Death of activist buries Russia's democratic future

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Galina Vasilyevna Starovoitova is dead, machine- gunned on the stairs of her own apartment building in St. Petersburg last Friday night. She was a symbol of all that was best about the new, democratic Russia that was struggling to break free from the wreckage of the Tsarist/Soviet past. And some fear that her miserable death (at the hands of "gangsters or Communists", as one of her colleagues put it) is a symbol of Russia's future.

I got to know Galina a bit in the heady, frightening days of 1989-1992 when the old Soviet Union was both democratizing and disintegrating, and I liked and admired her a lot. She was brave, honest, open, and clever -- and her whole reason for going into politics, she would say, was so that Russia could become "a normal country". I believed her, and I even thought it could happen.

She was an ethnologist by profession, and she entered politics in 1989 almost by accident. She wound up in the first more-or- less freely elected Supreme Soviet as a deputy from an Armenian seat, even though she was a Russian, because of her unflinching defense of the principle of self-determination for all ethnic groups.

She became a leader of the gallant band of democrats that dubbed itself the "Inter-Regional Deputies Group". (It was still illegal to form political parties that competed openly with the Communists). And in 1989, she played the major role in their fateful decision to make Boris Yeltsin their leader.

Galina Starovoitova had no illusions about Yeltsin, a bullying ex-apparatchik from the provinces who was brought in to run Moscow by Mikhail Gorbachev, and then quarreled with his boss and quit the Party. But Yeltsin was a brilliant populist who had just won 87 percent of the vote in a head-to-head contest with the Communist Party's candidate for the all-Moscow seat. If there was a free election for president of Russia, he would clearly win that too.

So the choice, in Starovoitova's eyes, was either to help him into power while educating him in democratic principles, or see him take power without them. And he really didn't have an idea in his head: his only post-secondary education had been in the Party's ideological schools, and he was not a man who read.

The dying Andrei Sakharov, the veteran dissident and Nobel Prize winner who was the group's titular leader, approved the choice of Yeltsin, who duly took over this ready-made party. For months afterwards you never saw Yeltsin without one of its members by his side, trying to fill this empty vessel with their democratic ideals.

They literally did shift work, taking turns to instruct Yeltsin in democratic principles, and Starovoitova bore the biggest part of the burden. When Yeltsin became president she became his adviser on nationality issues, but as his autocratic instincts gained the upper hand in 1992 she left the government, eventually becoming a fierce critic of his wicked war in Chechnya.

She stayed in politics as co-leader of the small Democratic Russia Party, and remained a high-profile defender of democratic principles. Earlier this month, she led the campaign in the Duma to censure retired Gen. Albert Makashov, a Communist deputy who has called for the mass arrest of Russia's Jews. (His Communist colleagues defended him and killed the motion).

She also recently vowed to stop ultra-nationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky from becoming governor of the Leningrad region (which surrounds St. Petersburg) by running against him. "He wants to establish a criminal dictatorship with fascist methods," she explained, "His is not a party, but a corrupt business where profit is made from political activity." And she was talking of making a run for the presidency in the elections in 2000.

So lots of people wanted Galina Starovoitova dead -- including some who would just have her killed as a way of terrorizing the country. Mikhail Gorbachev inclines to that view: "The question is whether this was a political group getting even with a politician over a specific issue, or a contract killing intended to provoke a reaction pushing the country towards further instability."

Russia is still far from being the "normal country" that she dreamt of. Even before the recent economic collapse it was a place where politics, crime, and banking are inextricably mixed, and where ordinary people struggle just to survive. The question that must have haunted Starovoitova was whether this was inevitable.

Agents of change must accept responsibility for the consequences of change. Could Russia have avoided this agonizing decade if the democrats had made different choices? And if not, should they have tried to change the system at all?

Yes, to the latter question. The centuries of dictatorship and repression had to be ended: the human cost of staying with the old system, cumulatively, was vastly greater than the price of change (though it is very hard on the generation that must pay the price).

And were the democrats wrong to hitch their wagon to Yeltsin? Perhaps but even now it's hard to see what better option they had in 1989. He was a drunken brute of a man, but he was going to win power with or without them -- and their efforts to educate and guide him may have kept him from behaving even worse.

Was this terrible, wasted decade inevitable? Nobody knows, but in retrospect it seems quite likely. What we now realize (better than before, anyway) is that 75 years of Communist dictatorship preceded by centuries of xenophobic Tsarist tyranny had left Russia far less well equipped to make the transition to "normality" than its neighbors to the West.

In Poland, or the Czech lands, or even the Baltic provinces of the old Soviet Union, Communist rule only lasted 40 or 50 years, and there was a large (though illegal) democratic opposition. The point of departure for the transformation was further down the road, so the transition has been faster and less painful. Russia will get there in the end, no doubt, but the pain is truly awful.