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俄羅斯學報 第三期 民國 92 年 3 月
In search of the social forces of post-Soviet Russia’s transformation, this paper
traces their origins back to the critical period of 1989-1993. From 1989 onwards,
competitive elections became the stimulus to the mobilizing force in society.
Liberalization in the form of social pluralism had expanded the scope of the civil
society, while democratization through the mechanism of contested elections had
turned it into a political society. 1 The institutional empowerment of the RSFSR
Congress of People’s Deputies and the Russian Presidency not only precipitated the
collapse of the Soviet Union but also complicated the state-building process in
post-Soviet Russia. In contrast to a regime-initiated civil society as the political ally of
“perestroyka from above,” this paper focuses on the society-mobilized civil society
which was the driving force of “reform from below.” 2
In this critical juncture, 1989-1993, I classify two types or functions of social
forces in the development of a society-mobilized civil society in two different
political contexts: first, 1989-91, an elections-stimulated and anti-regime civil society
(the politics of liberation); and second, 1991-93, a pro-reform and anti-restorationist
civil society (the politics of state-building). The political contexts of the disintegrating
Soviet Union and the subsequent Russian state-building triggered the corresponding
opportunities for political mobilization. The representative cases of a
society-mobilized civil society during this transition period were the miners’
movement and Democratic Russia (DemRossiya). Miners’ strikes endangered the
legitimacy of the Communist regime. The social movement DemRossiya used mass
rallies and electoral mobilization to topple the Soviet nomenklatura, as well as
mobilized support for Yeltsin’s administration in its struggle against the post-Soviet
1
Unlike its democratic counterparts in the anti-Communist movements in Eastern Europe, such as
Solidarity in Poland, Civic Forum in Czechoslovakia, and the Union of Democratic Forces in Bulgaria,
which were able to offer themselves as the alternatives to the outgoing Communist regimes, Russia’s
democratic movement represented by Democratic Russia (DemRossiya) never came to power, that is,
Russian civil society did not turn itself into a state. Lilia Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality
(Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999), 31.
2
This chapter focuses only on democratically reform-oriented organizations of civil society. For
conservative nationalist or statist groups, as well as the nationalist-communist alliance during this
period, see John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1993), chap. 4; Gordon M. Hahn, “Opposition Politics in Russia,” Europe-Asia
Studies 46, no. 2 (1994): 305-35; and Yitzhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism
and the Soviet State, 1953-1991 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
俄羅斯轉型的社會力量探源
75
anti-reform parliament. 3 This paper mainly focuses on three sets of institutional
arrangements which were central to the changing relations between state and society:
elections, social partnership, and executive-legislative relations.
The Politics of Liberation: An Elections-Stimulated and Anti-Regime Civil
Society
The roots of popular mobilization lay in the broadened political opportunity
structure initiated by Gorbachev. As transition theorists maintain: “Reformist political
leaders contribute to the potential for mobilization by adopting controversial policies
by reaching out to formerly marginalized constituencies for support in the ensuing
battles among the political elites.”4 Regime-initiated grassroots activism became a
support for Gorbachev and constituted an important alliance against the conservative
mid-level bureaucracy of the Communist Party. Public opinion and citizen
participation became increasingly significant in this transition period. The elections of
1989 and 1990 further enlarged the opportunity structure for political mobilization.
Newly empowered democratic institutions served as pro-reform counterweights to the
entrenched conservative bureaucracies.
Informal groups also provided training grounds for political elites and created the
organizational groundwork of electoral mobilization. 5 Various voters’ clubs and
electoral blocs were created by grassroots activists to support opposition candidates.
3
On a few occasions, according to Yitzhak M. Brudny, DemRossiya did not lose its impressive
mobilizational ability after the collapse of Communist regime “because of a distinctive feature of the
Russian democratization process: the emergence of the Gorbachev-era parliament (the Congress of
People’s Deputies and its Supreme Soviet) as an institution that has threatened to reverse the
democratization process in the post-communist period. This has sustained DR’s [DemRossiya] capacity
as a movement for anti-restorationist mobilization.” Yitzhak M. Brudny, “The Dynamics of
‘Democratic Russia’, 1990-1993” Post-Soviet Affairs 9, no. 2 (1993): 142.
4
Sidney Tarrow, “Aiming at a Moving Target: Social Science and the Recent Rebellions in Eastern
Europe,” PS: Political Science and Politics (March 1991): 15.
5
Brudny, “The Dynamics of ‘Democratic Russia’,” 142-43. With the exception of the Democratic
Union, most informal groups viewed the elections for the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, the
Russian Congress of People’s Deputies, and the local and district soviets as opportunities to promote
reform from within the system. Democratic Union did not participate in the elections and advocated the
overthrow of the entire Soviet system. See Michael McFaul and Sergei Markov, The Troubled Birth of
Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1993),
3 and 7.
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俄羅斯學報 第三期 民國 92 年 3 月
The introduction of competitive elections for the new parliaments created unity
among ideologically diverse elites and interregional electoral alliances across the
country and provided the most important stimulus for the formation of DemRossiya. 6
Opposition forces under the broad umbrella of DemRossiya were poised to challenge
the Communist Party for control of the state. The elections directly promoted Russia’s
independent democrats into government, thus establishing a base of opposition within
the Soviet state itself. The miners’ unrest, which undermined the authority of
Gorbachev’s leadership and provided an opportunity for the further encroachment of
the newly autonomous republic-level governments on the center, contributed to the
dissolution of the central government and state structures. 7 The organizational
structure, common value system, and mobilizational ability of informal groups,
DemRossiya, and labor movement, in conjunction with the regime’s response, are
critical elements in understanding the changing political opportunity structure as well
as the development of civil society.
Elections March 1989
A new election law was approved in December 1988, which provided for a
choice of candidates in the coming national-level and local legislative elections.
Despite the unprecedented use of contested elections for the USSR Congress of
People’s Deputies, one third of the 2,250 deputies were reserved seats for the
Communist Party, the Komsomol, the official trade unions and other
officially-sponsored public organizations. 8 Sergey Stankevich, a leader of the
Moscow Popular Front, was the only informal groups’ candidate to be elected to the
6
Brudny, “The Dynamics of ‘Democratic Russia’,” 142-43. For an interview which focused on the
history of informal movements leading up to the creation of DemRossiya, see the interview with
Mikhail Schneider, one of the original members of the organisational committee for DemRossiya, in
McFaul and Markov, The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy, 141-53.
7
Linda J. Cook, The Soviet Social Contract and Why It Failed: Welfare Policy and Workers’ Politics
from Brezhnev to Yeltsin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 193-96.
8
The major exception to the “rubber-stamp elections” in the 39 official public organizations authorized
to select deputies occurred in the Academy of Sciences, where a widespread mutiny forced a second
round of nominations and elections resulting in the winning of seats by several distinguished scientists
and scholars such as Andrey Sakharov, Dmitriy Likhachev, Roald Sagdeev, and Nikolay Shmelev. See
Michael Urban, Vyacheslav Igrunov, and Sergei Mitrokhin, The Rebirth of Politics in Russia
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 348; and Michael Urban, More Power to the Soviets:
the Democratic Revolution in the USSR (Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar, 1990), 93-7.
俄羅斯轉型的社會力量探源
77
new legislature. 9 Nevertheless, independent voters’ associations and popular fronts
did help elect progressive candidates in popular elections and in elections held in
public organizations as well, including Yuriy Afanas’ev, Il’ya Zaslavsky, Andrey
Sakharov, Telman Gdlyan, Boris Yeltsin, and Arkadiy Murashev. Informal groups also
conducted negative campaigns against conservative senior figures from the CPSU
hierarchy. 10 Even though the intention of the elections was to make sure of CPSU’s
“leading role” in society, which was still enshrined in the Soviet Constitution, the
elections also served as “a surrogate party purge, with popular rejection at the polls
providing added leverage to oust certain officials not identified with the reform
leadership.” 11
The 1989 elections represented a watershed event in the course of Russia’s
political development, fundamentally redefining the relations between state and
society. 12 At this juncture, the Congress of People’s Deputies became an important
9
McFaul and Markov, The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy, 143. Due to the resistance of the
local apparatus, Moscow Popular Front only managed to field candidates in two electoral districts
rather than in the nineteen districts of its original plan. Urban, et al., The Rebirth of Politics in Russia,
132.
