Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!enterpoop.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.natrev From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Yeltsin's Unfinished Revolution Date: Wed, 25 Nov 92 12:17:28 EST Message-ID: Lines: 446 Yeltsin's Unfinished Revolution ELISABETH RUBINFIEN AND DANIEL SNEIDER Miss Rubinfien is a Moscow correspondent of The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Sneider is the Moscow bureau chief of The Christian Science Monitor. MOSCOW IN post-Soviet Russia, political crises are as frequent and as predictable as winter snow flurries. The next is scheduled to erupt on December 1, when the Congress of People's Deputies, the nation's highest legislature, convenes its winter session. There, President Boris Yeltsin will confront yet another in a seemingly endless series of challenges to his rule. An array of enemies, from unre- pentant Communists to nostalgic worshipers of the earlier incarnation of the Russian Empire, will rise to assail him. At stake are the future of the two shaky pillars of the Yeltsin government -- the emerging market econ- omy and the half-formed democracy. So far Boris Yeltsin has emerged triumphant from each such engage- ment. He has relied on two political talents that eluded his now-carping predecessor -- the abilities to speak to the common man and to forge via- ble compromises. And so far, he has avoided Mikhail Gorbachev's suicidal tendency to surround himself with enemies. All of these crises ultimately stem from the unfinished character of the Second Russian Revolution -- that is, from Mr. Yeltsin's failure to create a post-Soviet political system. A year ago, riding on the wave of elation and faith that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr. Yeltsin de- cided not to dissolve the Congress and call new elections. He dallied in preparing a new constitution. He decided not to form his own party and bring the ragtag democrats together under his flag. As a result, he is left fighting with the past. What looks like a straight- forward confrontation between government and parliament is really a bat- tle with the remnants of the old system. The Congress of People's Depu- ties was elected in 1990, when Russia was still part of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party was still dominant. The standing parliament, the Supreme Soviet, is elected from its ranks. For the past year, the Congress and the Supreme Soviet have obstructed a number of key measures, including a draft constitution that would create an entirely new bicameral legislature, along with a strong executive. Many democrats urged Mr. Yeltsin to dissolve the Congress a year ago and hold new elections. But the president's decision not to do so seemed defensible at the time. It was still unclear what was going to happen to the Soviet Union, and the autumn was filled with struggle to define a new course for the country. That issue was resolved only in December, when Russia and its two Slavic partners signed the Minsk agreement. On the heels of that momentous event, Russia was scheduled to start its ambi- tious program of shock-therapy economic reforms crafted by reform czar, now acting premier, Yegor Gaidar. Alongside those practical considerations, Mr. Yeltsin's hesitation is also a product of his tendency arrogantly to rely on his personal strength to get what he wants. Instead of holding new elections, Mr. Yeltsin managed to persuade the Congress last December to grant him emergency powers that allow him to legislate by decree. Those powers were extended in April, though at the cost of slowing down economic reforms. This extra authority expires on December 1, making their extension the key issue of this gathering. Since that first fateful decision, Mr. Yeltsin has had two options: to com- promise and buy the time to push reforms through, hoping the economy will improve enough to enable him to redress his error; or to go for a fron- tal confrontation, dissolve the Congress, and count on his popularity. Mr. Yeltsin holds this latter option as a sword over the head of the par- liament. The rumors and denials of an imminent move to presidential rule -- an ominous term which no one can exactly define -- are all part of this game of nerves. Radical democrats advocate this approach, and urge the president to hold a popular referendum on the key questions of land priva- tization and approval of a new constitution. But for all the bluster, Mr. Yeltsin is most likely to choose Option Num- ber One. The democrats are too disorganized to be reliable allies, and the economy is too rocky to risk holding an election now. Moreover, things al- ways look worst of all here in November and December, as the winter snows deepen and daylight diminishes. An election in the upbeat mood of spring would be safer. Moreover, Mr. Yeltsin is confident he can come away from this Congress with most of what he wants -- that is, that he will retain crucial powers, and reforms will remain basically on track. On November 14, Mr. Yeltsin hinted how