Pohl Funders-Larsen in Moscow describes the events leading to the bloody battles on 3/4 October. YELTSIN'S dissolution of the Russian parliament was the coup which his supporters had been calling for since August 1991, and which he only just stopped short of launching in March this year.
The Yeltsenites claimed that 'Presidential rule' would be terminated with elections to a new two-chamber parliament in December. But as the centrist daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta remarked in an editorial on 23 September "..it is only in fairy tales that democracy returns after three months of de facto dictatorship. If you dissolve one parliament, what is to stop you dissolving another?' Yeltsin, before last Sunday's events, tried to maintain a facade of legality, as large-scale repression initiated by him would have imperilled western support. But censorship is implemented ruthlessly in broadcasting, which has reverted to its pre-glasnost state, and one of the leading opposition papers Rossiskaya Gazeta has been already closed down.
Shake-up
Even before the bloody clashes last Sunday and Monday a major shake-up of the apparatus was underway, as functionaries and elected bodies loyal to parliament were suspended and replaced.
The Federation of Independent Russian Trade Unions had already come under attack. Its chairman Igor Klochkov told the newspaper Trud on 23 September: 'We have called on the Moscow trade unions to organise actions of protest, including strikes. It is necessary to stop the enterprises and take to the streets to defend the White House. Following this statement the phones of the trade unions were cut, and the government was rumoured to be preparing a decree on a six-month moratorium on strikes and trade union activities.
The failed anti-Yeltsin putsch by the , pro-Rutskoi forces has given Yeltsin a golden opportunity to push ahead with further repression and purge of his opponents. But before, his position did not seem so secure. and repression and authoritarian rule alone will not stabilise the situation.
The economic reform is in tatters. A continuing collapse in production, skyrocketing inflation at 30 per cent a month and a budget deficit far exceeding IMF targets bring daily hardship and misery to the vast majority of the population.
Politically, neither the more-or-less impromptu 'Constitutional Assembly' convened by yeltsin in June and July, nor attempts to win over regional elites through a "Federation Council' had yielded any clear results.
It was against this background of economic and political failure that Yeltsin decided to dissolve the parliament. But no big political victory gained through vanquishing the parliamentary putsch can turn the bureaucratic command economy into a perfect Hobbesian 'free market' overnight; nor can it instantly transform the deeply factionalised bureaucratic state apparatus into a workable bourgeois state.
It is these basic contradictions which underlay the failure of the 'Democrats' to utilise the breakthrough they made in August 1991 to achieve decisive results for pro-market reforms. These contradictions make themselves felt at the heart of the of the Yeltsenite alliance.
Conflict
Before the fighting there was inside the government a rapidly developing conflict between the 'conciliationists' (including prime minister Chernomyroin and Yeltsin's advisor on regional affairs Serge Shakhrai) who wanted a compromise with the regions, the industrialists and the moderate parliamentarists; and on the other hand the die-hard monetarists (including deputy prime minister Gaidar and finance minister Fyodorov).
The latter group will almost certainly have the upper hand now. They want a wage freeze in state industry, a cut in social spending and subsidies, and harshly authoritarian political measures.
The various pro-liberal currents have been able to use the presidency as a rallying point and Bonapartist bulwark for their interests. But the opposition had not succeeded in developing any coherent organisational alternative or political programme which could appeal to broad layers of working people.
It remains divided into dozens of endlessly bickering parliamentary factions, fronts and parties, many of which come across as dubious in their commitment to democracy, or harbour a strong nostalgia for the Soviet past and have made no break with the logic, or even the structures, of the bureaucratic apparatus.
Moreover the credentials of the parliamentary alliance in resisting the liberal reform were hardly impressive - after all they had endorsed yeltsin and his policies for a long period, opened the flood-gates for the neo-liberal Gaidar reforms in the autumn of 1992 and enthusiastically accented Cherno Myroin, now firmly behind Yeltsin, as prime minister less than a year ago.
It was no surprise then this that this opposition was incapable of waging a consistent fight against Yeltsin, until the military adventure last Sunday and Monday.
Determined
The trade unions acted in a somewhat more coherent and determined fashion; but they were unable to reach their membership base and motivate it for political action.
Meanwhile the whole left wing, from the Congress of Democratic Left Forces and the Party of Labour, to the various small anarchist and marxist groups, came out against Yeltsin. But their acute lack of organisational resources forced them to structure most of their activity either through parliament of the trade unions.
Many Moscow leftwingers participated actively in the pickets around the White House, where tens of thousands of people gathered every day to discuss and listen to news and speeches.
In spite of the dominant nationalist and Stalinist currents (with their large contingents of pensioners) the permanent picket attracted many new activists, including quite a few younger people and ANALYSIS women, attending not out of support for the conservatives but simply to protest against the Yeltsin regime.
Hardcore
The outcome of the putsch is a big victory for the hardcore free-market wing of Yeltsin's supporters. The big issue now will be the impact in the regions, and whether there is a further fragmentation of the Russian state. In any case the 'Latin Americanisation' of Russian economic, social and political life -with its pauperisation of whole social layers, rampant inflation, lawlessness and the permanent threat of political instability and coups - will continue.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 50, October 9 1993, Page 6