10
As a result, several senior CPSU members lost in the election campaign. For example, Yuriy
Solovev, the first secretary of the Leningrad oblast, ran unopposed but lost by not receiving the
required 50 percent. Aleksei Bol’shakov, the deputy chairman of the Leningrad Party committee, and
Anatoly Gerasimov, the first secretary of Leningrad City Party Committee, also lost. A total number of
31 regional first secretaries (the obkom and kraikom first secretaries) of the CPSU suffered defeat at
the polls. For details, see V. A. Kolosov, N. V. Petrov, L. V. Smirnyagin, eds., Vesna 89: geographiya
parliamentskikh vyborov (Moscow: Progress, 1990).
11
Urban, et al., The Rebirth of Politics in Russia, 120. Unable to win a seat in the electoral competition,
74 members and 36 candidate-members of the Central Committee accepted early retirement in the
immediate aftermath of the elections. Ibid. 121.
12
Despite the recognition of the limitations of the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies as a
representative institution, the Moscow Popular Front members still actively participated in the elections
because of their conviction that “change in a reformed Soviet political society, however limited, was
the only way to create the social basis for political influence when the party and state controlled all
instruments of coercion and still dominated resources essential for the mobilization of independent
activity.” They concluded that participating in the elections rather than conducting extrasystemic
confrontation against the Communist party was the only option for increasing public awareness and
activating citizens’ political consciousness. Marcia A. Weigle, Russia’s Liberal Project: State-Society
Relations in the Transition from Communism (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University
Press, 2000), 148-49.
俄羅斯學報 第三期 民國 92 年 3 月
78
institution for further democratic mobilization throughout 1989. During the May-June
first Congress, millions of people followed the daily proceedings of the Congress
through live television and radio. 13 Memorial and the Moscow Popular Front
alternated as hosts to the daily mass rally held at the parade grounds next to the
Luzhniki sports stadium, which served as a meeting place between deputies and
electorate. 14 Over 100,000 people showed up to endorse the principal slogans: “All
Power to the Soviets!,” “For a Radical Perestroika!,” and “For a Union of Really Free
and Sovereign People!.” 15 At the end of congressional proceedings, progressive
deputies, such as Afanas’ev, Yeltsin, Gavriil Popov, Stankevich, and Sakharov, arrived
at Luzhniki and gave their personal reports to the rally on that day’s events at the
Congress. The idea of the Moscow Association of Voters (MOI, in its Russian
acronym), a coalition of voters’ clubs that had coalesced around democratic
candidates during the March 1989 elections, was born at these rallies. 16 The backbone
of MOI was the Moscow Popular Front groups in every borough and the teams that
had acted as deputies’ campaign staffs. 17 Aiming at the upcoming Russian elections
scheduled for March 1990, MOI decided to seek maximum inclusiveness by avoiding
potentially divisive issues such as formulating a program (none was adopted) or
choosing a leader (a fifteen-person Coordinating Council was elected). 18
Within the Congress, a liberal bloc called the Interregional Group of Deputies
(hereafter: IGD) was organized by the progressive deputies. It was officially founded
in July 1989 by some 388 deputies. Five co-chairmen were elected, including Yeltsin,
Afanas’ev, Popov, Sakharov, and Viktor Palm. A Coordinating Council of twenty-five
13
Sakharov commented on this effect that, “the televised debates attracted enormous attention and
served further to politicize the populace.” Literaturnaya gazeta, 21 June 1989. Cited in Dunlop, The
Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire, 80.
14
The other sponsored informal groups were Moscow Tribune, Democratic Perestroika, Civic Dignity,
and Voters’ Club of Moscow. See Urban, et al., The Rebirth of Politics in Russia, 156.
15
16
Ibid.
“Interview with Mikhail Schneider,” in McFaul and Markov, The Troubled Birth of Russian
Democracy, 148.
17
Ibid.
18
Urban, et al., The Rebirth of Politics in Russia, 165. MOI held its founding conference on 27 July
1989. According to MOI’s charter, MOI was “a union of clubs and committees devoted to promoting
civil society and democracy whose efforts would be coordinated, but in no way directed, by MOI itself.
The functions envisaged for MOI were confined to publicity and electioneering: organization of public
discussions, publication of information bulletins, service on electoral commissions, nomination of
candidates, conducting election campaigns and contributing to the legislative process by drafting bills.”
Ibid., 360.
俄羅斯轉型的社會力量探源
79
persons was selected. In the political sphere, the platform adopted at the founding
congress advocated “revoking the CPSU’s monopoly on power, the granting of full
power to the soviets, the right of citizens freely to form political, professional, and
other organizations, and the responsibility of power before society.” 19
Despite its organizational weakness, the appearance of IGD as an opposition
faction in the legislature, around which grassroots informal groups and voters’ clubs
began to unite, represented a breakthrough for the democratic movement in terms of
communication. 20 In addition to regular attendance of IGD’s members at meetings
held by informal groups, the Coordinating Council of IGD also invited representatives
of informal groups to its conferences in December 1989 to cement close relations with
the democratic movement. 21 IGD’s changing political identity throughout 1989 could
be described as follows: “If its leading intellectual figures from Moscow Tribune had
defined their role in early 1989 as progressive counsel to the authorities and by
mid-year as a loyal--albeit reluctant--opposition, then by year’s end they were
prepared to acknowledge that theirs was indeed an opposition aimed not at reforming
the Communist system but at liquidating it.” 22
In January 1990, the Democratic Platform reform faction within the CPSU was
founded in Moscow by 455 delegates representing 175 party clubs and organizations
and 55,000 Communists from 102 cities and 13 union republics, to demand “rapid
democratization of the Communist party.” 23 On 2 February 1990 a democratic
demonstration attended by an estimated 500,000 people, the largest one held in
Moscow in decades, called for the revoking of Article Six of the Constitution. 24
Miners’ Strikes
The most significant worker activism by way of the massive strikes in 1989
resulted from Gorbachev’s political reforms. 25 The abrupt change in the political
19
Russkaya mysl’, 4 August 1989. Cited in Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet
Empire, 83.
20
Urban, et al., The Rebirth of Politics in Russia, 164.
21
Ibid., 168 and 361.
22
Ibid., 168.
23
Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire, 92.
24
Ibid., 93.
25
In the pre-Gorbachev period, according to Victor Zaslavsky, the lack of solidarity and collective
action among Soviet workers resulted from the credible threat of repression and from bureaucratic
80
俄羅斯學報 第三期 民國 92 年 3 月
climate, which occurred in the wake of the 1989 election campaign and the live
broadcasts of the first Congress, stimulated the process of politicization of miners’
demands in the major coal mining regions such as the Kuzbass, Vorkuta and the
Donbass. 26 This wave of coal miners’ strikes was not related to ethnic disputes as was
the previous mass strikes in the Caucasus and the Baltic republics in 1988, but to
political mobilization of sections of the Soviet working class. 27 Thanks to glasnost’,
the miners’ strikes of July 1989 received unprecedented publicity which set off a
demonstration effect throughout the USSR. 28
The coal miners’ strategic position in industry gave them the potential for
collective action that could have damaged or paralyzed the economy. Demanding
better wages and improved working conditions, over half a million miners were on
manipulation of workers. An atomized and depoliticized working class resulted in the workers’
political quiescence. See Victor Zaslavsky, The Neo-Stalinist State: Class, Ethnicity, and Consensus in
Soviet Society (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1982). Glasnost’ and the loosening of political control
contributed significantly to the emergence of labor activism and unrest. In the autumn of 1987, the
Soviet press began reporting Soviet workers’ protests, work stoppages, and strikes. In addition, during
the years 1986 through 1988, the consequences of a number of reform policies, such as an economic
modernization plan calling for large-scale reductions in the use of manual labor, and the Law on the
State Enterprises mandating both self-financing and self-management, provided the context for the
growth of workers’ discontent and activism. Appealing through established, official channels, workers’
protests against layoffs and pay cuts remained politically innocuous and were confined to individual
grievances, to the factories and to production relations. The patterns of workers’ strikes of 1987 and
1988 were spontaneous, uncoordinated, disconnected, and localized. Even from the perspective of the
social contract thesis which constrained the Gorbachev regime from pursuing its original reform
strategy, “before mid-1989, workers’ protests were neither large nor well organized enough to force
policy retreat.” See Cook, The Soviet Social Contract and Why It Failed, 152-56, and 207.
26
Russell Bova, “Worker Activism: the Role of the State,” in Perestroika from Below: Social
Movements in the Soviet Union, eds. J. B. Sedaitis and J. Butterfield (Boulder: Westview, 1991), 33-4.
