DATE=4/1/2000
TYPE=ON THE LINE
TITLE=ON THE LINE: THE RUSSIAN ELECTION
NUMBER=1-00835
EDITOR=OFFICE OF POLICY - 619-0037
CONTENT=
THEME: UP, HOLD UNDER AND FADE
Anncr: On the Line - a discussion of United
States policy and contemporary issues. This week,
"The Russian Election." Here is your host, Robert
Reilly.
Host: Hello and welcome to On the Line.
Russians went to the polls to elect a new
president. As expected, acting-President Valdimir
Putin won the election with nearly fifty-three
percent of the vote, compared to almost thirty
percent for Communist candidate Gennadi Zyuganov.
Mr. Putin is now preparing a comprehensive
economic program for his inauguration in May. It
remains to be seen how he will tackle the huge
problems of corruption and lawlessness, and the
continuing conflict in Chechnya.
Joining me today to discuss the results of the
Russian presidential elections are three experts.
Helmut Sonnenfeldt is a guest scholar at the
Brookings Institution and former counselor of the
U.S. State Department. Paul Goble is director of
Communications and Technology at Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty and a former State Department
specialist on the nationalities of the former
Soviet Union. And Joshua Muravchik is a resident
scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and
author of the book, The Imperative of American
Leadership.
Welcome to the program.
Helmut Sonnenfeldt, what significance do you
assign to this presidential election?
Sonnenfeldt: Well, they had it, although the
circumstances where somewhat shady, the way it was
wired and arranged. They had it and Putin seems to
have won the majority that you stated and he is
going to be president of Russia and, with that,
they are entering another phase of their
transition from what we know pretty well, namely
the former Soviet Union, a totalitarian system, to
something. Yeltsin did certain things that changed
matters quite remarkably in Russia but petered
out. And now will see where Putin is going to take
it, what kind of leader he will be. We have some
indications, maybe from his past, and some things
he has said and written. But I think in the end,
we will have to see how he takes his leadership
position and what he does with it -- he has got
enormous powers under the Yeltsin Constitution --
and how he uses them.
Host: Paul Goble, can you give a little more
definite shape to that something toward which they
are now moving?
Goble: I think that the most important thing about
this election, -- other that what Mr. Sonnenfeldt
said, that it took place -- is that, immediately
after winning, president-elect Putin did something
that no Russian leader has ever done before. He
acknowledged that almost half of the electorate
hadn't voted for him, that a large number of
people didn't like what he stood for, that it was
going to be absolutely necessary for him to find
some way to work with those people if Russia was
going to move forward. Unfortunately, the next
largest party is the Communist party. And a
coalition of Putin's Unity [party] and the
Communists doesn't point in a very reformist
direction. But it may mean that there will be a
new kind of cooperation between the executive and
legislative branches in Russia, something that
could lead to a move toward a more legal state, a
"rechtstadt," in which there will be real
legislation to back up policy, rather than, as
now, a pastiche of decrees, arbitrary actions and
so forth. That would, under current conditions, be
a step forward. It wouldn't be democracy
necessarily anytime soon, but it could be the
basis for the emergence of more vital civil
society and a more effective Russian government.
Host: Do you agree with that, Joshua Muravchik?
Muravchic: I don't disagree with it, but I feel
someone less upbeat [optimistic] about this
election in that it had the qualities more of a
coronation than an election. It's a very strange
situation in which what was presumably an election
campaign which when Putin was asked by reporters:
What are you going to do if you are elected? He
responded: I won't tell you. And Helmut
Sonnenfeldt was saying a few moments ago: "well,
now we will see what he is going to do or what he
believes, and we are looking for clues in his
past." It is a lot like how we used to greet the
rise of a new general secretary of the Communist
party in the Soviet Union.
Host: What about Paul Goble's point that almost
half the people in Russia voted against him?
That's not a coronation in that respect.
Muravchik: No. That's right. So it's not the same
thing as the old days. But I think Paul was also
saying that this is not quite an arrival at
democracy.
Goble: Absolutely.
Muravchik: Because in a democracy you have a
voting procedure, which they had in a fairly
decent form, but you also have some kind of
discourse that goes on in the voting procedure in
which the electorate insists on knowing about who
the candidates are and what they stand for. And
that just didn't happen here.
Sonnenfeldt: Obviously, he didn't want to go
beyond the generalities that were in his tract
that appeared on the Internet and other things
that he has said, because he didn't want to make
unnecessary enemies and he wanted to play the
cards very close to himself and not commit himself
to the things that he might regret.
Host: But is not that typical behavior for a
candidate who would say as little as possible to
get support?
