The Last Best Chance for Yeltsin

By Bruce W. Nelan

The armed mutiny had ended. Ordinary Muscovites were in the streets, flocking to stare at the charred shell of the White House, the skyscraper parliament building they had sardonically renamed "the Black House." Wiping tears from her cheeks, a woman with henna-streaked gray hair said to fellow gawkers, "I don't know what Rutskoi would have been like as a leader, but I'm fed up with Yeltsin."

"It's a good thing we won't have a chance to find out what Rutskoi is like," a well-dressed young man snapped. A Rutskoi supporter responded, "You will wake up when you have to clean American boots." A man in scholarly glasses murmured, "Just imagine what would have happened if parliament had seized power. Armed bands would be roaming the streets and robbing us."

Three years into the country's heart-wrenching drive to reinvent itself -- and hours after a hard-line coup attempt -- Russians found themselves last week swapping expressions of political drift. "It could have been worse," has long been a favorite conversation clincher among Russians. Last week it was also true. If the rampaging gangs of fascists, communists and nationalists had managed to take over in the Kremlin, the world would be staring at them, fearful about the guns they were so willing to use and about the immense nuclear arsenal at their disposal.

Americans, obsessed today with the image of a soldier's pale body dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, will find the power struggle in Russia a bigger worry in the long run. After the U.S. is out of Somalia, Yeltsin's foes will still be everywhere in Russia. The atavistic forces may have lost last week, but they will reorganize and wait for another opportunity.

For Yeltsin that lurking danger is a challenge he must face now. To do it, he is launching what some are calling, without irony, a period of authoritarian democracy. He will rule by decree -- at least until elections are held -- to try to get his country back on track toward economic and political reform. To accomplish this, he must do nothing less than prepare for elections, revitalize the stalled economy, pacify a politicized military and demonstrate that he heads a functioning government. "Yeltsin must get down to governing quickly," says Peter Frank, an expert on Russia at Essex University, England. "The government has broken down, and things cannot be allowed to drift further."

Bill Clinton, like other Western leaders, fully backed Yeltsin's use of force, saying the Russian President had "no other choice than to try to restore order." Still, many in the West were worried that Yeltsin might choose to emphasize the authoritarian part of his new activism at the expense of the democracy. Their concern was eased when Yeltsin declared on television last week that parliamentary elections would be held as scheduled on Dec. 12. Now Western attention will focus on how free and fair they are.

Or even if they are possible. A raft of procedural and substantive questions surrounds those elections (see box). Yeltsin suspended the Communist Party last week, and one of his most senior aides, Sergei Filatov, said the Party should be banned from the elctions. Yeltsin also dissolved city government and called on all regional soviets, the legislative councils subordinate to the Supreme Soviet, to resign so new local governments can be elected in December.

No one is clear about what kinds of local government organs may replace the hundreds of soviets, and in only two months Russians are to vote for members of a parliament that has not been established or finally defined. Last May, Yeltsin introduced the draft of a new constitution providing for a strong presidential system, a federal structure and a two-house parliament. But like so many other reforms in Russia, it was blocked by the old legislature, which had no incentive to put itself out of work.

In such uncertain circumstances, the Moscow government will need a great deal of help from outlying regions to organize the voting in December. But it is likely that many of the provincial towns and districts across Russia's 11 time zones will not rally to the task. They have a variety of reasons for not wanting to legitimize a strong central government: many of them are jealous of their natural resources, like oil, gold and diamonds, and want to maintain control of them and share in the profits from sales. And these localities fret that they pay ever higher taxes to Moscow and receive fewer services in return. Some provincial Russians are simply anti-Moscow or anti-Yeltsin.

In Bryansk, for example, a city of 500,000 about 210 miles southwest of Moscow, many defense plants have closed or cut back. Unemployment and inflation are rising to the point where the monthly minimum wage will buy only 10 lbs. of meat. Old communists like Pyotr Shirshov, a former army general who now heads the city soviet, predictably accuse Yeltsin of practicing "a pure form of dictatorship." More ominous for the President, disaffection has spread to young people, who might be expected to back reform. "I'm not really interested in politics," says Sergei Mishin, 20, an industrial technician, "but I know that people just don't believe anyone anymore. Too many promises have been made and not kept."

Now the reformers in Moscow, freed from parliamentary veto, will have to deliver on some of the promises. Yeltsin had already reappointed his reformer in chief, Yegor Gaidar, as Deputy Prime Minister, the post he lost last December under pressure from parliament. Gaidar says his top priority will be to rein in inflation, which was running at 21% a month in September and at a predicted rate of 1100% for 1993.

But here's the challenge: to reduce inflation the government will have to get a grip on the Central Bank, which up until now has been happily engaging in printing large quantities of money and passing out huge low-interest loans. Meanwhile, industrial production has been plunging as parliament has insisted on supporting state factories as a jobs program, arguing that spreading unemployment could lead to riots. With elections set for December and a presidential vote next June, Yeltsin will have to be careful not to throw too many of his potential supporters out of work as he does battle against inflation.

Employed or not, Russia's consumers are screaming that prices on basics are too high, and they are right. The problem is that with government funds and workers concentrated in state-controlled industries, production of high- quality civilian goods has not caught up with demand. Nor is it likely to until the factories, farms and retail outlets are privatized -- a process that will take years. Only about 20% of workers are employed in the private sector, and there is evidence most people are not even convinced that privatization is a good idea. In a study by the Russian Center for Public Opinion Research last summer, 72% of almost 2,000 respondents had negative feelings about such a conversion for large state enterprises.

Yeltsin's economic plans may also be hampered by his debt to the armed forces. The military has twice saved the President -- once by not firing on the White House in August 1991 and again by firing on it last week. Now the generals will be looking for a payoff for services rendered. While they will certainly try to influence overall security policy, their strongest concerns % are at home. The army has been humiliated by its loss of status, the poor housing provided for its officers returning from service in Eastern Europe and the Baltics, and a general decline in its living standards. So it will demand improvements. And it will also insist on a freer hand in dealing with security threats along Russia's borders with the newly independent republics and within Russia itself. "The generals," says Michael Dewar, deputy director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, "see nothing but instability inside Russia and on its periphery. They want the government to end the former and give the military the power to protect against the latter."

With so many concerns calling for stern management, Yeltsin might be expected to stay at his desk. Instead he announced he would fly to Japan this week for a long-scheduled three-day visit. He may have felt he had to keep the date this time, because he twice had to cancel to deal with crises at home. Beyond that, Yeltsin knows that appearances matter. Even if everything in Russia is not completely under his control, his arrival in Tokyo will invite the world to think he has everything firmly in hand.

In a televised speech last week Yeltsin declared, "We need a normal, democratic constitution as badly as we need the air to breathe. We need a united Russia. We need to carry on economic transformation unswervingly." For the first time since he was elected President in June 1991, he is free to set the course and give the necessary orders to his government. He -- and his well-wishers in the West -- will have no one else to blame if he should fail in his last, best chance to transform Russia.

With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly, John Kohan and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow and Ann M. Simmons/Bryansk