27
Peter Rutland, “Labor Unrest and Movements in 1989 and 1990,” in Milestones in Glasnost and
Perestroyka: Politics and People, eds. Ed A. Hewett and Victor H. Winston (Washington, D.C.: The
Brookings Institution, 1991), 290. According to Rutland, the worker unrest of 1989 had two distinctive
features: first, the plethora of demands, ranging from constitutional changes to minor aspects of wage
policy; and second, the extreme fragmentation of the movement--both over the tactics to be followed,
and over the general goals to be pursued. Ibid., 288.
28
Elizabeth Teague, “Perestroika and the Soviet Worker,” Government and Opposition 25, no. 2
(1990), 197.
俄羅斯轉型的社會力量探源
81
strike between 10 and 22 July 1989, the first time since the 1920s. 29 From July to
November 1989, the time lost through strikes amounted to 5.5 million man-days, that
is, an average of nearly 50,000 workers were on strike each day. 30 The miners’ strikes
bypassed the official trade unions and local authorities, demonstrating the latter’s
irrelevance to the miners’ needs. As a result, to co-ordinate activities and to negotiate
on their behalf with the authorities, the miners set up their own strike committees
which formulated their demands. 31 Strike committees later transformed themselves
into permanent workers’ committees to monitor the implementation of the strike
agreements.
The role of the miners was pivotal in accelerating “perestroyka from below,”
and in discrediting further the central planning system and the local party-state
apparatus. 32 The miners’ demands escalated from material necessities to political
ones. The first explicitly political demands came from the Arctic city of Vorkuta
29
Judith Devlin, The Rise of the Russian Democrats: The Causes and Consequences of the Elite
Revolution (Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar, 1995), 230.
30
Izvestiya, 14 December 1989.
31
Miners’ discontents and grievances focused on living conditions, work regime, the slow pace of
reform, the effects of reform, management, and environmental pollution. A typical list of demands
included improved pay, pensions, and holidays; better provision of food and industrial goods; more
housing construction; consumer, municipal, and medical services; more investment in modernization of
the mines; cuts in the administrative apparatus; and more rights for labor collectives. In general, the
miners supported the industrial reforms, that is, enterprise autonomy and self-financing. For details, see
Izvestiya, 19 July 1989, p. 6; and Trud, 12 July 1989, p. 1.
32
The experience of Poland’s Solidarity in 1980 was not relevant for the case of Soviet workers’ unrest
in the year of 1989. As Elizabeth Teague pointed out, three aspects revealed the difference. First, the
main aim of the Polish workers was to set up an independent trade union movement, while Soviet
workers just tried to reform the system from within. Secondly, Polish dissident intellectuals played a
major role in the development of the workers’ movement, while the communication between Soviet
workers and intellectuals was at that time almost non-existent. Thirdly and most importantly, the Polish
society was ethnically homogeneous and united by its Catholic faith, while the Soviet Union was a
multinational empire which led to the fragmentation of workers’ movements. Teague, “Perestroika and
the Soviet Worker,” 204-5. Rutland also pointed out that the links between the Soviet regions in the
course of strikes were rather tenuous, that is, the links were through an interregional demonstration
effect rather than through a network of truckers ferrying messages between the regional centers which
Poland’s Solidarity did in 1980. The Soviet strikes of 1989 did not succeed in generating a broadly
based workers’ movement along the lines of Poland’s Solidarity to topple the Soviet system. See
Rutland, “Labor Unrest and Movements in 1989 and 1990,” 292, 304 and 307-8.
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俄羅斯學報 第三期 民國 92 年 3 月
during the July 1989 strikes which coincided with the televised meetings of the
opening session of the Supreme Soviet. 33 Vladimir Lushnikov, a miner deputy elected
from Vorkuta, spelled out the political demands of the miners in a nationally televised
speech before the USSR Supreme Soviet: the removal of Article 6 from the
Constitution; direct election of the chairmen of soviets at all levels; and the abolition
of the guaranteed seats in the soviets for the officially-sponsored public
organizations. 34
The government developed ad hoc procedures, sending high-level commissions
to negotiate with the strike committees, and providing multiple institutional
guarantors including the Council of Ministers and the All-Union Central Council of
Trade Unions to the strike agreements. The miners’ strikes were defused only through
the signed agreements which were formalized as Council of Ministers Resolution No.
608 that assured miners’ grievances and demands would be met in full. 35 The
government also tried to establish a legal framework for industrial conflicts. On
October 9 1989 the Supreme Soviet adopted the resolution “On Procedures for
Settling Collective Labor Disputes,” which both established and limited Soviet
workers’ right to strike. 36 The issue of the legality of strikes politicized the continuing
workers’ unrest and left miners outraged and intransigent. 37
Apart from the coal mining areas, strike activity in other key sectors of the
economy tried to emulate the miners’ success but failed to generate a network of new
organizations capable of articulating and defending workers’ interests. 38 The March
33
Rutland, “Labor Unrest and Movements in 1989 and 1990,” 301.
34
Krasnaya znamya, 25 July 1989, p. 1. Cited in Rutland, “Labor Unrest and Movements in 1989 and
1990,” 301.
35
Polozheniye, “O gosudarstvenno-obshchestvennoy komissii po kontrol’yu za vypolneniyem
postanovleniya SM SSSR ot 3 Avgusta 1989 no. 608,” Moscow, 24 November 1989. See Rutland,
“Labor Unrest and Movements in 1989 and 1990,” 302-4.
36
For the text of this resolution, see Pravda, 14 October 1989, pp. 1-2.
37
Cook, The Soviet Social Contract and Why It Failed, 170-71.
38
Rutland, “Labor Unrest and Movements in 1989 and 1990,” 314-15. The coal miners represent only
one sector of the industrial labor force. In the words of Linda J. Cook, “a sector clearly distinguished
by three features of the mining socioeconomy which are critical to an understanding of the strikes’
patterns and program: 1. the concentration of miners in workers’ settlements where they do hard and
dangerous work, which contributed to their solidarity and militance; 2. the low profitability of the coal
industry caused by state price control; 3. international demand for coal, which can potentially be sold
for hard currency on international markets.” Cook, The Soviet Social Contract and Why It Failed, 157.
俄羅斯轉型的社會力量探源
83
1990 elections for republic and local soviets provided an opportunity for strike
activists to participate in high politics. For example, five Kuzbass leaders were elected
to the Russian parliament, and 30 candidates who were endorsed by Kuzbass’s
electoral campaign were elected to the 250-seat Kemerovo oblast soviet. 39 The
miners’ committees continued to raise grievances about the government’s fulfillment
of the strike accord, Resolution No. 608. In July 1990, the Regional Council of Strike
Committees called a twenty-four-hour political strike to demand the resignation of
Ryzhkov’s government, the end of party control of enterprises and central institutions,
and the nationalization of the property of the Communist Party and All-Union Central
Council of Trade Unions. 40 In the absence of both institutionalized mechanisms and
competence for bargaining with organized workers, as Linda J. Cook wrote,
“Ryzhkov’s government typically responded to labor unrest with easy concessions
followed by poor delivery, setting a pattern which led repeatedly to protracted
disputes with mobilized sectors of the labor force, and which further undermined the
state’s authority.” 41
In the hope of creating a new, independent national trade union federation, the
Confederation of Labor was formed in May 1990 in Novokuznetsk by 270
representatives of small independent unions from around the country. 42 This
organisation was weak and could not represent the whole workers’ movement because
workers from other industries, except those from the Kuzbass coal mining districts,
failed to join it in significant numbers. Attempts by party conservatives to co-opt the
workers’ movement through the compliant United Workers’ Front also failed to attract
the miners. 43
Due to their declining living standards and the government’s failure to implement
Resolution No. 608, particularly regarding the miners’ economic autonomy, the coal
miners went on strike again in March 1991. With a lack of unified leadership, the
39
V. Pribylovskiy, Slovar’ novykh politicheskikh partii i organizatsii Rossii (Moscow: Panorama,
1991), 83.
40
Cook, The Soviet Social Contract and Why It Failed, 193.
41
Ibid., 194 and 206.
42
Rutland, “Labor Unrest and Movements in 1989 and 1990,” 310; and V. N. Berezovskiy, N. I.
Krotov and V. V. Chervyakov, Rossiya: partii, assotsiatsii, soyuzy, kluby, vol. 1 (Moscow: Rau-Press,
1991), 56-7.
