Duly reported by the resident correspondents of U.S. newspapers and television networks, rumors of an imminent political crisis regularly sweep Moscow. Like sumo wrestlers before a match, the three main institutional players in Russian politics today—the presidential administration, the government headed by Prime Minister Evgeny Primakov, and the lower house of the Russian Parliament, the Duma—make scary faces and mutter dire threats of retribution against their opponents. Hardly a day passes without dark hints of the dismissal of the government, the impeachment of the president, or the dissolution of the Duma. Despite the ritual posturing, no outbreak of open political warfare is likely until fall, when the parliamentary and presidential election campaigns get under way. Until then, the political forecast for Russia is tense but stable.

The combatants’ uncharacteristic restraint arises from a combination of present-day liabilities, which render the costs of an all-out political confrontation unacceptably high, and longer-term considerations of democratic politics. This pause, however, must not be confused with paralysis: the Russian political landscape is changing configurations and colors almost daily as the major political actors individually and collectively maneuver in preparation for the parliamentary election in December and the battle for the presidency six months later.

The Left Opposition

As a result of the financial and political crisis of August, when Moscow defaulted on its domestic and, in part, foreign debt and devalued the ruble, Russia, for the first time since 1991, is ruled by a government forged by and, in effect, responsible to the Parliament, not the president. The leftist opposition now has a stake in the running of the country. That circumstance alone helps explain the relative moderation: the "popular-patriotic" bloc is reluctant to rock the boat, most of which it now owns.

Furthermore, the steady dwindling of the Communists’ actuarially challenged electorate leaves no hope whatsoever for a Communist candidate’s victory in any free and fair presidential race. In the field of at least half a dozen candidates, the chairman of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), Gennady Zyuganov, will be lucky to get 20 percent of the vote, compared with the 31 percent that he received in the first round in 1996. In addition, matched up in a hypothetical runoff in public opinion polls, Zyuganov invariably loses to every one of the other major candidates. And whil e the prospects for a legitimately won Communist presidency are dim, the chances for a Communist dictatorship have been even more remote since October. Then, having promised to put "millions" in the streets in a nationwide protest, the "popular-patriotic" organizers had to contend with a few hundred thousand in a country of 150 million.

By contrast, solidifying the reactionary Left's hold on the Duma might be well within reach, given the KPRF's unparalleled organizational resources and skills. Even with the steadily dwindling electoral base, the 500,000 card-holding activists (several times the membership of all other parties and movements combined) engaged in door-to-door canvassing and the more than 150 pro-Communist national and local newspapers and magazines may, as in 1995, produce a near-total turnout of the leftist electorate, with a real possibility of extending the 200-seat plurality closer still to a veto-proof two-thirds majority of 350 (of 450) seats. Since anti-Americanism has always been central to the Left-nationalist agenda, the "popular patriots," who for years have labeled the Yeltsin regime "colonial" and a "fifth column," undoubtedly hope to use anti-American and anti-NATO sentiment unleashed by the NATO operations in Yugoslavia to boost their Duma membership. The modicum of stability needed for a parliamentary election is another reason for the Communists to abandon, or rather suspend, their Leninist strategy of "the-worse-the-better."

The Russian Left stands to risk much from a sudden vacancy in the Kremlin, the ensuing crisis, and a presidential election preceding the parliamentary one. From the Duma’s point of view, a sick and politically enfeebled president is vastly preferable to a vigorous chief executive bolstered by a fresh mandate from tens of millions of voters. This calculation seems behind the leisurely pace of the Duma’s ballyhooed impeachment proceedings against BorisYeltsin. There is little hope that the charges can garner the two-thirds of the vote necessary for conviction in the Duma, and fewer votes still are expected in the upper house, the Council of Federation. Rather than an earnest attempt to oust Yeltsin, impeachment appears to be yet another weapon in the complex game of pressures and counterpressures between the Kremlin, the government, and the Duma over redistribution of power and a hedge against dissolution by Yeltsin: the Duma may not be dismissed and early elections scheduled while the Parliament considers the case against the president. With the formal hearings scheduled to begin April 15, the Duma could easily drag them to mid-June, when it would be protected from dissolution by yet another constitutional injunction, this one prohibiting the Duma’s disbandment during the last half-year of the legislature’s term.

