What Would Lenin Say?

By John Kohan/Moscow

Boris Yeltsin refused to endorse any party in Russia's parliamentary elections. Nonetheless, he took to the campaign trail last week on a surprise visit to the volatile North Caucasus region, where ethnic tensions have sparked armed conflicts. The President's message could not have been more direct: if voters in this separatist-minded region failed to endorse his new draft constitution, the Russian Federation was in danger of falling apart. Local officials dutifully joined the President in a statement calling for a da vote in the constitutional referendum.

While attention focused on elections to the new bicameral parliament, the Kremlin was worried about how Russia's 108 million voters would cast their ballots on the constitution. Since Yeltsin suspended the rebellious parliament and crushed a hard-line armed revolt last October, he has been ruling alone by presidential decree. To bring Russia back onto a constitutional track, he took a bold gamble in asking voters simultaneously to select new lawmakers and approve a new law of the land.

Hard-liners have accused Yeltsin of using the new constitution to make himself into a modern-day czar. While the draft enshrines the broad provisions of the U.S. Bill of Rights and many declarative guarantees from the communist era, like the right to housing and medical care, it leaves key questions about the organization of the legislative branch to the discretion of the new parliament.

The most controversial articles give the President substantial powers to control parliament -- a major change from Soviet-era constitutions that brings Russia closer to the French model of a presidential republic. Because the Kremlin wants to rule out any possibility that the bloody showdown in October could be repeated, the new law grants Yeltsin the right to disband the parliament if it fails to accept his nominee for Prime Minister for the third time or attempts to force a vote of confidence twice in three months. The post of Vice President has been abolished, owing to Yeltsin's bitter experience with his own running mate turned rebel, Alexander Rutskoi. If the President becomes disabled, power temporarily passes to his Prime Minister.

The draft document, in the making for more than three years, offers Russians an impressive list of human rights. It upholds the principle of private property, including land ownership, as well as freedom of speech and religion. The document also outlaws home searches without a court order, protects the privacy of mail and telephone communications and explicitly forbids the use of torture. But words on paper do not make a law-governed state. Russians remember grandiloquent provisions on human rights contained in constitutions written for Stalin in 1936 and Leonid Brezhnev in 1977 -- rights they never enjoyed. Without stable government institutions in place to enforce the constitution, this document might suffer the same fate.

After the October showdown, the Kremlin tinkered with the draft to tighten central control over Russia's 89 regions and autonomous republics. Federal laws are given precedence over local legislative acts, and natural resources are subject to joint federal and local control. Anticipating trouble in the hinterlands, which have exploited tensions in Moscow to go their own way, last week Kremlin advisers bluntly told local leaders in the ethnic republics of Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Tuva and Kalmykia to refrain from "irresponsible remarks," hinting that the Kremlin might take measures to bring them into line.

Even the rules for the constitutional referendum are tricky: the draft must be approved by a majority of at least half of all registered voters. Fearing that the lackluster parliamentary campaign meant the constitution might be lost because of a low turnout, the President went on television to address the nation. The draft document was the best way to protect Russia "from shocks like October 1993," said Yeltsin. "If we want good for our country, for each other, for our children, we must vote for the constitution."

Not all Russian democrats were as concerned about a referendum victory. Radical economist Grigori Yavlinsky, leader of a reform bloc ranked second in public-opinion polls, believes a popularly elected legislature would be empowered to amend and ratify the constitution if it failed at the ballot box. But this is precisely the scenario Yeltsin wants to avoid. Since the new batch of deputies elected this week is likely to be an unwieldy mix of democrats, centrists, communists and nationalists, he could find himself confronted by a new parliament just as intent on whittling down his powers as the one he dissolved. Without popular support for a strong presidential constitution, the power struggle that has plagued Russia for so long could begin all over again.