THE Washington correspondent of the influential evening newspaper
Izvestia, Mr Alexander Shalnev, sounded an alarm bell in the paper's
weekend edition when he stated: ''The CIA does not have a clear picture
of what is going on in Russia.''
The logical conclusion is those of us whose resources are minuscule in
comparison to those of the Central Intelligence Agency have an even
smaller chance of finding out what is really happening.
But large amounts of money, spies in the sky, and operatives on the
ground are not everything and the thought has occurred to this
correspondent that perhaps the CIA's problem has something to do with
semantics.
My own rule of thumb when trying to understand what is happening is to
turn the language upside-down and in a great many cases this works. If a
person or a party in the West, for example, comes out in favour of state
health services, social protection, equal opportunities in education,
and other policies of that nature, it is deemed to be on the left of
centre. In Russian political terminology it would be ''right wing'' or
more commonly ''conservative''.
Conversely in Britain, for example, a person advocating totally
monetarist economic policies, the privatisation of everything that
moves, and the dominance of the market, would naturally belong on the
right wing of the Conservative Party. In Russia he or she would be
classed as a ''radical''. Similarly the Russian Liberal-Democratic Party
led by Mr Vladimir Zhirinovsky is ''liberal'' to the extent that it
wants to annexe Finland and ''democratic'' in that it has sent a number
of its less genial members to Iraq to protect Mr Saddam Hussein from the
ravages of ''American imperialism''.
We had a similar example of Russian political semantics this weekend
when a ''round-table'' conference took place in Moscow under the
auspices not only of Parliament but also of the Government with which it
is at loggerheads.
Politicians of varying hues attended, including the parliamentary
speaker, Mr Ruslan Khasbulatov, Vice-president Alexander Rutskoy, and Mr
Yeltsin's new Prime Minister, Mr Viktor Chernomyrdin.
At the opening of the conference the powerful Mr Khasbulatov said that
''only through a real consensus among all political and social forces
and the safeguarding of the democratic standards which the country has
attained, can it be lifted out of crisis''.
Our friends in the Central Intelligence Agency may have interpreted
this as meaning that only through a real consensus among all political
and social forces and the safeguarding of democratic standards could
Russia be lifted out of crisis. If they did, they were wrong.
What Mr Khasbulatov was really saying was that a referendum on whether
the country should be run by the President or the Parliament, fixed for
April 11 as part of a deal between himself and Mr Yeltsin, should not
now take place. He admitted as much later in the day at a reception for
the visiting Canadian Foreign Minister, Ms Barbara Macdougal.
Later still he made a contribution to ''consensus and reconciliation''
when he told another visiting Western politician, the Swedish Prime
Minister, Mr Karl Bildt, that Mr Yeltsin was ''not able to cope with his
job and should be relieved of his surveillance of the Government''. In
reply Mr Yeltsin's press secretary, Mr Vyacheslav Kostikov, also in
''conciliatory'' and ''consensual'' mood, said that Mr Khasbulatov had
shown ''a dangerous disposition for base political intrigues'' adding,
in the same spirit of ''consensus'', that: ''Ruslan Khasbulatov's
underhand attack on the head of the executive branch and his arrogant
statement that 'Parliament is the sole stabilising power' clearly reveal
the duplicity of this politician.''
The proposed referendum would, of course, take the matter out of the
hands of the politicians and into those of the people. But in this
respect the messages coming to us from the Russian people via the
opinion polls are every bit as confusing.
The National Opinion Centre in a poll of 1200 urban Russians published
on Saturday showed an absolute majority in favour of having a referendum
to decide who should run the country.
But when asked how they would respond if matters were to be decided by
a referendum, 32% said they would react by refusing to vote because the
question would be too confrontational.
Of those who said they would vote, 32% said they would vote for the
President and 26% for the Parliament. The presidential majority is well
within the margin of error of such a limited poll and in any event it
shows that if a referendum were to be held now, neither side would get
the necessary 50% of the electorate.
Such a result would throw the country into even further chaos.
Attempts to convene a Special Congress of Peoples' Deputies to have the
referendum dropped is likely to have similar consequences.
In the meantime there appears to be only one way to keep Russia on the
rails and that is undoubtedly an attitude of ''consensus and
reconciliation'' in the sense, of course, that these words are
understood in the West.
* Seamus Martin is Moscow Correspondent for the Irish Times.
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