I guess this does look like a change.... Not too many people
participate in this May day parade. I hope, the public mood
won't swing back to support communists in the next elections.
About the new government. Note that Yeltsin
and Kiriyenko selected the government made of people from outside
of Moscow and St.Petersburg. This is Yeltsin's policy.
The best Universities in Russia, however, are located in these
two cities and Novosibirsk. Note also that in the old days
there were absolutely no restrictions for a person elsewhere
in Russia to enter the top Universities, if that person was capable
enough. In short - I'm not sure how well educated they actually are.
I find it strange that ALL OF THEM have graduated from unknown places.
(unlike Chubais). Other than that - the feeling is that the new
government will be much better than the old one.
MOSCOW, May 1 (AFP) - Russia's Communists put a brave face
Friday on their recent humiliation at the hands of the Kremlin,
turning out in their thousands in glorious sunshine to mark labour
day with healthy doses of nostalgia.
Communist leaders, still smarting from President Boris Yeltsin's
victory a week ago in securing the prime minister of his choice, led
three separate processions through central Moscow before baying
their messages to a square full of some 5,000 sympathisers just a
block from the Kremlin.
The scene was a throwback to the Soviet Maydays of yesteryear,
the square awash with red flags, the air thick with cries of "Ura"
(hooray), and a giant statue of Karl Marx towering over a platform
lined three-deep with Communist leaders, who took turns to thunder
their rhetoric to the appreciative onlookers.
"The regime ruling Russia has led her into an abyss and
destruction," said Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov. "It is
not a country which has been born here, but a phantom which has no
legal emblem, no legal flag and in fact, no legal ruler.
"We all know what (new Premier Sergei) Kiriyenko will bring the
people," lamented Zyuganov, reeling off a litany of complaints
against a government still only a few days old.
"We think that under these conditions, we must call people to
adopt the slogan: 'The destroyer president must resign,'" Zyuganov
added.
He was not alone in his thoughts. Several banners paraded around
Theatre Square called on Yeltsin to quit, while others offered
unkind caricatures of the president engaged in various nefarious
activities.
"The people hate Yeltsin because he broke up the Soviet Union,"
spat Nikolai Grigorevich, an elderly onlooker. "He has presided over
this clique of alcoholism and corruption of youth."
But as spring announced itself with warm sunshine, the mood was
generally festive and good natured, however. May 1 has been a
favourite here ever since Soviet leaders adopted international
labour day as a national holiday and paradoxically gave everyone two
days off work.
The rally, complete with Lenin and Stalin portraits and
repetitive mantras of "All Power to the Soviets" and "rebuild our
Soviet Union," attracted few young people, and all questions to
demonstrators met with a wall of bitter nostalgia.
"We used to drink milk like water," said one woman who refused
to be named. "Now we can't afford anything. Capitalism is the
ultimate destruction, not just for us but for the whole world. This
is an international holiday of labour after all."
A bare kilometre (half mile) away, a more sinister crowd
gathered on the other side of the Kremlin for their own splinter
rally, a motley assemblage of far left meeting far right, with a
generous show of leather, shaven heads, facial hair and Motorhead
T-shirts.
"We want a Russia for the Russians," Sergei Markov told the
crowd of supporters of the National Bolshevik Party of Russia, whose
maxim is 'Russia is Everything - the rest are nothing.'
"Russians are the most important people of this country," he
declared, his resolute "Glory to Russia," meeting with a number of
Hitler salutes and much waving of flags depicting alternately
swastika-like hammer-and-sickles and hand grenades.
"We're not against other peoples," Markov told AFP later. "We
just hate Americans and their policy of globalisation - it's a
Jewish-imperialist conspiracy."
"Russia is a workers' country."
Unions said that some one million people turned out Friday to
mark May 1, around 40,000 of them in Moscow, a city of some nine
million people.
And if that turnout was unimpressive, the fact that
demonstrators split up into three separate rallies hinted at the
division in the leftist camp which has rendered it an increasingly
impotent force at the national level.
"We must become one party with one programme," screamed Working
Russia leader Viktor Anpilov at the mainstream rally. "The party of
Lenin and Stalin must be resurrected, for Russia, Ukraine, Belarus
and the whole Soviet Union."
It drew the biggest "Ura" of the day. |
