Yeltsin foes already campaigning for presidency

Yeltsin foes already campaigning for presidency

By Anatoly Verbin

MOSCOW (Reuter): Russia's next presidential election is still officially more than two years away, but for President Boris Yeltsin's two fiercest rivals the presidential campaign has already begun.

Election rules have yet to be drawn up, polls have not been called. Indeed, under the current constitution, they are not due until June 1996.

But extreme nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky and former vice- president Alexander Rutskoi, ignoring Yeltsin's calls for a political time-out, have begun the race already.

Zhirinovsky was made official candidate by his Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) over the weekend. Rutskoi is clearly positioning himself to stand, though he is yet to announce it.

With Yeltsin himself keeping his powder dry, Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin constrained by his office, and radical reformers still in disarray after their electoral defeat in December, the opposition have the field to themselves.

Zhirinovsky won dictatorial powers at an LDPR congress this weekend, saying they were needed "to form a one-party government and win the top post in the country".

The erratic nationalist promised to restore the Russian empire, threatened to dissolve the United Nations, accused the West of waging a bloodless World War III against Russia and, unusually, targeted Yeltsin personally.

He also hosted a Congress of Slav Peoples attended by a dozen delegations from fringe nationalist parties, most of them from Serbia, to announce:

"Let the West start worrying from April 3, the day when the Slavs started uniting, forming common state, political and maybe even military bodies."

Rutskoi was scarcely less militant. On Sunday he took part in a procession of hardline communists, nationalists and neo- fascists of the Russian National Unity grouping (RNE) to commemorate those killed last October when government troops and tanks crushed an armed uprising against Yeltsin.

Rutskoi led the uprising, in which officially 147 people were killed, from the old parliament headquarters, the White House. When it was crushed he was taken to jail and charged with organizing mass disturbances.

He was amnestied by parliament in February in what it called a conciliatory move but has shown no sign of repenting his call for armed militants to storm the Moscow television center and mayor's office, the actions which sparked off the uprising.

"No less than 500 people have been killed in the White House," Rutskoi said. "It is not RNE who are fascists, it is those who opened fire on the White House."

While avoiding Rutskoi's hardline rhetoric, moderate communists in parliament are also hostile to Yeltsin's idea of a political truce up to the presidential polls in 1996.

Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov made clear at a news conference last Friday that his party still does not accept the new constitution, passed in a referendum in December, and wants to amend it.

He also suggested that the presidential elections should be brought forward. Yeltsin, now 63, was elected in June 1991 for a five-year term.

Yeltsin's vagueness on whether he will stand himself, topped by continuing media reports of his failing health -- vehemently denied by his aides and family -- lead the opposition to view him as a lame duck.

Liberal reformers, shattered by their loss in December parliamentary elections and unable, at least for now, to overcome internal splits, do not seem in a position to put forward a strong candidate.

Free marketeer Yegor Gaidar has announced plans to create a party. Russian television responded in a sad comment: "The party cannot have mass following because he (Gaidar) is too honest and too clever."

That leaves Yeltsin himself and the centrist Chernomyrdin, though both are so far avoiding any firm commitments.

Yeltsin's message is that if there was a candidate whom he could trust and who was likely to win, the Russian leader would consider his historic task completed.

"For me, it is not a question of staying or leaving. It is a question of leaving Russia in safe and democratic hands," he said in an interview in the Spanish daily El Pais on Sunday. "These hands will have to be capable of holding the Russian rudder steady in heavy seas."

At the moment those hands seem most likely to be Chernomyrdin's. Since becoming prime minister in late 1992, Chernomyrdin has emerged as undisputable number two in Russia.

He has never wavered publicly in his loyalty to Yeltsin and maintains it is immoral to speak about his own presidential ambitions while the current incumbent is still in place.

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