Yeltsin's Big Gamble

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/ Barely hours after the speech, Valeri Zorkin, the Chairman of the Constitutional Court, which is supposed to prevent the executive and legislative branches from poaching on each other's turf -- but which Yeltsin has accused of siding with the Congress -- seemed ready to hear a prospective impeachment appeal against Yeltsin from parliament. He sent Yeltsin a letter charging the President with "suspending the basis of the Russian constitution," leading "to further destabilization of society." Vice President Alexander Rutskoi, once a Yeltsin ally but increasingly a voice of opposition, refused to sign the "special rule" decrees and called them unconstitutional under the Brezhnev version still in force. The country's prosecutor general, thought to be in Yeltsin's camp, and the deputy speaker of the Congress indicated no disagreement at a meeting where Zorkin declared that Yeltsin had put himself "outside the constitution."

And so the stage was set for chaos. If the Congress voted to impeach Yeltsin, he was unlikely to recognize its authority to do so. If he then dissolved the Congress, the Deputies would probably not go home. Thus the President and the legislative bodies were likely to settle into a pattern of issuing contradictory decrees that would be accepted by parts of the government and ignored by others. It was likely, for example, that the Supreme Soviet would try to take over the national television system by putting its own men in charge. It was likely too that the TV producers would resist and look to Yeltsin to maintain freedom of the press and full civil liberties for Russians. On the other hand, Yeltsin said he would order the central bank, which is under the control of Congress, to stop printing rubles -- and it will probably go right on doing so, further fueling inflation. Yeltsin lamented in his speech that Russia has two governments, but compared with what is likely to happen now, citizens haven't seen anything yet.

The President's enemies will certainly try to block the vote or get Russians to boycott it. Earlier this month, when the Congress canceled a referendum that had been set for April 11, legislators warned Yeltsin that he had no authority to schedule any kind of nationwide vote on his own, not even a nonbinding opinion poll. He can probably count on many local executives in administrative districts around the country to organize the polling. The lawmakers can just as surely rely on local soviets, or councils, to do everything they can to thwart it.

Both sides have been assiduously wooing the military with promises of pay hikes, pension increases and other goodies. Yeltsin, legally the commander in chief, reminded the armed forces last month that their compensation was raised five times last year. In his Saturday speech he ordered the soldiers to stay in their barracks and not take any part in the political struggle, a policy that Defense Minister Pavel Grachev seems willing to follow -- for now.