he intends to do that when he spoke to a meeting of some one thousand Russian enterprise directors, largely from the military-industrial complex, who have been demanding changes in the government's radical economic reform program. He cracked the whip, saying sternly that the industrial lobby's demand for another trillion rubles in subsidies would not be fulfilled. ''I don't want to deceive you,'' he said. ''I must state clearly there will be no trillion.'' The audience greeted the president's forceful speech with only a smat- tering of applause. But for the next ninety minutes he could be seen on the dais, chatting up Arkady Volsky, head of the Russian Union of Indus- trialists and Entrepreneurs, as if he had no differences with one of the most powerful critics of the current reform program. The routine was vintage Boris Yeltsin. Mr. Yeltsin is a master at com- bining the imperious strength of the traditional Russian leader with the cajoling of an early-twentieth-century American city ward boss. He draws lines, cracks down on the opposition, but then looks to make deals. Most importantly, he looks always to divide his foes, isolating those he cannot work with from those he can. POLITICAL forces in Russia today divide into three ideological blocs. The most extreme is the so-called Red - Brown alliance, a motley collection of hard-line Communist and neo-fascist nationalist groups drawn together under the umbrella of the National Salvation Front. The Front, which in- cludes many parliament members, calls for the resignation of Mr. Yeltsin and his government, and a return to the command economy. Mr. Yeltsin, invoking his power to rule by decree, has banned the organization as un- constitutional, but its members are tenacious. Sharing the basic economic goals of the National Salvation Front but stopping short of assaulting Mr. Yeltsin himself are several conservative factions in parliament -- the state and collective farm directors who op- pose the privatization of land, and state enterprise directors and workers who fear their companies will fail in a market economy. Political analysts say these organizations have enviable internal ''discipline'' -- that is, their members will probably vote as they are told. If they ally with the Red -- Browns in the Congress, they would present an anti-reform bloc that would be threatening, though not yet overwhelming. On the opposite extreme are the so-called democrats and radical reform- ers. These numerous political parties firmly support the president, Mr. Gaidar, and the reform process, but have other interests that keep them from uniting into a solid bloc. In the center stand the captains of industry represented by the Civic Union. The Civic Union brings together Mr. Volsky's industrial lobbying group with three smaller centrist organizations that have varied inter- ests. Among them is one headed by Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi, a former Afghan war hero who fears that the demise of the Soviet Union will be followed by the collapse of Russia itself. The Civic Union recently presented Mr. Yeltsin with its alternative pro- gram for economic reform. The program reads largely like a recap of 1970s Soviet policy: state subsidies, controlled wages and prices, centralized or- ders. Mr. Volsky himself, a smooth and genial politician, spent many years in the Communist Party Central Committee. ''He's the quintessen- tial Brezhnevite,'' warns Swedish economist Anders Aslund. Nonetheless, it is this large and powerful group that provides Mr. Yeltsin with his most fertile field for politicking. The driving force and real potential power in the Civic Union lies in its most progressive mem- bers, who dread a return to total state planning. A senior officer of Mr. Volsky's lobby is himself a good example. Nikolai Bekh is general director of Russia's largest truck manufacturer, KAMAZ, a typical Soviet leviathan that includes 18 plants and employs tens of thousands of workers. It was also among the first Russian enterprises to start to privatize, long before the current government reforms took effect. Mr. Bekh's priorities, as he explained last month at two conferences, aren't to squeeze more subsidies from the government, or to re-establish a system of centralized planning and price controls -- ideas that are cen- tral to the economic program that Mr. Volsky supports. Rather, he and many other Russian enterprise directors worry most about burdensome taxes, a paralyzed banking system, and foreign compe- tition. While they don't always favor the freewheeling American brand of capitalism, many like the middle-of-the-road option followed in Japan or South Korea. ''We, more so than anybody else, used to bear the brunt of economic de- pendence, suppression of initiative, and the pressure of the totalitarian system,'' said Mr. Bekh. ''We vote for economic independence with both our hands, for privatization, development of business contacts, the free market. However, this must be the market of equal opportunities.'' Mr. Volsky has already lost the old-style