For the time being, a frontal assault on the Kremlin is being supplanted with what is known in Eastern European politics as salami slicing: a piecemeal arrogation of power by the Parliament at the expense of the presidency. The weightiest, most desirable slice is a constitutional amendment that would institutionalize the Russian version of the French practice in which, following the election, the president delegates the formation of the government to the leader of the parliamentary majority. In France such an arrangement produced so-called cohabitation, with the president and the prime minister belonging to the opposite political camps: François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac in 1986–1988, Mitterrand and Eduard-Balladur in 1993–1995, and, since 1997, the right-of-center Chirac and the leader of the Socialist coalition, Lionel Jospin. Yeltsin’s appointment of Primakov in September led to a cohabitation of the Chirac-Jospin type. Now the Duma seeks to turn that precedent into a law mandating a prime minister chosen not by the president, but by the Duma.

President Yeltsin

His popularity reduced to single digits by the August 1998 financial crash, Boris Yeltsin has kept a relatively low profile since. With bleeding ulcers added to the already long list of his maladies (he was hospitalized twice this year and remained in the hospital for most of February and March), the president is yet to show signs of a sustained recovery, physical or political.

The possibility of a comeback, however, cannot ever be discounted. In every one of the past three years, Yeltsin, bearlike, lay low through the winter and then came to dominate national politics after a spectacular return to the arena. In March 1996 he rose from the political dead to win the presidential race. In March 1997 he struck again by announcing the "Second Economic Revolution" of deep budget cuts and market reforms and by appointing leading reformers to key government positions. A year later Yeltsin dismissed the plodding and cautious Viktor Chernomyrdin, who had been the prime minister since December 1992; citing the need to "make reforms more energetic and effective," he appointed the thirty-five-year-old former businessman and banker Sergey Kirienko to head the government.

If an attack on the Primakov government (and, by extension, on the leftist plurality in the Duma) were to be delivered, the timing, whether by design or chance, could be propitious. Unleashed by the August devaluation and, to a larger extent, by the government’s decision to print rubles to pay salaries and pensions, inflation is already by far the most acute of the public’s concerns. Some prominent Russian economists have predicted that the rate of price increases will jump at the end of March, and will fuel popular discontent and weaken the government.

Yet even if Yeltsin proves strong enough physically to repeat the bravura performance of the past three years, the case for what will almost certainly be the last broad political offensive of his career is significantly weakened by a serious tactical disadvantage. In an attempt to move the government back to center-right, Yeltsin’s most effective weapon in overcoming the Parliament’s resistance is the threat of dismissal and early election. This time, however, disbandment is implausible because the Duma may not be dismissed while the impeachment is under way and within six months of the end of its term. Furthermore, a direct confrontation with the Duma would undoubtedly swell the pro-impeachment vote, and would suddenly convert the process from a tactical maneuver into a real danger to the president. For these reasons, as well as because of serious political and physical liabilities, Yeltsin’s spring offensive may not materialize, or may be limited to firing such leading Communists in the government as the former chief of the Soviet Gosplan, First Deputy Prime Minister Yuriy Maslyukov.

Other Key Political Actors

The present political lull is in the interests of today’s leading presidential contenders: the mayor of Moscow, Yuriy Luzhkov, and Prime Minister Primakov. Neither is quite ready to run. In a country marked by an intensely ambivalent love-hate attitude toward the capital, Luzhkov’s main challenge is to translate the achievements of his corporatist style of management into a credible national following. With his Moscow-centric financial base shrunk by the crisis of August, Luzhkov may no longer count on an expensive national advertising campaign to make up for a lack of organizational network in the provinces. He must woo the provincial political elite, first and foremost the governors—a time-consuming task. In addition, much like "popular patriots," Luzhkov, who has vehemently criticized Yeltsin’s territorial concessions to Ukraine (the Black Sea island of Crimea and the city-port Sevastopol) and the transfer of the former Soviet Black Sea fleet to the Ukrainian authority, hopes to capitalize on the upsurge of anti-Americanism: the longer the U.S.-Russian conflict over Yugoslavia festers, the better are his chances.

