Nobody won in Moscow last week. The Russian president and his chief rival, parliamentary chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov, stepped back from confrontation with a last-minute compromise. Yeltsin dropped his earlier call for a “special rule” that would have allowed him to ignore the Parliament completely. Khasbulatov appeared on television demanding that the president form a “national reconciliation government,” but he refrained from holding proceedings to impeach the president-largely because he didn’t have the votes to win. On Sunday, Yeltsin promised to cancel his referendum plans if Congress agreed to hold presidential and parliamentary elections in the fall. The immediate threat to Yeltsin seemed to have subsided. The Russian president was still determined to meet with Bill Clinton in Vancouver at the end of the week despite the continuing uncertainty. The new balance of power between the president and the Parliament was still unsettled, but one thing seemed clear: neither the president nor the Parliament was really in charge.
Central authority is disintegrating with alarming speed, and Russia’s provinces are starting to call the shots. The regions had been pressuring Yeltsin to drop the April referendum; many local leaders resented being forced to choose. “The scariest thing is that this conflict in Moscow keeps threatening to come down to our level in the regions,” said Sergei Voblenko, chairman of the city council in Ryazan, about 120 miles southeast of Moscow. “It’s like asking me whom do I love more–Mama or Papa?” As both Yeltsin and Khasbulatov vie for the allegiance of provincial bosses, they risk leading Russia into the kind of crackup that became the fate of the old Soviet Union. And just as the collapse of the U.S.S.R. tore apart families, disrupted longstanding trade ties and sparked several small wars, the breakup of Russia would mean more of the same. Yeltsin understands the dangers. He recently fretted to a group of military commanders that his standoff with the Parliament could split Russia “into 50 or 60 principalities.” He added, “There would be war between them for 1,000 years.”
Russia’s restive provinces want a bigger piece of the action. Like the Soviet Union, Russia itself is a complex patchwork of more than 100 different ethnic groups whom Moscow has always ruled with an iron hand. Many of these local “autonomous” governments are now seizing more power as Moscow’s authority recedes. Even the ethnically Russian provinces want to keep more of their tax revenues, conduct their own foreign trade and let the Kremlin sink in its own political mess. Moscow doesn’t have the wherewithal to meet their challenge. “The collapse of Russia has already been predetermined–it is only a matter of putting it off for a few months,” wrote Vitaly Portnikov recently in the daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta. “Federal laws are no longer effective over a considerable part of its territory.”
The tussle between Yeltsin and Khasbulatov has played right into the hands of ambitious local leaders. Desperate for allies, both men have been trying to woo the regions with more and more generous offers of local autonomy. The process heated up before a meeting of the Congress of People’s Deputies in early December. Yeltsin and Yegor Gaidar, then the acting prime minister of Russia, told a meeting of local government chiefs that they would be allowed to keep 50 percent of local tax revenues, instead of the usual 30 percent. They even promised to raise that figure to 60 percent in the near future. Meanwhile, Khasbulatov was meeting with local leaders as well, soliciting their complaints and promising to help. Regional authorities began demanding more and more concessions from Moscow. In February, Yeltsin’s new prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, refused to grant local Siberian bosses greater autonomy in foreign trade, saying, “We do not need strong regions.” The Siberians were enraged. Said Vasily Dyakonov, head of Krasnoyarsk Territory in Siberia, “We’ve had enough of the center treating Siberia like a colony.”
Smelling opportunity, Khasbulatov quickly moved in. He flew to Novosibirsk, the largest city in Siberia, and was received like a Brezhnev-era Communist bigwig. “It was the kind of reception even [Mikhail Gorbachev] never got,” says Viktor Yukechev, editor of the newspaper Sibirskaya Gazeta. “The street cleaners even cleaned the streets.” Meeting with regional leaders there, Khasbulatov invited them to participate in approving the national budget, something Yeltsin never suggested-and a great chance to dip into the pork barrel. In return, the local bosses signed a statement opposing Yeltsin’s referendum idea. Yeltsin fired Vitaly Mukha, the regional chief of Novosibirsk, but Mukha’s colleagues in Siberia showered Yeltsin with angry letters calling for his reinstatement. Yeltsin was forced to back down; score one for an obscure Siberian apparatchik. In trying to win some local allies, the president ended up their prisoner.
Is the growing power of the regions vis-a-vis Moscow a good thing? It depends on the region. Many of Moscow’s challengers are simply ossified old bureaucrats who don’t want to carry out Boris Yeltsin’s reforms. These local bosses are eager to levy their own taxes and run their own budgets-so that they can feather their own’ nests. “They play the nationalist card, saying they are keeping the funds to serve local interests,” says one Western diplomat in Moscow. “But what they really want to do is strengthen their own power.”
