By Irina Glushchenko
and Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — When Boris Yeltsin chose Air Force Colonel Alexander Rutskoi as his running mate in the June 1991 Russian presidential elections, the Afghanistan war hero and former leading figure in Russian nationalist circles was supposed to aid Yeltsin by winning the votes of traditional-minded Communists and of workers in defence-related industries.
But Rutskoi turned out to have ideas and political ambitions of his own. Since late November, the Russian vice-president has emerged as one of the most prominent and unsparing critics of the government and its economic strategists.
As a result, Rutskoi told a Portuguese newspaper in December, he has been practically excluded from the mechanisms of decision making. He has reportedly been allowed only three personal staff members, compared with the 10 allotted to other high-ranking leaders.
Ironically, Rutskoi is using the same populist strategies that allowed Yeltsin to build his mass following and outmanoeuvre Mikhail Gorbachev. Like Yeltsin in earlier times, Rutskoi presents himself as a passionate "man of the people", familiar with the problems of ordinary folk and with a mission to defend them against bureaucrats and swindlers.
Rutskoi's campaign to become a political force in his own right began with putting together his own party, currently known as the Party of Free Russia, from among rightward-moving factions of the now banned Communist Party.
A second stage was played out late last year when the vice-president went on a vigorously publicised tour through the Urals and Siberia. He spent much of the time talking to managers and workers in the huge "military-industrial complex", now collapsing as a result of reduced state orders and of the failure of ill-prepared schemes for "converting" to civilian production.
At a stop in the Siberian city of Barnaul, Rutskoi scornfully described Yeltsin's key advisers as "little boys in pink pants".
On his return to Moscow, he made a series of bitter denunciations of the government's economic policies. His play for the sympathies of the armed forces and of defence industry workers was obvious, as he accused the government of allowing the productive and scientific basis of the country's security to fall into ruin. "You can't go on joking indefinitely with people who have weapons in their hands", Rutskoi observed ominously.
The vice-president went on to "speak the unspeakable" about the course which the privatisation of state assets and the development of market relations was following. "I am opposed", he said, "to a policy of market relations in which more than 600 commodity exchanges and more than 1200 commercial banks have been established on the territory of Russia, and are engaged in speculation". Could it be called commerce, he asked rhetorically, when the owners of a horde of commercial enterprises were buying up state-produced goods and reselling them for many times the purchase price? Speculation, he observed, was crowding out productive investment.
Military officers, teachers and doctors were having their salaries doubled or tripled, but the prices of foodstuffs and clothing had already risen by 10 to 15 times. Shops were being sold at auction, but to whom? In 25 years as a military aviator, Rutskoi asserted, he had not earned enough to buy even a simple kiosk; meanwhile, there were 30-year-olds able to pay 9 million roubles for a luxury apartment.
Rutskoi insisted that he was not opposed in principle to price liberalisation. But could it possibly make sense, he asked, to free prices in the current circumstances, when food supplies were in extreme crisis, when market mechanisms were undeveloped and when the state had no effective tools for implementing its tax policy?
Through loudly and persistently stating the obvious — that the government's policies are promoting social injustice, that their implementation is ham-fisted, and that their outcome will almost certainly be economic collapse and social chaos — Rutskoi aims to seize Yeltsin's mantle of the fearlessly outspoken defender of the people. But if the Russian vice-president emerges as the charismatic leader of a mass movement of the dispossessed, what will he do with his influence?
Rutskoi insists he has no fundamental disagreements with Yeltsin. The vice-president has never criticised the basic presumptions that underlie the Russian government's policies — presumptions such as the need for sweeping privatisation and for the eventual uninhibited operation of market forces. All Rutskoi has condemned are the methods used in pursuing these goals, and the timing.
Rutskoi is assiduously cultivating support among the armed forces and circles linked to them. Does he look forward to a time when the government's "reforms" have wrought their havoc, and he can lead a bloc of the armed forces and his civilian movement in overthrowing a discredited Yeltsin and installing a "strong regime"?
There is reason to believe that Rutskoi has authoritarian, chauvinist tendencies to match his impressionability and impulsiveness. He is reputed to have been behind the sorry episode last year in which the Yeltsin administration hinted strongly that Russia would insist on a redrawing of boundaries as part of the price of independence for other Soviet republics.
As the government's problems multiply and its popularity erodes, Rutskoi remains "a heartbeat from power", tirelessly building his own movement. It is not a thought that should make Russians sleep more soundly.