the eight-person State Committee for the State of Emergency began to collapse on August 22, Yeltsin issued a series of decrees placing all central state institutions, including the mass media and the military forces of the Soviet Union, under his control.
Yeltsin's bid to control all-Union institutions provoked an angry response from Nursultan Nazarbeyev, the president of the Kazakh republic. On August 27 Nazarbeyev said the Russian government's "great-power, chauvinist" attitude was driving other republics out of the Soviet Union. "Everybody is afraid", he said.
Nazarbeyev was particularly incensed by a statement by Yeltsin that, if the Soviet Union broke up, the borders of the states would not be the present ones. They would have to take into account "ethnic Russians and where they live".
Yeltsin's threat was repeated by his press secretary, Pavel Voshchanov: "The lines on our maps are not real boundaries. They are just lines on maps."
In the Ukraine, the Donbass coal-producing area and the Crimea both have large Russian populations. So does northern Kazakhstan; Russians constitute the largest ethnic group in Kazakhstan — 41% of the inhabitants.
"If these republics enter the [renewed] Union with Russia, it is not a problem", Voshchanov said. "But if they go, we must take care of the population that lives there and not forget that these lands were settled by Russians."
Nazarbeyev responded by stating that if anyone tried to redraw borders, it would mean "war, civil war."
He accused Yeltsin and his supporters of trying to monopolise power and expressed anger about the way the new Soviet government was being chosen.
He said that Yeltsin had told a meeting of the Federation Council, which groups the presidents of the Soviet republics, that he wanted to receive the federal premiership, the chairmanship of the KGB and the ministries of defence, foreign affairs and police
for his own candidates.
However, the meeting agreed that all the republics would consult on the composition of a new government. "But we dispersed and then saw a decree" signed by Gorbachev and Yeltsin appointing a commission headed by Russian Prime Minister Ivan Silayev to select a new federal government. Silayev immediately declared that future federal ministers would by controlled by their Russian counterparts.
"What sort of democracy is this?" Nazarbeyev asked.
Witch-hunt
At a rally in Moscow on August 23, Yeltsin claimed that the coup had been "secretly sanctioned by the neo-Stalinist core of the Communist Party Central Committee leadership". This accusation became the pretext for a witch-hunt directed not only against the top bureaucrats who organised the coup, but against all 15 million members of the Communist Party.
While the coup organisers were all prominent members of the party, there is no evidence that they acted with the endorsement of its leading bodies.
According to a report in the August 22 Australian, "the hardliners tried to convene a meeting of the Central Committee last night to depose Mr Gorbachev as party chief but were deprived of a quorum by reformists".
The report stated that the Central Committee's secretariat had adopted a resolution declaring the coup unconstitutional and demanding a meeting with Gorbachev. The "events of the last few days were initiated without the participation of the ruling bodies of the Communist Party", the resolution stated.
But identifying the party with the coup gave Yeltsin the pretext to settle the dispute which has been the axis of Soviet politics for several years now, namely, which wing of the elite will become the private owners of state property — the party functionaries controlling the central ministries and big state trusts, or lower level officials, technical experts and professionals who have become the base of support for Yeltsin and his allies in the Moscow and Leningrad city soviets.
"The political fight for power is the fight for property", Dr Svyatoslav Fyodorov, a member of the Central Committee until last year, observed in an article earlier this year in Komsomolskaya Pravda.
In the June 5 International Herald Tribune, David Remnick described the wholesale scramble by party officials to transform the state and party property they administer into private property:
"Suddenly countless Communist Party secretaries and apparatchiks ... are transforming themselves into a new class of 'biznesmeni' ...
"'The party apparatchiks — the smart ones — look at what happened to the Communists in Eastern Europe, and they know that one fine day very soon it's going to happen to them', said Igor Portyansky, director of a leading consulting group.
"'They want to be sure that they've made the crossover in time', he said. 'They want to hang on to the good life when the real market economy finally comes' ...
"With access to government connections, extraordinary tax breaks and hundreds of millions of rubles in party funds, Komsomol [Young Communist League] leaders have set up huge commercial banks like Menetep and Finist, and they are beginning to dominate the financial scene."
The coup organisers did not even make a pretence of defending "socialism". The British Guardian Weekly's Ian Traynor observed, "their appeal to the nation on Monday morning, referred not once to socialism, communism, or the party to which they owe their power, position, and privilege. In contrast, references to patriotism (5), the motherland (6), and Soviet (11) revealed an intention to play shrewdly by populism and tap the rampant discontent wrought by perestroika's economic failure."
The committee adopted the same populist demagogy that Yeltsin employed in his campaign for the Russian presidency in June. They promised a "consistent rise in the living standards of all citizens" and "support [to] private enterprise, granting it necessary opportunities for the development of production and services". Their aim was to ensure that the spoils of privatising of state property would go mainly to the central bureaucracy.
With Yeltsin's transfer of the Communist Party's property to the control of local city councils, local bureaucrats and professional layers will now be in the best position to become the new class of "biznesmeni".
Yeltsin's coup
Commenting on Yeltsin's actions, the liberal British Guardian Weekly observed on September 1: "There is nothing very democratic either about dissolving party organisations or banning newspapers ... Any banning should be directed against the apparatus which from Stalin onwards subverted the ideals of communism, and which could still be misused hereafter".
But Yeltsin and the politicians who support him have no intention
of dismantling the bureaucratic state machine created by Stalin. They know that restoring capitalism will lead to massive social dislocation and working-class discontent. They will need a powerful state machine to suppress the workers' opposition to their goal.
Following the wave of strikes and workers' rallies in April, protesting against the first step toward the introduction of "market" prices for state-supplied goods, Grigory Yavlinsky, one of the authors of the 500-days-to-capitalism plan supported by Yeltsin and the Russian government, wrote in Moscow News: "All reserves have been exhausted and the people's patience is at an end; a start can be made now by force and by shooting all the offenders". Yavlinsky is now a member of the economic commission headed by Ivan Silayev that will draw up a new plan for the creation of a "full-blooded" market economy.
In his statement resigning as general secretary of the Communist Party and calling on its Central Committee to dissolve itself, Mikhail Gorbachev called on "communists who support democracy, constitutional legality and a policy of restructuring society" to "commit themselves to creating a party on new foundations, capable, with all progressive forces, of engaging itself actively in the pursuit of authentic democratic reforms in the interests of the workers".
Yeltsin and his allies are determined to stop any such development. Already in July, he issued a decree banning "the activity of political parties and mass social movements" in any enterprise within the Russian republic.
On August 23, Yeltsin signed a decree banning publication of five Communist papers, including Pravda, accusing them of "incitement to unconstitutional activity" because they had published the emergency committee's statements.
Pravda's acting editor in chief, Gennady Seleznev, said: "This is the ninth time that Pravda has been axed. [Tsar] Nicholas II of Russia did it eight times. Boris the First has now done it for the first time."
Vladimir Gubarev, Pravda's science editor, pointed out: "Banning Pravda is not aimed at the paper itself. This is the first step towards destroying the party. As for Pravda, if it exists, a new party can again coalesce around it, as happened several times in our history already. Hence the decree."
The inclusion of the left-wing anti-Stalinist Glasnost in the ban clearly shows that it is aimed at "communists who support democracy". Glasnost could hardly be accused of supporting the coup, since its publication was outlawed by the emergency committee!
As London Sunday Times journalists Peter Millar and James
Blitz observed a week after the defeat of the coup: "Yeltsin has not just defeated the coup; he has taken it over".