By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — If the buying power of wages in Australia had fallen by 80% in a year, how large would the demonstrations be in Bourke Street or the Sydney Domain?
It would have to be more than the 15,000 or so people who marched into central Moscow on February 9. This was the response to the most determined effort so far to organise a mass protest against the policies of Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his government.
The organisers, the labour movement group Trudovaya Rossiya (Working Russia), had spoken confidently of drawing a quarter of a million people. On the surface, all the conditions for a huge mobilisation were there.
According to the accepted definitions, some 85% of the population now live in poverty or on the verge of it. The government's popularity rating is abysmal; in one recent poll, only 26% of Muscovites were even mildly inclined to view the actions of Yeltsin's ministers as helping to solve the country's crisis.
Trudovaya Rossiya's supporters conducted a vigorous postering campaign and distributed leaflets outside metro stations. They scarcely needed to. A noisy controversy blew up around the plans for the march, and in a poll conducted on February 4 and 5, an astonishing 88% of respondents said they had heard that the action was to take place.
The organisers planned a march to the Russian parliament building to confront the government directly. However, veterans of the resistance to the August 1991 coup attempt, together with the pro-government Democratic Russia bloc, promised a counterdemonstration.
To avoid clashes, Trudovaya Rossiya decided to march to Red Square instead. The response from the "democratic" city authorities was to ban both the march and the use of Red Square; all that would be permitted was a meeting in the adjacent Manezh Square. Trudovaya Rossiya declared that the march, from a rallying point across the Moscow River, would go ahead regardless.
Predictably, the city authorities made no attempt to back up their bluff and prevent the marchers crossing the river.
As at previous opposition demonstrations, workers used homemade placards and banners to vent their anger and exercise their wit. "If Yeltsin's a democrat, then a chicken's an albatross", one placard declared. "The people have got the hole — who's got the donut?", inquired another.
"The factories to the workers not the mafia!", demanded a third. "Yeltsin's turn to capitalism — a bloody crime against the people!", another declared. And ominously, "Army! Save the people and the fatherland!".
A sour note was the undisguised Russian chauvinism of many of the marchers. Often this extended to open anti-Semitism; "Yeltsin — chant.
At the Manezh Square, the demonstrators halted. A row of buses and massed ranks of police were blocking the entrance into Red Square.
In the cold winter afternoon, the demonstrators listened enthusiastically for more than two hours to a long series of speakers. The keynote addresses were from leaders of Trudovaya Rossiya and of various fragments of the now outlawed Communist Party. The central demands were for drastic price cuts on items of basic consumption; for the resignation of Yeltsin and his government; and for the reconvening of the now-dissolved Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR.
Why wasn't the demonstration much larger? The reasons provide a revealing picture of the malaise of the Russian left.
Even among the massive numbers who have no confidence in Yeltsin or his government's strategies, there is a sense of disorientation and powerlessness. With little experience of any political processes except those of Stalinism, Russians lack a sense for the ways in which an organised, militant mass movement can force changes in government policy or even drive a government out of office.
Secondly, no more than a handful have any answers when the government declares, Thatcher-style, that "there is no alternative" to harsh, anti-popular, neo-liberal policies.
The work of preparing critiques of neo-liberalism is under way, and the first coherent alternative programs are beginning to appear. But these developments are almost never reported or debated in the liberal-dominated media. Even people who recognise that the catastrophe overseen by Yeltsin and his ministers will not be followed by stabilisation and recovery within this decade lack a set of clear demands around which they can confidently mobilise.
Finally, many opponents of the government were deterred from attending by the character of the organisers, and by specific errors which these people committed in trying to build the action.
The march was organised more or less openly as a demonstration by and for Communists: Trudovaya Rossiya is closely identified with the Russian Communist Workers Party. The largest of the fragments of the old Communist Party, the RCWP is distinguished by its undemocratic internal regime, by its nostalgia for the Brezhnev "stagnation" era and by a prominent streak of Russian nationalism.
The party calls for the reinstitution of a highly centralised system of state planning, and for the resurrection of the Soviet Union in something like its old form. The latter aim could now be achieved only by forcibly suppressing the rights of independent nations.
Trudovaya Rossiya has few attractions for Russians who were not members of the old Communist Party — or even for large numbers who were. In calling its own demonstration, it decided against directing its efforts to helping build the kind of formation which would be a much more effective mobilising weapon — a broad coalition around a limited set of demands designed to articulate vital mass interests and to have broad appeal. The failure of the action to initiate real mass protest — the pro-government counterdemonstration was only marginally smaller — represents valuable time lost. But the lessons of this failure will reinforce the authority of other Russian leftists in arguing for a different approach.