Similarly, Primakov (his periodic denials of presidential designs notwithstanding) needs as much time as he can get to begin converting the powers of his office into IOUs from politicians and magnates to call in 2000. Even more critical to Primakov’s presidential aspiration is demonstrating to the Russian voter that he is capable not only of cautious mediation between the president and the Parliament in search of compromise and political stabilization (for which he is justly credited) but of bold and imaginative policies necessary to extricate the country from the current crisis.

Such an enterprise would, sooner or later, involve a confrontation with the Communist-led plurality in the Duma, and without Yeltsin’s support Primakov would lose. Thus, unless he decides to cast his lot with the Communists—and thereby comes close to committing political suicide—Primakov’s long-term interest in Yeltsin’s political survival makes rumors of the prime minister’s efforts to oust the president highly implausible.

At the same time, Primakov must show that, within a rather limited space given to the prime minister by the constitution, he is his own man and can spar with the president. This nuanced and deliberately ambiguous course undergirds the simultaneously symbiotic and mildly adversarial relationship between the president and prime minister, which has puzzled observers since fall—the alliance in which Primakov’s need of Yeltsin was far more acute than Yeltsin's of Primakov.

In the second tier of presidential hopefuls, Zyuganov holds heavy stakes in the preservation of the status quo. Next, along with the fading populist demagogue Vladimir Zhirinovsky, is Grigory Yavlinsky, the leader of the proreform, liberal Yabloko Party. Over the past six years, the key to his strategy of a spoiler among the proreform democrats has been not the pursuit of the presidency (for which he has never had a slightest chance) but the dream of prime ministership. One way to realize this dream was to maintain and expand his forty-five-member faction in the 450-seat Duma in the hope that one day the votes that he controlled would become an indispensable chip in a grand political game and could be cashed in for the appointment.

The only other scenario—even less likely but not improbable—that might land Yavlinsky on the governmental Olympus would involve an ouster of Primakov by a resurgent Yeltsin, who would then offer Yavlinsky the job. Thus, both the parliamentary election and Yeltsin’s presence in the Kremlin are in Yavlinsky’s interests. Even if a political storm were to his benefit, the desires of the perennial "liberal oppositionist" would be irrelevant: with a possible exception of Zhirinovsky, of all the presidential candidates Yavlinsky is least equipped with either the resources or the popular appeal necessary to foment a crisis or exploit it.

Only one of the presidential aspirants might wish for an immediate political earthquake. He is the governor of the Krasnoyarsk region, General Alexandr Lebed. The sensation of the first round of the 1996 presidential election, Lebed ran on an anticorruption platform and promised to end Moscow’s war on breakaway Chechnya. He came in third with 15 percent of the vote, served briefly in the Kremlin as the head of the powerful Security Council, and negotiated the withdrawal of federal troops from Chechnya. Lebed’s less than spectacular rule in Krasnoyarsk confirms the limited nature of his electoral arsenal: toughness, seeming incorruptibility, and distance from Moscow. He is a quintessential "crisis leader": his only chance for power is the collapse of the existing institutions of power and the demise of "normal" politics.

General Lebed aside, the bulk of the Russian political class seems to understand that the present political regime, no matter how flawed, is better than the anarchy or dictatorship that a deep crisis might bring about. Despite the incessant and shrill denunciations of Yeltsin, there is a growing perception across most of the Russian political spectrum that, for all its inadequacies, the 1993 presidential republic—of which Yeltsin is both the creator and the symbol—has proved far more resilient than predicted. Tested by a severe financial crisis, Russia’s first lasting nonauthoritarian political system has neither dissolved into murderous anarchy, as in Indonesia, nor turned into a nasty, scapegoating authoritarianism, as in Malaysia. There have been no curtailment of civil or political rights and liberties, no restrictions on the freedom of the mass media or the political activity of the opposition. The political order, forged by Yeltsin’s 1993 constitution, has proved its worth by containing enormous political and social pressures. There seems to be wariness in Moscow today about risking the regime's erosion or outright destruction.

