Yeltsin Orders End to Official Perks in Russia

Boris N. Yeltsin, the populist president of Russia, on Thursday decreed an end to the privileges enjoyed by Communist Party bureaucrats, government officials and industrial managers in the Russian Federation, the largest Soviet republic, in an unprecedented assault on the political elite.

Yeltsin, true to his “common man” political philosophy, declared that “privileges violate social fairness” and that benefits not directly earned by a person’s own labor should be outlawed.

Using his broad powers as chairman of the Presidium of the Russian Supreme Soviet, the republic’s legislature, Yeltsin said the government was canceling, effective immediately, “all kinds and forms of official privileges” and invalidating all the laws, decrees and orders authorizing them.

All officials, “no matter what posts they hold,” fall under its terms, he said.

The decree puckishly orders that the Russian Supreme Soviet’s committee on glasnost , or political openness, oversee its enforcement.

Yeltsin’s legal authority for such a sweeping move is not clear, but the broad terms in which Soviet laws, including the national and republican constitutions, are written may give him such powers. In Soviet legal theory, the power of the parliament is supreme, and it can be exercised fully by its legislative and executive bodies.

Still, whether Yeltsin can enforce such a decree against federal bodies, the Soviet military, the Communist Party and the many enterprises with operational autonomy is uncertain.

Yeltsin, determined to exercise the “sovereignty” decreed by the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies in May, has already challenged the central government on other fundamental issues, asserting control of the republic’s economy and its banking system.

With typical boldness, he has now cut through years of argument and counter-argument about the special benefits enjoyed by the political elite and by a wide range of other “privileged” people, including war veterans, invalids, “heroine-mothers” with large families and Communist Party stalwarts.

To replace them, the decree orders the republics’ soviets, or elected governmental councils, to decide on “the concrete conditions of work and the kinds of services for senior officials” and sets an Aug. 1 deadline.

Abolished were privileges “on power, on unearned remunerations, on undeserved benefits, (and) on undeserved and unearned comfortable working and living conditions for the leading workers of organizations, enterprises and offices and for workers of state organs.”

The effect, if the decree is fully enforced, should be to end a system where the pay is low, often no more than that of a skilled worker, and the benefits extensive.

In its place, under the Yeltsin system, the soviet for which the official works or that oversees the enterprise that employs him will decide on his pay and benefits, and the decision will be debated publicly. The decree also requires that the decisions be published in the press.

In a have-not era, little has grated upon the average Soviet worker as much as the well-stocked stores, comfortable apartments, chauffeur-driven cars, seaside vacations and other benefits available--regularly but never openly--to their bosses.

Yeltsin, who boasts of his family’s simple life style, including the lines that his wife stands in to buy food, has campaigned hard on the issue of privilege and won election to both the Russian and national parliaments with pledges to abolish them.

When questioned about “privileges,” party officials have replied defensively that they were really just compensation for the responsibilities they carried and for their long hours.

Many members of the government and party bureaucracy, as well as industrial managers, argued that such benefits would always be justified as long as the country had a planned economy in which scarce resources--in this case, such basics as food and housing--were allocated according to the government’s priorities rather than left to the market forces of supply and demand to regulate.

They have also argued that their salaries are kept relatively low in a spirit of egalitarianism, so that a senior government official might be paid little more than a bus driver.

Past attempts at reform have brought some reductions in the privileges, including the closure of many stores that served only the elite, the acceptance by special medical clinics of ordinary patients, the reduction in the number of government limousines and the transfer to public use of many vacation homes and exclusive resorts.

A special commission under Yevgeny M. Primakov, a member of the Presidential Council, the country’s top policy-making body, has been studying the question for months but with no apparent progress. Until now, the authorities have not attempted such a radical approach.

In February, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev took some action against the privileged elite by deciding that the country’s current and former leaders, except for himself and Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, were no longer entitled to luxuries such as country houses.

Some retired members of the Communist Party’s leadership, some in their 90s, were ordered to move out of the houses, and others were ordered to pay rent to the state organizations that owned them. They also lost the right to state-employed household workers and government cars and access to the special food stores.

Almost in anticipation of Yeltsin’s decree, the popular youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, in an usual personal story, reported Thursday on the simple life that Gorbachev’s 79-year-old mother lives in their native village in southern Russia.

Maria Gorbachev only recently got a new color television to replace her old black-and-white set, the paper said, and she still bakes her own bread. Her only privilege is the detachment of KGB agents who provide security down the road from her small house in the village of Privolnoye.

A new paint job on her house, and the color TV that recently replaced the old “Rekord” black-and-white set, “have not cost the state or the party one kopeck,” the paper’s correspondent said.

Not long ago, a rumor spread that she was moving to Moscow and selling her house, the newspaper said. Residents of Privolnoye were ready to make inquiries about buying her house, but she said she was not leaving Privolnoye.

“I have already lived in Moscow,” she told local party officials. “I don’t see my son here, and I wouldn’t see him there. He leaves home at 6 a.m. and returns late in the evening. . . . I will not go anywhere.”