43
On the formation of the United Workers’ Front, see FBIS:SU, 25 August 1989, p. 82, and FBIS:SU,
20 October 1989, pp, 71-73.
84
俄羅斯學報 第三期 民國 92 年 3 月
strikers displayed less organisation and unity than in the summer of 1989. 44 The April
1991 price reform further politicized labors’ movement. In the first quarter of 1991,
Russia lost 573,000 man-days through strikes. 45
Because the miners no longer trusted the central government to deliver on its
promises, they began to look to republic-level governments, which became the
alternative bargaining partners, for satisfaction of their demands. With the republic
governments promising the miners economic independence, together they formed an
alliance against the center and found common ground in demanding the transfer of the
mines from central to republic jurisdiction. The Soviet regime-labor relations during
Gorbachev’s period can be summarized in Cook’s words,
[T]he democratizing Soviet state was weak and vulnerable in the face of
grass-roots challenges from labor. No longer willing to repress workers’
grievances in the mode of its authoritarian predecessor, it also lacked the
established democratic state’s legal and institutional framework for labor
negotiation. Moreover, its hurried efforts to create rules for dealing with
industrial conflicts failed; miners and others rejected the legislation, and its
application served only to politicize the labor movement. 46
The March 1990 RSFSR Elections
With minor modifications, Russian legislative structure was built on the model of
the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies: Congress, Supreme Soviet, and Presidium
of the Supreme Soviet. Russian Congress had 1,068 deputies, 900 of them elected in
equally sized popular districts, and 168 of them elected in national-territorial districts.
There were no seats reserved for public organizations. The major difference between
the Russian and the USSR legislatures stemmed from the electoral laws that defined
44
The three organizations which initiated the strike, the Council of Kuzbass Workers’ Committees, the
Regional Council of Donbass Strike Committees, and the Independent Trade Union of Coal Miners,
shortly set up the Interregional Coordinating Council in Moscow. Despite their varied demands, the
two central demands were: “wage increase of 100 to 150 percent with improved pension benefits, and
the resignation of Gorbachev and his government.” Cook, The Soviet Social Contract and Why It
Failed, 194.
45
Ekonomika i zhizn’, no., 17, 1991, p. 16.
46
Cook, The Soviet Social Contract and Why It Failed, 171.
俄羅斯轉型的社會力量探源
85
the way the candidates were nominated. 47 Russian electoral law, which was passed by
the old Russian Supreme Soviet in October 1989, abolished the pre-electoral district
meetings, the “filters” in the March 1989 elections, which kept many independent
candidates off the ballot, and enabled many more types of collectives the right to
nominate candidates. 48 MOI made concerted efforts to get some of its members
elected to the district electoral commissions, since the latter had arbitrarily denied the
registrations of thousands of candidates in the previous elections. 49
The 1990 elections for the RSFSR Congress of People’s Deputies as well as local
and district soviets reinvigorated grassroots political activism. To get a better chance
of winning a seat, emerging political groups were inclined to become a serious
political force through the establishment of an electoral bloc. 50 Groups like Moscow
Popular Front and MOI became professional campaign organizations by means of
organizing mass demonstrations, disseminating leaflets, and mobilizing support
networks for democratically-minded candidates endorsed by the newly-established
electoral bloc DemRossiya. 51 Thus, opposition to the election candidates associated
with the Communist party apparatus and their nomenklatura allies in the state
bureaucracy and in state enterprises was organized by DemRossiya. DemRossiya was
supporting more than 5,000 candidates for the various soviets by 20 February 1990. 52
Radical majorities were elected to the city councils of Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and
several large cities in the Urals, Siberia, and the Far East.
47
Jerry F. Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985-1991 (Washington, D.C.:
Brookings Institution Press, 1997), 282-3. The more democratic electoral rules led to a more
democratic nomination process. According to Hough, “More candidates were nominated in the 1,068
districts in the 1990 Russian election than in the 1,500 districts in the 1989 USSR election--8,254 or 7.7
per district as compared with 7,351 or 4.9 per district in 1989. More important, the screening process
had drastically reduced the number of candidates from 4.9 to 1.9 per district in 1989, but only from 7.7
to 6.3 in 1990. The decrease in 1990 seems to have resulted almost totally from the voluntary
withdrawal of candidates, rules violations, or candidates being nominated in more than one district.”
Ibid., 283-4.
48
For the text of the 1990 Russian electoral law, see Izvestiya, 28 October 1989.
49
Urban, et al., The Rebirth of Politics in Russia, 176.
50
I. N. Barygin, ed., Politicheskie partii, dvizheniya i organizatsii sovremennoy Rossii na rubezhe
vekov. 1999 g. Analiticheskiy spravochnik (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Mikhaylova V. A., 1999), 35.
51
In addition to MOI and the Moscow Popular Front, the other important organizational predecessors
of DemRossiya were the Memorial, the Interclub Party Group, the nationwide network of voters’ clubs,
and the Interregional Group of Deputies. Brudny, “The Dynamics of ‘Democratic Russia’,” 143.
52
Argumenty i fakty, no. 8, (24 February-2 March 1990), p. 8.
86
俄羅斯學報 第三期 民國 92 年 3 月
After February 1990 new political parties had formed as a result of the repeal of
the Communist Party’s monopoly enshrined in Article Six of the Constitution. 53
However, the March 1990 elections were not multi-party elections both because the
Constitutional amendment was enacted too late (the official removal of Article 6 from
the Soviet Constitution was carried out on 13 March 1990 by the Third Congress of
People’s Deputies) to affect the formalities of the balloting 54 and because new
political parties had organized themselves too late to participate in the elections.55 The
Law on Public Associations which was adopted in October 1990 established the legal
mechanism whereby registered political parties and other civic organizations could
gain the status of juridical persons, thereby enabling them legally to engage in their
essential activities, such as opening of bank accounts, possession of foreign currency,
rental of premises, conclusion of contracts with printing houses, acquisition of
copying equipment, and operation of their own newspapers. 56
53
Article Six of the 1977 Soviet Constitution (which declared the Communist Party to be “the leading
and guiding force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system”) was replaced by a provision
which legalized the principle of a multi-party system: “The Communist Party of the Soviet Union,
other political parties, as well as trade union, youth, and other public organizations and mass
movements participate in shaping the policies of the Soviet state and in running state and public affairs
through their representatives elected to the soviets of people’s deputies and in other ways.” Pravda, 16
March 1990. Cited in Stephen White, Graeme Gill, and Darrell Slider, The Politics of Transition:
Shaping a Post-Soviet Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 155.
54
Timothy J. Colton, “The Moscow Election of 1990,” in Hewett and Winston, eds., Milestones in
Glasnost and Perestroyka, 334-5.
55
Even though Democratic Union, the self-proclaimed political party, had been founded in May 1988,
it boycotted both the 1989 and 1990 elections. On the formation of political parties, Urban, Igrunov,
and Mitrokhin, specified two axes of conflict that structured party formation from the emergence of a
national movement opposed to the Soviet regime in late 1989 to that regime’s overthrow in August
1991: the first axis was a single social-political movement as opposition to the Communist order; and
the second axis was conflict over sovereignty, Russia versus the USSR, after the 1990 elections. They
identified three types of political parties that formed in correspondence to three stages of CPSU
disintegration within the above time-frame: Stage 1: identity-based parties, such as the Social
Democratic Party of Russia, the Russian Christian Democratic Movement, and the Constitutional
Democratic Party; Stage 2: programmatic factions in the CPSU, including the Marxist Platform, the
Democratic Platform, and the Movement of Communist Initiative; and Stage 3: the anti-Communist
party, such as the Democratic Party of Russia. See Urban, et al., The Rebirth of Politics in Russia,
201-20.
56
White, Gill, and Slider, The Politics of Transition, 155-56.
俄羅斯轉型的社會力量探源
87
The concept of civil society was officially welcomed at the 28th Congress of
CPSU in 1990 when an entire section of the official document “Toward a Humane
Democratic Socialism” was devoted to “civil society and the legal state.” Among the
formulations to be found there are the following: “the formation of a civil society in
which no person exists for the sake of the state, but the state exists for the sake of the
person;” and “all social groups and communities have a guaranteed legal right and
actual possibility to express and build their interests,” which would be protected by
the “strengthening of a legal state, which excludes the dictatorship of any class, party,
grouping, or administrative bureaucracy.” 57 A new Central Committee Department for
Work with Socio-Political Organizations was created to facilitate contacts with public
organizations. However, public associations also faced resistance from conservative
Communist officials who used the power they possessed over registration and access
to facilities such as premises and printing equipment to obstruct the former
activities. 58 They also tried to hinder the development of the emerging public
organizations by such dirty tricks as infiltration of existing organizations, fostering
alternative groups to oppose those they perceived to be a challenge, attacks in the
media, and the forcible break-up of meetings. 59
In order to gain the status of a legal entity DemRossiya decided to register its
organizing committee with the Moscow City Council. 60 DemRossiya held its
founding congress in Moscow on 20-21 October 1990 and defined itself as a
movement consisting of its parliamentary bloc, political parties, civic organizations,
and individuals. 61 It was a loosely organized and collectively led social movement
57
Materialy XXVIII S’ezda KPSS, pp. 88-89. Cited in Mary Buckley, Redefining Russian Society and
Polity (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), 202. For emphasizing the importance of civil society and a
legal state for the development of human civilization, see the article published in the journal
Communist, Viktor Zotov, “Grazhdanskoe obshchestvo i pravovoe gosudarstvo: pokazateli
tsivilizovannosti,” Kommunist 17 (November 1990): 20-30.