The Stakes in the December 1999 Election

The huge budget deficit, which is responsible for the Russian financial crisis, is caused by the regime’s inability, during the past seven years, to carry out several key structural reforms, unpopular with millions of voters and opposed by powerful interest groups of enterprise managers and owners, by the Communist agricultural bosses who still rule the Russian countryside, and by corrupt government bureaucrats and the top entrepreneurs, the "oligarchs." The reform measures include the reduction of the enormous, budget-busting "social subsidies" (housing, utilities, transportation) for virtually the entire population; the right to buy and sell agricultural land; the adoption and enforcement of a simplified, fair, and transparent tax system; and greater openness to, and guarantees for, foreign particip ation in the Russian economy (most urgently, banking).

As the daring but failed attempts in 1997 and 1998 have demonstrated, such measures cannot be implemented within the current political framework and require new electoral mandates in 1999 and in 2000. A proreform majority, or even plurality, in the Duma would result in the passage and implementation of at least some of these measures. Conversely, a Duma in which the leftist popular-patriotic bloc remains the largest faction would mean the continuation of present conditions: the futile search for the chimerical third way that could lead to economic growth without sharp budget reduction and the loosening of the bureaucrats’ choking and corrupt grip over much of the economy; endless procrastination and pitiful tinkering by the former Soviet officials instead of a consistent economic policy; likely renationalization of major industries; inflation; increasing autarky; stagnation; and further impoverishment of tens of millions of Russians.

Although much will happen between April and December, some of the key factors that would frame the fateful outcome of the 1999 election are already in at least partial view. The central component, which makes everything else possible, is the Russians’ stubborn adherence to the liberties and procedures of democratic self-rule. As they have done consistently in the past eight years, public opinion polls reveal a solid prodemocracy majority. In one recent national survey, the respondents rejected by more than two to one the cancellation of elections (63 percent to 26 percent), the banning of meetings and demonstrations (68 percent to 21 percent), and the establishment of censorship of mass media (60 percent to 26 percent).¹

Much of the election will be determined by how closely the behavior of the proreform voters and parties repeats or, conversely, differs from their 1995 performance, the most salient features of which were a high level of absenteeism and an inability to unite. Then, millions of urban, college-educated men and women under forty—who had benefited the most from the democratic and economic revolutions and who only six months hence would overwhelmingly vote for Yeltsin and ensure his 54 percent to 40 percent second-round victory over Zyuganov—failed to come to the polls. Between 5 million and 6 million fewer voters participated in the Duma elections than in the presidential poll.

By contrast, the generally older, pro-Communist electorate turned out in force. Those most dependent on the state for support and subsidies—retirees and workers of the former Soviet military-industrial complex—and those who had suffered the most from inflation, budget cuts, and delayed salaries and pensions proved to be model voters, disciplined by decades of Soviet rule in which nonvoting was tantamount to subversion.

Still, even with the paltry turnout among some key demographic groups, proreform and proregime parties in 1995 received 31 percent (21 million) of the votes cast—only 1 percent and fewer than 1 million votes under the Left’s total. This minuscule difference, however, had been magnified by the peculiarities of Russian electoral law and the infighting among the right-of-center leaders. Half the Duma seats are allotted on the basis of a party’s national results; to qualify for any seats, a party must receive at least 5 percent of the national party-list vote.

In the party vote the contrast between the antireform Left and the proreform Right could hardly have been starker. The former fielded four parties, and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation received 69 percent of all votes cast for the opposition. On the right were thirteen parties and blocs, with the largest vote-getter, the progovernment "Our Home Is Russia" of Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, garnering 33 percent of the proreform-proregime vote, followed by Grigory Yavlinsky’s Yabloko (22 percent). The remaining 45 percent of the right-of-center vote (9 million) was wasted by being split among smaller parties that failed to clear the 5 percent barrier. As a result, with only 1 percent more of the national party vote, the Left received 35 percent more seats in the Duma than the Right: 187 seats and 121 seats, respectively.

