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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the June 27, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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The Buying and Selling of Yeltsin: Market Politics in Russia

By Deirdre Griswold

The election in Russia has shown once again that the political form of bourgeois democracy--or at least its image, if not its essence--remains useful in advancing the predatory aims of monopoly capital.

That could change--especially if the worldwide system of capitalism goes through any of the great economic shocks that have periodically caused it to implode, causing chaos and mass suffering. Then the bourgeoisie might resort to more openly authoritarian forms of political rule.

For now, however, the imperialists--especially the United States--and their Russian bourgeois collaborators have been able to use their enormous material resources and control over the media and the repressive state apparatus to buy, deceive, intimidate and seduce enough voters into supporting their candidate: the unlikely democrat, Boris Yeltsin. This put him slightly ahead of the Communist candidate, Gennadi Zyuganov, in the first round of voting.

And it gained them time to continue to consolidate capitalist rule in the former workers' state.

The Magic Of Money

Just a few months ago, even the bourgeois media considered Yeltsin a loser. The conditions of life that capitalist counter-revolution has brought to Russia have been so devastating to the workers and farmers, pauperizing even many highly trained intellectual workers, that it seemed a joke to suggest that Yeltsin could win.

But now, billions of dollars later, after skilled spin masters and experts in political deceit of all kinds have done their magic, Yeltsin is out ahead. Now he's lining up the support of bourgeois nationalists like Gen. Alexander Lebed for the second round of the election.

The maneuver with Lebed has been particularly crass and shameful. The general ran on an anti-Yeltsin platform, lambasting the war in Chechnya and corruption in the government. In the last week, he suddenly was all over television with paid ads. When he then got 15 percent of the vote, the capitalist media professed surprise.

But this was no accident. According to conservative columnist William Safire, writing from Russia, "The more malleable Lebed was given a final-week infusion of money, TV coverage and attention from Yeltsin as a potential successor late last week." (New York Times, June 17)

The day after the election, Yeltsin fired Defense Minister Pavel Grachev, who had taken responsibility for the unpopular war in Chechnya, and appointed Lebed as his national security adviser.

Lebed then endorsed Yeltsin.

So the "anti-Yeltsin" general's campaign was pumped up by Yeltsin--in order to draw votes away from Zyuganov.

This is bourgeois politics. It leads to the greatest cynicism among the masses, who find out after the election is over that they have been thoroughly deceived.

No wonder that the United States, the paragon of capitalist democracy, has one of the lowest rates of voter turnout in the world.

To hear the media tell it, capitalist democracy is the only kind of democracy. The alternative, they say, is an out-and-out dictatorship, either of the right or the left.

Democracy as a Form of Class Dictatorship

Marxists have used the term "dictatorship" honestly and openly to describe the rule of one class over another.

Ever since the division of human society into classes of haves and have-nots with opposing material interests, the state has been the instrument of the property-owning class. The state's main function has been to keep the oppressed and exploited in their place so that the daily process whereby the rich accumulate additional wealth from their labor could go on relatively undisturbed.

In ancient Greece, often cited as the wellspring of Western democracy, there was a dictatorship of the slave owners over the slaves. But within the slave-owning class, there was room for democratic discussion over how best to maintain their privileged status.

In the modern capitalist democracies, the franchise has been extended to include today's wage slaves--those enslaved by capital, which decides whether they work or starve. A highly sophisticated apparatus has evolved to round up enough popular votes every few years to keep capitalist parties in office.

Behind the elected officials lies the armed might of the state--the military, the courts, the police. They are organized from the top down, without even a nod to democracy.

Few workers ever hold office, even though today's working class makes up the undisputed majority of the population. Women and people from oppressed nationalities are a tiny minority of the elected bodies. The cost of campaigning escalates each year, so that candidates who cannot please the richest contributors have little hope of winning.

This is the highest form of democracy that the bourgeoisie can aspire to.

Soviets and Workers' Democracy

The Russian revolutionaries used the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" to characterize the new state set up after the 1917 Russian Revolution. Yes, it was a dictatorship in that it used force--the working class and the peasants were armed and organized.

But this dictatorship's objective was to do away with oppression and exploitation. The workers' state existed to prevent the former property-owning classes from returning to power. Its aim was to reorganize production on a socialized basis so that class divisions would eventually melt away.

