Slouching toward democracy - Russia's less than enthusiastic support for democratic elections

National Review, Jan 24, 1994 by Mark Almond

IT WAS billed (in the West) as Russia's first truly democratic elections, but Russians had got tired of repeating what the Western networks excitedly called their first taste of democracy. They had had one already in 1989 when they elected the first (and last) Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR. They had had another in 1990 when they chose the Russian Parliament (since blasted out of the White House on October 4, 1993). In 1991, they had gone to the polls to elect Boris Yeltsin as president in a six-way race. And in April 1993, they had voted in a referendum on constitutional change. Western reporters might still get excited by so much birth of democracy, but by December 12 voting had lost its charms for the people who had to go out and cast their ballots.

So much voting but so little change brought about by the ballot box. To be sure, there has been an unprecedented set of changes in what used to be the Soviet Union, but none of them were brought about by the direct expression of the people's will. No one asked the voters in December 1991 whether they wanted to abolish the USSR (though they probably did), and last October neither Yeltsin nor his hardline opponents in the White House thought of putting their dispute to the people until after the power struggle had been won. Little wonder that as people went to vote on December 12, few seemed to think that the outcome would matter much.

Perhaps they were wrong. After all, the first results sent shock waves not only through the Russian establishment but across the world. Instead of a comfortable victory for the party favored by Western governments (with lavish provision of electoral consultants, spin doctors, and the whole works), the most disreputable candidate, leading the most vociferously anti-Western party, swept into the lead as counting got under way.

Anyone who had witnessed the self-satisfaction and arrogance of the reformers right up until the first results were in could not help sharing the Schadenfreude that went through Russia. Tempting fate, Yeltsin's bevy of radical young reformers called themselves "Russia's Choice," but their use of slick Western advertising against a background of "necessary" belt-tightening to produce a market economy did not wash, not least because it was obvious that they and their friends were enjoying the fruits of capitalism today while the rest of Russia waits for jam tomorrow.

Vladimir Bukovsky, who spent long years in Soviet prisons, has pointed out that Russia's reformers are born-again capitalists, but that they were not born yesterday. Yegor Gaidar and his team were the privileged children of the Soviet elite (born, as one Russian wit put it, with silver hammer-and-sickles in their mouths); advantage as much as principle caused them to shift from Communism to capitalism.

What has gone on in Russia for the last two years is not the birth of a market economy, but a gigantic firesale of the Soviet Union. Ex-Communists, their "reform-minded" children, and Western carpetbaggers have got in on the biggest asset-stripping operation in history. The Communists may not have produced much, but they left a lot of raw materials, oil, and real estate to be shared out. That has been happening, and it isn't a pretty sight.

On election night, while a glitzy televised party got under way with the Russia's Choice campaign song as the opening number, old women could be seen trying to sell what little they had in the underpasses around the Kremlin. The new poor in Russia are not druggies, alcoholics, or even suffering from senile dementia; they are the victims of the twentieth century. Children in the time of Lenin, war-widowed under Stalin, they are now rendered destitute by another "revolution."

Ironically, it was the old who voted for Russia's Choice. Although the Western admen had told the party to project its message to the young, Russia's future, in the polling stations I visited (and other observers found the same thing), it was the old who voted, and they did what they were told by state television as they have always done. Pointing at a line of widows waiting to vote, one Russian remarked, "You think they are robots, but we have the most sophisticated robots in the world. Yesterday they voted for the Communists. Today they are re-programmed to vote for the democrats."

Contrary to the trite reports that "young people voted for change," my straw poll indicated that people under forty either did not vote or voted disproportionately for Zhirinovsky. Only naive believers in the "goodness" of young people could think that because a Russian in a baseball cap looks Western, he must be "politically correct." Young Russians have learned to despise authority. The old system taught them to despise bourgeois morality. The rat-race since 1991 has not exactly changed their minds.

Zhirinovsky's crude nihilism appeals more widely than many observers care to admit. Among the vast ranks of non-voters (half the population if not more), his program of cheap vodka and every kind of kick from sex to a restored Russian empire has a level of support that is not comfortable to contemplate. But the West should be worrying about Russia's next generation, not the old guard.