The Lessons of 1995–1999

Since the last Duma election in 1995, several truths about Russian politics have been established. The first is the critical importance of the Duma. The 6 percent gap between the 1995 and 1996 turnouts was due (in addition to the contrast between Russian December and Russian June) to a divergence in the electorate’s perception: the Duma was seen as an ineffectual and impotent govoril’nya (a place of empty talk), while in the presidential election voters were choosing the khozyain, the master of the country. It is now quite obvious that, though usually incapable of mastering the consensus necessary for constructive work, the Parliament is quite adept at uniting in opposition to governmental initiatives and painful reforms.

The Duma’s stature is further enhanced by Yeltsin’s imminent departure from the scene, in June 2000 at the latest. Much as they were irritated by his blunders and mocked his numerous faux pas, the proreform voters in general and the emerging post-Soviet middle class of entrepreneurs and independent professionals in particular knew that, when push came to shove, they had a friend in the Kremlin who would protect the major economic and political achievements of the past eight years. The passing of the Lord Protector of the Russian revolution might concentrate the minds of proreform constituency wonderfully, and produce more active participation in the campaign and, most critically, a greater turnout in December.

The same is a fortiori true of the proreform leaders, who may not be able to count on the Kremlin much longer. As the former prime minister Sergey Kirienko put it recently, "Political activization occurs when there is a threat of losing something, and now there is such a threat."² A major lesson learned by the Russian reformers is that no matter how rational the measures seem to them and no matter how much support they have in the Kremlin, a decisive break with the Soviet economic and social legacy is impossible without a political base that extends beyond the consistently promarket third of the electorate. The reformers now see that their inability to push through some key structural measures in 1997 and 1998 stemmed from not just the opposition of the Duma (although that was the immediate cause) but also "the weakness of authority because of the absence of consensus in the society about the goals, means, and price of the reforms."³

Even in the depth of the crisis that followed the August devaluation and default and a full year before the election, 15 percent of the respondents in a nationwide poll said that they would vote for candidates of the proreform Right in the parliamentary elections.⁴ The Russian right’s two critical tasks will be to extend this proreform electorate to at least the 30 percent that it received in 1995 and to unite to translate these votes into Duma seats. What Egor Gaidar called "the process of crystallization of the right-of-center forces that are capable of responding to the key needs of the electorate"⁵ has already begun. On January 14 in Moscow the "executive committee of the right-of-center forces" announced the formation of the Right Cause bloc, which will field a single slate of candidates in December. Among the bloc’s leaders are Sergey Kirienko, former acting prime minister Egor Gaidar, and former first deputy prime ministers Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemtsov.

The August 1998 crisis ended what might be called the heroic phase of the Russian revolution by underscoring limitations to what might be accomplished in a democracy by dramatic breakthroughs engineered by individuals, no matter how brilliant, determined, powerful, or lucky. If the revolution is to continue, it must be sustained by a national consensus shaped and harnessed by steady, mostly unglamorous, and often pedestrian work in the trenches of electoral politics. Whether such an arrangement is possible in Russia will become clear in December; in preparation, the combatants in the Russian political wars have engineered the present uneasy and fragile truce.

Notes

1. "In Russia’s Winter of Discontent, Luzhkov and Primakov Lead in Race to Succeed Yeltsin," Opinion Analysis, February 11, 1999, p. 4. The USIA-sponsored survey of 1,798 Russian adults was conducted between December 12, 1998, and January 5, 1999. The margin of potential sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points. The cited results do not add up to 100 because of the "don’t know" responses.

2. Sergey Kirienko, "Sergey Kirienko stavit na professionalov" (Sergey Kirienko bets on professionals), Moskovskie Novosti, November 22-26, 1998, p. 5.

3. "Sergey Kirienko stavit."

4. Vladimir Korsunkiy, "‘Prvoye delo’ pravogo tsentra" (The "right cause" of the right center), Izvestia, January 13, 1999, p. 1.

5. Egor Gaidar, "Legko li izmenit’ rodinu?" (How easy is it to change the motherland?), Novoye Vremya, November 22, 1998, p. 13.

Leon Aron is a resident scholar and the director of Russian Studies at AEI.