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Introduction: Russia: Is Reform Still Possible?
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10176 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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8 / 1993 |
526 Words |
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The good news is that two years after the collapse of Soviet communism, Russia is still a democracy and is still trying to adopt a market economy. The bad news is that Russia often seems uncertain whether it wants to remain a democracy and keep effecting market reforms.
President Boris Yeltsin's decisive victory in the April referendum was an encouraging sign about Russia's political future, but several questions remain. Can he and the Soviet-era Parliament agree on a constitution? Can effective democratic institutions, including an independent judiciary, be created? Can a country that has known only totalitarianism throughout its long history become democratic?
Economically, Russia continues to wrestle with enormous problems, such as three-digit inflation, lack of capital, inexperience with the laws of supply and demand, and an antiquated infrastructure. While entrepreneurs, large and small, mushroom in Moscow and other major cities, capitalism in the rest of Russia lags behind. Is it possible to shift so large a country from a command to a market economy? How much and what kind of aid should the United States and the rest of the West provide Russia?
Surveying the political scene, Carl Linden of George Washington University states that the April referendum marked a major step toward Russia's second great attempt in this century to form a democratic state. The pro-Yeltsin vote revealed the willingness of the Russian people to "put freedom even ahead of bread."
The people have in fact become the key factor of Russian politics, eclipsing the bureaucracy, the army, and the KGB of old. Two years ago, says Linden, they opposed the putsch and halted a return to dictatorship. This spring, they issued a clarion call for a democratic constitution and representative government.
While Russia's economic problems are essentially internal, which only it can solve, the West has tremendous leverage on the final outcome. The key, according to John Guardiano of the Heritage Foundation, is to encourage the rapidly growing cadre of small-scale Russian businessmen and entrepreneurs.
However, official agencies of both Russia and the West are more occupied with the old state enterprises and approaches. Western policy, Guardiano states, must center on the entrepreneur as the "mainspring of economic growth" and the guarantor of peace.
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