#37 | April 23 - May 6, 1998  

By Matt Taibbi

Reporting the news before it happens is always a dangerous business, but when waiting for the inevitable loses its thrill, it's all a real journalist has left to do. And with Russian parliamentary politics, the thrill has been gone for ages now. Though this paper hits the stands on April 23, we're pretty sure it's already safe to report the following: Sergei Kiriyenko was confirmed as Prime Minister this Friday, April 24, on the third State Duma vote on his candidacy since he was nominated by Preisdent Yeltsin last month. It was a close vote, 226-224, and it passed on a secret ballot.

Okay, we might be wrong, and if we are, that's pretty embarrassing. But we don't think so. If recent history is any guide, this whole confirmation process has been a protracted dog-and-pony show all along, with the end result decided upon weeks ago. The only news story to come out of it, as far as we can tell, is that the myth of the "communist-dominated opposition" is finally being exposed.

Last year, the big myth in Russian politics waiting to be exploded was the "energetic young reformer" tag-a misleading, boosterish tic on the face of public discourse that first appeared in force when Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemtsov joined the government in March. A couple of scandals, five firings, and about 30 eXile covers later, almost no one but Carol J. Williams, Geoff Winestock, and a few Pacific-theater-bound Japanese imperial troops who haven't heard the war ended are still using the term.

That doesn't mean the West has learned. One cliche dies, another rises to take its place. This week, on the eve of yet another phony parliamentary confrontation, the next great cliche finally headed upstream toward its death. When the communists fold again tomorrow and vote in the "unacceptable" Kiriyenko to the Prime Minister spot, intelligent Russia-watchers will know: it's time for the wire-service catchword "communist-dominated opposition" to finally bite the dust.

A few years ago, British bookmakers laid odds that the reappearance of Christ was more likely than a victory by an Englishman at Wimbledon. Something like that level of metaphysical certainty was observed this week among reporters and players all across the political spectrum when asked how the communists would vote on Friday. Almost to the last man, they all said almost exactly the same thing:
"Of course Kiriyenko will pass by two or three votes, with precisely the right amount of communists voting in favor," said Yelena Lukasheva, spokeswoman for the Yabloko faction.

"Exactly the right amount of communists needed to change their minds will change their minds, and Kiriyenko will pass," said Vladimir Pribylovsky of the Panorama Research Center.

"Yes, it's all prearranged, everyone knows that," said Vasily Ustyuzhanin, Duma reporter for Komsomolskaya Pravda. "Just the right number of communists will vote in favor."

The communist method for orchestrating farcical parlimentary confrontations has been well documented in the last year, with nearly identical voting behavior during the 1998 budget vote, the tax code vote last fall, and the threatened no-confidence vote at around the same time.

The scam is pretty simple. First the government puts forward a bill totally antithetical to the communist platform. The communists react violently, with impassioned speeches on the Duma floor announcing that their party will never, ever pass the bill. A first vote is taken, and the communists and the LDPR reject the bill, creating the momentary appearance of dissent.

Then, at some point between the first and third votes, individual communists begin playing a good-cop/bad-cop game, with one communist leader (i.e., Zyuganov) playing the role of the principled stalwart who will never give in, while another (i.e., Seleznyov) begins weepily pleading for compromise, croaking raven-like warnings about the disastrous consequences of a third nay vote and a Duma dissolution.

Then-and this is the best part-the third and decisive vote arrives, and on a secret ballot, the government inititative passes by exactly or almost exactly the correct number of votes. Some 40-odd communists will have flipped, attributing the change in heart to the desires of their constituents, their fear of greater social instability following a rospusk, or some other thing. Meanwhile, grumblings will come out of the Yabloko faction, which voted no throughout and voted no in unison in the last round, in which the communists who voted yea are accused of earning new dachas or government cars in exchange for their votes.

The key to this whole scheme is that even though the bill passes, the majority of communists will have voted no, allowing them to retain claims of being an opposition party.

"The majority votes no, allowing them to look like the opposition," said Pribylovsky. "But the government doesn't need the majority. It needs the minority, which is what the communist party delivers every time."

Alexander Kravets, the Communist Party's chief ideologist, perfectly explained the new communist "ideology" earlier this week.

"Our party," he said, "will not vote to confirm Kiriyenko under any circumstances."

Could he absolutely guarantee, then, that Kiriyenko would not be confirmed on Friday?

"The party first has to vote at a plenum on Thursday," he said. "And at that plenum, I can guarantee that the party will vote to reject Kiriyenko. His candidacy is unacceptable to us."

Well... the party is one thing, but what if the majority of the party votes to reject, but a minority votes to confirm?

"The party will act with unity and discipline," he said.

Right, but does that mean all the deputies will vote no, or just most of them?

"They'll act according to the decision of the plenum."

Blah, blah. In any case, a complicit partner to the communists in the Potemkin village parliament effort is Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party, which, like the communists, is a party that draws nearly the whole of its electoral support through loud denunciations of the government in regional elections.

When Zhirinovsky first ascended to the national spotlight in 1993, Western reporters immediately labeled the Duma a hotbed of "hardliners," a habit they haven't dropped since. Back then, the very term "hardliner", like its current sister cliche "communist-dominated opposition", was intended to describe a political bloc that would put up obstacles to the reform program of Boris Yeltsin's government.

