The Last Hurrah?

By Bruce W. Nelan

Kicking off his campaign for a national vote of confidence, Boris Yeltsin stepped briskly before a restless, questioning crowd of students and instructors at the Moscow Aviation Institute last week. After a brief introduction, he jumped straight into his speech, speaking loudly and with no emotion. At one point, the head of the institute started chatting with colleagues sitting at a table behind Yeltsin, prompting the Russian President to interrupt his reading and glower at them. The mood lightened only when Yeltsin, 30 minutes into his speech, practiced a little pork-barrel politics and promised the students better living stipends and free trips home. A smattering of applause. Then Yeltsin pledged to increase the subsidy to the student cafeteria. A little more clapping. "If there is scant applause to this, that means food is no problem," said Yeltsin. "Or perhaps you are so undernourished that you are too weak to applaud." Finally, laughter filled the room.

It was a rare moment of humor in a listless campaign in which both candidate and voters have acted as if a week in the Gulag would be preferable to enduring one more speech. To break his deadlock with the nay-saying parliament, Yeltsin has organized a national vote on April 25 that will ask Russians whether they trust their President, whether they approve of his economic reform policies and whether they favor holding early elections for both President and the 1,033-member Congress of People's Deputies. Yeltsin is determined to win yes votes on all four points.

Even if he does, it isn't going to matter.

When the votes are counted, Yeltsin will still be President, and his foes in the Congress of People's Deputies will still be bent on ousting him and watering down his reforms. To make matters worse, both sides will probably claim victory in the referendum. Yeltsin is likely to win a majority on the first question of the four on the ballot, which asks simply if Russian citizens support him. A tidy majority would be a personal triumph for him.

But he will not be overcoming the hurdle that parliament set up when it approved the poll: a requirement that he win a yes from a majority of all eligible voters in Russia. That adds up to more than 53 million of the country's 106 million qualified adults -- an impossible feat for any politician in a democracy. By the Russian parliament's standard, no U.S. President could have made it to the White House. When he ran for President in 1991, Yeltsin captured 60% of the votes cast -- but even that landslide represented only 43% of the electorate.

Yeltsin suspects his supporters' Constitutional Court challenge to this requirement will not succeed, because the Chief Justice, Valeri Zorkin, has joined forces with the parliamentary camp in earlier struggles. If his suspicion is correct, he will issue a decree dismissing the new majority provision as "a crude violation of the constitution and the law on referendums." In other words, if he gains the approval of a simple majority of those who vote, he will raise his own hand as the winner. Once that is done, he says, he intends to be "more decisive" in pursuing a "whole package" of initiatives to overcome the parliamentary opposition.

Parliament and its aggressive leader, Ruslan Khasbulatov, will be mounting an attack of their own. When Yeltsin does not come up with the required 53 million votes, they may demand his resignation or try again to vote him out of office, as they almost did last month. The Constitutional Court's Zorkin could rule that the President should resign in favor of the Vice President, Alexander Rutskoi, another anti-Yeltsinite.

All of these possibilities point to a gloomy future of more governmental paralysis and more clashes between the executive and the legislature. "It's an agony of the political system," says Alexei Yablokov, a senior presidential aide. "I think Yeltsin will choose a new constitution with a new parliament. It's the only way." The sides may come to a tentative agreement about holding elections this year, ahead of schedule, but stall them by continuing to disagree over whether to rewrite the constitution.

Though Khasbulatov is still his main foe, Yeltsin landed his heaviest blows last week on Rutskoi. Charging that the Vice President "is categorically not in agreement with reform," Yeltsin said he intends to dismiss him from his position as supervisor of agricultural programs. Rutskoi has also discovered that his armored Mercedes has been replaced with an old Volga sedan, his security detail cut back sharply and his personal physician dismissed.

Despite his displays of combat fatigue last week, Yeltsin took his campaign to the Kuzbass, a mining area of western Siberia that has been a strong power base for him in recent years. He found that the miners are still on his side, but their ardor has cooled. He seemed almost apologetic when he asked them to help him break the stalemate in Moscow. "Our policy squabbling at the highest level," he said, "is a crime and should be stopped."

His reception in the region's meeting halls was mixed, and at one gathering of 400 in Novokuznetsk, some in the audience grumbled aloud. An elderly woman, a pensioner, followed him around asking insistently, "How can you live on 6,000 rubles (($9)) a month?" Yeltsin agreed life was hard, but the woman would not relent. Finally, exasperated, he fired back, "Don't vote. That is your right."

TIME correspondents traveling around Russia last week found the voters mostly pro-Yeltsin but often unenthusiastic, weary of politics, preoccupied with everyday problems. "I'll support Yeltsin now," said Alexei Svetlichny, a member of the Nizhni Novgorod city council, "but this will be the last time." Lyudmila Yakutin, a bank inspector in the city, was more firmly for Yeltsin: "The President must have the power, not those windbags" in parliament, she said. Yes, agreed economist Yevgeni Kozlov, Yeltsin may not be the ideal choice, but he is definitely "preferable to that chaotic Congress."

In the city of Kaluga, residents also felt that on balance Yeltsin was better than parliament, but he has another opponent: apathy. "We're talking about the provinces here," said Igor Babichev, editor of a business weekly. "If the weather is good on election day, people will be out in the countryside collecting potatoes." And quite a few Russians probably agreed with 21-year-old Natasha Leshiner, a sales assistant, who believed, "We should do away with the whole government. We have the same bureaucrats we had in the past."

A sweeping purge of that kind might sound appealing, but it is not going to happen. The members of parliament and officials of the executive branch are far too attached to their prestige and perquisites to give them up easily. Even early elections, probably the best solution Russians can hope for, are not a certainty, no matter how the country answers its questions next week.

With reporting by David Aikman/Moscow, Ann M. Simmons/Kaluga and Yuri Zarakhovich/Nizhni Novgorod