By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — Back in 1990 and 1991, the suggestion would have seemed absurd. Five years into the future, politicians wanting to rise to high office would no longer be proclaiming themselves "democrats" and pronouncing anathemas on anything to do with socialism. Instead, they would be touting themselves as socialists.
The first years of the decade were a time when Russians, it was widely assumed, drew an automatic link between socialism and the Soviet system. There was a fear that the Soviet rulers had compromised the vocabulary of the left to the point where basic terms would be unusable for decades to come.
Since then, Russians have had a stiff shot of capitalism. And now — surprise! — socialism has come back into vogue. An astonishing range of political figures, some with very chequered pasts, are declaring that they want to stand alongside the masses in the struggle for guaranteed social security and a just distribution of wealth.
No fewer than four "socialist" parties are being established in and around the parliament. The champions of socialism, Russians are being told, include Vladimir Bryntsalov, parliamentary deputy and multi-millionaire head of the cosmetics firm Ferrein. Bryntsalov has been widely accused of buying most of the million petition signatures which he presented recently in a bid to make the ballot for the June 16 presidential elections.
Bryntsalov has now reportedly begun moves to set up a "socialist" party under his leadership. A similar project has been launched by the vice-president of the liberal research foundation "Reform", Martin Shakkum, in collaboration with the electoral bloc "My Fatherland". Another such endeavour is that of Yuri Petrov, industrialist and head of the "Realist" political club.
The most serious of these projects is being engineered by Ivan Rybkin, former speaker of the State Duma, the lower house of the parliament. As speaker, Rybkin formed a relationship of undisguised warmth with President Boris Yeltsin. Together with several former leaders of the Women of Russia parliamentary bloc and Vladimir Medvedev, head of the Regions of Russia deputies' group, Rybkin on April 4 held the founding meeting of his Socialist Party of Russia. In the presidential elections, Rybkin pledged, his "socialists" would support Yeltsin.
The emergence of such "socialists" presents the left movement with real obstacles and dangers. When half a dozen parties with left-sounding names clutter the ballot papers, broad layers of the population are dismayed by the picture of socialists as compulsive splitters and faction-fighters.
Rybkin's scheme in particular bears the marks of a deliberate wrecking operation. Following their April 4 meeting, Rybkin and his collaborators applied to the Justice Ministry to register the name "Socialist Party of Russia". An application to register the same name had already been initiated by a much larger and longer-established organisation — one that consists, moreover, of real leftists.
On March 16, the Socialist Party of Workers resolved to change its name, as part of an effort to encourage regroupment among various left tendencies. Preliminary consultations were then begun with the Justice Ministry, and the necessary documents were submitted on April 8.
On April 9, however, the name "Socialist Party of Russia" was granted by the ministry to Rybkin's group, set up a mere five days before.
Alongside the "left" poses of political hacks, the real work of building a united democratic left movement is going ahead. One sign of this was the recent founding of a cross-fraction group of left socialist deputies in the State Duma. Although their group lacks the numbers to constitute a formal parliamentary fraction, it is likely to play a significant role as a pole of opposition both to the big-business politics practised by Yeltsin, and to the "nomenklatura socialism" of many Communists and Agrarians.
The left socialist deputies have begun issuing a parliamentary newsletter entitled Levy Povorot ("Left Turn").
In its first issue, Levy Povorot comments ironically on the "epidemic of party-building" in Russia today, and on the shifting ideological fashions among political careerists. It argues that the views of most Russians have changed much less in the past five or six years than have the stances of politicians. The so-called centrist voters have mostly remained leftists who do not trust the Communist Party.