Opinion
Page, January 7, 1996
WEIMAR RUSSIA?
Gregory
Freidin
Once
again, as in the first two years of Yeltsin’s presidency, the specter of
Weimar Germany in demise haunts the imagination of Russia watchers.
Looking at the result of the recent Duma election as a straw poll for the
upcoming presidential race in June, 1996, one can easily imagine a
nightmare scenario of the Russian voters having to choose between Gennady
Zyuganov and Vladimir Zhirinovsky or Ziuganov and a weak reform candidate
like Grigory Yavlinsky. A less nightmarish scenario, though still
frightening enough is that Zyuganov, riding the wave of popular discontent
with the status quo, may be challenging weakened and ailing Yeltsin or a
Viktor Chernomyrdin, fatally damaged, like Hubert Humphrey in 1968, by his
loyalty to the outgoing and unpopular president. In short, the fear is
that the new authoritarian or even totalitarian regime may enter
Russia, not through a coup d'état as in 1917 or as during Mussolini’s
march on Rome, but though the ballot box, according to all the rules of
formulae of Russia’s democratic and rather presidential-oriented
constitution.
Indeed,
the Weimar analogy is enticing. Like Weimar Germany, Russia has
experienced a national humiliation as it lost its superpower status; like
Weimar Germany, it has been gripped by an economic crisis, compounded by
the breakdown in the social fabric of society, evident in the rise of
organized crime and decline in basic social services; and like Weimar
Germany, with its open violent street clashes between the Nazis and the
Communists, Russia has experienced bloody political upheavals, most
notably the dissolution of the Soviets in the fall of 1993 and the
seemingly interminable, over a year-old war in Chechnya. The
communists’ success at the polls, bringing their representation in the
Second Duma to 35% from a mere 10% (or 22%, if one counts the now defunct
Agrarian Party) should practically complete the picture (recall Hitler’s
similar success at the polls in 1930). The finishing touches come from the
ideological reorientation of the Russian Communists, who have swapped the
ostensibly internationalist and proletarian Marxist-Leninist script for a
sentimental National Bolshevism which wraps its vision of the
paternalistic authoritarian state in the mystical aura of the Russian
Orthodox nostalgia and the odious “blood and guts” nationalism. Like
Hitler’s party comrades, Russia’s communists have shown plenty of
political savvy. Running a miserly campaign, relying on the grass roots
where other parties spent lavishly of garish advertising, the Communists
of Russia have demonstrated that promises of bread have a greater appeal
to the electorate, especially the segment courted by them, than the
political campaign circus served up to the people for their amusement by
their other heavy-weight rivals.
But
was this really the "victory of the communists," or a “victory
for communism,” as many observers have rushed to conclude in the wake of
the elections? And does the analogy with Germany really hold or does the
post-cold-war world invite a different comparison?
After
all the bad press that the communists have been receiving during the
perestroika and , especially, after the collapse of Soviet communism,
Zyuganov's party is, indeed, a real come-back kid. The numbers, too, speak
in the CPR’s favor: the Communist Party of Russia will be the largest
single party faction in the Duma, controlling 35% of the seats. So far so
good, but a closer look reveals what for the communists of Russian should
be a less sanguine picture:
·
The
35% of the Duma seats is the figure "padded" by the peculiarity
of Russia's electoral law: had the seats been distributed exactly
according to the votes cast, the communist block in the Duma would not
have exceeded 25%.
·
Over
a third of the communist deputies (58 out of 158) were elected from the
so-called single-mandate districts, which means that they owe their
victory, not so much to the party as to their local constituencies, a
significant factor, given the growing autonomy of the regions.
·
Even
if one counts the Duma deputies of the other “left parties,” the
barely breathing Agrarians and the microscopic old nomenklatura
party, Power to the People, which made their way into the Duma by
winning in the single-mandate districts, the total comes to 41%.
·
Zyuganov
is the consummate dull politician. His dogged, unassuming manner and lack
of any charismatic attributes have served him well in the Duma campaign,
taking the edge off the harsh revanchist radicalism of the party’s
program. But a presidential campaign is made for candidates who have a
fire in their belly.
·
One
such fire-and-brimstone communist, the leader of Labor Russia, Viktor
Anpilov, was unable to take his party over the 5% threshold or send a
single candidate into the Second Duma, which tells us that communism as
such is pretty much dead.
·
General
Alexander Lebed’s recent offer to lend the Communist Party of Russia his
charismatic appeal in exchange for the presidential prize is a bad deal
for the communists and is bound to be rejected. Russian presidency is
powerful enough to enable the president to forget who made his victory
possible, and Lebed, who has professed no love for the communists either
in his campaign or his memoirs is very unlikely to be obliged.
·
Finally,
the Zhirinovsky factor. Vladimir Zhirinovsky will continue to draw the
less structured protest vote from the opposition to reform. Indeed, unless
Zhirinovsky goes through a personality change, submits to Zyuganov’s
questionable charm (he has recently rejected such an alliance), and
manages, at the same time, to bring with him his volatile constituency,
the results of the Duma elections do not automatically translate into the
communist victory in the presidential sweepstakes.