industrial bosses and can't af- ford to alienate the new Russian businessmen. He needs a compromise al- most as much as the president -- who, in turn, cannot hope to win the vote on his presidential authority without Mr. Volsky's backing. The only ques- tion is the price the Yeltsin - Gaidar team will have to pay for this backing. Radical economic reforms will inevitably be moderated. Such adapta- tions raise the specter of outright reversal, or at least of drifting by habit toward the patterns of old. But with Mr. Gaidar still in place and some reforms becoming increasingly entrenched, that drift should be controllable. At least some elements of a potential compromise are already clear. The Gaidar government has already presented a new anti-crisis program which allows for selective credits and tax privileges for state enterprises. A new federal corporation would buy 10 to 15 per cent of their production, a step back to the monster Gossnab, the Soviet Union's state-controlled distribution structure. Already last spring, Mr. Yeltsin significantly eased tight money controls aimed at restoring real value to the ruble and enforc- ing discipline on the state-owned enterprises. Whether such compromises in themselves endanger reforms is hotly ar- gued. Even the International Monetary Fund seems to be shifting ground, reportedly accepting the need to retain much of the state sector for some time to come. Others, such as Mr. Aslund, warn that the hyperinflation resulting from making deals with the Volsky lobby will destroy the re- forms, leading to a restoration of authoritarian rule. But whether or not such compromises are economically defensible, they are politically inevitable. So long as the Russian revolution remains un- finished, the forces of the old order will remain a brake on reform. And, perhaps appropriately, the more Russia strives to become a Western-style democracy rather than another rendition of autocracy, the more politics should be a matter of compro-mise. ******************************************************************** Clinton in Clover DANIEL WATTENBERG Mr. Wattenberg writes for The American Spectator. WASHINGTON, D.C. IS BILL CLINTON going to govern as a New Democrat after all? It's still too soon to tell, but moderate, DLC-type Democrats like what they've seen so far. Naivete? Remember that in 1976, Scoop Jackson Democrats, the immediate ideological ancestors of the New Democrats, had high hopes that Jimmy Carter's hawkish campaign rhetoric would translate into some key appointments. What did they get? As Elliott Abrams memorably put it, ''One ambassadorship. Not Indonesia. Not Polynesia. But Micronesia.'' In the spring of 1991, I interviewed Bill Clinton (chairman of the DLC at the time) in Baton Rouge, where he and DLC President Al From were opening a Louisiana chapter of the organization. Eastern Europe had been liberated, Gorbachev was still in power, and Clinton was contemplat- ing a run for the presidential nomination. I asked him whether he be- lieved that Ronald Reagan's security policies -- the military build-up, the Reagan Doctrine, the anti-Communist rhetoric -- deserved credit for the collapse of the Soviet bloc. And he said: ''I think it had something to do with it . . . The kind of system they tried to have in Eastern Europe just doesn't work very well in the world we're living in, and as soon as the peo- ple found out just how terrible it was and what their alternatives were, it was more or less doomed. But I think precedent to that you had to have the willingness of the Soviet Union to let it happen in Eastern Europe, which I think was at least in part a function of their own internal prob- lems, but those internal problems were certainly aggravated by the enormous stresses we put on them because of the military build-up. They had to match what we did. . . . And also the rhetoric of rolling back Com- munist regimes, changing the preconceived notion that once you go Com- munist you can never turn it back, which Reagan had something to do with, played a contributing role . . . Reagan's policies . . . certainly accelerated the trend.'' He gave Reagan more credit, I remember thinking, than George Bush had up to that time. For a guy flirting with a Democratic presidential campaign it was pretty gutsy talk. And it's worth keeping in mind in evaluating centrist Democrats' optimism about the way the early transition is unfolding. It is still very early, and announcements of the ten or so people who will head up department and agency reviews will make things much clearer. When Mickey Kantor was busted by a coalition of Clinton campaign staf- fers as broadly trans-ideological as the anti-Saddam coalition, his elabo- rate pre-election plans for a transition that would start naming people al- most the day after the election were discarded. As a result, the transition clock was wound back by about two weeks. Now, Clinton is running his own transition, and there are noises out of Little Rock that he intends to decide what his policies are first and then pick people to carry