Even if the president had billions to spend on shoring up the Russians, it is unlikely that he can buy Yeltsin a way out of trouble. The Russian president has been badly weakened by a power struggle that turned into a constitutional crisis. For a year and a half he has tried to impose radical economic reform, mostly through presidential decree, bypassing a conservative Russian Legislature stocked with communist holdovers and rabid nationalists. The legislators struck back, asserting their nominal supremacy under the old, Soviet-era Constitution. The Congress of People’s Deputies subjected Yeltsin to the torture of a thousand cuts, slashing away at his powers and humiliating him with every nonlethal slice.
Yeltsin warned darkly that he might have to take “extreme measures.” “The Congress is pushing the president toward deep and tragic reflections about what steps he must take to save reforms and save democracy,” his spokesman said. Yeltsin’s American patrons hoped he wouldn’t stage some sort of presidential coup-though they feared they might have to support him, at least passively, if he did. Washington had little influence over events in Russia. “We could have, done a lot in January 1992 with a few billion dollars. Today it would take tens of billions, and given Yeltsin’s declining power, it still might not succeed,” says Paul Goble, a former CIA and State Department official who was an in-house critic of the Bush administration’s efforts to save Mikhail Gorbachev. “We can’t save Yeltsin or reform. We can only participate at the margins.”
That’s a tough break for Clinton, since in a way his own presidency is riding on Yeltsin’s. “If Boris Yeltsin’s democratic government collapses and is replaced by an aggressive, hard-line nationalist government, this will have a far greater impact on the American economy than all the Clinton domestic programs combined,” Nixon wrote in The New York Times two weeks ago. Clinton seems to agree. Aid to Russia is the only foreign-policy issue he has listed among his top five legislative priorities. “He knows it’s central to his success as president,” says an aide. Clinton called last week for an emergency meeting of the seven leading industrial democracies to discuss aid and debt relief for Russia. And he tried repeatedly to bolster Yeltsin with rhetoric. “I support democracy in Russia and the movement to a market economy, and Boris Yeltsin is the elected president of Russia,” he said after the Congress of People’s Deputies slapped Yeltsin down for the umpteenth time.
So far, Clinton’s advisers are taking the crisis calmly. Strobe Talbott, the former Time magazine editor and longstanding FOB who has been nominated ambassador at large to Russia and other former Soviet republics, is preparing a package of aid proposals for Clinton’s still-scheduled summit with Yeltsin in Vancouver early next month. The idea would be to bypass the government and directly bolster Russia’s fledgling private industry. Talbott and others in the administration believe Yeltsin still has not reached the end of the line. “The question is,” said a top State Department official, “can we give him a new lease on life? We’re doing what we can; we’re going to do more.” Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev told Secretary of State Warren Christopher that, despite outward appearances, Yeltsin remained in control. Christopher said their phone conversation was “very reassuring.”
Still, the assault on Yeltsin was unrelenting. The Congress trimmed his executive prerogatives, repudiating a power-sharing compromise that was worked out last December. Congress chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov, Yeltsin’s most prominent rival, said the compromise was “the work of the Devil.” Legislators scrubbed Yeltsin’s plan for a national referendum right after his summit with Clinton, asking Russians to decide whether the president or the Parliament should have the upper hand in government. Yeltsin may hold a nonbinding plebiscite on the issue. Khasbulatov wants to move up elections for both the presidency and the Parliament, sensing that weakness at home and abroad has made Yeltsin politically vulnerable. “Yeltsin is a puppet of the Americans,” charges Mikhail Astafyev, a conservative deputy.
Or is it Clinton who has become a pawn of Yeltsin? In last year’s presidential campaign, Clinton criticized Bush for sticking with Gorbachev when he could have supported Yeltsin’s democrats. Now some analysts, including Henry Kissinger, worry that Clinton may be staking too much on Yeltsin. “There’s a big difference here,” replies a Clinton aide. “When Bush was embracing Gorbachev, to the exclusion of everyone else, there was an even more reform-minded alternative-Yeltsin. There is no more reform-minded alternative now to Yeltsin.” Nixon, who has visited Russia three times in the past three years, wrote in his Times op-ed piece that, “After meeting all the major leaders in Russia, I am convinced that our choice is not between [Yeltsin] and somebody better, but between him and someone worse.”
But if Yeltsin is to govern effectively, he may have to silence the Parliament. It is not at all clear that he can get away with imposing presidential rule. Although he has pointedly courted military leaders, they have taken the position, so far, that the armed forces should stay out of the political struggle. The United States obviously cannot promise in advance to support Yeltsin if he takes matters into his own hands. But if he moves peacefully against the Congress, and guarantees quick elections to settle the power struggle, it is hard to see how Washington could disown him. “I would go with Boris Yeltsin, even if he behaves undemocratically in the short term,” says Michael Mandelbaum, a Russia expert and Clinton friend who wrote the transition team’s study on Russia. “He is a democrat; most of the parliamentarians are not. He was elected democratically; they were not. And he favors market and democratic reforms, while they do not.” As Yeltsin tries to muddle through his latest crisis, Washington has little choice but to stand by its man.