58
White, Gill, and Slider, The Politics of Transition, 160.
59
Ibid.
60
“Interview with Mikhail Schneider,” 151.
61
According to Brudny, the founding congress of DemRossiya “was the most representative gathering
of democratic forces ever assembled in Russia: 1,273 delegates representing 10 main political parties
and 31 democratic organizations, the Interregional Group of Deputies, the DR [DemRossiya]
parliamentary bloc, and regionally-elected delegates from Moscow, Leningrad, and seventy regions of
Russia.” DemRossiya’s intention of coordinating all existing democratic organizations “represented a
88
俄羅斯學報 第三期 民國 92 年 3 月
rather than a well-disciplined and vertically-structured political party. 62 Its goals were
the “coordination of democratic forces opposing the state-political monopoly of the
CPSU, the carrying out of joint electoral campaigns, the coordination of parliamentary
activity, and other concrete actions promoting the creation of a civil society.” 63
In the absence of identifiable social interests or social differentiation structured
by property relations and manifest as associations pursuing specific interests, the only
mandate that DemRossiya could have sought in the elections was a political mandate
to undo the Communist order. 64 As an anti-Communist movement, DemRossiya
organized a series of demonstrations in major cities throughout Russia to topple the
old order: a protest over the invasions of Lithuania and Latvia in January 1991; a
successfully mobilized support for Yeltsin in March 1991 when the conservative
members of the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies had launched a campaign to
relieve Yeltsin of his chairmanship; the landslide election of Yeltsin as Russia’s first
President in June 1991; and the banning of the Communist Party following the August
1991 putsch.
June 1991 Russian Presidential Election and the August 1991 Coup
By the spring of 1991 DemRossiya had emerged as a force to be reckoned with:
by April 1991 it boasted a membership of 1.3 million in a thousand cities and towns
across Russia; a significant presence in the Russian parliament (about 35 per cent of
the seats); majorities of seats in the city soviets of Moscow and Leningrad; and its
clear departure from the East European model of a social movement which envisioned only individual
membership.” Cited in Brudny, “The Dynamics of ‘Democratic Russia’,” 149 and 148, respectively.
62
Ibid., 148. DemRossiya’s governing bodies consisted of a 48-member Coordinating Council and a
138-member Council of Regional Representatives. The movement’s first elected co-chairmen were
Yuriy Afanas’ev, Viktor Dmitriyev, Arkadiy Murashov, Lev Ponomaryov, and Gavriil Popov. Ibid.,
150.
63
Ibid., 150. According to the Declaration of the Congress of the DemRossiya, DemRossiya is founded
on the following principles: 1. Priority of the rights and interests of the individual over the rights and
interests of the State, parties, social and ethnic groups; 2. Implementation of the right to
self-determination, while observing the rights of the ethnic, religious and other minorities of the
non-native population; 3. Creation of a social market economy through privatization; 4. Social security
and charity as essential elements of the civil society; and 5. Intellectual and confessional tolerance,
while fighting totalitarian parties and structures which aspire to a political monopoly. Cited in Devlin,
The Rise of the Russian Democrats, 216.
64
Urban, et al., The Rebirth of Politics in Russia, 199, 220, and 371.
俄羅斯轉型的社會力量探源
89
mobilizational ability for demonstrations in the capital and other large cities. 65
Despite DemRossiya’s disappointment with Yeltsin’s refusal to accommodate its
request to call on Russians to vote against the Union in the March 1991 referendum,
the establishment of the Russian presidency endorsed by the referendum provided a
new opportunity for DemRossiya to mobilize democratic forces to campaign for
Yeltsin. DemRossiya’s National Initiative Group was officially registered with
Moscow City Soviet in May 1991 for the purpose of placing Yeltsin’s name on the
ballot through the petition option requiring 100,000 signatures. 66 Activists of
DemRossiya played a key role in the work of the electoral headquarters in Moscow
and in the regional headquarters in provincial cities as well. 67
Emphasizing the image of a statesman standing above the political fray, Yeltsin,
even as a symbolic leader of DemRossiya, did not establish any formal connections
with DemRossiya or any other organisation. 68 Soon after the elections, Yeltsin further
distanced himself from DemRossiya. 69 Regardless of DemRossiya’s rejection of the
draft of the Union Treaty, Yeltsin’s decision to sign the treaty jeopardized their
alliance. 70 The August 1991 coup defused their potential confrontation and provided
DemRossiya another opportunity to mobilize social forces in support of Yeltsin
through three mass demonstrations in Moscow and pro-democracy rallies in major
provincial cities. 71 The unprecedented civic unity and mobilization, particularly in
Moscow, raised the political costs of repression enormously and contributed
substantially to the failure of the coup which ended in just a few days.
The Politics of State-Building: A Pro-Reform and Anti-Restorationist Civil
Society
65
Michael E. Urban, “Boris El’tsin, Democratic Russia and the Campaign for the Russian Presidency,”
Soviet Studies 44, no. 2 (1992): 191.
66
Ibid., 204.
67
Brudny, “The Dynamics of ‘Democratic Russia’,” 152.
68
Yeltsin eschewed establishing any direct relationship with DemRossiya which secured his
nomination and conducted his election campaign. For example, Yeltsin failed to consult DemRossiya
on such major issues as the “nine-plus-one” agreement, his choice of Aleksander Rutskoi for his
running mate, and the composition of his post-election government. Urban, “Boris El’tsin, Democratic
Russia and the Campaign for the Russian Presidency,” 194.
69
Brudny, “The Dynamics of ‘Democratic Russia’,” 152.
70
Ibid., 152-53.
71
Ibid.
90
俄羅斯學報 第三期 民國 92 年 3 月
The major root of the political crisis in post-Communist Russia was the widening
gap between a weak and unconsolidated regime and a gradually demobilized society.
The sources of the power struggle lay more within the emerging political system than
outside of it. 72 In the words of Afanas’ev, one leading member of DemRossiya, “The
confrontational character of the relations between the government and the society has
changed little since Communism’s collapse....Russian society is excluded from the
decision-making process.” 73 Few of the institutional, legal, cultural, or behavioral
supports essential for an institutionalized civil society were in place. The domination
of political structure over civil society continued due to the rudimentary and
amorphous situation of post-Soviet civil society. 74 Accordingly, the confrontation
between the executive and the legislative branches took place in the context of
growing passivity on the part of society and increasing weakness of the democratic
movement. 75 In this section, the social bases of the construction of post-Soviet
Russia’s state are addressed in an analysis of corporatist forms of interest
representation and the adapting role of DemRossiya in support of Yeltsin’s
administration.
The Failure of Social Partnership 76
72
Lilia Shevtsova, “Parliament and the Political Crisis in Russia, 1991-1993,” in Democratization in
Russia: The Development of Legislative Institutions, ed. Jeffrey W. Hahn (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe,
1996), 41.
73
Literaturnaya gazeta, February 19, 1992. Cited in Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 33.
74
A. Galkin and Yu. Krasin, Grazhdanskoe obshchestvo: put’ k politicheskoy stabil’nosti (Moscow:
Fond sotsial’no-politicheskikh issledovaniy, 1992), 7.
75
Shevtsova, “Parliament and the Political Crisis in Russia, 1991-1993,” 37-39.