Zhirinovsky himself helped foster the illusion by shrieking about re-seizing Alaska and dipping his boots in the Indian Ocean, positions that Western reporters, after long and careful consideration, concluded probably did not coincide with the spirit of the Sachs/Gaidar shock therapy program. Nonetheless, years passed and no one seemed to bother to check and see how Zhirinovsky's faction actually voted. As it turned out, his party and the rapidly multiplying communists were often better friends to the government than the self-proclaimed pro-government party, Our Home is Russia.

For example, when the Duma voted on the tax code last year, the LDPR was the only faction to vote 100 percent in favor of the government-sponsored bill. They were followed by the KPRF, 70% of whose deputies voted yea. The NDR came in a distant third, with an even half of its deputies voting against the government's new code.

Journalists have proved incapable of following the vote count instead of the floor speeches. When the government put forward its 1998 budget, Zhirinovsky went into one of his famous tirades, calling the thing an outrage and a crime. Then the day of the vote came, and...voila! The LDPR voted 100% in favor. Still, despite the "hardliners'" consistent record of folding at the last minute and serving up their votes to the Kremlin, Western reporters continue to report the parliamentary "crises" at face value. A Moscow Times editorial about the Kiriyenko vote last week was a good example:
"But the stakes are now deadly serious. The State Duma will have one last opportunity to approve Kiriyenko as prime minister next Friday.
Otherwise, Russia will be faced with fresh parliamentary elections and months of political uncertainty."

Meanwhile, wire services like Reuters continue to drum up the hardliner bogeymen years after they've already proved themselves toothless:
"The Communist and nationalist-dominated State Duma lower house of parliament refused again on Friday to confirm Kiriyenko, with many saying the 35-year-old former energy minister did not have enough experience to run the country."

The excuse most observers usually give for continuing to describe the "hardliners" as a real opposition is that the change in heart these factions demonstrate in key votes only reflects the natural democratic process of protest and compromise. In fact, though, the communists and the Liberal Democrats don't bargain their votes for political advantage, which is the way the process is supposed to work. Instead, they bargain for stuff-like the new Central Committee building the communists mysteriously won funding for around the time of the tax code vote.

Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky delineated the difference in an interview with Novaya Gazeta during the no confidence vote last year.

"What they agreed upon-that's what should have us worried. They agreed on how much money Zhirinovsky will make, or how much the KPRF will get to make improvements (i.e., the new Central Committee building), or eight minutes of free air time-that's one thing.
"But we wanted to bargain so that the taxes would be different."

The reason legitimizing the communist opposition is so insidious is that it takes pressure off the Yeltsin regime to govern responsibly. As long as the communists are alive as a legitimate opposition, Yeltsin automatically has the support of most Western countries and Western financial institutions like the World Bank, for whom staunch anti-communism is quite reasonably the cornerstone of any approach to foreign affairs, in particular to relations with Russia. In reality, though, post-communist Russia has long since evolved past the simple democrat vs. communist paradigm that dominated discussion of this country's politics in the early part of this decade. In truth, the total complicity of the "opposition" with government initiatives now places Russia in close spiritual company with corporate Latin American governments like Mexico's PRI regime, which are essentially one-party systems whose deomcratic processes are largely orchestrated and symbolic. Like these Banana republics, Russia has evolved into a state with parliamentary factions that play the roles of left and right while careful to keep their performances from having any real effect on the political process.

The result is a dual deception-the projection on the international stage of the Yeltsin government as a bulwark against communism, while within Russia dissent is appropriated by phony wolf-crying opposition. As Yavlinsky told Novaya Gazeta:
"They walk around with red flags, while the ruling party seems to have a three-color flag. People see that and think: that's a different flag, let's vote for them."

"Not just the communists, but the government needs the parliamentary battle to look hard-fought and close," said Pribylovsky. "If the communists aren't convincing as an opposition, they won't be re-elected. And they want them re-elected."

Of course, the peculiar structure of the Russian parliamentary system makes it difficult for any parliamentary group to genuinely oppose the government. Rejection of any government initiative means more or less automatic dissolution of parliament, costly new elections, and the risk of reduced ranks following the next vote.

Still, a party that votes in defiance of its constituents in exchange for a new office is pretty goddamned sad. It's important to remember, also, that this particular batch of communists by and large isn't the big, bad group of gritty thugs who once ran the biggest police state the world has ever seen. Instead, these are a bunch of half-bright fat flunkies who couldn't cut it as major players in the Soviet Union, only rising to captain the communist ghost ship when the real crew bailed to become filthy-rich bankers and power-wielding democrats after 1991. These are guys whose goals in life during Soviet times were a couple of foreign-tailored suits, access to exclusive lingerie boutiques, and a new gray Volga-and now that that's exactly what they're getting, they're happy as clams.

"The term 'communist opposition' is already a contradiction in terms," said Lukasheva. "For the most part, these people aren't politicians. They're actors. And anyone who calls them anything else is insulting people who are really trying to act like democrats."