them out. If true, this could mean that Clinton is serious about ideological renewal and sensitive to the danger of mechanically filling slots with job-hungry members of Washington's liberal establishment. Moderates are very encouraged by Clinton's choice of Al From as the transition's domestic-policy director. After making the party platform a manifesto of Clintonism as the nominee's representative on the platform commission, Mr. From had seemed to be locked up in a meat freezer throughout the campaign. A source called the appointment ''very impor- tant and rather surprising, because there was a lot of antagonism toward the DLC in some quarters of the campaign.'' Al From's deputy for domestic policy is Bruce Reed, a policy director of the DLC before joining the Clin- ton campaign as issues director. Another key appointment was that of former South Carolina Governor Richard Riley to supervise personnel selection below the Cabinet level. ''Dick is a definite DLC moderate Democrat and he'll be in charge of making sure that all these sub-Cabinet appointees in fact reflect Clinton's desires,'' said one source. ''There couldn't be a better choice.'' Earlier, Jan Pi- ercey, a ''search advisor'' for the highly liberal MacArthur Foundation, had been named as director of personnel for the transition. The Riley appoint- ment could mean that Piercey will be effectively put out of commission, perhaps relegated to loading the forty thousand unsolicited resumes the campaign has received into a data bank. In 1976, the only contact that Scoop Jackson Democrats had in the Car- ter transition was Matt Coffey, with whom a couple of them had worked back in the Johnson Administration. When a delegation went to see Cof- fey, someone casually referred to then-AFL-CIO Secretary - Treasurer Lane Kirkland as one of ''our guys'' on foreign policy. The Jackson Demo- crats were not reassured when Coffey replied, ''Oh. Does the AFL-CIO have an interest in foreign policy?'' The vibes are better this time. Samuel ''Sandy'' Berger and Anthony Lake, Director of Policy Planning in the Carter State Department, head the transition's national-security ''cluster goup.'' A recovered McGovernite, Berger is credited with reaching out to bring foreign-policy neo-conservatives like Richard Schifter, Joshua Muravchik, and Penn Kemble back to the Democratic fold during the cam- paign. A source says that the foreign-policy transition will be heavily in- fluenced not so much by Democrats who were hard-line anti-Communists during the cold war as by people who come from ''the groups that were involved in the pro-democracy activities -- the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute, and that sort of thing.'' He adds: ''It's going to be a pretty decent group.'' At this early stage, fears of Carter II appear exaggerated. Still, Clin- ton's stumble in the transition's first days into embarrassing public disa- greement with Senator San Nunn and the military over his intention to reverse the military's ban on homosexuals illustrates the continuing dan- ger of insular, liberal groupthink. ''The reason Nunn spoke out the way he did is that he had counseled the campaign and had been sort of ig- nored,'' explained a source. ''It's a bit of evidence about the kind of prob- lem that might arise in a Clinton Administration if they don't bring in people from a wide enough range of views to have some honest debate about these problems before they get out in public with them.'' So far Clinton looks better than expected, but he is not out of the top of the first inning yet. True, he has named a couple of good people, but what is he going to do the first time the Left tries to gig one of them? Clin- ton looks like early JFK now, but he may end up as Son of Carter yet. If so, we can all look forward to better relations with Micronesia. ******************************************************************** The Sultan's Dream ERIK V. KUEHNELT-LEDDIHN Mr. Kuehnelt-Leddihn, NR's European correspondent, is currently on his annual speaking tour in the United States. MUSCAT OMAN has no art treasures like Italy, no natural beauty like Ceylon, no overpowering industry like Japan, no smothering wealth like Kuwait. Yet, to the visitor, it provides a unique experience -- the chance to observe a country that is brand new and yet thoroughly traditional, as close to an ideal nation as I ever hope to see. Oman is almost like a rabbit pulled out of a magician's hat. In the cities one sees hardly a house built before 1972; the few old homes that remain have been cleverly renovated. And yet, apart from a few luxurious hotels, all its buildings are strictly in the Islamic style. There is no poverty, and education is pursued very seriously. The streets of Muscat, the capital, are so clean that one could safely eat off their surface, and one can walk around at any time of night with no fear of being mugged. Oman is truly a dream come true. In 1970, Sultan Qaboos bin Sayid Al- Sayid came into power, and about the same time oil was found. A Commu- nist insurgent movement, aided