76
It should be noted that by the autumn of 1990, both the central and republic-level governments had
actually begun holding regular consultations with the reformed official trade unions over employment,
income, and other labor and social policies. In October 1990, Ryzhkov declared his government ready
for a social partnership with the newly-established General Confederation of Trade Unions (the
reformed successor of the old All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions). A general agreement
between the union and the Council of Ministers, which gave organized labor privileged status and
influence in economic and social policy-making, was approved in April 1991. According to Cook,
there were three problems with this social partnership (corporatist) approach to Soviet state-labor
relations. First, there was no significant, independent entrepreneurial or managerial group. Secondly,
the Soviet economy, with the exception of the embryonic cooperative sector, had no market features;
the state largely controlled and bore responsibility for wages, prices, and production. Finally, the
General Confederation of Trade Unions could not represent the interests of labor as a whole because of
俄羅斯轉型的社會力量探源
91
To defuse industrial unrest and maintain social stability, Yeltsin’s government
created an institutional framework of social partnership (also known as
neocorporatism or tripartism) within which workplace conflicts might be mediated
during market reforms. 77 On 26 October 1991, two days before informing the
parliament of his intention to launch economic reform, Yeltsin signed a presidential
decree “On Guaranteeing the Rights of Trade Unions during Transition to a Market
Economy,” according to which the government would consult with both Russian
official trade unions (the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia, the
successor to the old official RSFSR branch of Soviet trade unions) and other
republican trade union associations before adopting any major legislation on social or
economic issues. On 15 November 1991, Yeltsin signed a decree “On Social
Partnership and the Resolution of Labor Disputes,” which pledged that the Russian
government would reach an annual agreement on social and economic questions with
representatives of republican trade union associations and employers. Aiming to
review and set general and sectoral wage rates, monitor working conditions, and
mediate industrial disputes, a tripartite commission under the co-ordination of
Gennadii Burbulis, the then State Secretary, was created and composed of
representatives of the Russian government, the official and unofficial trade unions,
and Russia’s fledgling employers’ associations. 78
The Russian Tripartite Commission on the Regulation of Social and Labor
its lack of authority among rank-and-file workers. See Cook, The Soviet Social Contract and Why It
Failed, 191-92.
77
See Elizabeth Teague, “Russian Government Seeks ‘Social Partnership’,” RFE/RL Research Report
1, no., 25 (19 June 1992): 16-23. Corporatism is defined by Philippe C. Schmitter as “a system of
interest representation in which the constituent units are organized into a limited number of singular,
compulsory, noncompetitive, hierarchically ordered and functionally differentiated categories,
recognized or licensed (if not created) by the state and granted a deliberate representational monopoly
within their respective categories in exchange for observing certain controls on their selection of
leaders and articulation of demands and support.” Philippe C. Schmitter, “Still the Century of
Corporatism?” in The New Corporatism, eds. Fredrick B. Pike and Thomas Stritch (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), 93-94.
78
Organized management and organized labor were the most coherent and resource-rich interests in
post-Soviet civil society, mainly because of their critical positions in the economy and due to labors’
broad membership organisation. Without their cooperation, Yeltsin would be governing in a near
vacuum because he had no firm organized links to major societal interests. See Cook, The Soviet Social
Contract and Why It Failed, 212.
92
俄羅斯學報 第三期 民國 92 年 3 月
Relations came into official existence on 2 January 1992. The staff of government
ministries represented the government subgroup. A number of employers’
organizations including the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs and the
Congress of Russian Business Circles served on the employers’ subgroup. Fourteen
members of official and unofficial trade unions represented the trade union subgroup:
nine representatives from the Council of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions
of Russia; three from the Union of Socialist Trade Unions; and one each from the
Independent Miners’ Union and the independent union of civil aviation pilots. 79 On
25 March 1992, a General Agreement for 1992 was signed by representatives of the
above three subgroups. 80 In reality, the settlements of labor disputes were reached
outside the tripartite framework. The government managed to reduce strikes by giving
in to strikers’ demands and granting wage increases at the expense of the economic
reform program. 81 The desire of the government to find compliant trade-union
partners proved in vain, because such unions would not be able to win the workers’
trust. 82 The social partnership program was inadequate in shaping interest
representations and in promoting a social basis of support for state power, and thus it
failed to establish a corporatist arrangement for state-labor-management relations. 83
79
Teague, “Russian Government Seeks ‘Social Partnership’,” 20.
80
Under the terms of the General Agreement, “the government made various promises concerning the
provision of social safety nets (retraining programs, job creation schemes, unemployment benefits, and
so on) during the reform process. In return, the trade unions and the employers’ associations (including
those representing major state-owned enterprises) assented to the government’s plans to liberalize
prices, privatize property, and create what the General Agreement called ‘a socially oriented market
economy.’ The employers’ promised to refrain from mass layoffs and plant closures, and the unions
promised that, as long as the government and the employers observed their pledges, they would not call
their members out on strike.” Ibid., 20-21. For the text of the General Agreement, see Ekonomika i
zhizn’, no., 17, 1992, p. 20.
81
Teague, “Russian Government Seeks ‘Social Partnership’,” 22.
82
Igor Iurgens, “Chto tolky razgovarivat’ s zerkalom?” Trud, 9 October 1992, p. 3. The Federation of
Independent Trade Unions, as Simon Clarke has noted, seemed to represent not the interests of workers
but, along with managers, the interests of their production branch. See Simon Clarke, Peter Fairbrother,
and Vadim Borisov, The Workers’ Movement in Russia (Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar, 1995), 407.
83
Corporatism failed to establish an organizational model for post-Communist Russian state-society
relations. As Weigle pointed out, “The fledgling state had neither the institutional coherence nor the
financial resources to promote a state-dominated corporatism; Russian society did not have the
prerequisites, such as clearly defined property relations, an established market, or coherent sets of
interests represented in established organizations, to produce a society-instigated corporatism. Neither
business nor labor interests were developed enough to engage the state in meaningful discussion
俄羅斯轉型的社會力量探源
93
The Constraint of Executive-Legislative Conflict
The state-building period between 1992 and 1993 can be characterized as a
period of “dual power,” the fighting for supreme authority in Russia between the
president and the parliament. 84 Former Communists and right-wing nationalists
played an active and significant role in the Russian parliament and the majority of
local soviets, which became the bastion of institutional opposition to Yeltsin’s radical
economic reforms. The confrontation between the executive authority and the
legislature reflected the paradox of Russian political reality in this period. As Lilia
Shevtsova pointed out, “On the one hand, the preservation of the old institutions that
had been formed in the communist era (mainly the legislature) contributed to stability
of the situation in the postcommunist period. On the other hand, attempts to use the
old structures for the implementation of new goals provoked conflicts and increased
the political crisis; the demands of short-term stability contradicted the demands of
long-term stability.” 85
The constitutional crisis was generated by two main factors: elites’ strategic
choices and the peculiar institutional arrangements. 86 Since the collapse of
leading to feasible agreements on state-labor-management relations.” Weigle, Russia’s Liberal Project,
234.
84
During 1990-91, as Lilia Shevtsova observed, there were no serious conflicts between the Russian
executive branch and the legislature. Their consensus was mainly based on that of the struggle with
Gorbachev’s center. The disappearance of the common enemy, that is, the collapse of the Soviet Union
in December 1991, stimulated a process of polarization between these two former allies. Shevtsova,
“Parliament and the Political Crisis in Russia, 1991-1993,” 30. For an examination of three commonly
cited explanations for the deputies’ change from support to opposition towards Yeltsin and his reform
policies, i.e., (1) Faithful delegates: the deputies were representing the will of the nation in opposing
Yeltsin and Gaidar; (2) Design flaws: the innate flaws of the peculiar organisation of the Soviet
legislative system; and (3) Conservative deputies: the make up of the deputy corps in terms of social
background, see Thomas F. Remington, “Ménage a Trois: The End of Soviet Parliamentarism,” in
Democratization in Russia, 107-17. On this period as one of dual power, see Archie Brown, “Political
Leadership in Post-Communist Russia,” in Russia in Search of its Future, eds. Amin Saikal and
William Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 28-47.
85
86
Shevtsova, “Parliament and the Political Crisis in Russia, 1991-1993,” 38.
See Yitzhak M. Brudny, “Ruslan Khasbulatov, Aleksandr Rutskoi, and Intraelite Conflict in
Postcommunist Russia, 1991-1994,” in Patterns in Post-Soviet Leadership, eds. Timothy J. Colton and
Robert C. Tucker (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995): 75-101.
94
俄羅斯學報 第三期 民國 92 年 3 月
Communism, political elites were responding to institutional opportunities to better
their positions in the post-Communist Russian state. It was a power struggle within
the original anti-Gorbachev alliance involving Yeltsin, on the one hand, and Ruslan
Khasbulatov and Aleksandr Rutskoy, on the other. By January 1992, the
Yeltsin-Khasbulatov-Rutskoy coalition had collapsed because the primary goals
uniting its participants--to remove Gorbachev, destroy the CPSU, and abolish the
Union structure--were fulfilled, and a consensus on economic reform and the new
constitution failed to be reached. 87
The creation of the Russian presidency had destructive effects on the balance of
power between conservative and democratic deputies. 88 The position of the
democratic forces within the parliament was weakened as many deputies gave up their
deputy mandate upon assuming an executive branch job. 89 Yeltsin tended to free
executive decision making from legislative oversight rather than to build his base of
support within the Congress. 90 The confrontation between the president and
parliament at the top was mirrored below. The local institutions created by Yeltsin’s
decree in 1991-92, the appointed presidential representatives and heads of
administration, caused polarized gridlock between governors who looked to Yeltsin
for support and provincial soviets which aligned themselves with Khasbulatov’s
parliament. 91
The deputies had little party identification and few organizational means to
87
Ibid., 81 and 84.
