Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 9 – Efforts by
Vladimir Putin to ensure that there will not be any change in the leadership of
the country, efforts he justifies by the supposed threat of disintegration of
the country in the event of any change, grow out of the government crisis of
the fall of 1993, Andrey Degtyanov says.
Putin himself for once honest made
that clear in his February 4 remarks in Cherepovets, the historian says. In his
speech, the Kremlin leader said that people don’t want to remember but must not
forget what happened in 1993 when the country faced disaster which Boris
Yeltsin prevented only by holding a referendum on trust in himself (region.expert/unchangeability/).
For Putin, the clash in 1993 was “’a
zero-sum game,’ in which the victor would get everything and in the event of defeat
would lose everything.” And because of that understanding, Yeltsin and then his
hand-picked successor have done everything to prevent something similar from
occurring ever again.
Because of the continuing centrality
of the events of that time, it is critically important that they be understood,
Degtyanov says. They grew out of a conflict between a popularly elected
president and a popularly elected parliament over what was to be included in
the constitution but over the status there of the 1992 Federative Treaty in
particular.
The parliament wanted to include
that treaty in the constitution, while the president wanted there to be no reference
to its existence, thus implicitly annulling the treaty itself. That agreement
specified that the country was to be based on federalism, the decentralization of
state power, and the equality and self-determination of the peoples within the Russian
Federation.
Such things were completely
unacceptable to the presidential party which viewed them as setting the stage
for “’the disintegration of the country.’” Behind their fears were two
developments that typically get lost in the coverage of the events of that time,
St. Petersburg’s decision to become a republic and the Sverdlovsk Oblast’s to create
a Urals Republic.
What those actions meant was that
the rights the non-Russian republics had claimed and that were both recognized
but also limited and controlled by Moscow were now being claimed by
predominantly ethnic Russian regions, a much greater challenge to the power of
the center over the country.
To block this, Yeltsin on September
21, 1993, issued a decree disbanding the parliament and ordering a referendum
on his constitutional project. The
Russian Constitutional Court ruled against him, and the parliamentarians
decided to ignore his actions and called for a meeting in Moscow on October 5.
Significant too for subsequent
events was the declaration by the oblasts and krays of the Councils of Siberia
and the Russian Far East about their willingness to host meetings of the
parliamentary bodies Yeltsin had liquidated in one or another Russian city east
of the Urals, Degtyanov says (cf. region.expert/barricades/).
But such a playing out of events was
blocked as a result of “the provocative storm of the Ostankino television center
by the Muscovite radical (imperial!) opposition.” That freed the Kremlin to use
force against the parliament and by October 5 Yeltsin had established complete
control of the situation.
In the wake of this use of force,
Yeltsin disbanded not only the parliament but also the regionalist Leningrad
council, suppressed the Urals Republic, and imposed a system of the appointment
of governors over the next two years lest there be any repetition of the events
of 1993.
In short, Degtyanov says, Yeltsin
sought to “liquidate” three potential threats – “a federal parliament independent
of the president, regional parliaments, and the Constitutional Court” – and thus
destroy “the federative state with its division of powers,” something “about
which the Kremlin even today doesn’t want to remember but also must not
forget.”
To “save Russia” and prevent its
disintegration into chaos, Yeltsin elevated the position of president to something
similar to Tolkien’s Ring of Power, “a magical artefact of terrible power”
capable of preventing the disasters its wearer continued to predict and one
that requires that there must not be any succession but only continuity.
In fact, Degtyanov suggests, this
approach based on the phobias of Russia’s rulers threatens the future of the country
far more than anything else and thus the best approach is to seek to promote “federalism,
the sovereignty of equal regional republics, an independent parliament … and an
independent court.”
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