Holding Russia's Fate In His Hands

By JOHN KOHAN MOSCOW

The course of true reform never has run smooth in Russia. As President Boris Yeltsin prepares to do battle with hard-line opponents at the Congress of People's Deputies this week, Russians are braced for another bruising power struggle. After seven years of political turbulence, the country is highly sensitized to trouble. Rumors of a coup, a dictatorship, social upheaval have raced through the capital. But something else has happened as well. Most of Russia's 150 million citizens are taking the latest crisis in stride, indifferent to all the fuss in Moscow. However imperfect their experiment in democracy has proved so far, they have gained confidence that one day it will succeed.

At the moment, their faith is pinned on Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin. He is too much the populist President to take comparisons with King Louis XIV of France very kindly. But anyone who looks at how power is wielded in Russia today cannot help seeing that, to paraphrase the boastful French monarch, l'etat c'est Yeltsin. The Russian leader never aspired to the role of Sun President, around whom everything in the realm turns. But he so dominates the political landscape that it would be no exaggeration to say that as Yeltsin goes, so goes the nation.

Under his leadership, Russia has taken major strides toward becoming a free and open society. The disastrous state of the economy he inherited has made it exceptionally difficult, but his reform team is doing much better than many Western analysts expected. Yet it would be foolhardy for the West to turn its back on Russia just because the ideological conflicts of the cold war are over. The burden that Yeltsin must carry is too heavy for one man. If he should falter, the consequences will reverberate around the world. Russia, says Gennadi Burbulis, Yeltsin's chief political strategist, has become "the prism through which a universal longing for global change has been focused."

The trouble is that one year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia still lacks the kind of political institutions that would ensure the continuity of reforms without Yeltsin. Attempts to establish a system of checks and balances are not faring well. The legislature is paralyzed by unending battles with the executive branch. The new constitutional court must work without a proper constitution. The government has to listen to such a deafening chorus of calls for its resignation that ministers cannot concentrate on the business of reform. It falls to the President to keep the operation of state on track. Says Burbulis: "The majority of Russians have confidence not in institutions like the parliament and government but in the person of the President. During a transformation of such magnitude this kind of personification of power can be positive, but it is also dangerous."

Russia is not the only part of the former Soviet Union to find the transition from totalitarian rule to democracy rocky. The new states have learned that it is not enough to establish a presidential form of rule if there are not local democratic traditions to sustain it. During the past year, new Presidents have been overthrown in the former republics of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Tajikistan. In the Central Asian nation of Turkmenistan, President Saparmurad Niyazov is reviving the tradition of the communist personality cult, complete with marching columns of youths dressed in T shirts emblazoned with his portrait.

So far Yeltsin has proved immune to efforts by sycophantic followers to turn him into an uncrowned Czar. He is a true man of the people -- a real muzhik, as the Russians say -- who works in his own garden and loves to eat herring with boiled potatoes. To maintain the common touch, he often stops his official motorcade to chat with people on the street. Although he has an unfortunate habit of making promises dictated by the feelings of the moment, he has been courageous in supporting unpopular economic policies that have eroded his standing among ordinary citizens.

Yeltsin in his quest to be the kind of strong executive he thinks Russia needs. After he was chosen chairman of the supreme soviet in May 1990, he did a stint as parliamentary leader. A year and one month later, he became the first popularly elected President in the country's history. He even took on the second job of Prime Minister for several months in October 1991. None of these has quite fit the bill. The irony is that Yeltsin is haunted by the same problem that plagued his rival, Mikhail Gorbachev, when the former Soviet President was trying to create a new structure of power to replace Communist Party rule: he has more authority on paper than in practice.

The dilemma can be summed up in two questions: Should authoritarian methods be used to advance the cause of democratic reform? When is the use of force justified in defense of law and order? These issues resonate deeply in a nation where totalitarian leaders used to violate basic human rights as a matter of course. Gorbachev never resolved the conflict of how to be a strong President without sliding into totalitarian rule. Yeltsin is still feeling his way. Whenever he begins to talk tough in response to turmoil in the ethnic enclaves of the Russian Federation or the latest challenge from parliament, the opposition immediately warns of a coming dictatorship.

Russia desperately needs a new constitution to codify the nation's guidelines. The project has been caught in a dispute between Yeltsin and the parliament over what kind of state structure to enshrine in the new basic law. Yeltsin wants a strong President, who will have a free hand to organize new government structures and appoint ministers. His whole approach is anathema to legislators who want to give parliament the power to control government appointments and to make the head of state a figurehead that Yeltsin supporters claim would be akin to the British Queen.

