By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — Since tanks of the armed forces finally blew away Russia's parliament on October 4, President Boris Yeltsin has moved swiftly to suspend, disband or intimidate the major potential sources of opposition to his rule.
Many organisations' functions have been halted by presidential decrees. In addition to the parliament, they include the Constitutional Court; 10 political organisations including two of the country's largest parties; most of the national opposition daily newspapers; and the Moscow City Soviet, the elected legislature representing the Russian capital's 9 million population.
On October 9, Yeltsin signed a decree ending the key decision-making powers of the elected soviets, or councils, of Russia's 68 provinces and ethnically defined territories and districts. The way has been cleared for "reforms" which will leave local representative bodies throughout most of Russia heavily subordinate to administrative chiefs appointed from Moscow.
In legal terms, the most outrageous of the president's moves was the suspension on October 7 of the Constitutional Court. The court's chairperson, Valery Zorkin, had resigned under heavy government pressure the previous day. By removing the last theoretical check on Yeltsin's actions, the suspension of the court has made the president a dictator in the literal sense. In a startlingly vindictive note, Yeltsin in his suspension order condemned the court, which ruled against his September 21 decree abolishing the parliament, for having pushed Russia "to the brink of civil war".
Political parties
Also suspended are Russia's largest political party, the 500,000-member Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), and one of the largest formations of the political "centre", the People's Party of Free Russia (NPSR). These parties were on a list of 10 political organisations declared suspended by the Justice Ministry on October 7 and 8. Under the order, the premises of the organisations affected were to be seized and their financial accounts frozen.
Attempts were later made to justify these suspensions on the grounds that members of the banned organisations had been responsible for acts of violence during the struggles that followed Yeltsin's September 21 coup. The leaders of the NPSR formerly included Russian Vice-President Alexander Rutskoi, whom the parliament appointed acting president after Yeltsin was automatically impeached.
However, other leaders of the NPSR later dissociated the party from Rutskoi, and political parties in any case are not collectively responsible for the unsanctioned acts of individual members. The real reasons for the suspensions seem to have included the desire of the Yeltsin regime to remove two powerful opponents from the list of parties contesting the elections called for December 11-12.
The government has shown just as little compunction in shutting down the opposition press. At one point all four of the national opposition daily newspapers were suspended. The parliament's paper Rossiyskaya Gazeta has now reappeared as a pro-Yeltsin government gazette, with a new editor. The trade union-sponsored Rabochaya Tribuna resumed publication on October 8, but in the days since has been so timid and conciliatory as to be unrecognisable.
Journalists for the newspapers now on sale in Moscow are conscious that they and their publications are under close official scrutiny. "The government urged news organisations to practise 'self-censorship', the English-language Moscow Tribune reported on October 7, "and threatened to seize editions that contained 'false information that might destabilise the situation'".
The ultimate goal of Yeltsin's move against the parliament was to help prepare the way for another burst of economic "shock therapy". If this anti-popular program is to be carried through, there is no way the regime can allow the existence of an independent labour movement serious about defending the rights of its members.
Labour movement
According to Finance Ministry figures reported on October 8 by the English-language Moscow Times, real inflation-adjusted wages in Russia fell by a third between June and September. During the summer and early autumn, economic hardship propelled many hundreds of thousands of Russian workers into strikes and other protest actions. The country's main labour organisation, the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR), played an important role in preparing and coordinating these struggles.
Yeltsin has not coupled his war on the parliament and its supporters with a similar all-out assault on the labour movement, preferring to take on his enemies one at a time. He has combined harassment and hints of repression with moves to strip the trade unions of long-established economic functions. Nevertheless, the blows against the workers' movement have hit hard.
On September 23 telephone lines to the FNPR's Moscow headquarters were cut off, remaining out of action for most of the following week. Threats were made to outlaw the automatic deduction of union dues from workers' pay packets. On September 28 a presidential decree deprived the union movement of its control over the social welfare funds out of which sickness and injury compensation, vacation vouchers, child endowments and many other benefits had been provided to workers.
Without help from enterprises in collecting union dues, and without many of the previous material incentives for workers to keep up their union membership, many of the less well-organised unions faced extinction. The outburst of armed struggle on October 3 and 4 multiplied the pressures and flung the labour movement as a whole into disarray.
Plans for protest actions were forgotten. Leaders of weaker unions began to speak of postponing the extraordinary FNPR congress that had been called for October 28. On October 7 FNPR Chairperson Igor Klochkov, who had been closely identified with the plans for an autumn industrial campaign, and who had strongly opposed Yeltsin's coup, resigned "in order to maintain the unity of the FNPR".
Regions
Throughout the period since September 21, a far greater threat to Yeltsin's plans than labour militancy has been opposition from Russia's 88 republics, provinces, and ethnically defined territories and districts. In the struggle with the provincial leaderships, Yeltsin appeared until October 3 to be losing ground. Pressure from local elites seemed likely to force him to a compromise with the parliament.
The events of October 3 and 4 swung the advantage behind the president. No longer needing support from the regions for his campaign to overthrow the parliament, Yeltsin was free to place the provincial legislatures high on his list for involuntary "reform".
In a television broadcast on October 6 Yeltsin hinted strongly that regional soviets which opposed him would be forcibly shut down, suggesting that instead they "dissolve and go away peacefully in a dignified manner without fights or upheaval". In a decree the following day, the president gave himself the sole power to appoint and dismiss regional administrative leaders.
Scattered shows of defiance nevertheless persisted. Yeltsin's response was a model of ruthlessness. A decree on October 9 went close to abolishing all 68 legislatures in the ethnically Russian provinces and in the "autonomous" national regions and districts. The local soviets lost their various executive functions and their right to decide budget provisions; they will now be required to obtain the agreement of local executive leaders for all legislation related to financial expenditures.
These moves by Yeltsin are only a way station on the road to abolishing the provincial legislatures as meaningful organs of local self-rule. The decree of October 9 ordered the setting up of a presidential commission, which was given a mere six days to draw up proposals for the further "reform" of the regional legislatures.
As the liberal Moscow daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta observed on October 12, the future of the Russian provinces will be one of "strong governors and mayors"; input from the population will be slight. Yeltsin's direct influence will be powerful; of the administrative heads of provinces, all but about 10 are direct presidential appointees, and all are aware that they can be sacked if they fail to do the president's bidding.
The provincial legislatures in Russia were elected in March 1990 under conditions which were generally judged to be fair. As a violation of democratic practice, the moves to abolish the provincial soviets can only be compared to a decision by a US president to forcibly liquidate the legislatures of most of the US states — after personally appointing most of the governors.
So far, the ethnically defined republics have been spared a Russian takeover; Yeltsin's October 9 decree merely "recommended" that their soviets dissolve themselves. But the legislatures of the lesser "autonomous" regions were ordered to subordinate themselves to the administrative chiefs. This instruction left no doubt as to what Yeltsin perceived the "autonomy" of small national groups to be worth.
In order to quell opposition from the provinces, Yeltsin has taken a course which will turn around the indispensable process through which power had begun to be devolved from the central ministries to the local level. In the centralising thrust of his policies, as in his resort to autocratic methods, Russia's "democratic" president is emerging as a hardline son of the Soviet apparatus.