Yeltsin under fire
It’s a far cry from the days when Yeltsin was hailed for out-gorbacheving Gorbachev, when his proposals for reform went beyond the political and social realms propagated by his predecessor and sought to address the economic sphere as well. Now those very reforms have earned the Russian president his latest indictment: genocide against the Russian people for his role as overseer of the calamitous drop in living standards.
Certainly the Communist proponents of the genocide charge hardly hold a proper pulpit from which to preach that particular sermon. Not only were they responsible for the deaths of millions of Russians, but they have neither sought contrition nor received castigation for their crimes.
Ever since the impeachment commission was set up last summer, its members have been concocting one article of impeachment after another in an attempt to oust the Russian president. The genocide charge was added last month to a list of four other articles already filed by the commission. Yeltsin has also been accused of instigating the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 by signing the Belovezha agreements, using force in fomenting state disorder by dismissing the parliament following a showdown with the hard-liners of that institution in October of 1993, waging the bungled war in Chechnya, and allowing for the disintegration of the nation’s once-proud military.
One member of the Duma’s impeachment commission who has been extremely outspoken in his call for Yeltsin’s resignation is Viktor Ilyukhin. On March 9 he made a public appeal to President Yeltsin to transfer his personal savings from foreign bank accounts to Russian commercial banks. Ilyukhin sees it as an excellent way for Yeltsin to set an example which business tycoons might imitate in order to keep capital from draining out of the country. According to Ilyukhin, the potential amount of money that could be returned in this manner is even greater than the sums currently being negotiated with the IMF. Ilyukhin plans to introduce an amendment to the Criminal Code making the non-return of assets removed from Russia a criminal offense. If this is true, it looks as if the Communist Party faction member is just looking to add a sixth article of impeachment to the growing list of charges against the president. If he were to make the suggestion to the IMF, for example, that the IMF would provide matching funds for every dollar that returned to the country in this fashion, his suggestion might acquire more credibility as a way to promote the economic interests of the country and not just another way of detracting from the president’s already floundering reputation.
Although a member of Vladimir Zhirinovskii's ultranationalist party announced last week that several of that party’s deputies were ready to vote in favor of Yeltsin's impeachment, it is hardly likely that the Duma could produce the two thirds vote it needs to take the impeachment process to the next stage. And even if they were able by some miracle to come up with those numbers, Yeltsin has too many supporters in the Constitutional Court for the process to go any further.
Members of the executive staff are naturally Yeltsin’s staunchest defenders. In January, Prime Minister Yevgenii Primakov had outlined a political pact between Russia’s executive and legislative branches. According to this proposal, Yeltsin would refrain from dissolving the Duma in exchange for the Duma’s agreement to drop the impeachment hearings. Last week, Oleg Sysuev, first deputy chief of the presidential staff, warned in an interview with "Die Welt" that Yeltsin’s premature resignation would only open the way to destabilizing forces, namely, nationalists and Stalinists.
Americans may have finished with their impeachment dilemma, but the Russians are still having to deal with theirs. That Yeltsin will actually be impeached right out of office is about as likely as it was for Clinton. The laws and the odds are against it. However, like their American counterparts, the Russian politicians are waging a political war bent on seeking to appeal to the sentiments of their constituents. The Republicans got it all wrong. But the Russian Communists may have found just the right button to push. The dire state of the Russian economy requires a scapegoat, and Yeltsin does quite nicely.
March 1999
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