Others argue that challenging central authority is not a disaster at all-quite the contrary. The Soviet economy was vastly overcentralized, and local governments now need a little breathing room. Now Moscow simply doesn’t have the muscle to organize the new capitalist economy. “The central organs that could have carried out the transition to a market simply aren’t doing it,” says Voblenko of the Ryazan city council. “If we here at the local level don’t do it, nobody will.” Some regions have already charged far ahead of Moscow in introducing reforms. Most successful is the province of Nizhny Novgorod, formerly Gorky, where a 34-year-old governor, Boris Nemtsov, has privatized shops, factories and now even agricultural land. Aided by phalanxes of World Bank and other foreign experts, Nizhny Novgorod has set in motion more economic reforms than virtually any other region of Russia. Says Nemtsov flatly, “The regions of the Russian Federation are responsible for all the reforms in the country.”
Local leaders argue that this freedom to maneuver will hold Russia together, not tear it apart. Nemtsov says he’s introducing conditions in which people can “work quietly” so that the country’s integrity can be maintained in a calmer atmosphere and a looser federal structure. Far from abetting Russia’s breakup, he claims, “we are doing everything so that this does not happen.” Politicians in Tatarstan, an autonomous region on the Volga River that has declared itself a “sovereign state” within Russia, also claim that their motives are constructive. “The Soviet Union fell apart because the central power refused to give freedom to its members,” says Fandas Safiullin, a centrist legislator in Tatarstan. “We are reforming Russia, showing how it can avoid disintegration.” He compares the Tatars and their independence movement to the American revolutionaries throwing tea into Boston Harbor. “If Russia gives us our rights,” Safiullin says, “we won’t need to throw our oil into the Volga.”
Tatarstan may be more like Texas than Boston; for Moscow, the secession of this oil-rich region would be a devastating blow. And many Tatar nationalists are talking about outright secession, looking to overturn Ivan the Terrible’s subjugation of the Tatar people. “Russia occupied us in 1552 and must beg forgiveness,” Tatar nationalist Marat Mulyukov told a March 19 rally in Kazan, Tatarstan’s capital. “Now Russia is falling apart, and we must hurry to make them recognize our independence.” The Kremlin worries that millions of Tatars scattered around Russia, especially in the southern Urals, could grow more radical. Moscow’s nightmare: that Muslim Tatar form the basis of an anti-Russian Islamic movement across the broad southern and eastern flanks of the country. For Russians, those fears run as deep as the centuries-old memories of Genghis Khan and the Golden Horde.
When the regions have something valuable to barter, there’s little Moscow can do. Bashkortostan, a Muslim autonomous republic next door to Tatarstan, is one of only two regions in the whole country that manufacture airplane fuel, and it’s also a major oil refiner. So Bashkortostan’s leaders were able to cut a special deal with Moscow: they turn over only 10 percent of their tax revenues to the central government instead of the 70 percent that is required elsewhere in Russia. Bashkortostan was even able to amend a federation treaty governing relations between Moscow and the regions; it signed a separate agreement that allows Bashkortostan to control its own foreign trade.
Moscow has less and less leverage over the hinterland. In the past the Kremlin could use its control over vital resources to keep far-flung regions in the fold. One example is Sakha, formerly Yakutia, a huge region within the Arctic Circle that produces most of Russia’s diamonds, the country’s fourth largest earner of hard currency. So far, Sakha has chosen not to challenge Moscow by declaring sovereignty over its own territory: the region is poor, and it needs Russia for oil and food that is hauled in on barges. But Moscow’s ability to deliver the goods–in the most literal sense-is fading. These days, prices are rising so fast that by the time funds arrive in the provinces, their value has dropped sharply since the time they were promised. “Regionalism is the most serious problem created by inflation,” says former acting prime minister Gaidar. “The center has lost its chance to influence the regions because money doesn’t work anymore.”
Yeltsin had been hoping the April referendum would stem the decline of his authority. Some allies at the local level were determined to make sure of that. Valery Ryumin, mayor of Ryazan, said he could produce a 92 percent turnout “at least.” Why was he so confident? “We have a warehouse full of cooking oil and we will sell it at half price to anyone who comes to vote,” Ryumin told NEWSWEEK with a sly smile. “You know, one third of the people in this city are pensioners who need cooking oil, which is in short supply.” And if the pensioners didn’t vote the right way? Ryumin quoted Stalin: “Voters decide nothing; people who count votes decide everything.”
