COLUMN LEFT/ ALEXANDER COCKBURN : U.S. Connives to Abort Russ Democracy : Clinton blesses Yeltsin’s power grab, mislabeling it as struggle between ‘reform’ and ‘reaction.’

The putsch launched by Russian President Boris Yeltsin on Saturday was undertaken with the direct connivance of the Clinton Administration and is now being cheered on by a bipartisan chorus of the U.S. political and journalistic elite. This shameful spectacle illustrates two things: the profound ignorance here of recent political history and actual political conditions in Russia and, worse still, the brazen indifference here to the painful progress toward democracy already achieved by the Russians.

First, the connivance. On March 12, “a senior Administration official” confided to the press that “Washington would not oppose a move by Mr. Yeltsin to suspend his Parliament or abolish the Soviet-era constitution to put down political opposition.” This all-important public signal gave Yeltsin his green light.

The virtually unchallenged assumption in the United States is that Yeltsin is the lone representative of democratic legitimacy, confronted by holdovers from the Soviet museum intent on steering Russia back toward a totalitarian past.

Yeltsin owes both his own political ascendancy and the post he now holds to the same Congress of People’s Deputies whose credentials are now being derided here. The Congress itself was elected in March, 1990. The Communists still ruled, but the conditions under which that vote took place bore no resemblance to the one-party rituals of the past. There were no reserved seats. Any candidate nominated by residents or by workers in a factory or institute could get on the ballot. Every prospective deputy had to face the voters, had to get 51% of the vote.

This, remember, was at a time when the Communist Party was in utter disrepute, but when many of the most vociferous reformers were still formally party members, like Yeltsin himself, since Russia was still in a one-party system. In some areas, particularly the more rural ones, the old nomenklatura still held sway, and their representatives were uncontested. But elsewhere this was not the case. The March, 1990, election saw victories for such famous dissidents as Galina Starovoitova and Father Gleb Yakunin.

This Congress then set about the task of creating a constitutional structure embodying formal separation of powers. It brought the executive presidency--Yeltsin’s post--into being in the spring of 1991, and also created a constitutional court modeled on the U.S. Supreme Court. This is the structure painfully struggling to establish itself, that Yeltsin now proposes to overturn in favor of absolutist powers familiar to anyone who has read a page of Russian history.

To claim, as Clinton and the U.S. political Establishment are doing, that Russia is now convulsed by a battle between “reform” (equated with something called “the free market”) and “Stalinist reaction,” with these two impulses represented by Yeltsin and the Legislature, is grotesquely to misrepresent Russia’s crisis.

Two struggles are in progress. One is for political legitimacy. To favor Yeltsin in this is akin to a Russian arguing that in order to win passage of his economic package and health reforms, President Clinton should establish “special powers” abrogating checks and balances maintained by the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court.

The second struggle is for economic reform, which Russians want. They also want basic services they had in the past, like health care, education and housing. The current version of the “free market” being imposed on them is not alluring to most Russians, which is why the legislators have felt empowered to curb Yeltsin, thus provoking his new power grab.

Russian workers want economic democracy, which is not synonymous with the capitalist free market, as many American workers would readily agree. Workers support reform if it gives them more control over their enterprises, beyond the basic necessities. They suspect both the old nomenklatura and crash programs of reform urged by Yeltsin and his overseas backers in the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In some cities across Russia--Ekaterinberg, Vorkuta--these workers’ committees are emerging as significant voices.

In this epic struggle the U.S. government is shortsighted both in Realpolitik and in principle. Why support a Yeltsin lunging for dominance over other new nations such as the Ukraine, but also a Yeltsin who may soon be gone? Why instill in Russians the memory that a would-be usurper of Russia’s fledgling democracy has the full backing of the United States? Russians remember how the Western powers tried to crush an earlier revolution. Why rekindle that memory with this public conniving at the desperate putsch of a would-be czar?