By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — For people who follow events in Latin America as well as Russia, there was something strangely familiar about President Yeltsin's March 20 declaration of "special powers".
Last April a nearly identical formula — concentrating all state authority in the presidency, and dissolving the national congress — was used by Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori to clear away the obstacle which the congress posed to the full-blooded implementation in Peru of monetarist "shock therapy".
The resemblance wasn't lost on Fujimori either. The situation and language were different, the Peruvian president told a television interviewer, but the similarities were nonetheless "striking".
Perhaps it wasn't all coincidence. In both Peru and Russia, the policies that the "presidential coup" was designed to further had been mapped out in detail by the International Monetary Fund. Readers can judge for themselves whether the international advice was limited to financial matters.
The centrepiece of Yeltsin's "special rule" was a declaration that the Russian president intended to ignore any decision, by any state authority, that contradicted his decrees. This situation would continue until a plebiscite on April 25, in which Russians would be called on to adopt a motion of confidence in the president, a new constitution and a new electoral law.
Like the Peruvian coup, the Russian one was to be sanitised by being declared "temporary". In Russia, one-person dictatorship was to last only until the plebiscite results were in.
But in the case of Russia, and very probably of Peru as well, the prompt restoration of a functioning parliament was by no means considered essential by all of the coup's foreign backers. This can be seen clearly from an editorial that appeared in the London Financial Times on March 22:
"Mr Yeltsin's gamble can only pay off if it is the start of a sustained process ... he cannot wait until a new constitution is in place before taking steps to make economic reform and financial stabilisation begin to work. That will almost certainly mean having to ask in the plebiscite for the extension of his special powers for a finite period while elections are held and deliberations completed on Russia's political future."
No-one who understands what Yeltsin and the Financial Times mean by "economic reform and financial stabilisation" will be surprised to learn that the newspaper thinks these goals should be pursued under extended dictatorial rule. But even if the period of dictatorship is relatively brief — Yeltsin wanted to impose his "special rule" for 35 days — the "Fujimori option" is not just an unusually ical housecleaning.
Like Fujimori, Yeltsin aimed to seize dictatorial powers in order to intimidate his opponents and allow his supporters an intensive assault on the views of the population. As in Peru, the plan was to ensure that the new legislature stood in a much more subservient relationship to the executive than the old one.
In both cases the developed countries of the West applied heavy pressure to back up the aims of the presidential dictatorship and make sure these aims would eventually be accepted by voters. The pressure included both threats — in the case of Russia, hints that a new Cold War would ensue if Yeltsin were not allowed to prevail — and bribes. The suggestion was floated that if Yeltsin triumphed, Russia might be in line for aid of $US10 billion.
Neither in Peru nor in Russia was the remaking of national politics meant to be short term. In Russia, the new constitution was to involve a drastic refashioning of the legislative branch, including abolition of the Congress of People's Deputies. Would these changes be in the interests of democracy? Russians were to be given just 35 days to study, discuss and decide.
Yeltsin's "special rule", which Western ideologues tried to excuse because of its brevity and supposed democratic purpose, was thus intended to bring about a major, permanent shift in the terrain of Russian politics — by methods that were totally undemocratic.