Russia Still Split Over Democracy’s Strength

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin was addressing the crowd, but Mikhail Mikinsky was too angry to listen.

“Yeltsin destroyed the USSR and sold it off to the West!” the World War II veteran screamed into the face of a younger man. “And the West turned it into a colony.”

“Nonsense! The old days were worse,” Alexander Streltsov shouted back. “Just three or five people decided what films I could see, what books I could read. They gave us one candidate, and we had to vote for him.

“Now it’s my choice,” he added. “This is democracy, where you get to choose.”

The heated exchange at a campaign rally in the Volga River city of Astrakhan summed up the choice Russians faced last week in the final phase of their first presidential election of the post-Soviet era.

By reelecting Yeltsin over Communist rival Gennady A. Zyuganov, many voters say they rejected a return to the Soviet past and preserved their right to choose. But does this really make Russia an emerging democracy?

In the uneasy interval between Yeltsin’s two terms, that question divides voters, politicians, intellectuals and foreign observers here almost as passionately as did the battle between Yeltsin and Zyuganov.

On one side are optimists, who say Russia is becoming a democracy out of sheer force of habit. Wednesday’s runoff was the eighth nationwide election in seven years. Voter turnout is always higher than in the United States, the process is peaceful, and the losers accept defeat.

Both candidates were unpopular, yet 69% of the electorate went to the polls. Acting out of rational self-interest, they chose not between personalities but between competing ideas, the optimists argue.

Yeltsin won, these observers say, because of his democratic instincts. He identified the war in the separatist republic of Chechnya and the chronic delay of wages as key issues, moved to resolve them and won 54% of the vote. Instead of banning the Communists, as he tried to do after his 1991 election, he was conciliatory last week. There was talk of Communists joining his government.

On the other side are pessimists, who had predicted that Yeltsin could not win a free election and therefore would not allow one. They were wrong but kept insisting, after the returns were in, that Russia is doomed to autocracy or chaos.

After five months of Western-style campaigning and professions of democratic values, they note, Russians now have a president who may be too ill to govern, the prospect of a messy struggle to succeed him and a powerful new national security chief who calls himself a “semi-democrat.”

Whoever sits in the Kremlin is bound to rule as an autocrat, the pessimists warn. Yeltsin has sharply limited parliament’s powers. Citizens have created few grass-roots organizations to defend their interests. The media, forfeiting their hard-won independence to back Yeltsin in the race, showed how easily they can be swayed or bought.

“The nature of this regime, with super-presidential powers, was determined by the 1993 coup,” when Yeltsin used force to close the Soviet-era parliament, said Igor Klyamkin, a Russian pollster. “The last election has not changed the regime in this sense.”

The current debate about democracy is an extension of a centuries-old one between Russia’s Westernizers and Slavophiles over whether their country can behave like the rest of Europe. Until 1991, Russia had been ruled by either czars or Communist Party bosses and had never had an elected government or democratic opposition.

The Marquis de Custine, a French chronicler, wrote in the early 19th century that “Russians, great and small, are drunk with slavery” and could not be reformed. Zyuganov once remarked that Russia “is a special world . . . hostile in its soul to the West.”

But Westernizers seized on last week’s election as final proof that this conviction is wrong.

“Russian democracy is irrevocable,” declared Anatoly B. Chubais, Yeltsin’s campaign chief. “Nobody will ever succeed in reversing this in my country a year from now, 10 years from now, a hundred years from now. Never.”

But a large majority of voters leaving the polls said they reject Yeltsin’s brand of democracy.

According to a nationwide exit poll by Mitofsky International, just 7% said “today’s democracy” is the best form of government, while 51% said they would prefer a “changed democracy” and 25% said they would favor “modern socialism,” an option interpreted as European-style social democracy.

Russians and foreign observers expressed strong reservations about the fairness of the campaign--from a pro-Yeltsin bias in all television coverage to the president’s evasion of campaign spending limits through rallies and concerts financed by nominally independent well-wishers.

“There was a consensus among the establishment, the bureaucrats and the apparatchiks to use every damn trick in the book to put down the Communists, short of visibly breaking the law,” said Michael Meadowcroft, chief of the 400-member observer mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. “Zyuganov never had a chance.”

U.S. Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering disagreed. Noting the Communist Party’s superior organization and docile voter base, he said, “It was not necessarily a question of David and Goliath.”

Another debate over Yeltsin’s democratic credentials erupted at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace during a post-election briefing.

Michael McFaul, a professor at Stanford University, said Yeltsin “wanted to win a free and fair election” and consistently rejected advice from aides to rig or abort the vote.

Nikolai Petrov, a Russian colleague seated beside him, insisted that Yeltsin adopted that position only after polls showed him leading.

“He was preparing for all options, including falsifications,” Petrov said.

In any case, Yeltsin’s victory has postponed a litmus test for Russian democracy--the first peaceful transfer of power from a defeated incumbent to an elected successor.

Yeltsin’s administration is often depicted on both sides of the debate as a coalition of powerful financial, agricultural and industrial lobbies that compete to siphon off Russia’s wealth and subsidies at the expense of the state--resisted from within by a small band of reformers.

Russian analyst Liliya Shevtsova describes this regime as instinctively authoritarian and out of touch with society. The hopeful news, she says, is that it now accepts the need to renew its mandate through elections.

“If Yeltsin continues to be a zombie, if he continues to rely on his cronies, then the election will only deepen the people’s frustration with democracy,” she said. “But if it brings good government, then people will say: ‘We influenced this. We sent a message, and they listened.’ Then the democratic mentality of society will be stronger.”

Yeltsin’s new security chief, Gen. Alexander I. Lebed, embodies both the hope and the risks of the process.

The retired general ran a popular law-and-order campaign, finished third in the first round of voting and was brought into Yeltsin’s team in exchange for his endorsement.

“Lebed got 15%, and Yeltsin made room for him,” said Valentina Shelipova, a computer technician in Obninsk, southwest of Moscow, who said she hopes Lebed will root out crime and corruption. “People are starting to believe their votes count for something.”

But Lebed, who has never been tested by public office, is viewed by others as a wannabe dictator whose sudden rise to prominence would be difficult in a more mature democracy.

It will take years, analysts say, for Russians to develop a network of political parties, labor unions and interest groups capable of exerting a moderating influence on their leaders between elections.

But the campaign showed that Russians can be engaged in politics. For five months, they followed it closely, discussed it intensely.

“Are we becoming a democracy? I don’t know,” Yelena Levina, a doctor, said after voting in Moscow. “Russia is on its way somewhere--nobody can predict where. But we are optimistic. We are tired of being pessimists.”