Yeltsin Puts His Shoulder to the Wheel of Politics : Russia: As festering problems build, he demands support in writing for his increasingly suspect constitution.

Following the violent showdown between Boris Yeltsin and the Supreme Soviet, which ended with the storming last October of the building in which the former legislature met, there has been half a year of relative calm in Russia.

It is true that the December elections for a new Parliament as well as the more recent local elections produced results that were unwelcome to the Russian president and his team, but Yeltsin was able to get a new constitution adopted that greatly increased his powers; there has been no further resort to political violence (as distinct from Mafia-type and ordinary criminal violence, which has continued to increase).

Yet behind the surface calm there are hidden dangers. If Moscow is beginning to adjust to a new style of life, while borrowing freely from the old, tensions are higher in numerous other parts of the country. In the effort to prevent already high inflation from becoming hyper-inflation, the government has failed to provide many enterprises (including Siberian coal mines) with the money to pay workers’ wages. If large-scale unemployment--extremely difficult to avoid as Russia’s backward economy adapts to market conditions--were to be added to the existing grievances of manual workers, social unrest would surely follow. Some of the new rich may even be haunted by the specter of proletarian revolution.

Apart from manual workers in declining industries, the military-industrial complex potentially represents a threat to the surface stability of contemporary Russian politics. The state is no longer generating the revenue to keep the army and military industry in anything like the style to which they were once accustomed, and, accordingly, they remain both an actual--and potentially still greater--source of support for extremist parties and backward-looking politicians.

One major problem area that may open the way for the military-industrial complex to play a still larger role in policy is that of relations with other parts of the former Soviet Union. Political conflict with Ukraine is already severe and it could turn into military skirmishes or worse if the Russian-dominated Crimea or Eastern Ukraine pressed for unification with Russia. Some leaders of the successor states see a new confederal union, based on the model of the European Union, as the best way of avoiding interethnic and interregional conflict within the new states.

Thus, President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazhakhstan, where tensions between Kazakhs and Russians have been mounting, has become the principal advocate of a new Eurasian Union (consisting of all the former Soviet republics apart form the Baltic states). The Ukrainian president, Leonid Kravchuk, in contrast, attempts to hold middle ground between the more nationalist of his compatriots and Russophone citizens, and does not dare to outrage the former by backing any kind of institutionally based union with Russia.

A further problem is the unease even among democratic politicians concerning the way the new constitution was adopted and about the willingness of the Russian president to bend it for the sake of temporary political convenience. It has become clear that the turnout in the Russian parliamentary elections in December was significantly less than the 55% hurriedly announced.

Since the presidential team had set themselves the modest target of a turnout of more than 50% for the new constitution to be validly adopted, their highest priority was to achieve that figure. Yet one deputy from a democratic grouping in the state Duma told me in Moscow last week that only 37% of the electorate had voted in his constituency an hour before polling stations closed; he was subsequently to find the official figure for turnout in his constituency recorded as 55%. He believed that to be not only obviously fraudulent but also far from an isolated example.

Similarly, Yeltsin’s demand that the procurator general he appointed after last October’s disturbances find a way of not implementing the Duma’s resolution of amnesty for Alexander Rutskoy and Ruslan Khasbulatov has led to a good deal of sympathy for the man who was briefly the country’s highest law officer. Alexei Kazannik, a believer in the rule of law, has given several interviews since his resignation in which he has spoken of the impossibility of getting Yelstin to accept that there were certain things that the law (even the recently adopted constitution designed to strengthen Yeltsin’s powers) did not permit either the president or the procurator general to do.

Now Yeltsin has called for all significant political actors to sign a civil accord, a new agreement to abide by certain principles, the most important of which is not to seek to change the new constitution. Discussions concerning the text of the agreement have been conducted for many weeks and it appeared last week that a majority of leaders of political parties as well as of provincial governors were ready to sign the accord. Those governors who do not sign are likely to be dismissed by Yeltsin.

It is hard to believe, however, that the act of signing a document on civil accord offers a fundamental solution to the problem of agreeing on the supremacy of law and on rules of the political game. Among the likely signatories are some who have already said in private that they regard it as essential to change the constitution before the next election. Whatever reservations they have about Yeltsin, they regard as a much greater risk the handing of the excessive presidential powers that the constitution incorporates to a quite conceivably authoritarian nationalist successor, even if that person’s name is not Vladimir Zhirinovsky.