Armageddon Averted by Kotkin Stephen;

Author:Kotkin, Stephen; [Kotkin, Stephen;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780195368642
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2008-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

Lame Presidentialism

Think back to the spring and summer of 1989, a time when the first legislature worthy of that name came into being in the Soviet Union. It was an awkward two-tiered structure comprising a Congress of People’s Deputies—a kind of permanent Constitutional Convention—and a smaller “working parliament,” the Supreme Soviet, selected from the Congress. Importantly, the nomination made by the Congress’s chairman (Gorbachev) for the post of prime minister was subject to a confirmation vote, after which he submitted nominees for other government posts to the deputies. Even the heads of the defense ministry and KGB, Yazov and Kryuchkov, had to appear and answer questions as part of the confirmation process. The two future putschists were confirmed, but some nominated ministers were rejected, and confirmed ministers could be called back any time to submit reports and answer questions. Lawmakers also formed committees that investigated the use of force on Soviet territory by the executive branch. Gorbachev’s call for a law-based state—pravovoe gosudarstvo, akin to the continental notion of a Rechtsstaat—began to resonate.

But, having sidelined the Communist Party and transformed the parliament, Gorbachev found himself with only indirect levers over the Soviet legislature and the government. In March 1990, when he created a Soviet presidency, supposedly adapting the French hybrid presidential–parliamentary system, the government began to report to both the president and the legislature, but the legislature granted the president extraordinary powers, such as the right to issue decrees with the force of law and to impose martial law. Still not content, Gorbachev remade the government (council of ministers), this time supposedly on the U.S. model, into a cabinet directly subordinated to the presidency. But then, in February–March 1991, he evicted the cabinet from the Kremlin to make way for his own presidential staff, whose departments were made to parallel the government ministries. In other words, the structure of the Soviet presidency—redundancy to the executive branch—reproduced that of the Central Committee apparat, which Gorbachev had only recently subverted.

Draining the CC apparat of its best functionaries, the Soviet presidential staff grew quickly.1 But the president’s ability to enforce decrees, and penalize noncompliance by the central and regional bureaucracy, remained elusive. Gorbachev had recreated the formal position of the general secretary in the presidency, but he had no substitutes for the bygone cult of the office of general secretary, the lost presence of Communist Party organizations throughout all institutions, or the cohesion once provided by Communist ideology and party “discipline.” Vertical subordination was further undermined by the expropriations of state property, the assertiveness of republic legislatures, and the creation of republic presidencies. The Soviet state acquired a presidency suspended in the air, a government made redundant by the presidency, and members of a Soviet parliament expressing frustration at their decreasing ability to direct the president or the government. Following the failed August 1991 putsch by the marginalized cabinet, President Gorbachev dismissed his government and abolished the Supreme Soviet. Soon, of course, he, too, was gone.

Far from avoiding such self-defeating institutional arrangements, the Russian leadership under Yeltsin—obsessed with Gorbachev—copied them.

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