The Logic in Yeltsin’s Madness

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin has again tossed a political hand grenade before darting back behind the Kremlin’s walls, leaving observers to wonder at his increasingly inexplicable behavior. With Yeltsin’s firing of Prime Minister Sergei V. Stepashin last week, and his appointment of the virtually unknown Vladimir V. Putin as his successor, a total of four people have now served in that position during the past 18 months. In the Western press, commentators struggling to explain the string of firings have concentrated on Yeltsin’s poor health, in many cases linking his frailty to his concern to secure his legacy: a more democratic Russia, set on the path of market reforms, increasingly linked with the West and free from the menace of a communist resurgence.

The Russian press has a much more jaded view of Yeltsin’s record and motives. Seen up close, the president’s legacy seems much less impressive and scarcely worth defending. Russian politics are increasingly corrupt, opaque and authoritarian, thanks in part to Yeltsin’s own constitution, which invests enormous powers in the president. Following last August’s economic collapse, market reforms have lost much of the luster they once seemed to have. The ruble has lost 75% of its value this year alone, and millions of Russians find it hard to make ends meet, even if they are fortunate enough to receive a paycheck. Relations with Western countries have gone from bad, with NATO expansion, to worse, with the East-West rift over Kosovo. Finally, despite Stepashin’s assurances to the contrary when he visited Washington last month, Russian communism is far from being a spent political force. The Communist Party controls the largest bloc of seats in the lower house of the Russian parliament, the Duma, and it looks set to gain from an anti-Yeltsin political backlash in the parliamentary elections set for December. All segments of the Russian public are heartily tired of Yeltsin, whose public approval rating hovers at the statistically insignificant 7% level.

Much commentary, especially outside Russia, has neglected an important element of the current political situation, which may go a long way toward explaining Yeltsin’s moves. The Russian Federation is threatening to come apart at the seams. Since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, the underlying forces of Russian political and social life have been centrifugal, drawing power away from Moscow, where it always lay during the highly centralized Soviet years, to the provinces and autonomous republics. While the world’s attention has been focused on the political dust storms and instability in the Russian capital, regional power bosses have steadily undercut the center’s claims. Yeltsin and the Duma may issue decrees, but local bosses enforce the rules as they see fit. Most important, financial power has ebbed away from the Kremlin, as regional authorities withhold payment of tax revenues.

Among many political failures as president, one of Yeltsin’s most serious has been his inability, even his unwillingness, to create a political party that would unite his supporters and create a countrywide organization that could reach beyond Moscow into the provinces. Yeltsin seems to have feared that a party might slip beyond his control and, like Ross Perot, he would find that his creation could live on without him. Lacking the presidential imprimatur, supporters of political liberalization, westernization and market economics have been forced to form their own microparties, which war with one another and split the reform vote. Meantime, the president’s rivals have slowly built up party structures that pervade the vast hinterlands of Russia, where Yeltsin’s political authority hangs in midair, with no local roots. The Communist Party, which has large-scale regional organizations left over from the Soviet era, has been the principal beneficiary of Yeltsin’s shortsighted and politically self-centered approach.

Politically ambitious people who did not want to join the Communist Party or the various nationalist and right-wing groups, such as Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky’s misnamed Liberal Democratic Party, have faced two choices during the Yeltsin years. First, they could work within the Moscow-based apparat, advancing by playing the Byzantine game of Kremlin politics, hoping to catch the presidential eye or the patronage of one of the capital’s financial or political power barons to climb the slippery political pole. This is the route chosen by most of Yeltsin’s prime ministers, including Putin. Putin has no experience in the world of electoral politics, and he has no ready constituency within Russia at large or in the legislature. A colonel of the old Soviet KGB, he made the leap to the Kremlin big leagues by befriending Anatoly B. Chubais, Yeltsin’s one-time champion of economic privatization. Once ensconced within the Kremlin power elite, Putin rose steadily, coming to command the Federal Security Service, successor to his old employer, the KGB. Yeltsin has explicitly endorsed him as his own successor in the presidential elections scheduled for next June.

That endorsement might be the kiss of death, leaving an electorally inexperienced Putin to campaign with the full weight of Yeltsin-era corruption on his back. Other ambitious reformists hoping to capture the noncommunist reform mantle foresaw this dilemma and have chosen the alternate route to political power. Politicians such as Moscow mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov and another of Yeltsin’s former prime ministers, Yevgeny M. Primakov, have chosen to distance themselves from the corruption and cronyism of Kremlin politics, linking relatively moderate nationalist appeals with calls for greater probity in politics and economics.

This year, these aspirants for the moderate, noncommunist opposition banner took decisive measures to overcome the political fragmentation and organize nationwide. In April, regional power brokers formed the political bloc All Russia, under the leadership of President Mintimer S. Shaimiyev of Tatarstan, one of the Russian Federation’s many autonomous regions. This group brought together the people who have gradually assembled the real levers of power in their hands, but lacked a leader of national prominence to contest power at the center. Following several months of negotiations, this group finally allied with the smaller organization Fatherland, headed by Luzhkov, early this month. This latter group, though lacking strong nationwide organization, enjoys power at the center, media access and, in Luzhkov, a leader of national prominence. Together, these two forces stake a powerful claim to the post-Yeltsin noncommunist political ground.

These developments are far from happy for Yeltsin, who fears any group that he has not created and does not control. Although corruption is rife in the regions and in Luzhkov’s Moscow, the new group will campaign as though this is all a product of presidential malfeasance or neglect. Furthermore, within the ranks of this alliance, many voices are calling for legal prosecution of those--right up to the president--who looted Soviet economic assets. Wih the election of the wrong successor, Yeltsin might find himself in the dock, rather than in quiet retirement.

The formation of the new political alliance coincided with the eruption of the latest armed secessionist movement, this one in Dagestan, a province neighboring Chechnya. During the last few days, armed Islamic rebels, numbering 1,200 in Russian accounts, have infiltrated the province and declared a jihad. Although Russian armed forces have promised massive retaliation, airstrikes have failed, so far, to drive the rebels back, and the whole affair rekindles memories of the failed 1994-96 Chechen war, a low point of Yeltsin’s presidency.

By naming Putin as the new prime minister, Yeltsin is apparently trying to demonstrate that he is placing a firmer hand at the wheel, one that will deal quickly with the Dagestan rebellion before it flares out of control and spreads the secessionist virus throughout the Russian Federation.

In his remarks when appointing Putin, Yeltsin signaled that he hoped the new prime minister would also deal with rivals closer to home. Although Putin lacks any political base outside Kremlin walls, presidential elections are still a year away. Yeltsin said, “I think that he has sufficient time to prove himself.” Perhaps. But the time may have passed when Yeltsin can persuade the Russian people, or the world, that all is well in Moscow simply by reshuffling the political deck. The political forces that will usher in the post-Yeltsin era are already waiting in the wings, prepared to capitalize on the ills of Russian life. The Dagestan crisis may give them the opening they need.*