Quarrels May Stall Russian Constitution

Before he was arrested more than a century and a half ago, an idealistic military officer dreamed of a time when Russians, like the other peoples of Europe, would be free citizens of a society grounded in law.

“One should establish rules or laws, the way it was of old,” wrote Nikita Muraviev, a captain in the Imperial Guards, expressing the seditious credo that would get him banished to Siberia. What this country desperately needed, Muraviev said, was the end of “autocratic sovereigns.”

On Monday, as the broad Russian plain continues to thaw from winter snows and roads like those of Muraviev’s time are churned into spring mud pots, more than 1,000 successors of the 19th-Century liberal officer, who died disappointed in exile, will come to Moscow to try to give Russia its first democratic constitution.

The czarist officer’s vision may remain unrealized, at least for now. That is because the members of the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies, both pawns and players in a process that began in earnest 1 1/2 years ago, may find themselves so paralyzed by economic and political quarrels that they cannot seize the historic moment.

“In the catastrophic situation we are now in, it’s simply not right to adopt a new constitution,” said Viktor V. Aksyuchits, leader of the nationalist Russian National Assembly faction. Instead, he said recently, angry members of the Congress will press for resignation of “the government of national humiliation” and try to strip Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin of the greatly enhanced powers he was granted last autumn.

Although as the Congress neared, some top middle-of-the-roaders and political vagabonds such as Congress Chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov were moving to protect Yeltsin’s leadership, Aksyuchits predicted that at least 45% of the deputies would support his combative stance.

No doubt many who attend the Congress will have other worries besides a constitution on their minds. Russia, its economy self-destructing by the week, has staggered through winter without the bread riots and other mass disorders that officials here and overseas--including CIA Director Robert M. Gates--predicted. But there is little contentment.

“The pots keep boiling--the pots of dissatisfaction, of conflict,” observed historian and radical reformer Yuri N. Afanasyev.

He foresees no rapid improvement. Indeed, his historian’s eye discerns alarming parallels with Russia during the revolutionary convulsions of 1917 and the ensuing civil war: beggars clad in ragtag clothes, an upsurge of mysticism, decadence and crime, even a sharp increase in the number of abandoned dogs roaming the streets.

Just how grim things have become was signaled by a bill Yeltsin signed into law a few weeks ago: It now gives families special payments, equal to three times a worker’s minimum monthly wage, to help defray the cost of burying their dead. Because of skyrocketing inflation, people say, wooden coffins are prohibitively expensive and Russians must now bury their loved ones in plastic bags.

Against such a bleak backdrop, conservatives and members of reconstituted Communist factions are crying for the heads of key government figures, such as First Deputy Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar. Gaidar is a reassuring presence to the International Monetary Fund, but to the average Russian, he is the official most intimately linked to price hikes of 1,000% and more that have occurred since December.

Last week, Yeltsin--moving to defuse some of the anticipated opposition maneuvers at the Congress--relieved Gaidar of the Finance Ministry portfolio he had simultaneously held with the first deputy premiership and moved Secretary of State Gennady E. Burbulis out of his second job of deputy premier. Russian officials made it clear both men remain in the highest circles of the government.

At the Congress, which should last for at least a week, Gaidar and Yeltsin are expected to lay out the next phase of their economic reforms--wide-scale privatization of assets once owned by the state.

On the left, however, critics will lambaste them for not implementing the campaign for free-market change faster and for delaying until June the removal of state subsidies on all energy prices, from electricity and heating fuel to gasoline and even petroleum products used to make plastics.

But the main struggle should take place around what kind of laws and government a post-Soviet, post-socialist Russia should have. That will be a striking novelty in a land that historically either knew no limits on government power, as was the case under the Romanovs, or had constitutions that were little more than Marxist eyewash.

Members of the Decembrists, a group of liberal conspirators that included Muraviev, plotted in 1825 to put a new czar on the throne and obtain Russia’s first constitution. The revolt was crushed, and its authors were hanged or exiled to Siberia.

So foreign, in fact, did the very concept of a constitution--in Russian konstitutsiya-- once seem that many simple Russian people, historians note, sometimes confused it with another imported word, prostitutka , or prostitute.

It was not until 1918 that Russia, then in the hands of the Bolsheviks, received a constitution, an ideological manifesto that laid down the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as the basic instrument of enforcing the revolution’s rule. A constitutional convention had been elected on a democratic basis shortly after the Communist takeover in 1917, but V. I. Lenin dissolved it after it had met for one day, since his Bolsheviks had won only 24% of the seats.

Three Soviet constitutions followed, the most recent in 1977. The constitution drafted under dictator Josef Stalin in 1936, which created a healthy decentralized democracy on paper that still impresses jurists with its institutional perfection, did nothing to impede in the slightest the epoch of political terror that was then beginning.

Until the Russian Congress, which is empowered to adopt constitutional changes, decides otherwise, this country will be governed by the constitution adopted April 12, 1978, for the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic.

Although it has been amended, for example, to create the Congress and the presidency to which Yeltsin was elected last June, the 1978 charter remains socialist in philosophy. It ordains a Soviet government system, not one based on the sovereignty of the people and the democracy of majority rule.

