Russia does it Yeltsin’s way

By winning standoff he now wields absolute presidential rule

By Nick Hayes

            Last week, Russian President Boris Yeltsin had it his way. He forced the Russian legislature, or Duma, to accept his nomination of Sergei Kiriyenko as prime minister and kept Russia on the fast track toward a system of arbitrary and corrupt presidential rule. To get there, Yeltsin had to clear the way of three obstacles.

            First and foremost, Yeltsin moved to strip his own government of any authority or legitimacy other than its subservience to him. On March 23, he threw Russia into a month long crisis when without warning he appeared on national television and announced that he had fired Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and the entire government. At first, he said, he would be his own prime minister. That would have been too flagrantly in violation of the Russian Constitution, so Yeltsin chose the next best option.

            The Russian president nominated a political nonentity in the person of 35-year-old minister of fuel and energy, Sergei Kiriyenko. If you went by the Russian press, Kiriyenko started his career as a member of the Young Communist League, took advantage of his brief stint in the energy ministry to enrich himself, and is a member of the Church of Scientology.

            On the morning before his confirmation, the new prime minister told the newspaper “Nezavismaya Gazeta” the truth that lay behind his nomination. “Personally, I owe nothing to anybody except the president.” That’s right, and that’s why Yeltsin chose him.

            This is to be a government that serves Yeltsin’s whims. Former Prime Minister Chernomyrdin had ties to a powerful oil and gas conglomerate and took his photo ops with the likes of Vice President Al Gore or Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl. He even deserved credit for working with the Russian Duma to obtain approval of the government’s budget proposal.

            The dismissed Deputy Minister Anatoly Chubais had support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Western investors. Boris Nemtsov is the government’s poster boy for the handful of Russians who still believe in free markets. The fact that some in the government stayed in, others went straight out, and others still hang in limbo only further underscores Yeltsin’s capriciousness.

Russian-style pork

            The second obstacle in the president’s way lay in his constitutional obligation to obtain the approval by the elected legislature, the Duma, for his choice of prime minister. Keep in mind that the last time the Duma’s deputies defied Yeltsin in the fall of 1993 Yeltsin sent in the tanks to change their minds.

            This time Yeltsin’s tactics were slightly more subtle. He first cajoled the deputies with the venal promise to “take care of their needs.” Read that as outright bribery or pork-barrel politics, Russian style. Then, he threatened to dissolve the Duma and force the deputies into new elections. Finally, he hinted that he would change the law and procedures for those elections.

            Only the Communist Party --- led by Yeltsin’s 1996 rival in the presidential election, Gennady Zyuganov --- had a chance to block Yeltsin. The timing lent special significance to Yeltsin’s victory in this round. In the old Communist days, from the celebration of Vladimir Lenin’s birthday on April 22 through April 24 when all good Russian workers “volunteered” a day’s work for the greater good of the Communist cause, this week in April had served a special role in honoring the founder of Russian communism and his party. This year, Russia’s Communist deputies in the Duma marker their founder’s day by breaking party ranks and voting to keep their jobs and small perks in the Duma. It was a gesture analogous to American schoolchildren honoring Presidents’ Day by cutting down cherry trees.

            Yeltsin gave members of the Duma a cynically cruel choice. They could either support his nomination of the unqualified Kiriyenko and hang on to the small change that is their take of the new spoils system, or they would face the risk of elections according to the president’s rules. The Duma, and even its Communists, took the money and stayed as if to show that the only constitutional check on Yeltsin’s power could be bought cheap.

            The president’s third problem, however, could not be bought. Since 1991, Yeltsin has presided over a privatization of state assets in what the textbooks may someday describe as the largest example of insider trading in the 20^th century. The process lined the pockets of bureaucrats and enriched powerful financial magnates whose careers give new meaning to the phrase crony capitalism.

            Yeltsin had to show that he was still relevant in the face of the power of such new Russian magnates Borin Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky whose moneyed empires own most of the media, the banks and, if rumors are true, the government officials. Yeltsin caught them off guard. Yeltsin’s firing of the government in March sent Russia’s media tycoons into spin control. Berezovsky, for example, went to the airwaves of his own television station and the pages of his newspaper to suggest that his hand lay behind Yeltsin’s actions. Up to the day of Kiriyenko’s confirmation, Berezovsky’s press implied that he was orchestrating a compromise between Yeltsin and the Duma. By refusing a compromise, Yeltsin gained the pleasure of both humbling the legislature and poking ah ole in Berezovsky’s credibility.

            In the end, Yeltsin won. President Clinton called the Kiriyenko confirmation “a good day for Russia and the United States.” In Moscow, the pro-government newspaper called the event a victory for “an apolitical government of technocrats.” Not so. Politics has had everything to do with the recent events.

            Yeltsin has moved Russia out of its Communist past into a new era built upon ingredients from the autocracy of the czars, the personality cult of Joseph Stalin and the corruption comparable to some postcolonial regime in Africa.

            Time is running out for the ailing Yeltsin. In what may well be his last major political act, he has assured that Russia will have a government based on absolute presidential rule administered by fawning favorites and benefiting a few rich and powerful oligarchs. They made their wealth the good old-fashioned Russian way by cutting deals with the government, pilfering the nation’s wealth and gobbling up any foreign assistance from direct investment to IMF loans.

            Inside the Kremlin, Yeltsin now wields power the way that those old walls have known for five centuries.

--- Nick Hayes teaches history at Hamline University in St. Paul and is director of the Hamline/KTCA-TV Collaborative in International Journalism.