88
See Remington, “Ménage a Trois: The End of Soviet Parliamentarism,” 117-32.
89
Ibid., 118-19.
90
Ibid., 126. According to Remington, the bipolar distribution of political positions along the left-right
cleavage produced at the elections of 1990 had eroded by the sixth Congress (6-21 April 1992).
Resisting Gaidar’s program of economic shock therapy, the Communist conservatives consolidated
their power within the Congress through 1992. The left-right dimension was supplemented by a new
one over presidential power. By the summer of 1993, deputies of the anti-Yeltsin opposition had
assumed nearly all the leadership positions in the parliament. Ibid., 124-32.
91
Jeffrey W. Hahn, “Studying the Russian Experience: Lessons for Legislative Studies (and for
Russia),” in Hahn, ed., Democratization in Russia, 244. According to Hahn, power at the local level
was wielded by elites because of the institutional weakness. “In the absence of established process,
local Russian politics remains highly personalistic.” Jeffrey W. Hahn, “Conclusions: Common Features
of Post-Soviet Local Politics,” in Local Power and Post-Soviet Politics, eds. Theodore H. Friedgut and
Jeffrey W. Hahn (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 277.
俄羅斯轉型的社會力量探源
95
mobilize voter support because the elections of 1990 were not multi-party elections.92
The decision not to hold founding elections in late 1991 had a destructive effect on
political parties and led to a delay in the formation of representative links with the
electorate. 93 Due to the weakness of alternative sources of support, the deputies
subordinated themselves to the patronage power wielded by the executive and
legislative leaderships. 94 The problem of the absence of strong linkages between
deputies and Russian citizens helped to explain why legislative factions failed to
evolve into real electoral parties. 95 Yeltsin’s refusal to associate himself with any
political party further excluded party politics from regular channels of interaction with
the state. The lack of a genuine multi-party system to intermediate competing social
interests reinforced the conflicts at the top echelon of power. 96
The Eighth Congress of People’s Deputies on March 12, 1993 terminated all the
extraordinary powers that had been accorded to Yeltsin by the Fifth Congress in
October 1991: the powers to issue decrees with the force of law, to appoint local
92
The first multi-party elections came in December 1993. None of the three sets of contested elections
in 1989, 1990, and 1991 fulfilled the criteria of multi-party elections. See Archie Brown, The
Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 1996), 188.
93
See Grigoriy V. Golosov, “Formaty partiinykh sistem v novykh demokratiiakh: institutsional’nye
faktory neustoichivosti i fragmentatsii,” Polis, no. 1 (1998): 106-29. According to Urban, there were
three missed opportunities to provide structure to political society: (1) in January 1990 the Democratic
Platform decided to remain in the CPSU; (2) in the 1991 presidential election Yeltsin avoided
responsibility to his base, and the latter were reluctant to demand it; and (3) the failure to call new
elections after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Urban, et al., The Rebirth of Politics in Russia, 213,
243 and 265.
94
Remington, “Ménage a Trois: The End of Soviet Parliamentarism,” 118-23. A well-defined social
structure necessary to anchor a political party system did not develop, given the absence of private
property or established social interests. Party development after the coup did not depend on
establishing a social base of support or forming stable coalitions, due to the absence of new elections.
In terms of consolidating a multi-party system, the tasks of developing a mass base, organizational
coherence, and stable links with state institutions were complicated by the post-Communist conditions
of social disarray, economic reforms, and state construction. Weigle, Russia’s Liberal Project, 146,
180, and 194.
95
Hahn, “Studying the Russian Experience,” 246-49.
96
Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 89.
96
俄羅斯學報 第三期 民國 92 年 3 月
administrative chiefs, and to name ministers without the approval of the parliament. 97
On September 21, 1993, Yeltsin issued decree No. 1400, “On the Stages of
Constitutional Reform in the Russian Federation,” to dissolve the parliament. On
October 4, 1993, Yeltsin declared a state of emergency in the city of Moscow and
bombarded the parliament. The Constitutional Court was also disbanded in the
autumn of 1993. 98 Russia remained without such a judicial body until 1995. After his
victory over parliament, Yeltsin quickly set a date of December 1993 for the new
parliamentary elections and a referendum on the presidential constitution. His draft
constitution which liberated the president from all constraints was approved by the
national referendum. 99 The results of the new parliamentary elections were a clear
vote of no confidence in the pro-presidential radical liberals represented by Gaydar’s
Russia’s Choice. 100 After the elections, Yeltsin began to distance himself even further
from his liberal associates. The growing role of the Prime Minister Viktor
Chernomyrdin reflected the triumph of the interest groups of natural resources and
agrarian lobbies, the enterprise-director elites, and the federal bureaucracy. 101
The Adapting Role of DemRossiya
97
These extraordinary powers should have expired by the end of December 1992, but they had been
extended by the compromise reached at the Seventh Congress of People’s Deputies in December 1992.
See Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 69-70.
98
The Constitutional Court, which was established in 1991, proved incapable of clarifying
constitutional prerogatives of state institutions. Between 1991 and 1993, with no stable state structure,
the court’s role was as politicized as the policy processes occurring in the executive and the legislature.
Weigle, Russia’s Liberal Project, 218. For the analysis of the Russian Constitutional Court and its
function during the first Russian Republic, see Robert Sharlet, “The Russian Constitutional Court: The
First Term,” Post-Soviet Affairs 9, no. 1 (January-March 1993): 1-39; and idem, “Russian
Constitutional Crisis: Law and Politics under Yeltsin,” Post-Soviet Affairs 9, no. 4 (October-December
1993): 314-36.
99
Unlike its predecessor, the 1993 Constitution makes it nearly impossible for impeachment to be used,
gives the president an effective veto over legislation, and is difficult to amend. The combination of veto
and decree authority was crucial to Yeltsin’s ability to legislate by decree. For an argument of “the
nature and extent of presidential decree authority and the political and institutional context in which it
was exercised varied considerably between the two post-Soviet Russian republics,” see Scott Parrish,
“Presidential Decree and Authority in Russia, 1991-95,” in Executive Decree Authority, eds. John M.
Carey and Matthew Soberg Shugart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 62-103.
100
Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 97.
101
Ibid., 97-103.
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97
Civil society as a whole in Soviet Russia was characterized by a common
anti-regime sentiment rather than by a special program of change. This enabled the
formation of an all-inclusive strategic alliance at the expense of crafting a coherent
and constructive organisation. 102 In the wake of their August 1991 triumph, the
divisions between Yeltsin and DemRossiya--and within DemRossiya itself--had
sharpened even more. Yeltsin’s contingent strategy of enhancing his personal
authority to the neglect of institutional building was achieved at the expense of his
own long-term organizational base.
A loose electoral bloc whose primary plank was opposition to the ruling
apparatus was well suited to accomplishing the purpose of mobilizing a mass
electorate during the election campaign, but what was an asset in the campaign,
however, would become a liability for the elected democrats after the elections when
the problem of governing had to be addressed. Focusing on the wider constituency as
a whole and maintaining freedom of political maneuver, elected democratic
politicians like Russia’s President Yeltsin, Moscow’s Mayor Popov, and Leningrad’s
Mayor Sobchak felt that high office and membership of a political organisation were
incompatible and therefore refrained from assuming leadership of DemRossiya. 103
As with other anti-Communist social movements in the post-Communist era,
DemRossiya after the August 1991 coup was plagued by organizational splits and
secessions, leadership infighting, an inability to define new goals and a shortage of
opportunities for political mobilization, lack of funding, and the need to adjust to a
long period of forced inactivity. 104 It was hard to keep the divergent groups together
when the common goal of destroying the Communist regime had been achieved. For
example, its composite center-right parties like Travkin’s Democratic Party, Viktor
Aksyuchits’s Christian Democrats, and Mikhail Astaf’ev’s branch of the Kadets
(Constitutional Democrats) did not share the majority view of DemRossiya’s
members on the issue of Russian sovereignty and the need to reform the Soviet Union.
