Russian Lawmakers Give Nod to Draft of ’97 Budget

After weeks of resistance, Russia’s Communist-dominated parliament finally passed the 1997 draft budget at its initial reading Sunday, having first forced the cash-strapped government to rewrite it to include $6 billion in extra spending.

Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin won the battle over the budget when, after a private talk with Communist leader Gennady A. Zyuganov, the latter told his followers to vote in favor of the draft--at least for the moment.

“We think that here the government will fulfill its promises for the first time,” Zyuganov told the Duma, the lower house of parliament. The draft then passed, 262 to 122, with seven abstentions. It needed 226 yes votes.

Relieved, Chernomyrdin promised the deputies that he would tell President Boris N. Yeltsin they had behaved “constructively.”

Communist discontent with government economic policy has focused on Chernomyrdin’s failure to break a vicious cycle of debt among state firms or to pay months of back wages to workers in the state sector--failures that have prompted strikes and intense hardships in industry.

The Communist leader qualified his support for the draft budget with a warning to Chernomyrdin that the prime minister will have to obey 11 demands if he wants Communist backing for the second and third readings of the bill, now set for Dec. 25. The draft will be submitted to the upper house, the Federation Council, after its third reading in the Duma.

Most of Zyuganov’s demands were appeals to the government to sort out the mess of unpaid bills and wages--issues that Chernomyrdin later said will be addressed. The final Communist demand was that Chernomyrdin ensure the firing of Yeltsin’s chief of staff, liberal Anatoly B. Chubais, a favorite object of hatred among the Communists.

In an interview after the vote, Chernomyrdin shrugged off the last condition.

“It has absolutely nothing to do with the budget. I refused, and I told them so in the Duma session,” he told NTV television.

He said he had not offered the Communists any perks, privileges or government portfolios to get Zyuganov to drop his opposition to next year’s budget, a logjam that had kept Russia on tenterhooks for weeks.

Zyuganov’s maneuvering room had been shrinking with every delay. While the Communist leadership is under growing pressure from rank-and-file members of the party to take a public stand against the government, Zyuganov was worried that Yeltsin would dissolve the Duma if it rejected the budget.

After Wednesday, Yeltsin has the constitutional right to dissolve the Duma, elected a year ago, and call more parliamentary elections.

Mikhail Yurin, deputy head of the Duma and a member of the liberal Yabloko party, said he thinks the tough-guy conditions Zyuganov issued Sunday were just a face-saving way to back down from his earlier resistance.

“What happened today was not a discussion but an apology to the voters,” he said.

It was the second success in as many days for Chernomyrdin. On Saturday, the International Monetary Fund, which had frozen monthly installments of a $10-billion credit line to Russia since October because it was dissatisfied with government tax-collection efforts, decided to release the $336-million October installment after a much-publicized government campaign to squeeze taxes out of late payers.

Communist resistance to the budget first began to soften when Chernomyrdin allowed the extra spending to be written into it. But liberal lawmaker Oksana Dmitriyeva said she believes the government’s promises to expand its original budget are illusory.

“There is nothing concrete [in it]--it is more a declaration of intent. The government has made declarations like this before and has never fulfilled them,” she said.