By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — "The Executive Committee of the Council of the FNPR calls on affiliated organisations, labour collectives, and blue and white collar workers to use all available means, including strikes, to make a decisive protest against anti-constitutional actions irrespective of who commits them. We demand immediate cancellation of the unconstitutional restrictions on the activity of the legislative power ..."
This was how Russia's mass trade union federation, the 65-million-member Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia, responded on September 22 to President Boris Yeltsin's decree suspending the country's parliament. The union's condemnation of the presidential coup was just one among a long series of statements from influential organisations and individuals demanding that constitutional legality be restored.
The president of the Executive Committee of the Civic Union, Vasily Lipitsky, sharply attacked Yeltsin's actions. The Civic Union is the umbrella organisation of Russia's political "centre", uniting several large populist-type political parties with a major business organisation, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs.
"After all the declarations and decrees", Lipitsky told an interviewer, "from the legal point of view Yeltsin can no longer be considered to be president". The Civic Union leader was referring to constitutional provisions under which the president is automatically disbarred from office if he or she attempts to curtail the rights of the parliament. On the night of September 21, the parliament acted on these provisions, declaring Vice-President Alexander Rutskoi to be Russia's acting president.
Rutskoi's own People's Party of Free Russia, which is part of the Civic Union, condemned what it described as "an attempt at a coup d'etat and the installation of a regime of personal power". The Congress of Democratic Left Forces, which unites Russia's non-Communist left parties, accused Yeltsin of "trying on the uniform of Pinochet".
As the Moscow daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta noted, the only political groups that have given unequivocal support to the president's actions have been avowedly pro-Yeltsin "democratic" parties and movements. Even here there have been defectors; the United Social Democrats have denounced Yeltsin's decree, as has Republican Party co-chair Igor Yakovenko.
Well-known public figures who have condemned Yeltsin's coup include Mikhail Gorbachev. "Yeltsin had no right to do what he did", the former Soviet president told reporters in Italy. "It was a very foolish and undemocratic thing to do."
"I think Yeltsin will back down", former dissident Zhores Medvedev said in an interview. "Yeltsin has failed in his reforms, and this is just an attempt to conceal that failure."
The president has generally been able to summon the country's small strata of liberal intellectuals and "new rich" entrepreneurs to support his cause. But among the far larger and more vital layers of organised labour and managers of state-owned or recently privatised industry, backing for Yeltsin's coup has been thin and isolated.
And just as critically for a leader who hopes to solve his problems through a snap election (to a still non-existent parliament!), Yeltsin has clearly failed to carry with him the bulk of Russia's established political forces.