102
For example, due to the character of informal groups or voters’ associations unconcerned with
programs and internal leadership structures, the efforts to form a nationwide league, such as the
Popular Front of the RSFSR, or an all-union coalition of voters’ associations, such as the All-Union
Association of Voters, tended to fail as in the former case, or if established, soon disappeared, as in the
latter. See Urban, et al., The Rebirth of Politics in Russia, 165-67.
103
Devlin, The Rise of the Russian Democrats, 218-23. In seeking to extract the Communist Party from
the state, the RSFSR Congress of People’s Deputies passed a law in June 1990 which stipulated that
high-ranking members in a party could not simultaneously hold ministerial posts, or be chairmen of
councils or on committees with the Supreme Soviet.
104
Brudny, “The Dynamics of ‘Democratic Russia’,” 141 and 168.
98
俄羅斯學報 第三期 民國 92 年 3 月
This split the Moscow branch of DemRossiya and resulted in an open breach in the
movement in October 1991 when Travkin, Aksyuchits, and Astaf’ev withdrew from
it. 105 The infighting within, and splits of, DemRossiya’s leadership seemed inevitable.
As Michael Urban, Vyacheslav Igrunov, and Sergei Mitrokhin have noted,
DemRossiya’s organizational forms were shaped by the state socialist context
from which it emerged and against which it defined itself. On the one hand,
the absence of a civil society structured by the institution of property meant
that it, too, would consist of an ensemble of personalized relations analogous
to those characteristic of the party-state that it opposed......On the other hand,
although it appeared as a national movement, its corpus was not a coalition of
social interests expressing themselves as voluntary associations--say, trade
unions or professional associations--but overlapping networks of personal
acquaintances among its leaders, organizers and activists developed as far
back as the dissident period and extending through the informal movement,
the 1989 election campaigns, work in the I-RDG [Interregional Group of
Deputies], voters’ associations and the 1990 campaign itself. 106
From the very beginning, the relationship between Yeltsin and DemRossiya was
“mutually-parasitic.” 107 For DemRossiya, the lack of opportunities for electoral
mobilization caused both a decline in the number of energetic activists and a trend to
disintegration in local chapters. The worsening economic situation compelled
DemRossiya to seek subsidies from the government to survive. 108 For Yeltsin, a
growing opposition in parliament against his economic reforms forced him to seek
support from DemRossiya. In December 1991, these mutual interests led to the
establishment of the Public Committees of Russian Reforms based on DemRossiya’s
regional branches in support of the government’s economic program. This decision
caused splits between the majority pro-government wing and the minority radical
opposition wing of DemRossiya’s leadership. 109
105
Devlin, The Rise of the Russian Democrats, 218.
106
Urban, et al., The Rebirth of Politics in Russia, 192.
107
Ibid., 183-84.
108
Brudny, “The Dynamics of ‘Democratic Russia’,” 156.
109
According to Brudny, the radicals headed by Afanas’ev and Sal’ye condemned Yeltsin for his
betrayal of the cause of democratization by preserving the political and economic power of the old
nomenklatura and argued that “dependency on governmental support would transform DR
[DemRossiya] into an organization completely subservient to executive authority.” Ibid., 156-59.
俄羅斯轉型的社會力量探源
99
On July 4 1992, in order to broaden the political base of support for Yeltsin,
DemRossiya, several associations of private entrepreneurs, a few democratic factions
in the parliament and other organizations participated in a conference entitled Forum
of Supporters of Reform. On the urging of high-ranking officials, including Burbulis,
Gaydar, and Anatoliy Chubays, in the autumn of 1992 this forum led to the formation
of Democratic Choice, an alliance in defense of democracy and radical economic
reforms, which was accompanied by the founding of its parliamentary wing of some
150 Yeltsin-supporting deputies--Parliamentary Coalition for Reforms. 110 The defeat
of DemRossiya’s radical members and the creation of the pro-Yeltsin Democratic
Choice alliance brought to an end DemRossiya’s year-long period of splits among its
leadership, as well as the search for the resources and the new goals to maintain its
raison d’etre. 111 Facing a wave of anti-reform demonstrations staged by the
Communist-nationalist alliance and a growing anti-Yeltsin parliament, DemRossiya’s
revitalized political mission was to rally Russians to defend Yeltsin for the sake of
radical economic reform and constitutional reform, one consistent with its experience
in oppositional political mobilization. 112
In sharp contrast to its demobilized democratic counterparts in Eastern Europe
and the Baltic states in the post-Communist era, DemRossiya did not lose its
impressive mobilizational ability, demonstrating its support for Yeltsin in the cases of
the March 1993 impeachment and the April 1993 referendum. 113 However, the
110
Ibid., 160-61. In sharp contrast to the rapid privatization program of Democratic Choice, the Civic
Union, a center-right coalition between Arkadiy Volskiy’s Russian Union of Industrialists and
Entrepreneurs, Travkin’s Democratic Party, and Rutskoi’s People’s Party of Free Russia, was formed
earlier in June 1992, representing the particular interests of the industrialists and state enterprise
managers. For arguments that a passive Russian state was under the control of the economic interests of
the management, see A. A. Ignat’ev and B. V. Mikhailov, “Grazhdanskoe obshchestvo i perspektivy
demokratii v Rossii,” in Grazhdanskoe obshchestvo i perspektivy demokratii v Rossii, ed., B. V.
Mikhailov (Moscow: Rossiiskii nauchnyi fond, 1994).
111
Brudny, “The Dynamics of ‘Democratic Russia’,” 161.
112
Ibid., 157-61.
113
DemRossiya mobilized 100,000 demonstrators, the largest political rally since the August 1991
coup, on Red Square to express their support for Yeltsin on 28 March 1993, the day the Congress was
voting on the motion to impeach the Russian president. DemRossiya also made a greater contribution
to Yeltsin’s victory in the referendum than its contribution to his 1991 presidential victory.
DemRossiya succeeded in mobilizing the presumably indifferent electorate through its Public
Committees in Support of the Referendum in every region. A total of 64.2 percent of the registered
voters cast their ballots, while 58.7 and 53 percent, respectively, expressed their support for Yeltsin and
100
俄羅斯學報 第三期 民國 92 年 3 月
development of the social movement DemRossiya was ultimately dependent on
Yeltsin’s willingness to adopt a populist political strategy as a contingent alternative to
his preferred intra-elite compromise: Yeltsin’s confrontation with his opponents
energized DemRossiya; Yeltsin’s compromise with his opponents relegated
DemRossiya to irrelevance. 114
Conclusion
A gradual widening of the boundaries of legitimate social initiatives promoted a
society-mobilized civil society to define its own reform agendas that challenged the
authority and legitimacy of the Communist regime. The introduction of contested
elections in the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies of 1989 and the following year’s
republic and local elections changed the incentives for popular mobilization by
lowering the risks of persecution and opening channels for citizens to participate and
influence the policy-making process. It was an unprecedented event in Soviet history
that deputies were chosen by popular mandate. Political actors thus responded to
institutional opportunities for high politics via civil society organizations.
DemRossiya and the miners’ movement represented the major social forces of
demanding from below. In the hope of political liberation, a combination of
anti-Communist ideology and an inclusive form of organisation inclining to zero-sum
conflict-oriented resolution (we against them) proved useful for solidarity and
collective action, but such a strategy was incapable of articulating and adjusting
conflicting social claims of quotidian politics when the common enemy had been
destroyed.
Post-Soviet Russian civil society had to adjust to the new political reality of state
construction. Political elites’ strategic choices and peculiar institutional arrangements
triggered the constitutional crisis. The conflict between the executive and the
legislature dominated state-society relations. Social forces were mobilized in support
of or in opposition to Yeltsin’s economic reforms. The Social Partnership program
failed to resolve workers’ problems. The social movement DemRossiya adapted its
the government’s economic program. Brudny, Ibid., 167-68. From the perspective of Yeltsin’s populist
strategy, as Hahn wrote, “The longer-term effect of the referendum, however, was to strengthen
Yeltsin’s conviction that he enjoyed a popular mandate and that the Russian people would back him in
a confrontation with parliament.” Hahn, “Introduction: Analyzing Parliamentary Development in
Russia,” 20.
114
Brudny, “The Dynamics of ‘Democratic Russia’,” 141-70.
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101
anti-regime role to support Yeltsin’s government at the expense of its own political
autonomy. After the dissolution of the parliament and the adoption of a presidential
constitution, a superpresidency established by Yeltsin became the paramount power. A
wider gap between the state and society was doomed to be inevitable.