Within this dictatorship of the proletariat, this workers' state, the greatest democracy for the masses existed during Lenin's lifetime. Its political form--the Soviets, or councils--had sprung up spontaneously, first in the unsuccessful 1905 Revolution, then again in 1917. The Soviets paralleled the Commune created in 1870 by the revolutionary workers of Paris.

For the first time in history, the masses had direct representation in running the affairs of state. The Soviets of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers Deputies were a cauldron of political struggle. Every tendency within the revolutionary movement was there.

As in the Paris Commune, the deputies to the Soviets could be recalled at any time if they failed to carry out the wishes of the masses. How different from a bourgeois election! The day after the runoff election in Russia, those who voted for Yeltsin will wake up to find out they were deceived--on the war in Chechnya, on jobs and wages, on inflation. They will be told there's nothing they can do about it for another four years.

The Soviets were very different. There was a constant turnover of deputies as they multiplied during the turbulent year of 1917. The Bolshevik Party, although only a minority in the Soviets at first, called for them to take the power away from the bourgeois-dominated Duma.

"All Power to the Soviets" was the key to revolutionary victory in October 1917.

Democracy In Form, Autocracy In Essence

By the time they were about to be dismantled and the USSR destroyed, the Soviets may have been only a shadow of their former selves. But many deputies were still elected directly in the factories.

There was a separate legislative chamber to make sure that every nationality, no matter how small, had a political voice and vote. More than one-third of the deputies were women, if the local Soviets are included.

It was vastly superior to the bourgeois form of government that now exists in Russia.

The Western imperialists loved to call the Soviets a rubber stamp for decisions made by the Communist Party leadership. But under Yeltsin, the Duma or parliament doesn't even play that role.

Since last December, the Communists have held the major bloc in the Duma. But the office of the president has been invested with such enormous power that Yeltsin has disregarded the parliament. He has become an autocrat, without even a real party to keep him in check.

What Yeltsin does have is the vigorous support of world imperialism, especially the United States. That pulled him through the election.

It is now well known that a $10-billion loan from the International Monetary Fund was put at Yeltsin's disposal before the election. Some campaign contribution!

With it he paid back wages to many workers, raised

soldiers' pay, gave money to pensioners. This violated IMF conditions. But the world bankers let it go this time.

It's only after the election that they'll call in the debt--by demanding further privatization of state-owned industries, including layoffs, and higher prices on necessities like food and fuel. Then many who hoped Yeltsin had changed will be cursing him again.

But the West helped Yeltsin in another way too--by threatening a return to the Cold War if Zyuganov won. Yes, they said, you can vote for a Communist in this free election. But if you win you'll have to live once again under the nuclear shadow.

And this time you've lost 40 percent of your country,

you've lost your allies in Eastern Europe, your army will be divided, many of your weapons will have been dismantled, and you'll be facing the prospect of a civil war as well.

Zyuganov and the Workers

It is a measure of how hated the new capitalism has become that one-third of the voters stood up to these threats, saw through the bribes and hype, and voted for Zyuganov.

It is not as though Zyuganov were a leader well known to the masses for his powerful oratory or his winning tactics. He is not.

Zyuganov represents the middle layer of Communist Party leaders who kept the organization together after Gorbachev, Yeltsin and all the other bourgeois functionaries who had climbed to the top of the party abandoned it.

The grassroots strength of the communist form of organization, even now, is what brought out the vote for Zyuganov when Yeltsin outspent him 10,000 to one.

Now, before the final round of voting when Zyuganov faces off against Yeltsin, the Russian president will continue to wheel and deal, trying to pin down the endorsements of erstwhile bourgeois opponents. His U.S. advisers are playing a big arm-twisting role in this process.

It would be a setback for the workers if Zyuganov were to follow a similar route and seek alliances with various bourgeois forces--especially if that required jettisoning parts of his already ambiguous program on the economy and catering to Great Russian chauvinism. So far, it seems that the overt rejection of such an alliance has come from the right-wing political figures described as "nationalist" in the West--particularly Gen. Lebed and extreme chauvinist Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

Zyuganov's reconstituted Communist Party of the Russian Federation is not tested in serious class struggle. Unlike the early Bolsheviks, it is not a combat organization that was forged in fighting for the workers' interests.

But Yeltsin's ability to contain the masses in a real struggle is not tested either. So the bourgeoisie is relieved over the outcome of the vote so far. They did not get the out-and-out electoral victory they would have liked. But they have kept the class struggle confined to the electoral arena where money and media control give them the advantage.

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