Western governments operate successfully on both models. But the particular state of politics in Russia tilts the balance in favor of Yeltsin. Far from being a driving force for change, the current two-tier parliament, made up of a permanently working supreme soviet and a larger Congress of People's Deputies that meets at least twice a year, has turned into a major bastion of communist and conservative opposition to reform. The legislature is a cross section, frozen in time, of political forces active in the Soviet Union back in 1990, when the last elections were held and Communist Party influence remained strong.

As things now stand, Yeltsin is saddled with what he views as an obstreperous bunch of foot draggers until their terms expire in 1995. He could try to use the the special powers that the parliament granted him after the abortive coup attempt in August 1991 to disband the legislature altogether and impose direct presidential rule. But many fear such a risky step, and parliamentarians were quick to call Yeltsin's bluff by summoning the People's Deputies into session -- over his heated opposition -- on Dec. 1, the very day his mandate to rule by decree expires.

Yeltsin may talk tough, but he has left the door open for compromise. The government reached an accord, of sorts, last week with the Civic Union, the opposition group representing the interests of powerful Russian industrialists. Yeltsin agreed to restore some state controls over the economy during the transition to a free market. In another move aimed at defusing political tensions, Deputy Prime Minister Mikhail Poltoranin, an archenemy of the hard-liners, stepped down. He wanted, he said, "to protect the President from mounting attacks from an opposition bent on revenge."

On the eve of the congress, the Yeltsin team also floated a plan for a "constitutional agreement" with parliament. The scheme called for a 12- to-18-month "stabilization" period during which the powers of the President, the parliament and the government would be redefined. Since Yeltsin would undoubtedly have to impose limitations on the parliament to make the plan work, rebellious deputies seem unlikely to buy it, even if the President agrees to shake up his Cabinet in the bargain.

Yeltsin has already tried to outmaneuver the parliament by setting up extragovernmental agencies that are answerable only to the President. Yet even Yeltsin's democratic supporters were concerned when he established a new security council to oversee defense, security, police and foreign-policy issues, with Yuri Skokov, an elusive apparatchik from the military-industrial sector, as chief of staff. It reminds too many people of the party's old secret Politburo. Yeltsin has also set up special commissions that report to him personally to deal with the agricultural crisis and the growing crime rate. Such moves have prompted the conservative daily Pravda to warn that the President was creating "a supreme authority in the country whose decisions cannot be questioned."

The Yeltsin team has been toying with other options to break the deadlock between the rival branches of power. One would be to turn directly to the people, as Gorbachev did in March 1991 when he held a national referendum on a new Soviet Union. Radical democratic groups have long been prodding Yeltsin to put the parliament-or-Pres ident question to a similar vote. Another referendum topic that some economists believe to be absolutely crucial to the success of Yeltsin's reforms is whether land ought to be bought and sold: without private property laws, capitalism cannot flourish. The President says he is considering putting both questions to a plebiscite by the spring of 1993.

But Russia is not Switzerland, a small country where public referendums have a long tradition. Such calls to let the people make decisions directly ^ illustrate the troubles that democratic forces have had in moving Russia toward the kind of multiparty system that is at the heart of Western-style representative democracy. The collapse of the Communist Party created a vacuum that none of the multitudinous new movements and parties has been able to fill. Many of the fledgling parties are identified with the personalities that lead them rather than any real programs to meet the needs of Russia's emerging society. Since no elections are scheduled for the near future, they are all in effect lobbying groups, vying for the President's ear.

In many ways, Yeltsin is a master politician, determined to get politics off the national agenda so that Russia can finally buckle down to work. Many of his tactical moves appear to be prompted by a desire to hold the forces of reaction in check long enough for a new society to emerge, where economic self-interest will prevail over the political passions of the past. He also seems to be sincere in his intention to devolve power from a small group of players in Moscow out into the vast reaches of the country. But the paradox Yeltsin must ultimately resolve is whether he is willing to use his own political power to the full in order to one day give power back to the people.

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CREDIT: TIME Charts by Steve Hart

1992 through 1994 projected [TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Sources: PlanEcon; U.S. State Dept.}]CAPTION: ARMENIA AZERBAIJAN BELARUS ESTONIA GEORGIA KAZAKHSTAN KYRGYZSTAN LATVIA LITHUANIA MOLDOVA RUSSIA TAJIKISTAN TURKMENISTAN UKRAINE UZBEKISTAN

With reporting by Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow