Scattered Opposition

Cathy Young from the March 1993 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

"To go into opposition–at the time that Yuri Afanasiev and Marina Salier spoke about this, everyone was in opposition to the government and to the president except for the DemRussia movement and the organizations that are part of it. Did we have to add our opposition as well?" asks DemRussia coordinator Vera Kriger. "Our approach was and is and will be different: working constructively in the areas where we can make a difference. Our experts at the Supreme Soviet made many specific proposals which were included in the privatization law and were passed by the Supreme Soviet. It is very difficult to get this Supreme Soviet to pass anything at all, but it passed."

DemRussia leaders bristle at accusations of blind loyalty to the president, citing their criticism of the extension of credits to failing state enterprises. But they seem to see some truth in the charge that their failure to criticize the government has put it under one-sided pressure to placate the right. "We must criticize the government from the left," says Filippov.

Kriger too, is ambivalent: "We trusted those people. We agitated for them. We got millions to vote for them. Then how can we abandon them, and, moreover, go into opposition to them? Was it not our task to help them? That doesn't mean just patting them on the head and saying, 'Oh, what good boys you are.' It means helping them with deeds, criticizing them." As long as anti-reform forces control Congress, Yeltsin's political cunning may well be the best hope for reform. But the line between clever maneuvering and appeasement that makes reform meaningless is a dangerously thin one, as Gorbachev found out.

The president himself isn't terribly popular–his approval rating dipped below 30 percent in some polls by the fall of 1992. And despite a July survey of Muscovites showing 42 percent with either "complete" or "partial" confidence in Democratic Russia, public apathy or cynicism gives well-organized former Communists the upper hand. When an election was held last summer in the Moscow suburb of Dmitrov for a vacated seat in parliament, voter turnout was 30 percent (rendering the election invalid under Russian law, which requires a minimum 50-percent turnout). The former first secretary of the local Communist Party committee, who had the resources to mobilize supporters, came in first.

And the power of the nomenklatura has been barely dented. This is especially obvious in the provinces, where yesterday's head of the local Communist Party committee is often today's "democratic" mayor. More than 75 percent of Yeltsin's "direct representatives"–officials appointed to make sure that local authorities do not block reforms–are former first secretaries of regional Communist Party committees.

But if the endurance of nomenklatura perks is rattling, the endurance of KGB power and secrecy is downright ominous. In the last years of Gorbachev, despite assurances that the KGB was no longer spying on Soviet citizens, most people suspected that this was not entirely true. These suspicions were fully confirmed after the fall of the Soviet regime, when officials of the "reorganized" and renamed Russian security service admitted to recent surveillance of democratic activists, giving new assurances that this would not happen again.

Batkin, the Renaissance historian and former DemRussia leader, remains skeptical: "When a top official of the new Russian KGB testified at the Constitutional Court hearings [on the legitimacy of Yeltsin's ban on the Communist Party] and was asked if this practice continued today, he just smirked and shrugged. You should have seen his face."

To achieve real reform would take a complete overhaul of the political system with clearly delineated separation of powers and efficient checks and balances. One of the resolutions of the DemRussia convention urges exactly that. And Marina Salier wants to do more than call for change. She and her Constituent Union are gathering signatures to call for a referendum on whether to dissolve the legislature and elect a constitutional convention. Under Russian law, if the sponsors of a referendum can collect I million signatures, the measure must be placed on the ballot.

Among other provisions, Salier believes a new constitution must contain the words, "Private property is sacred and inviolable." It would also establish a new legislature, presumably less dominated by reactionaries (although given current mistrust of politics, some reformers fear that new elections might produce a communist-dominated body).

The idea of a constitutional convention has been in the air since the radical Democratic Union proposed it as an alternative to the 1990 elections. In 1991, the Free Democratic Party of Russia (of which both Salier and Yeltsin loyalist Kriger were cofounders) became the first serious political party to back a convention. And last April, a convention seemed a real possibility when Yeltsin tentatively called for a referendum. Excited DemRussia members organized committees to collect signatures but abandoned the effort when Yeltsin's call turned out to be a mere ploy to wrench emergency powers from Congress.

The idea of a constitutional convention stitl appeals to many moderate and radical democrats, but most doubt that it is realistic at this time, with political enthusiasm at low ebb. And even if Salier succeeds in collecting the necessary signatures, the referendum faces a major obstacle: The Russian Congress does not always obey Russian law.

Last year, DemRussia launched a drive to gather signatures for a referendum on legalizing private ownership of land, seen as a way to get parliament. Despite a slow start, hampered by mixed signals from Yeltsin, democratic activists succeeded in collecting 2.5 million valid signatures–1.5 million over the required minimum. Yet in December the anti-reform Congress refused to sanction the referendum, prompting DemRussia to appeal the issue to the Constitutional Court.

Salier herself does not expect the current petition drive to succeed. But she thinks a new constitution is essential to fulfill the promise of the reformers’ revolution.

"Yeltsin spoke to [the U.S.] Congress and declared to a standing ovation, 'The communist regime has collapsed,' " she says. "Did any one of these congressmen ask him, 'What has replaced it? Do you have a new constitution? What political system does Russia have now if the communist system is gone?' Well, who can answer that question? It's just what it always was. There is no new political system."

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