Soviet bureaucrats announce new political project to spur restoration of capitalism

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After the Russian presidential elections, a new operation has been launched to broaden the political support for the "restructuring" of bureaucratic domination in the Soviet Union.

It follows in line with the April 23 agreement between Gorbachev and Yeltsin and the leaders of the nine republics whose governments are still controlled by the Communist Party. It confirms the alliance between the two Soviet leaders sealed after Yeltsin won the Russian presidency.

The Movement for Democratic Reforms, proclaimed on July 1, associates the oppositionist mayors of Moscow and Leningrad-Gavril Popov and Anatoly Sobchak— decried as "anti-Communists" in the official Soviet press-along with lieutenants of Yeltsin, and top advisors of Gorbachev.

The movement's declaration was also signed by, among others, A. Yakovlev, a senior advisor of Gorbachev; A. Rutskoi, vice president of the Russian republic; I. Silaev, premier of the Russian republic; A. Volskii, the former Moscow-appointed administrator of Nagorno-Karabakh; S. Shatalin and N. Petrakov, economic advisors of Gorbachev.

Eduard Shevardnadze, former Soviet foreign minister, prepared the ground for the announcement of the new movement during an international tour shortly before. He is one of its main spokespersons.

Stabilize the political situation The declared aim of the new movement is to "stabilize the political situation." Its statement said: "The country can only be saved by immediate consolidation of the most conscious, constructive, responsible part of the society, capable of holding it back from anarchy, leading the country through the complex transition from bureaucratic dictatorship to democracy."

It was to be a movement of compromise: "A destructive lust for battle and demonstration of force are alien to us. We are against whipping up any 'militant spirit' in society, when man rises up against man, class against class, nation against nation, when one political party declares a holy war against any other. We are for seeking compromises and agreement, for cooperation. The country will not survive a second civil war."

The statement declared explicitly its support for the April 23 agreement: "We support the Novo-Ogarevo [the name of the dacha where the agreement was signed] process ... as a means of saving our multinational commonwealth, of preserving it in the form of a state of a new type." The Novo-Ogarevo accord also includes a call for a ban on strikes.

Summarizing the statement on the national question, Aleksander Ginzburg wrote in the July 5 issue of the Paris Russian-language paper Russkaya Mysl': "It calls for national cooperation, the preservation of the historic core of the state as a union ot tree and sovereign peopies, and condemns all torms of national extremism, chauvinism and racism." This sounds very much like Gorbachev's formulations and his New Treaty of Union.

Attitude toward national movements In a July 5 rally in Leningrad for the new movement, Sobchak said: "The movement of democrats was created in the first place to break and oppose the very dangerous tendency that is producing its results in some republics, where the regimes developing are more and more remi niscent of fascism."

This attitude toward the national movements in the non-Russian republics is quite similar to that of the official Communist Party press. Not all these movements, of course, are free from undemocratic tendencies. But in general, they have been the icebreakers of the antitotalitarian movement in the USSR. They deserve, and have won, the support of consistent Russian democrats.

By defining the new organization as a broad movement rather than a party, the question of whether it is really oppositional to the Communist Party has been left unclear. This has aroused well justified suspicion among the oppositional forces.

For example, Nikolai Travkin, a leader of the Democratic Party of Russia, broke from the project, with the following denunciation: "There had been a preliminary agreement that the initiators of this process would quit the party. Now there is no word about that. Moreover, it is being said that one can be part of this movement and not leave the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Then, it is a reform CPSU and not any kind of democratic movement."

New cover for the bureaucracy Clearly, this movement is a new political instrument for the bureaucracy. The latter is divided over the project, as it is over perestroika, of which the new movement is a logical consequence. But the initiative seems likely to draw an even greater division among the opposition.

For the first time, opposition leaders who support capitalist restoration have openly aligned themselves with Gorbachev's program for restoring capitalism and announcement of the new movement during an international tour ... He nternational tour . is one of its main spokespersons.

for maintaining the rule of the bureaucracy through "constitutional" forms.

This operation may temporarily divide the antibureaucratic movement. But it will also help to clarify who is for real democracy, democracy for the working people, and who is for the continued rule of privilege in a new form. Certainly, the anti-Communist rhetoric of a Sobchak, for example-who supported renaming Leningrad "St. Petersburg"—has not kept him from joining in a project to "stabilize the political situation" in the USSR on the lines advocated by Gorbachev, the chief of the ruling bureaucracy.

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