1996 Russian presidential elections - 05 July 1996

For once, it's almost exactly true to use the blanket cliche, everybody is saying, well everybody is saying, or writing, that America is shaking with relief at the surprisingly solid victory of Mr Yeltsin over, in particular, Mr Zyuganov. And then, wouldn't you know, everybody piped up very quickly to say, but don't think the Russian future is going to be anything but rocky.

Here are the opening sentences of three commentaries, one, a newspaper leader, the others from well-known columnists. One: "Unfortunately a sigh of relief at Mr Zyuganov's defeat cannot be accompanied by confidence in Mr Yeltsin." Two: "The bad guys lost in the Russian state's first presidential election, but does it mean that the good guys won?" Now, the lead editorial from the most majestic of America's dailies: "The forces of democracy and reform won a vital victory in Russia, but Russia's reality does not justify euphoria today."

Always that but.

It reminds me of the story about the man who suspected his wife of infidelity, hired a detective, and the detective came back and reported he'd seen nothing suspicious. He spied on a flat, he saw a man enter a bedroom with the suspect wife, he saw them take off their clothes, but then they turned the lights out, and, moaned the husband, always this doubt. The truth is that nobody dares predict anything for sure about the political and social future of Russia, in spite of all the knowing speculation about the Russian economy, the role of the International Monetary Fund, the dangers of resurgent and militant nationalism if Mr Yeltsin were soon succeeded by General Lebed and so on. To me, the big unanswered question is as old as government, as old as the Bible: can the leopard change his spots?

Before I enlarge on what to me is the fundamental question about the alleged collapse of communism, and the rise of something called democracy, I think we ought to recognise with applause, the point made by a seasoned commentator, the veteran Flora Lewis who writes for The New York Times out of Paris. She it was, the only one I saw, who noted that the Russians voted for the first time by direct universal suffrage.

Let us marvel at the historic fact that by so doing, so soon after a long dictatorship, Russia beat the Western democracies – including Britain and the United States – by a century or more. What we don't stress in our history teaching is that it's only this century, only since I was a schoolboy, that any democracy we know allowed direct universal suffrage. United States senators were not elected till I think about 1913. Before that they were picked by the state legislatures. And when finally the people elected them, the learned Henry Adams wrote a book called The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma. What he meant, I think, was degradation by democracy.

Come to that, I wonder how many American schoolchildren know that the founding fathers had no intention of founding a democracy, after they heard no less a grandee than George Washington himself, who was in the chair, say – at the very beginning of their discussions on what sort of government do we mean to have – he said, among civilised nations, no form of government is in such ill repute as democracy, it leads to factions. Factions then meant political parties, another novelty the delegates had no intention of introducing. What those famous fathers meant to create was a republic, which they did. The word democracy is nowhere to be found in the Constitution. But, as in Britain, as in eventually even the German and Italian kingdoms, democracy raised its homely head and asserted itself.

In the beginning of the United States, voting was restricted to white males who were also men of property. And when in the middle of the 19th century America proclaimed universal suffrage, the universe was presumed not to include any person, male or female, of colour. Until indeed the very eve of the Second World War most southern states had a poll tax, which effectively made it impossible for coloured folk – as we said – to be able to afford to vote. And mention of male and female reminds me that women couldn't vote in the United States until 1920, the United Kingdom till 1919. Winston Churchill was not the only famous statesman who thought there was something unnatural about a woman's vote.

So voting by direct universal suffrage is something very new in the world, and maybe even Britain and the United States should not take so cockily for granted, as we do, the idea, as one writer put it, that democracy and capitalism are God-given and foolproof.

And we still can't be sure about the future of any form of democracy in Russia in the long-run, which, if Mr Yeltsin died and there was a reshuffling of power, could be a very short run. When I suggested that the fundamental question was can the leopard change his spots, what I might have said another way is, can we be sure that the present rulers or competing rulers of Russia, all of whom were brought up and thrived under communism, have really changed the deepest beliefs and overcome their lifelong assumption that government of the people is government over the people, imposed by a dictatorship?

General Lebed offers a puzzling answer. He has no political experience whatsoever. He once made it clear he was not a Democrat, now he says he's a semi-Democrat. The one foreign country he's visited is Afghanistan, as a soldier, as an ultimately frustrated general. He has one passion, one religion if you like: Russian nationalism. In other self-professing reformed dictatorships, nationalism has very shortly overcome democracy. I don't think in fact it's too much to say that anyone who believes in the doctrine of my country right or wrong is an enemy of democracy.

Well now the question really is: can a middle aged Russian change his character? And if that question sounds absurd or irrelevant as a political problem, please explain the undying popularity since 1842, I think when it was written, of Dickens's Christmas Carol. Scrooge is the most dramatic, the most flagrant example of a man we'd all like to be, a man who changed his character overnight for the better. It's an enviable, if outrageous story.

In this connection, the name and career of Mr Gorbachev comes to mind. Not because there's a prayer of his ever coming to power again – he got something like one per cent of the vote, and somebody noted significantly, most of his vote came from very young people who believed against the man's life history, that he was a true born again Western liberal. I myself was always perhaps unreasonably suspicious of Mr Gorbachev, considered as the Russian Adlai Stevenson. His long association with the KGB, that sticks in the throat. Any man who held power during the seventy years of communism had to know that the whole communist system was fortified by the existence of the secret police, the midnight knock on the door, the labour camp, by prison and torture. These were not aberrations of a strict, disciplined republic. They were its essential props. George Orwell put his finger on the nerve of our Western liberal ignorance or criminal indifference by writing the sin of the left in the 1930s was to be anti-fascist without being anti-totalitarian, which is to say, in that benighted decade, anti-Stalin.

In view of what we've come to learn in the past three decades – much of which sensible people guessed at and many more victims knew – it's now impossible to believe that anybody should have thought of Joseph Stalin as a very strict but kindly Uncle Joe, Roosevelt liked to call him, and not as he was, the bloodiest tyrant of this century, challenged for the title perhaps only by Pol Pot.

Well I've known two politicians who without self-righteousness did change their characters dramatically in one regard. President Harry Truman was brought up in Missouri, of a family which during the Civil War was on the confederate side. He learned from his mother and schoolmates to talk about wretched niggers and have no thought – as none of us did sixty years ago – about their rising from third class citizenship to become something other than servant or labourer or licensed clown.

Yet Harry Truman, once he got to Washington and mingled with other men from other states, he abolished segregation in the United States armed forces; he sponsored the first fair employment act, which nibbled away at segregation. Even more unlikely, even more surprisingly, Lyndon Johnson, a Texan of rude manners and, where race was concerned, certainly one of the good ol' boys, had something of a revelation when one day he started calling up all his southern friends and northern union leaders, everyone who'd guarded the white man's supremacy in jobs, in politics, and he said, I talked like you folks, I acted like you folks, but things have changed, have got to change. He, more than any other American, was responsible for the civil rights acts and the black revolution they brought about.

So I'm just wondering whether Mr Yeltsin has the belief and the strength to go on with the turbulent experiment of direct universal suffrage, and I'm praying that if the worst happens, General Lebed will not want to fulfil his earlier ambition of a prouder, larger, more orderly Russian empire.

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