Sonnenfeldt: Well it's not quite typical because
he really didn't get into programmatic things. Now
it's true that there are plenty of instances where
candidates are very voluble about what they are
going to do when they get into office, and then
they do the opposite. So, on that score, I'll give
him the chance to see what he comes up with in
detail. It's regrettable that there wasn't more of
a disclosure of that, but I think, okay, that's
happened. I do think that given the power of
decree that Yeltsin used enormously, there is a
real question of how he is going to go about
structuring whatever he's going to do: economic
reform, the judicial system, dealing with
corruption, dealing with oligarchs, and in foreign
and defense policies, and so on. Whether he is
going to try to get a consensus through what
exists in the way of political institutions, or
whether he is just going to announce it one fine
day and everybody will salute him and say: "Yes,
Sir."
Goble: I think that it is terribly important to
understand that he can try running the country by
decree. I mean that's what Yeltsin tried to do. It
probably can't be done in every case. I always
opposed the December 1993 constitution because I
thought it gave the president entirely too much
power. But I think that Putin is going to do some
ruling by decree. I think he's going to also try
to begin to create a legal system. It's not going
to be a liberal system; it's going to be a
dictatorial system. But the system is broken down.
The entity is broken down and, unless there is
some predictability, I think he has a real problem
in recreating it.
Sonnenfeldt: If I can just make a quick point on
that. Of course, I agree that issuing decrees from
Moscow or orders or any kind doesn't mean that
people even living in Moscow, let alone in more
remote places, are going to respond as required.
That was the problem even in the Communist period
when there were all kinds of deals between
[Leonid] Brezhnev and the local potentates where
they paid their dues and Brezhnev let them do
whatever they wanted at home. There is an
indicator, if that's the right word, from
something that Putin had said, or at least had
speculated about, and that is whether they
shouldn't appoint the regional leaders rather than
have elections for them. And thereby do away with
the whole notion of the Federation Council, the
second chamber which was put in the constitution
as one way of balancing the center. But his
inclination seems to be that these people better
work for him directly and he better know who they
are, so that they'll do what he says, or else he
will punish them, rather than having their own
sources of political power.
Host: But that would require a change in the
constitution, would it not? But, Joshua Muravchik,
it seems that there are a couple of things known
about what he wants to do because he repeatedly
says, we have to have a level playing field here
in Russia for business. We have to have rule of
law or that peculiar term he uses, a dictatorship
of law, so that this is a safe place to invest, so
that capital flight stops, so entrepreneurs can
get on with their business. He seems to be keenly
aware of that and what is required to create the
conditions for normal business. Would you agree?
Muravchik: Well, I'm not sure. The question is: he
may have a keen sense of what, in theory, is
required to create a hospitable atmosphere for
business. But that doesn't means that he has a
clear idea of how to achieve that. It's easier
said than done. What I find worse are some
stories, for example, that he has some grand
notion of using the former K-G-B or its apparatus
as an instrument to stamp out corruption. Well, in
the old Soviet Union, the K-G-B was very effective
and very strong, but they have plenty of
corruption. It's not very good. The K-G-B or that
apparatus is not a very good instrument, I don't
think, for eliminating corruption. But it can be a
very effective instrument for stamping out
liberty.
Host: How do you go about addressing the enormous
problems that he and Russia are now facing with
corruption, the lack of rule of law?
Sonnenfeldt: How do you go about it? I don't have
the problem.
Host: You are not a candidate.
Sonnenfeldt: One thing about Putin is that he
doesn't have a whole lot of experience in that
kind of thing either. He did do something in
Leningrad and Saint Petersburg with [former Mayor
Anatoly] Sobchak, now dead by a heart attack,
which involved a certain amount of free
enterprises and the risks of investment, and all
of that. And I think even a judicial system
locally, at least, that people were prepared to
rely on. By in terms of his experience and skills,
I don't think there is much there. So he gets
himself people that he knows and, of course, he
knows mostly K-G-B people and Saint Petersburg
people, and the few others. And we'll see how
brilliant these K-G-B people are in dealing with
these issues.
Goble: I don't think he's going to find it easy to
succeed in any of the areas he's trying to go
after. I think that he's going to find the
problems so enormous that the effort to succeed
will lead to other problems. If he tries to
eliminate the elected governors, for example, he
will prompt some of the regions to think about
leaving, just as the Soviet Union fell apart when
[Mikhail] Gorbachev tried to recentralize things
in 1991. If he tries to go after the oligarchs,
the oligarchs can make his life miserable. If he
tries to eliminate one house of the legislature,
there will be screams about a retreat from
democracy even from Western countries. There are a
whole lot of things he may try to do, impulses
behind him. And I don't think he is going to be a
success. I think he's is going to fail.
Host: What about the one thing he said he needs to
do most urgently, and that, as you mentioned, he
may have a Duma that is more compliant to enact
such a proposal, even though the Communists are
still the largest single body within it, and that
is finally the legalization of land ownership in
Russia?
Goble: He has to get fifty percent plus one votes
for that, and he may not get it.
