‘Impeachment’ Not the Same in Russian

The president’s enemies have been waiting a long time for their chance to bring him down. In recent weeks, lawmakers have held lengthy impeachment hearings that seek to hold him accountable for a variety of sins.

They regularly drag out charges from the president’s past that call into question his morality and behavior. Harsh rhetoric attacking his character rings through the halls and hearing rooms.

But for President Boris N. Yeltsin--unlike his friend, President Clinton--the impeachment hearings that have dragged on for months in the Russian parliament are a mere political sideshow.

While the two presidents both face impeachment proceedings, the circumstances in which each finds himself are quite different.

The kind of behavior that got Clinton in trouble might well improve Russians’ opinion of their feeble, 67-year-old president by suggesting a vigor that they haven’t seen in their leader in years. The Communist-inspired impeachment charges seek to hold Yeltsin responsible for Russia’s greatest calamities: its economic collapse, the disastrous mid-1990s war in the breakaway republic of Chechnya, the sharp rise in the rate of crime, and the equally startling decline in the country’s population.

“The Communists are stepping up their anti-Yeltsin hysteria, trying to draw parallels and screaming that if in America the president can be impeached for a mere trifle, Yeltsin should surely be impeached for the serious crimes attributed to him,” said Viktor I. Borisyuk, a political analyst and former Yeltsin advisor.

The efforts of Yeltsin’s foes to impeach him, however, are handicapped by the fact that they must operate under a constitution--written by Yeltsin himself five years ago--that makes it nearly impossible for parliament to remove a president from office.

Some deputies in the Duma, the lower house of parliament, predict that Russia’s impeachment hearings will still be running in 2000, when the next presidential elections are scheduled.

So far, a Duma committee has approved three articles of impeachment, charging that Yeltsin: instigated the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, illegally used force against parliament in 1993 when it resisted his order dissolving the body, and mounted the unsuccessful war in Chechnya that claimed as many as 80,000 lives between December 1994 and August 1996.

This week, Communist Duma Deputy Viktor I. Ilyukhin used the hearings as a forum to accuse Yeltsin of “genocide” against his own people. Evidence for the genocide theory includes the fact that Russia’s population has fallen from nearly 149 million to 146.5 million in the past five years, while the average life expectancy of Russian men has plummeted to 57 years.

Riding a rising tide of anti-Semitism, Ilyukhin blamed Jews who have served in Yeltsin’s government for engineering economic policies responsible for slashing standards of living, “preventing childbirth” and reducing the population of ethnic Russians. “The large-scale genocide wouldn’t have been possible if Yeltsin’s inner circle had consisted of the main ethnic groups, and not exclusively of one group--the Jews,” Ilyukhin told the committee hearing the impeachment issue.

In fact, while Jews have held some important posts in his government, most of the president’s top officials have been ethnic Russians.

Russian political analysts predict that, in the end, neither impeachment drive will lead to the removal of a president, but they note that the efforts offer an interesting contrast between the countries’ political systems.

In the United States, the economy is relatively healthy and opinion polls indicate that a majority of the public opposes the effort to remove Clinton from office. In Russia, the country has rapidly deteriorated under a politically weakened president and Yeltsin’s standing in polls is in single digits--but he still holds sufficient power to block any constitutional effort to oust him.

“Both impeachment scandals reflect the current level of development of the political systems and the maturity of moral standards in both societies,” said Andrei V. Kortunov, president of the Russian Science Foundation. “In America, a president that lost, for example, the war in Chechnya would never be able to win another term. In Russia, by contrast, a rumor of a love affair may boost the president’s popularity.”