By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — With a decree issued on October 28, Russian President Boris Yeltsin outlawed the country's major opposition formation, the National Salvation Front (FNS). The FNS had been set up four days earlier at a Moscow congress attended by representatives of more than 40 anti-Yeltsin parties and movements.
Covering political viewpoints ranging from communist to monarchist — but not including the small forces of the "democratic left" — the FNS is the formal embodiment of the so-called "left-right opposition", in which former members of the Communist Party are allied with Russian nationalists.
Yeltsin's decree charged law enforcement bodies with "taking measures to ensure that the said formation and its structures are not established and do not operate".
The head of the State Legal Administration (GPU), Alexander Kotenkov, stated that the bringing of criminal charges against people who had spoken at the FNS congress was "not excluded".
Public reaction to the banning was broadly negative, including among prominent adherents of Yeltsin's pro-capitalist policies. Co-president of the Democratic Party of Russia Vyacheslav Smirnov told the press, "Objectively, the FNS didn't break any laws — it's only a speculation. In the end the decree will merely help the organisation's publicity campaign."
Kotenkov held a press conference on October 30. Asked to specify the anti-constitutional actions for which the FNS had been outlawed, Kotenkov listed: insulting attacks on the president and government; a call for the halting of the program of converting defence industries to civilian production; refusal to recognise the Belovezhskoe Pushche agreement [underlying the CIS]; a subheading in one of the organisation's programmatic documents; and the intention of FNS members to form committees of national salvation and to call on the next sitting of the full Russian parliament to grant these committees executive powers.
When journalists objected that these actions hardly contradicted the constitution, the GPU chief replied that anti-constitutional appeals were present in the documents of the FNS "in veiled form".
With nothing better than this to back it, the ban is unlikely to survive a Supreme Court challenge, which leaders of the FNS now plan to launch. So why did Yeltsin, a shrewd infighter despite his overall lack of political grasp, issue his decree? The reasons suggested in the press highlight the chaotic state of Russian politics in the past month, as the government's credibility has plunged to new lows and various power blocs within the establishment have fought to have their interests elevated to the level of state policy.
A widespread guess was that Yeltsin, having banned the FNS, planned to use the demonstration by FNS supporters on the 75th anniversary of the Russian Revolution on November 7 as a pretext for declaring a state of emergency, dissolving parliament and imposing direct presidential rule. This course was known to have supporters among sectors of the elite.
Dissolving parliament would also forestall one of the main political challenges Yeltsin faces — the December session of the full legislature, the Congress of People's Deputies.
The congress is noticeably more hostile to Yeltsin than the smaller Supreme Soviet, and its next sitting is likely to see a determined push to curb the sweeping emergency powers which the president has enjoyed for many months. Yeltsin has campaigned for the December sitting to be postponed to April.
Alternatively, persecution of the "left-right opposition" may be intended to divert public attention while Yeltsin carries through an important shift of direction. Since the summer, the Yeltsin administration has made a partial and inconsistent break with the doctrinaire neo-liberalism associated with premier Yegor Gaidar.
Many elements of Gaidar's program remain, but the president has backed away from a central element — a ruthless credit squeeze which would bankrupt thousands of state firms and put their employees out of work.
With inflation mounting, output plunging and economic policy a strange mix of irreconcilable ingredients, many of the most powerful figures in Russian industry are demanding that Gaidar be sacked and new ministers brought into the government.
Spearheading the demand for a new course has been the Civic Union, a political bloc identified closely with the managers of state enterprises. The Civic Union identifies itself as the "centre", and in no sense is it part of the opposition to Yeltsin; in many cases, the enterprise managers would be delighted to become private capitalists, but know that their factories would be unviable without state support.
Most industrial managers here have always been sceptical of neo- liberal theories. A typical viewpoint in the Civic Union is that of Arkady Volsky, the influential president of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs. Volsky was paraphrased recently in the newspaper Kommersant as saying that instead of "the present Texas variant of reform", Russia would be better suited by the Chinese model, in which the state sector was not destroyed but competed with the private sector, which in turn ate economically, legally and even through tariffs.
Leaders of the Civic Union have indicated that they would not object to the next session of the Congress of People's Deputies being postponed until April, provided the government adopted their basic strategies and a number of their representatives were appointed to the ministry.
Such a deal might well offer Yeltsin his best chance of keeping his powers, and of avoiding the mass unemployment, social explosions and — quite probably — disintegration of the Russian state that persisting with neo-liberal strategies would bring. However, a turnaround of this kind would still pose many dangers for the president.
The move would draw a furious response from the millions of young people and professionals who still believe in Gaidar's "reforms". It would also meet hostility from the new financial bourgeoisie, which fears that even the credits already granted to industry will create hyperinflation.
Other groups likely to react with anger include speculators who have grown rich selling imported consumer goods; new tariff policies designed to aid Russian producers would cut into the importers' profits. Finally, a break with Gaidarism would end any possibility of aid from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
These considerations would give Yeltsin ample cause to look for a smokescreen. Inventing a communist threat, and then using draconian methods to crush it, is a hallowed Western method of political distraction in which the Russian president clearly needs little coaching.