They Shall Be Heard

Boris Yeltsin is back, by popular demand, a sign that the Soviet Union’s experiment in opening up its hitherto closed political system remains alive as well as tumultuous. Yeltsin, who was booted out of his posts as Moscow’s Communist Party boss and alternate member of the ruling Politburo because he demanded faster and more radical reforms, was at first denied election to the Supreme Soviet in balloting by the conservative-dominated Congress of People’s Deputies. Then two events, one of them wholly unexpected but both indicative of the winds of political change rippling across the Communist world, acted to reverse that result.

The first was the loud and passionate outcry in the congress and in the streets of Moscow over what was seen as a conspiracy to neutralize the deputy who had won a greater number of votes--more than 6 million--than any other delegate elected to the congress. The second was the selfless surprise decision by a Siberian law professor named Alexei I. Kazannik to give up his seat in the 542-member Supreme Soviet in Yeltsin’s favor. In a truly theatrical twist, the party conservatives who despise what Yeltsin stands for and who thought they had effectively muzzled him found themselves outmaneuvered.

Consequently, Yeltsin will sit in the new Supreme Soviet, the advisory and legislative body that is supposed to wield real authority. But Yeltsin isn’t waiting to speak his mind. In a panoramic speech to the congress this week, he outlined his own political ideas and priorities, even urging President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to submit himself to an annual popular vote of confidence on his tenure. Gorbachev, sitting stony-faced as Yeltsin spoke, clearly was not amused.

The formative process for the first sanctioned political opposition in the Soviet Union in more than 70 years thus continues. How effective might that opposition be? The congress has made sure that the Supreme Soviet will contain a majority of party loyalists. Almost certainly they will move very slowly to consider the political and social changes that Gorbachev has generally endorsed as essential to the country’s progress. The conservatives have powerful ideological reasons for opposing any changes that threaten the party’s monopoly on power. They have personal reasons as well, given that from the party comes their livelihood, their prestige and such perquisites as the apartments, the cars, the dachas, the special stores and clinics that in the nominally egalitarian Soviet Union work to make some animals decidedly more equal than others.

The Supreme Soviet, then, will be composed of a ruling government party--cautious, jealous of its standing and resistant to change--and a diverse opposition that can claim with considerable justification to represent a mandate for more sweeping economic and political liberalization. The Soviet Communist Party has always held that it not only reflects but embodies the will of the people. Now, at a minimum, the party’s representatives in the new Supreme Soviet will be challenged at every step of the way to explain just how their actions are intended to benefit the people. For now at least, the legislative rubber stamp has been retired. The allocation of seats in the Supreme Soviet assures that party loyalists will still be in control, but Yeltsin and other reformers have already served plain notice that they are in earnest, that they will not retreat and that they will be heard.