and financed by neighboring South Yemen, sprouted in the Southern Province, but with some outside help the Sultan defeated the rebellion. And then the total rebuilding began. Present-day Oman is an absolute monarchy in which, however, the ruler aims to carry on a systematic dialogue with the people. He makes an extensive annual tour of the country with all his ministers to hear com- plaints and proposals, but he has also set up a State Consultative Council, whose members he appoints from a list of freely elected candidates. Is this the first step on the road to a truly parliamentary democracy? I hope not, because such a democracy would inevitably founder on ideological, relig- ious, and above all tribal differences. The majority of Omanis are Sun- nites, but over a third, including the royal family, belong to the Ibadhi sect; there are also a few Shiites. Tribally, Oman includes non-Arab Be- ludshis, the legacy of Oman's past greatness, when it owned a whole em- pire from present-day Pakistan to East Africa. Although the empire is gone, Oman still has strategic importance, dominating as it does the Straits of Hormuz. Another advantage of Oman's not being a democracy is that its rulers' vision is not bounded by the date of the next election. They are planning for the future, including the probability that some day the oil reserves will run out. Enormous efforts are being made to irrigate the countryside and to exploit Oman's other natural resources -- chromium, iron, copper, coal. In addition, much thought is devoted to Omani education. In every village (I have seen a great many) the most imposing building is the school. (Be- fore the present Sultan took over, in all of Oman there were only two schools for boys and one for girls.) In 1986 a fine, modern university was opened in Muscat; the science departments and the medical school have the best equipment money can buy. The students at the university are very definitely an intellectual elite. Surprisingly, for an Arab country, about half of them are women and, even more surprising to a Westerner, the majority of the women study the natural sciences, not the humanities. Actually, this should not be so sur- prising, since women are more given to detail and to the concrete, while men generally prefer to live in the clouds. Although Omani society keeps the sexes at a distance (in the university men and women are seated sep- arately in the lecture halls), the ministries have a high proportion of fe- male personnel. Women secretaries (with kerchiefs, but no longer veiled) are seen everywhere. Polygamy is on the wane, and the home is very much the woman's domain. Mosques abound, and the Islamic prescription to pray five times a day is quite strictly obeyed. The government knows very well that only a relig- ious education provides the foundation of a moral life: hence the freedom given to the country's Christians to practice their faith and teach it to their children. Guest workers are a very important element in the modernization of Oman. However, the government wisely wants to prevent a massive im- migration of Asians such as we see in other Gulf states. In Qatar the im- migrant population amounts to nearly 90 per cent, and there even the na- tive children start to speak Urdu instead of Arabic. In Oman the guest workers from India, Pakistan, and the Philippines mostly come without a family and get a month's vacation each year, which they use to visit their relatives at home. What are the prospects for Oman's continuing on its present, highly suc- cessful path? Will the university's increasing output of intellectuals create dissatisfaction with an absolute monarchy, however beneficent, and the demand for a more representative government? Such a development should not be expected in the near future, for a variety of reasons. These are, first of all, the lack of any such impetus in the Islamic tradition, cou- pled with the strength of that tradition in Oman. Then there is the strongly patriarchal mentality prevailing in the tribes, and the enormous popularity of the Sultan himself. Finally, there is the people's stake in the country's prosperity. Of course, history does not move on an even keel. But Oman's ''enlightened absolutism'' has the support not only of the elites, but also of the people at large (which was not the case in the Shah's Iran). We have to bear in mind that the country as we know it today started from scratch just twenty years ago. Similar success stories are found in the Far East -- Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore -- but even there not in such an extremely neat and pure form. Perhaps, I dare to venture, this is because Oman is a monotheistic country with a clear vertical order, where things are simply done and not endlessly disputed. Theoretically the same should have been so in the late USSR, but there the system failed because it was based on a fundamental falsehood about the universe, including God and man. This article is copyright 1992 National Review. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM