Yeltsin's move to dissolve parliament echoes turmoil of a distant past

YELTSIN'S rule had been established with surprising ease over most of the empire, but nowhere had it been consolidated and as the months drew on chaos became worse. The railways scarcely moved, industry was grinding to a standstill, the towns were very hungry. Everything was in a turmoil. . . The Russian Parliament. . . gave a large majority to other parties, but Yeltsin dismissed this Parliament at once. It may be doubted whether the Parliament would have thrown up leaders capable of ruling Russia in thoseturbulent times, but Yeltsin gave it no chance to try. . .'' These two quotations are from A History of Russia by John Lawrence (first published in 1957), from the chapter dealing with the forced dissolution by the Bolsheviks of the semi-democratically elected Constituent Assembly in January 1918. I simply took the liberty of substituting ''Russian Parliament'' for ''Constituent Assembly'' and, sacrilegiously enough, Yeltsin for ''Communists'' (or Bolsheviks).

It won't be a revelation to say that the tumultuous events in Russia in the past couple of weeks have a painful semblance to the political turmoil of early 1918. We all know what it led up to: the civil war.

At a first glance, it seems bizarre that President Boris Yeltsin, having proclaimed himself an ardent anti-Communist, chose to deal with the opposition in exactly the same way as the Bolsheviks did in 1918. Yet, on the other hand, if we review his thriving 20-year long career as a top-ranking Communist Party apparatchik, this similarity will start to look much less surprising.

There was one small, yet significant, development in Russia last week that was hardly noticed by the western media. According to Radio Liberty, on the third day of the White House confrontation, the besieged parliamentarians were approached by a compromise-seeking envoy from Mr Yeltsin's camp who, on behalf of the President, asked them to surrender in exchange for hundreds of senior executive positions in Yeltsin-controlled provinces and 52 ambassadorial posts.

The deputies allegedly refused, but the very fact of such an offer shows that both conflicting sides, if to throw aside purely political differences, still understand each other pretty well.

Indeed, both Mr Yeltsin's supporters and the rebellious deputies in their majority have one and the same background - a totalitarian system, where personal power, and nothing but personal power, mattered.