Why Yeltsin Remains the Key : Anti-reform Communists still hold obstructionist power

The stormy two-week session just concluded by Russia’s Congress of People’s Deputies has left President Boris N. Yeltsin’s reform efforts alive, but still under heavy siege.

The membership of the congress, elected for a five-year term in 1990, reflects the political realities of the immediate past. Former Communist Party functionaries are heavily represented in the 1,046-member parliament, where they form a powerful obstructionist bloc. Yeltsin, though he retains for now the power to rule by decree in key areas, was nonetheless forced to make concessions to the anti-reform faction. That could lead to a dilution or slowing of the painful but necessary measures he advocates to free the economy from the dead hand of centralized control.

That’s a cause for concern, because any slackening in the momentum of reform toward a market economy--whether in privatizing land and state enterprises or eliminating price controls and ending enormously expensive subsidies--could jeopardize the vital aid package that the United States, Western Europeans and others are putting together.

Russia managed to make it through this past winter without major upheaval, but its economic outlook remains gloomy in the extreme. Industrial production continues to plummet, a public battered by soaring prices and still unrelieved shortages grows more impatient with its political leadership. It was in this atmosphere that the enemies of reform sought to wrest power from the executive and appropriate it to the legislature. They failed, but the effort surely won’t be their last.

Divided government often produces drift and inaction even in the most established of democracies. In Russia, where people are struggling to learn what democracy is all about, antagonisms between the executive and the legislature threaten to become crippling, even fatal. Clearly, as U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III reaffirmed in a speech this week, American interests and values are best served by seeing democracy and free markets take hold in Russia. That means supporting the forces of reform against the forces of reaction. Yeltsin remains the key instrument of that reform.