Is Moscow Still a Good Bet? : Duma throws Russian constitution in Yeltsin’s face

President Boris N. Yeltsin has appealed to Russia’s lawmakers for a new spirit of cooperation in addressing the great and growing problems facing their country. But from the looks of things he’s more likely in for a period of bitter confrontation instead.

The new popularly elected Duma, as the lower house of Parliament is known, seems ready to pick up where its predecessor, which was dissolved by Yeltsin last fall, left off. Shaping up is a renewed struggle over power and a time of deepening political conflict, one whose outcome is anything but certain. President Clinton’s necessary effort to maintain stable relations with Russia and keep open the lines to its reformers--a policy already greatly complicated by the disclosure that Russia had a paid spy within the ranks of the CIA--will inevitably be made harder by the political turbulence brewing in Moscow. In the long course of things, Russia’s internal political developments seem sure to have a much greater impact on U.S.-Russia relations than the Aldrich Ames spy case.

Yelstin’s plaintive plea for cooperation followed by just a day the Duma’s lopsided vote to grant amnesty to some of the most conspicuous enemies of the president, and of reform. With extremists taking the lead but with support from some centrist politicians as well, the Duma ordered freedom for the dozen men who are standing trial for attempting to overthrow President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in August, 1991, and for those who led the rebellion that tried to oust Yeltsin last October. Among the latter are former Vice President Alexander Rutskoi and former Parliament Chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov.

The Duma vote, perfectly legal under the new Yeltsin-supported constitution, was explained by one centrist deputy as an effort to leave the past behind. In fact, it simply assures that the worst of the recent past will gain new influence over the present. Restoring the political rights of putschists even while former communists and neo-fascists ride high in the Parliament is a sure prescription not for reconciliation but for disorder. Yeltsin’s government may try to fight or delay the amnesty. That action itself could trigger an early political crisis, perhaps forcing Clinton’s Russian policy back to the drawing board.