OK, Comrade Yeltsin, You Win Again!

Russians may have thought communism's collapse had ended rule by an all-powerful individual with a rubber-stamp legislature, but the more things change the more they seem to stay the same. Attempts to impeach Boris Yeltsin collapsed in the Communist-dominated Duma Saturday, and now the opposition-controlled parliament looks likely to rubber-stamp the whimsical president's choice of prime minister on Wednesday. "Relying on the indifference of the voters and on the ineptitude of the Duma, Boris Yeltsin has carried the day," says TIME Moscow correspondent Andrew Meier. What seemed last week to be a showdown in the making turned out to be simply business as usual.

So how did Yeltsin manage to roll over a legislature that had vowed to impeach him and to deny approval to his prime minister-designate, Sergei Stepashin? "In this country, sooner or later everything is negotiable," says Meier. "Never underestimate the sheer, petty greed of the legislators. They want their positions and the accompanying perks, and they weren't prepared to stand up to Yeltsin if that meant facing early elections." Post-communist Russia may have multiparty elections and a free press, but the political establishment cut its teeth on the covert power-politicking of the Soviet era. "Other than the presidency, Russia's political institutions are very weak," says Meier. "Despite the trappings of democracy, it's still a backroom Soviet political culture." So when it came to Saturday's impeachment vote, many of the legislators whose constituents and parties would have expected them to vote against Yeltsin simply didn't show up. In true Soviet style, they spent the weekend at their dachas.