Sonnenfeldt: I don't know whether he will get it
or not. But if that's his impulse, the more power
to him. Let him try. I can't judge whether these
kinds of things that he says, either on the
promising side or on the worrisome side, are
things that he's going to be able to do and really
wants to do. I think it really means we have to
wait and see. And I don't think we can influence
it very much. The only other thing that I want to
say about it: I do hope he does concentrate on
those issues and doesn't see glory and the sense
of pride that he wants to restore in Russia by
external adventures, because then, not only will
he not succeed in making something of Russia, this
very rich country, domestically, but he will get
into something maybe not exactly resembling the
Cold War but something that they lost once before.
Host: What about his internal adventure in
Chechnya, which is what vaunted him into the
public eye as a viable candidate?
Muravchik: Let's get to that in a moment. I just
wanted to add another point on the previous points
we were talking about. I want to bring it back to
the initial point that I made, which is the
absence of some kind of democratic discourse
during the election campaign and the absence of a
clear program of Putin coming forth and saying
what it is he stands for. It may seem like clever
politics because he had a lead and he didn't want
to gamble anything. But the democratic process
also is a process in which people who run for
office rally a constituency behind a certain
program. And when they get elected they can feel
and point to a body of public support for what it
is they are going to do. Whatever initiatives that
Putin may take with regard to land reform or rule
of law, or whatever it may be, he can scarcely
claim or feel he's got a big body of sentiment
that has registered itself behind him in
implementing one program or another.
Sonnenfeldt: We know he has no mandate. He will
self-define a mandate and then see whether he can
rustle up the necessary votes in the Duma or
expressions of support. I think that's one of the
realities. I don't like it, but that's what we've
got to deal with.
Goble: And the fact that he's likely to have a
great deal of difficulty doing that makes the
continuing conflict of Chechnya and the risks that
he will pursue other adventures all that more
likely. He's losing in Chechnya now. The Russians
are taking greater casualties. That's going to
continue. There is going to be a desire to find
some way to stand tall, be proud. This is a
position he has staked out -- that Russia needs to
be in charge of things. And to the extent that he
finds it difficult or impossible to assemble
support for rule of law, for land reform,
whatever, I think he's going to be ever more
tempted to those kinds of adventures, given his
past approach in Chechnya, and that the risks for
Russia are enormous.
Sonnenfeldt: One other thing, and that is that
they have been patting themselves on the back for
an economy that seems to be improving. But it's a
windfall. It has to do with oil and gas prices.
And indeed, they are making more money as a
result, and they have added to their dollar
holdings and reserves. Now the question is: will
they know what to do with that, while they have
it? There are statistics indicating that capital
flight continues unabated because Russians
themselves don't trust the system. I guess other
Russians might trust it, but think the outside
world is more trustworthy. So at the moment, that
probably helped him in the election because people
think that things are better and there is more
food and clothing in the stores.
Host: Josh Muravchik, do you have any worries such
as you just heard about the foreign policy that
might come from a Putin administration?
Muravchik: Indeed, I have commented a few times
now about the lack of discussion of the issues.
So, there is that and there is really no long
knowledge of who Putin is or was. What was his
victory? His victory was that he's the hero of
Chechnya, and so he's likely to have it in his
mind that the way to really make out well
politically is to be a war hero. I think that when
he starts trying to implement some of the other
kinds of projects that Paul was addressing and
starts to have some of the difficulty that he is
bound to have, there's going to be a very strong
temptation laid out there to think, "now I'm in
trouble; my popularity is going down, but I
remember back in the glorious moment when I was
the conqueror of Chechnya, then everybody loved
me. So maybe I`ve got to rerun that scenario."
Host: If you were U-S president, what would your
approach be to Mr. Putin?
Goble: Well, I think that we have to be very
cautious. I think we should avoid saying anything
definitive about what this man is. We should watch
what he does; we shouldn't proclaim him a
democrat. We shouldn't assume that we can do
business with him, or assume we can't.
Host: Didn't President Clinton basically get it
right, saying we hope you are moving in the
direction of establishing rule of law, fighting
corruption, cooperating on proliferation?
Sonnenfeldt: I think that is okay. I think we
should watch our vocabulary. We shouldn't be
talking about flourishing democracies and these
various other phrases that became common usage a
while back. I'm not so sure that President
Clinton ought to be rushing over there to a
meeting with him, although that seems to be
standard practice. And of course, the president is
leaving office so he may want to have that as part
of his record. You have to deal with him; he's the
president. We've got some interests that are quite
important. We still, as far as I know, have the
Nunn-Lugar program that assists them in getting
rid of some nuclear weapons and the environmental
problems and all that. So we can't simply say that
we'll sit and wait and do nothing. But I would be
cautious and not flamboyant.
Host: I'm afraid that's all the time we have
this week. I would like to thank our guests --
Helmut Sonnenfeldt from the Brookings Institution;
Paul Goble from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty;
and Joshua Muravchik from the American Enterprise
Institute -- for joining me to discuss the Russian
election. This is Robert Reilly for On the Line.
Anncr: You've been listening to "On the Line" - a
discussion of United States policies and
contemporary issues. This is --------.
31-Mar-2000 13:23 PM EDT (31-Mar-2000 1823 UTC)
NNNN
Source: Voice of America
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