Tale of Two Parliaments

The weary aphorism “History repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce” hovered like a curse over delegates to the Soviet Union’s first representative national assembly to convene since the Bolshevik revolution. But the new Supreme Soviet managed to escape history’s repetition, either tragic or farcical, when the Parliament successfully concluded its session last week despite ethnic and labor unrest, divisive policy debates and confrontational confirmation hearings.

History’s precedent had not been hopeful. Eighty-three years earlier, on April 26, 1906, 524 men gathered in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to convene Russia’s first-ever national Parliament. They represented all regions and strata of the Russian empire, from Russians and Ukrainians to Poles, Jews, Tartars and Bashkirs. More than one-third of them were peasants, many of whom had never before visited the capital. They looked around with wide eyes, dazzled by the medals and jewels of the government’s ministers.

The assembly, or Duma, brought a broad range of concerns to the session, not the least of which were economic restructuring and political liberalization. The delegates gave the government a comprehensive list of demands including guarantees of legal and political rights, amnesty for political and religious prisoners, land redistribution for the peasants, equality for the different nation-alities and constitutional checks and balances. “With a united voice,” the assembly said, “the country has loudly declared that the renewal of national life is possible only on the basis for freedom, the right of independent popular action, popular participation in the legislative power and popular control of the executive.”

Less than a month later the experiment in elected representation was over. The government and its prime minister, unprepared to share legislative power with the reform-minded Duma, reasserted the power of the executive and told the assembly that its role was to “cooperate with”--or rubber-stamp--executive policies. The Duma, unwilling to be passive, issued a vote of no confidence in the government and left town. Although other Dumas convened, the cause of active, popular government had been thwarted. Until this year.

This summer’s Supreme Soviet did not have an easy time. Like the First Duma, it had a list of economic and political goals that at first seemed too radical for the government. But the two branches of government managed to get along, most likely because the government was finally ready to cede some power to a legislature. The second time around, Russia and the Soviet Union seem to have gotten it right--at least for now.