Power lust that led Russia to the begging bowl

RUSSIA is unravelling. A man who just five months ago was sacked for incompetence is now back at the helm and charged with doing what he failed to do in the five years he was in office, only this time the situation is much worse. Russians do not know, and the prime minister himself probably does not yet know, who his ministers are going to be, who is in charge of what. The State Duma Russia's parliament - beats its collective breast, while dragging its feet in the hope of making cheap political gains. Powerful financial "oligarchs" , those who have benefited most from the privatisation of Russia's assets, seek to ensure their narrow collective security; while President Yeltsin, said to be missing from Moscow, sick, muddled, demoralised, but still with occasional flashes of fight in him, watches in puzzlement as his authority ebbs away.

What will happen is anyone's guess. Investor confidence has fled; a tidal wave of debt is still poised over Russia, ready to crash down at the slightest sign that the slide in the rouble is accelerating. Reform lost out when Kiriyenko was sacked last Sunday. Now the word on the spin doctors' lips is stability; but in Russia stability is too often another way of saying inertia.

It may well be the case that Russia would have been better off if seven years ago she had begun just a very slow, gradual transition to the market, instead of the precipitate rush that is now ending in confusion. Be that as it may, trying to revert to some kind of centrally controlled economy now is hardly likely to succeed; as with Humpty Dumpty, today's Russian economy cannot be put back together again.

The West must share some of the blame for Russia's predicament. In the seven years since the collapse of the USSR, many western financial institutions and not a few western politicians have demonstrated an almost blind faith in the primacy of economics over politics that would have done credit to an old-style Marxist.

STILL in 1991 under the sway of Reagan-ite and Thatcherite monetarist ideas, the West led Russia to believe that so long as centralised planning and state control over the country's resources were abolished, and so long as market relations were allowed to prevail, then somehow political change would follow and lead in time to liberal democracy.

But why should it? And, in any case, how long was such a transition to take?

What Russia needed most after the failed coup of August 1991 was a set of new political institutions that, together with a gradual transition to market relations, would help to create an open, law- based society.

This does not mean that Russia should have uncritically adopted western democratic institutions in the same way that she adopted economic ones. But institutions designed to ensure the three fundamentals of democracy - choice, accountability, the rule of law - should have been put in place. Instead, what developed was a struggle for raw power.

There are many words in the Russian language that denote power, but one in particular has a special resonance for Russians. it is vlast, a word that incorporates power in its physical sense, power as authority and might, and the power the power that rules over the people.

From 1991 to September 1993, the legislature and the president struggled for the power that was washing around in the system following the demise of the communist party. In the end, the contest for power became so fierce that Yeltsin had to shell the Supreme Soviet into submission.

It was, by his own admission, an illegal, unconstitutional act. But it might have been morally justified had he used the power that he had seized in the interests of creating a better, more democratic system. Sadly, however, he, too, was concerned primarily with maximising his own power. If the legislature had formerly enjoyed too much power and the executive too little, now, with the introduction of a new constitution in December, 1993, the legislature was neutered and the presidency accorded a superabundance of power. These were not just checks and balances; they were, rather, impassable roadblocks in the path of anyone or any institution that had the temerity to oppose the president. As Russians, say, there are good tsars and bad tsars, and often even good tsars turn bad.

This is what happened to Yeltsin. As his physical and mental powers declined, and as the challenges facing his country became such as to place them far beyond his intellectual comprehension, crisis succeeded crisis Heaven knows, Yeltsin tried to cope and it is by no means certain that anyone else could have done better at this particular juncture of Russian history.

But, in the end, his main preoccupation became power for the sake of power: as a former presidential press secretary once put it memorably: "Yeltsin does not have a personal democratic ideology. His ideology, his friend, his concubine, his mistress, his passion, is power."

AT this very moment, power is ebbing away from Yeltsin. To be sure, he is still president and thus invested with those enormous powers that he arrogated to himself in 1993. But the sacking of Kiriyenko and the appointment as acting prime minister of Viktor Chernomyrdin last Sunday were almost certainly the product of pressures exerted on him by a grouping of powerful figures who not only demanded, and got, their own man into office, but also a free hand for him to put together his cabinet. But what is a free hand worth to Chernomyrdin if, having divested himself of Yeltsin's meddling, he now must balance the seemingly incompatible claims of interests as diverse as the financial oligarchs and the communist opposition?

Russia's crisis has for too long been perceived as economic. Obviously, that is the aspect that is most visible and most tangible. But Russia's fundamental problem is political. Not in the sense of sacking this minister and appointing another, but, rather, in the lack of workable political institutions that not only distribute power more fairly around the system, but which also mediate between government and governed.

In the welter of concern about such matters as honouring debts and the course of the rouble, it is easy from a distance to lose sight of the plight of the ordinary Russian citizen, especially away from the sparkle and excitement of Moscow. But, in a phrase used by Charlotte Bronte in her novel Shirley long before universal suffrage existed in Britain, people in Russia are asking ever more insistently what "them that governs us aims to do for us and with us?" It is a question that urgently demands an answer, otherwise there is a risk that Russians' legendary stoicism and patience will at last be exhausted; and if that were to happen the consequences could be terrible indeed.

Peter Frank is Professor of Russian Politics at the University of Essex

Copyright 1998
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