Whenever the vote comes, Yeltsin may be able to mobilize support by convincing his far-flung constituents that he is the only person who can maintain stability. But a parliamentary election could well stick him with essentially the same rebellious legislature he’s been battling for the past and a half. The drear prospect of continued squabbling may keep Russians from the polls; if the turnout is unimpressive, Moscow will lose legitimacy rather than gain it from the vote.
The steady loss of legitimacy began under the U.S.S.R. In Russia, the collapse of the empire continues. “Local leaders have always had their little fiefdoms, but now the king can’t get allegiance from the lords,” says Russian specialist Corbin Lyday of the University of California, Berkeley. “Politically, this just leads to total breakdown.” Yeltsin and Khasbulatov both stand to suffer from that breakdown. But political intrigues like the one that rocked Russia last week only serve to hasten it. ..MR.-
Do you think the U.S. should:
31% Help Boris Yeltsin stay in power 62% Remain neutral
If Boris Yeltsin does not retain power, should the U.S.:
15% Cut off aid to Russia 54% Continue aid only if Russia’s leaders keep moving toward capitalism and democracy 24% Continue aid in any case to help the Russian people
If Yeltsin loses power, will Russia become a significant threat to the U.S.?
33% Yes 59% No
NEWSWEEK Poll, March 25-26, 1993
title: “After The Showdown” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-28” author: “Norma Ghosh”
Of course we are not and China is not the old Soviet Union. It has neither the material capacity nor the ideological appeal to be a global rival to America. To state the obvious but often obscured fact: China is a Third World country. It has a per capita GDP of about $3,800–well below Mexico’s–and spends less than 15 percent of the Pentagon’s annual budget on its armed forces. Nor does the Middle Kingdom have the ideological appeal of the old Soviet Union. Nowhere on the planet is China the model for the future–not even in China, which is busily becoming a quasi-capitalist society.
The danger China poses to the United States is not one of booming strength but rather of weakness–both of the country and of its regime. Unfortunately, that’s not going to make it any easier to maintain peace in East Asia.
China is going through a massive, painful transition from an agrarian to an industrial society (and from the lunacy of Maoism to the market). In recent years this has produced huge social stresses and strains as state-owned enterprises collapse in the northern rust belt, law and order unravels in the countryside and corruption accompanies primitive capitalism in the cities.
More troublesome for Beijing is the slow erosion of the ideology that gave it legitimacy. The regime has filled the vacuum left by Marxism in part by competent management. Chinese living standards have risen continuously for the last quarter century and most Chinese credit their government for this remarkable change. But equally, the regime has cultivated the image of being the fierce protector of China’s sovereignty. This sort of nationalism rarely exists in the abstract and in China it has come to mean one thing more than any other–standing up to the United States. Thus we see that with the Communist Party in the midst of a leadership succession, none of its potential leaders wants to look soft. This is a problem that will not pass. The regime’s vulnerability has made it encourage, or at least embrace ugly, anti-American forces it may not be able to control.
Economics and ideology aside, even in military terms China is fearful of its weakness. Ever since the gulf war–and then the Kosovo campaign–Beijing has been worried that it’s old, rusting armed forces and a strategy that relied on quantity not quality (in men and arms) were no match for America’s laser-guided weapons and stealth warfare. Even worse, they might not even be a match for Taiwan’s high-tech forces. Over the last few years the politics of the region have, from Beijing’s standpoint, gotten worse. Taiwan has grown bolder in its dealings with the mainland and the United States seems more willing to come to the island’s assistance. So China has begun a major military modernization and is studying low-tech methods of battling a high-tech army–what military planners call “asymmetric warfare.” American planes hovering above, hugging the Chinese coast, always there to watch, listen and learn must represent a constant reminder of America’s overwhelming superiority.
So do these weaknesses suggest that China is really not a threat? No. It suggests that China is really not stable. It is being run by an aging regime that is trying simultaneously to modernize its vast country, gain influence in the world and preserve its own power. Besides, weak powers have often proved just as troublesome as strong ones. In an important essay in the spring issue of International Security, MIT’s Thomas Christensen points out that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor fully aware that it was going up against a much stronger adversary and was starting a war it knew it would probably lose. China itself entered the Korean War, hoping that a quick strike at an advantageous moment would make up for the fact that American forces were superior to its own. Christensen’s extensive interviews with Chinese strategists and analysts suggest that many in Beijing believe a confrontation with America over Taiwan is inevitable–even though these analysts recognize that China may not win that war. For them, the costs of inaction appear greater than the risks of action.
The greatest problem for America over the next few years is that the communist regime in Beijing will look around and see growing social unrest, the rise of a middle class, the Internet and satellite television, Falun Gong, America’s relentless technological edge, Taiwan’s growing assertiveness and conclude that it has to do something because time is not on its side. The fact that it is right is precisely what makes the situation so dangerous.
