Yeltsin and Crew Are Sinking Like the Ruble
By MICHAEL WINES
MOSCOW -- The man who climbed atop a tank and led Russia out of communism in 1991 has scarcely been seen in public since his country's financial markets and currency fell off a cliff last week.
The big question -- for him and for the reforms he champions -- is whether Russians any longer care.
President Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, already deeply unpopular, now seems to have sunk even lower in political and public esteem than his country's ruble. The Duma, Russia's lower house of Parliament, voted 245-32 Friday to ask him to resign. Newspapers are savaging him with headlines like, "The Devaluation of the President."
Political experts say the week's events all but abort prospects that Yeltsin, now 67, might seek a third term in 2000. His top aides, a best-and-brightest crew widely admired abroad, are now so tarred by failure at home that their own political prospects are slight.
In fact, there is nobody on Russia's political horizon who embraces the president's westernized brand of economic policy and has a chance of winning a presidential election.
"There is nobody to continue the reforms," said Otto Latsis, the deputy editor of the newspaper Noviye Izvestia and a highly regarded political analyst. "We can only pin our hopes on some semi-miracle that, in two years, Russia's savior may emerge."
Latsis and others are quick to stress that predicting Russia's future is a fool's job, and that Yeltsin in particular has risen from the dead before. Still, the devaluation and debt restructuring of this week almost certainly will mean inflation, recession and less government revenue at a time when Russians are clamoring for stability, growth and billions of rubles in back wages and pensions.
None of that bodes well for market-style reforms or their proponents. To the contrary, political experts say the crisis has strengthened the two left-of-center politicians already regarded as the early presidential front-runners: Alexander Lebed, the former general who now governs the vast Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk, and Yuri Luzhkov, the canny mayor of Moscow.
Both men are strong-willed, even authoritarian rulers. Though Lebed can be unpredictable, both lean less toward free markets than toward centralized control of the economy. Luzhkov has a smooth political style. Lebed is rougher-edged but trying hard; his aides are discussing political and economic cramming sessions with officials at Harvard University.
Neither would be a president even remotely like the mercurial but steadfastly Western-oriented Yeltsin. Nor would the other current major contender, Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist who ran second behind Yeltsin two years ago.
Two other assumed candidates, Victor Chernomyrdin and Gregory Yavlinsky, are more reform-minded, but neither has a large following. Chernomyrdin also suffers because he was Yeltsin's prime minister during the birth of the policies that led to this month's economic catastrophe.
Friday, in the first hours of an emergency session on the fiscal crisis, members of the Duma put aside Yeltsin's demands to overhaul the country's Gordian tax system and spent several hours flaying him and his advisers. "I think it would be a blessing if Yeltsin and his entourage resigned voluntarily," Zyuganov said.
Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko gave no quarter. Warning that the nation's financial crisis has just begun, he said Yeltsin's team "cannot afford the luxury of being a popular government."
"I am criticized on the ground that the government has no political support -- that is true," he said. "But let us honestly admit that there is no political force in the country which is prepared to assume the responsibility for the economy with elections not far off."
Kiriyenko explicitly included the Duma among those forces, noting that Parliament had refused Yeltsin's pleas to raise taxes or reorder spending this summer, even though the government's debt payments alone were running 11 billion rubles a month above its income.
Yeltsin, on vacation for five weeks now, has struck a strange pose through all this. Almost a week ago, in Novgorod, he thundered that the ruble would not be devalued and that he would not cut short his rest to return to Moscow because that would be viewed as evidence of a "disaster." Within hours, both events came to pass.
One newspaper account of his visit to a Novgorod factory described Yeltsin as confused, tempestuous and, at one point, gasping for air. Atop other reports, including his seeming infirmity at last month's funeral for the long-dead Czar Nicholas II and a visit to Sweden notable for his misstatements, the weekend appearance raised new questions about Yeltsin's health and command of events.
The president seemed generally serene Friday in his only other recent public appearance, to oversee naval maneuvers off the Arctic Circle town of Severmorsk. He literally waved away the Duma's request that he quit, saying the legislators did not appear to understand that Russia needs a president.
Some outsiders say that while Yeltsin still holds the reins, able to veto his aides, he obviously has lost steam. "It seems clear that Yeltsin has never been weaker," said Rory MacFarquhar, a political scientist at the Russian European Center for Economic Policy in Moscow. "It's clear he's confused. He's not in a position to throw his weight around."
For reformers, the problem is that Yeltsin, for all his problems, remains the weightiest force they have. "Without his active support, it's hard to imagine the reformers' making any serious changes," MacFarquhar said.
Change is what they now need. Besides pushing the Duma into approving a series of tax increases, the Yeltsin government needs, in Western economists' view, to rein in a banking system controlled by some of the country's richest and most powerful figures and supported by parts of the bureaucracy, including the Central Bank.
Both moves could be crucial to the economic course after devaluation and debt restructuring -- and crucial to public opinion in the next election. The question is whether a weakened Yeltsin can or will push them.
Saturday, August 22, 1998
Copyright 1998 The New York Times |
