Boris Gets Stirred, Russia Is Shaken

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That was back in 1993, when he ordered tanks to fire on the Duma after legislators refused to heed his decree dissolving parliament. With the elected legislature dominated by hostile Communists and nationalists, Yeltsin had remained in power by adopting executive powers familiar to czarist Russia but unthinkable in a Western democracy. Indeed, he's adopted Czar Nicholas II's practice in the years preceding the Bolshevik revolution of holding himself above the tides of politics but regularly firing the government in the face of popular discontent. (Primakov had been Yeltsin's fifth prime minister.)

The Yeltsin-Duma clash represents a dilemma that cuts deeper than personalities, however. The reforms necessary to turn Russia into a capitalist economy exacted a toll so harsh from ordinary Russians that they voted in droves for the recently reviled Communists as their living standards plummeted. The "shock therapy" applied by Yeltsin's ministers in the early '90s left Russian voters deeply impoverished and contemptuous of any politician advocating the free-market economics on which they blamed their plight. Maintaining any semblance of economic reform in Russia may, paradoxically, demands a measure of autocracy no matter who holds the reins of power.

But Yeltsin's latest rampage may mark the beginning of a decisive showdown with the Duma, because it breaks an eight-month-old truce hammered out last August in order to save the economy. At that time, tension between Yeltsin and the Duma had reached a breaking point: The economy was in free fall and Yeltsin had just fired neophyte prime minister Sergei Kiriyenko -- whom he'd installed only five months earlier over the Duma's strenuous objections, after sacking Viktor Chernomyrdin for incompetence. It was Yeltsin's bizarre proposal to reinstate Chernomyrdin that finally provoked the Duma to stand up and say nyet. Allowing the return of the unpopular Chernomyrdin on a whim of Yeltsin's would have damned the Duma in the eyes of the electorate. So after twice rejecting Chernomyrdin's nomination, legislators warned that they would risk having Yeltsin dissolve the Duma rather than endorse his nominee.