CALLS FROM HIGH UP TO REVERSE REFORMS.

The chairman of Russia’s Federation Council, Vladimir Shumeiko, has just published a book, entitled Russian Reforms and Federalism in which he criticizes Russia’s market reforms. The book, reportedly published in only a few thousand copies which hit the bookstands in mid-October, is cited as arguing that the implementation of market reforms has, since 1992, brought Russia to a "degrading, semicolonial condition," reducing it to the position of a supplier of raw materials to other countries. Shumeiko’s book is further cited as calling for revision of privatization as an "imperative" measure, including "deprivatization and nationalization" and "restoration of state control" over certain economic sectors. Shumeiko is careful to disown a "return to authoritarian methods" of rule, but he himself has supported the authoritarian methods practiced by Boris Yeltsin and his entourage. (3)

In that vein, minister of state and Yeltsin supporter Nikolai Travkin urged Yeltsin yesterday to institute personal rule, if a low turnout enables "reactionary forces" to win the upcoming legislative election on the strength of the votes of "louts, lumpens, and pensioners, backward-lookers who never miss a chance to participate in elections." In such a case, Yeltsin would have to dissolve the new Duma and cancel the 1996 presidential election "in order to bring the country toward genuine democracy in an authoritarian regime." That perspective made him join the governmental "Russia is Our Home" bloc, Travkin told a news conference while campaigning for RIOH in Nizhny Novgorod. (4)

Delimitation Accords Aim To Preserve Russia’s Integrity.