RUSSIA'S hard-drinking president Boris Yeltsin must have thought he was hallucinating when he saw his defeated opponents Alexander Rutskoi and Ruslan Khasbulatov walk free from Moscow's Lefortovo jail at the end of February, reports COLIN MEADE. RUTSKOI and Khasbulatov were the leaders of the disobedient majority of the Parliament in its former incarnation, dissolved by Yeltsin and dispersed under a hail of gunfire last October.
After this blow for democracy, Yeltsin expected new elections to produce a docile legislature.
As a second line of defence, Yeltsin organised a plebiscite to grant himself as president sweeping powers of rule by decree and veto.
Release
In the event the elections produced a parliament one of whose first acts was to order the release of Rutskoi and Khasbulatoy along with the authors of the 1991 coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev.
Supporters of the release of Rutskoi and co. were able to line up the two thirds majority needed to override Yeltsin's veto and the president's attempts to get the prosecutor general to block the move came to naught.
Recent results in the prolonged series of regional elections now underway have also brought no comfort for Yeltsin, with big victories for former Communists in a number of industrial aregs.
Since coming to power in August 1991, Yeltsin has balanced between the so-called Atlanticists, who want drastic free "Zhirinovsky's success is a result of the failure of pro-democratic forces in Russia to find ways of challenging the old order that appeal to the interests of the Russian people and its working class" "Recent results in the prolonged series of regional elections now underway have also brought no comfort for Yeltsin, with big victories for former Communists in a number of industrial areas" market reforms and a strict alignment with the west on foreign policy, and the nationalistminded pan-Slay military industrial lobby (MIL).
Real power A nod towards the Atlanticists would keep the West happy, but there was always an accompanying wink towards the real powers that be.
Yeltsin kept aloof from the Atlanticist camp in the election campaign and its leading lights such as Yegor Gaidar and Boris Fedorov have left his new postelection government.
Fedorov has signalled his assessment of his side's prospects by leaving Russia for a highly paid job in an international agency.
Nonetheless, despite what is looking more like a lurch than a tilt towards the MIL, strong factions in the western establishments are maintaining their support for the Russian president.
Commentators are urging policy-makers to show 'understanding' for the need to respond to Russian nationalist sentiment.
Mole unmasked
However, the recent unmasking of Russia's super-mole in the CIA, Aldrich Ames, may signal the opening of a campaign to undermine Clinton's pro-Yeltsin policy by elements of the US establishment nostalgic for the halcyon days of the Cold War.
Despite the jostling for position at the top there is a considerable degree of consensus emerging between Yeltsin's government and the majority in the two houses of parliament.
Virtually everyone who matters in Moscow now talks stridently about the need to defend Russia's interests and embattled Russian minorities in the near abroad' - the former Soviet Union and its erstwhile sphere of influence.
All are broadly in favour of sustaining the military industrial complex and keeping national control of the country's massive raw material wealth.
Close contacts
Yeltsin's prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin maintains close contacts with leaders of the industrial and agricultural lobbies.
The largest parties/blocs in the lower house, the State Duma, are: Gaidar's Russia's Choice and an unstable array of "pro-reform' factions headed by ambitious individuals. Zhirinovsky's far right National Liberal Party, and the Communist Party and its close ally the Agrarians.
The upper house, the Council of the Federation, is dominated by regional officials, many of them Yeltsin appointees, and is also said to contain a significant number of businessmen.
The chair of the State Duma, Zhirinovsky's plan for dictatorial capitalist restoration will not end poverty or shortages Ivan Rybkin is a representative of the collective farm lobby and his counterpart in the upper house, Shumeiko of big industry.
Assuming there are no further coup attempts, Russian politics will in the immediate future be dominated by the run up to the presidential elections due in 1996. Gaidar, Rutskoi, Zhirinovsky, Chernomyrdin (with Yeltsin's backing?) and many more besides all have at least one eye on the prize.
Zhirinovsky, unlike other anti-Yeltsin politicians, supported the strengthening of presidential powers, hoping one day to exercise them himself.
Protest vote
His strong showing in the elections was partly due to the fact that Rutskoi was in jail and other parties that could have captured the protest vote were banned.
All other parties in the new parliament have been refusing to support his nominees for important committee posts. But, even if he is not about to seize power, Zhirinovsky has a real social base and a programme adapted to growing exasperation with the lack of effective decision making at the centre.
The main reasons given in Russian surveys for supporting Zhirinovsky are the need for a restoration of discipline, strong state controls and the elimination of the threat of anarchy.
At the same time, he denounces both the new pro-western rich and the old Communist nomenclature, making the telling point that the two poles are not so far apart as they might want to appear.
Zhirinovsky's success is thus a result of the failure of prodemocratic forces in Russia to find ways of challenging the old order that appeal to the interests WORLD NEWS of the Russian people and its working class.
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