For a year and a half, a commission led by Russian lawmaker Oleg G. Rumyantsev has been drafting what ultimately has become a monster of a replacement. At last count, it covered eight tabloid-sized newspaper pages and contained 138 articles (the U.S. Constitution has seven).

Known in Kremlin shorthand as the “official variant,” Rumyantsev’s constitution would create what the commission secretary has called a “semi-presidential” division of power.

Its most important features include provisions that would prevent Yeltsin from dissolving Parliament and give the lawmakers the power to fire individual members of Yeltsin’s Cabinet, if they could muster a two-thirds vote.

That text was laboriously making its way through Russia’s smaller working legislature, the Supreme Soviet, when Yeltsin and Burbulis, chief of the presidential brain trust, took aim at it, Yeltsin reportedly damning it as too “socialist” and “Soviet.”

Thickening the plot, St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak then surfaced with a proposal of his own--a constitution reviving institutions of czarist times (for example, the large territorial division known as the guberniya) as well as 18th-Century political doctrines such as the “inalienable rights” mentioned in the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

As the Congress meeting nears, at least three other draft constitutions are in various stages of completion. It will be up to Yeltsin to publicly throw his support to one of them, in what should be a moment of high drama at the Congress.

After meeting with Yeltsin for 90 minutes last week, Rumyantsev said the president, who officially chairs the Constitutional Commission but has kept a studied silence through most of its work, will offer his own amendments to Articles 16 and 17 of the “official variant” to greatly beef up presidential authority.

Evidently, Yeltsin wants no part of a mere “semi-presidential” system. A St. Petersburg radical who met with Yeltsin said he has rejected Sobchak’s draft because it would give the president no more authority to govern than the “Queen of England.”

One key decision the Congress must face is whether to revoke the right to legislate by decrees that it gave to Yeltsin in October. Yeltsin’s simultaneous holding of two other important posts--those of Russia’s premier and defense minister--will also probably come under attack.

Meantime, the Russian White House on the banks of the Moscow River has been abuzz for weeks with rumors that Yeltsin may have to sacrifice some of his more unpopular underlings to placate the members of Congress.

In the march to a market economy, Gaidar and his team of self-assured economic whiz kids have made numerous enemies. Academician Georgy A. Arbatov has even accused Gaidar, a 36-year-old doctor of economics, of resorting to the same tactics as the Bolsheviks--”lying, secrecy and misleading the population.”

But as the United States and other major industrialized nations gear up to give Russia $24 billion in economic aid, the trust and respect that Gaidar has earned abroad is an asset Yeltsin can hardly afford to discard.

Another lightning rod for legislative criticism, Sergei M. Shakhrai, the president’s adviser on legal affairs, has also resigned as deputy prime minister, pleading his desire to remain in the Congress as a deputy. He should be a leader of the floor fight at the Congress to get Yeltsin’s agenda approved.

The president’s acting spokesman, Alexei Novikov, predicts the Congress will be the scene of “an attack . . . against the government and the policy of reform as a whole.” To apply pressure on the 1,068-seat Parliament, Yeltsin’s allies plan a “Russian citizens’ assembly” at a Moscow movie hall today to endorse presidential policies.

Intriguingly, in Rumyantsev’s draft, which creates a bicameral legislature similar to the current Supreme Soviet, there is no mention of the Congress, an assembly elected in March, 1990, when the Communist Party still held a constitutionally protected grip on power.

By approving the “official variant” and scheduling a national referendum to ratify it, the Congress would, therefore, be signing its own death warrant. For progressives, killing off the institutional dinosaur that has survived since Soviet times and remains ominously unpredictable is crucial.

“I think Yeltsin and Burbulis intend getting rid of the institution,” said radical reformer Afanasyev.

The Controversies to Watch

The sixth meeting of the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies, elected in 1990, should be a vibrant sounding board for Russia’s worries and frustrations. It will also be the scene of political maneuvers for and against President Boris N. Yeltsin. Among the possible controversies: * What kind of constitution should an independent Russia have? How free a hand, constitutionally speaking, should Yeltsin be granted to enact his programs?

* What rights should minority homelands inside Russia be allowed? How much home rule can restive Tatarstan, Chechen-Ingushetia and other ethnic areas receive in the name of federalism without endangering Russia’s status as a single state?

* How fast should the government implement the next phase of its economic reform plan--privatization of shops, factories and other state property?

* Can Yegor T. Gaidar, the man chiefly in charge of implementing the economic reforms, muster enough support to continue as first deputy prime minister? To placate critics, will Yeltsin have to relinquish the post of prime minister or defense minister, positions he holds along with the presidency? Will he have to fire some of his associates?

* Will the Congress, elected in spring, 1990, when the Communist Party still ruled a unitary Soviet state, agree to vote itself out of existence by adopting a new constitution?

* Also on the agenda, and potential flash points for conflict, are elections for Russia’s smaller working legislature, the Supreme Soviet; appointments to top judicial bodies, and discussion of ties with other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Source: Staff Reports