A dispute in numbers
1992 1992-04Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 17 →
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There are great political stakes in the latest series of political tests mounted by the neo-Stalinists. This is presumably what explains the vast differences in the reports of them. Thus, in the March 21 issue of People's Weekly World, the paper of the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA), Mike Davidow wrote from Moscow that 300,000 people had turned out for the March 17 demonstration.
The same demonstration was estimated at only 10,000 by New York Times correspondent Serge Schmemann, who dismissed the whole affair as a farce. However, the Paris-based anti-Communist weekly Russkaya Mysl' quoted a press source in the Democratic Russia Press (DR) as saying that although there were not many people on the square at the beginning, the crowd eventually grew to about 40,000 or 50,000.
One of the speakers, according to this source, announced over the microphone that there were 350,000 people there from 60 cities. It seems, then, that the demonstration could have hardly been so small as 10,000, or such an announcement would have been too obviously false.
The figure cited by DR Press seems to be the most likely estimate. The neo-Stalinists have a mass base in the apparatus, although this is a small minority in the population as a whole. Hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats in the USSR central apparatus have been fired by Yeltsin, and many of them could be expected to support such a demonstration.
Moreover, it seems reasonable to expect that some people are attracted by the left demagogy of the neo-Stalinists, since there have been no other opportunities for protesting against the Yeltsin economic policies that have been drastically cutting the living standarus or te populauon. Dul it is also clear that the neo-Stalinists have not yet been able to attract the discontented masses to their flag.
It is equally clear that the demonstration could not have been anything like 300,000 people. Russkaya Mysl' reported the presence of very large numbers of journalists. If there had been a really massive demonstration, news of it could not have been blacked out, and there would certainly have been reverberations The neo-Stalinists seem to have decided to make wildly exaggerated claims in order to maintain the morale of their faithful, who, they apparently expect, are still prepared to believe just about anything their leaders tell them Why The New York Times would minimize the size of the demonstration is another question. Most likely, it hopes to imply that Yeltsin is firmly in control - G.F.