FOCUS-Crisis-hit Russia unmoved by revolution past
12:44 p.m. Nov 07, 1998 Eastern
By Alastair Macdonald
MOSCOW, Nov 7 (Reuters) - President Boris Yeltsin defended his democratic reforms on Saturday, the 81st anniversary of the Russian revolution, and said even his bitter communist opponents had laid to rest their violent past.
While mass indifference lent weight to his dismissal of hardline rhetoric from a few thousand nostalgic citizens who marked the date by rallying under the red flag, further talk of Western food aid belied the ailing Kremlin leader's suggestion that Russia could speedily deal with its economic crisis.
Few Russians felt moved to join thinly attended communist rallies marking what was once, as Revolution Day, a high holiday on the Soviet calendar. For the majority, simple economic survival was more pressing than making their voice heard.
Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, one of several leaders warming up for the election battle to succeed Yeltsin, told some 8,000 followers on Moscow's Lubyanka Square that he would push for a rapid parliamentary move to oust the president, whose second term is not due to end until mid-2000.
''The first condition is Mr Yeltsin's resignation,'' he said.
Police said only 140,000 people attended rallies across the country. An opinion poll, quoted by Interfax news agency, showed that only 13 percent of Russians agreed with communist ideology.
Yeltsin, who is in Sochi on the Black Sea recuperating from what the Kremlin says is ''fatigue,'' looked tired in a television address to mark the 1917 revolution anniversary, which has been renamed the Day of Accord and Reconciliation under Yeltsin.
He has insisted he will see out his term but has handed much of his work over to Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov.
His three-minute address on Saturday carried a note of valedictory self-justification.
Even communists accepted democracy and the market, he said.
''No matter how much reforms are criticised today, they have achieved their main purpose,'' Yeltsin said. ''They have changed not only the course of history but people's minds, from animosity and hatred to tolerance and dialogue. That is what will help us 0put right more quickly our present difficulties.''
The prospect seems dim, however, of a quick remedy for the worst economic crisis since communism ended seven years ago.
Deputy Prime Minister Gennady Kulik told Interfax news agency he believed the United States was ready to offer further food aid following a package agreed on Friday to tide Russia over the winter after its worst harvest in decades.
Under Friday's deal, negotiated by Kulik, the United States will give Russia a cheap food credit of $600 million, 1.5 million tonnes of wheat and 100,000 tonnes of other food.
Russia imported a third of all its food last year and the weak rouble created fears it could not afford supplies for the winter. The European Union is also considering aid.
Despite a willingness in the West to prevent the sort of food shortages that might spark unrest -- as it did in 1917 -- Washington has also stepped up its criticism of Primakov.
His two-month-old government, which includes Communist first deputy premier Yuri Maslyukov, is seeking to re-assert state economic controls and is printing new cash in attempts to stem the crisis.
Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, in the harshest U.S. criticism yet, called it a retreat from market economics and warned bluntly on Friday of ''political drift, turmoil and even crackup'' in the world's second nuclear power.
Maslyukov, who is in charge of the economy and finances, defended the programme in an interview with ORT television on Saturday, saying the government was not ditching the market principles but was just being cautious.
''I know we'll be criticised for giving the state a bigger role, for reducing the role of the market. I can assure you, no way (we are going to do it),'' Malsyukov said.
''The market has to be prepared, approaches to it have to be cleared from mines first.'' He also criticised Russia's previous reformist governments which he said had succeeded in ''strangling the economy'' by over-exposing it to the free market competition.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited. |
