RUSSIA'96: THE PEOPLE CHOOSE

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Besides these concrete problems, there is also the Russians' loss of psychological security. "If you were viewing Russia from Mars," says Yuli Guzman, a former liberal member of Russia's State Duma, "you would have to say life has got better in the last five years. But if people are living better in objective terms, their subjective sense is that things have got worse. Even those who have become rich and traveled the world have a hankering for the past, when you had the illusion that someone--whether Stalin, the party or your trade union leader--was always thinking of you, and your chunk of kolbasa was guaranteed, even if you had to stand in line for it."

But shouldn't freedom outweigh the drawbacks of reform? Not in Russia, which has no tradition of viewing freedom as a value. Alexander Yakovlev, who was a top adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet President, once put it this way: "We're not just trying to establish a reformed system. We're trying to dismantle the 1,000-year-old Russian paradigm of unfreedom." Trying--and perhaps failing once more. The words Ivan Turgenev wrote in The Dream more than a century ago, some years after Alexander II's decision to free the serfs, could apply today: "And once again after years I traverse your roads, And once again I find you, the same, unchanged!...And although you were freed from slavery, you do not know what to do with freedom."

In Russia today "freedom shock," to use Guzman's term, is explained succinctly by Roman, a 42-year-old taxi driver in Yaroslavl. "People have no concept of freedom," he says. "They substitute freedom of action for freedom of thought. They see freedom as license. They don't realize freedom requires self-discipline. They fear that freedom leads to anarchy. They view it as the ability, if one can, to lord it over those weaker than they are." This may explain why, in a survey of almost 2,500 Russians conducted in January by Richard Rose, a professor at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, 77% of respondents answered "order" when asked whether order or democracy was "more important for Russia now." Only 9% chose "democracy."

It is against this background that Boris Yeltsin seeks re-election. He has brought many of his difficulties upon himself--by allowing crime and corruption to flourish, by permitting privatization to enrich the few, by invading Chechnya. As a former Communist Party boss, he has always held suspect democratic credentials, and since 1993 he has undermined the establishment of democratic principles by his authoritarianism and his failure to build a party that would define and pursue those ideals. With his record working against him, Yeltsin has had to run against it--and, like Bill Clinton in the U.S., he is skillfully appropriating some hot issues of his opponents while demonizing them at the same time.