Such
an outcome is even less likely if one considers the reform faction in the
Duma identifying with Chernomyrdin’s “Our Home is Russia” (OHR),
Yavlinsky's “Yabloko,” Gaidar’s “Russia’s Democratic Choice”, and Sviatoslav Fyodorov “Party of Free Labor.” This
block, over a quarter of the Duma, has held its own or even gained, if
marginally, compared to 1993. More important, the government’s party –
being strongly represented in the Duma (12%), which was not the case in
1993 – is in a position to draw to itself the independent deputies. In a
recent statement, the head of the OHR faction, Sergei Belyaev, boasted
that his party had 100 supporters in the Duma, practically doubling
OHR’s, original number of seats. If, as some important indicators
suggest, Russia has entered a period of economic recovery – for one,
after several years of precipitous decline, housing construction in the
first eleven months of 1995 has increased 10% over the same period in 1994
– Chernomyrdin’s party may indeed increase its ranks substantially,
stealing the momentum factor away from the communists in the next six
months.
Prime
Minister Chernomyrdin’s own story holds a key to understanding of
Russia’s political dynamic in the post-communist era. The collapse of
Soviet communism was not an accident; it was a structural phenomenon: both
the ideological and natural resources that had kept Russia going as a
superpower had been exhausted by the 1980s. Gorbachev’s resistance to
radical economic reform had, in effect, bankrupted the country by the time
Yeltsin took over in 1991: the state’s treasury was as empty as the
shelves in food stores. At that time reform was the only option, and
Viktor Chernomyrdin’s ascendancy in Yeltsin’s government (after Gaidar
had to resign under the communists’ pressure), the ever-growing
commitment of this communist apparatchik to reform demonstrate that the
transformation of Russia’s economy stems not from a politician’s
will, but from a structural need for change that cannot be avoided, not
even by a Zyuganov.
The
centers most sensitive to this need are Russia’s major urban centers,
and indeed, Moscow and St. Petersburg have voted overwhelmingly in favor
of the reform politicians, while Zyuganov’s support came from the older,
retired constituency, the stagnant, woefully inefficient coal mining
regions, the conservative, primarily agricultural belt in Southern Russia
and the regions of chronic dependency on central government, such as the
Northern Caucasian republic of Daghestan. These constituencies can only
represent Russia’s past, nostalgia for the simplicity and ignorance of
the Soviet era, not Russia’s future, indeed, not even her present with
its multi-ethnic composition, structurally weaker central state,
increasing autonomy of the regions, dependency on raw material exports and
economic integration with the West, emergence of powerful private economic
conglomerates linked to the state in the center and the regions, and the
utter unwillingness of the population to shed blood for one imperial dream
or another.
In
fact, given the massive economic dislocations brought about by the
collapse of the communist system, radical economic reforms of the last
four years, and the traditional Russian mismanagement and government
corruption, the results of the parliamentary election should not be
disheartening for anyone committed to a democratic Russia:
·
this
was the second election of the democratic Russia and it was carried out
successfully without – according to the international observers – any
noticeable large-scale fraud;
·
the
boisterous, gaudy and
well-financed campaigns by the major parties succeeded in bringing to the
polls 65% of the eligible voters – a remarkable contrast with the still
disputed 50.6% turnout in the apathetic December 1993;
·
the
implacable opponent of reform, the communist party of Russia, collected
only 22% of the popular vote – just enough to spur the government into a
more active and, one hopes, more efficient mode of operation, but not
enough to give some hot heads in the government the idea for making Russia
safe for democracy through a state of siege;
·
reform
has battered and disenfranchised economically a large segment of the
population in Russia. According to the government statistics, close to a
third of the population lives at or below the poverty line. In this
context the communists’ 22% speak more in favor of the sobriety and
maturity of the Russian electorate, than its gullibility before the
communist sloganeering;
·
the
reformers, whose favorite game seems to be the old-fashioned factionalism,
have received yet another painful lesson in coalition building and can no
longer escape the need for forming an alliance in the upcoming
presidential elections.
·
Perhaps
most important, the “party of power,” Prime Minister Chernomyrdin’s
“Our Home Is Russia,” did well enough by clearing the 10% benchmark,
set for it by President Boris Yeltsin, but not so well as to make every
Russian voter terminally cynical about the democratic process; indeed, the
result calls to mind not so much the Weimar Germany as lesson of the last
elections in the United States, demonstrating that in a democracy,
incumbency is not necessarily an advantage;
The
Weimar outcome is all the more unlikely because of the foreign policy
context in which Russia begun its move toward democracy. It has joined the
trend that had been sweeping across Europe, Asia, and Latin America for
the last decades and not, as was the case with the Weimar Germany, has
been holding forth against a powerful countertrend toward dictatorship and
international adventurism. The more recent foreign policy successes of
democracy – in Haiti, in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, and most
recently and significantly, in the Balkans, affect Russia’s presidential
politics by discouraging nationalist vitriol and encouraging international
interdependence and cooperation. Even Zyuganov understands that fortress
Russia there cannot be, and he has been trying to offer his assurances to
foreign investors, articulating a fear of every major Russian politician
that flight of capital from Russia may precipitate the country’s
collapse and disintegration. If even Zyuganov understands the severe
limitations on national sovereignty in the post-cold-war world, there is
little place in Russian politics for a grandiose utopia and self-hypnosis
that once led Russia, Italy, and Germany to the brink of national suicide.
Washington, D.C., the fight to the bitter end between the two branches of
a democratic government, or the stand-off between the unions and the in
Alain Jupe’s government in France is a far better analogy for what has
been going on in Russia – not a nighmare of democracy, just a democratic
mess.
Copyright © 1996 by Gregory Freidin
