Communists take revenge on Yeltsin
for his loss to Putin
Today the State Duma must consider a request to the Constitutional Court about the unconstitutionality of Vladimir Putin’s decree on guarantees to the first president of Russia. According to the communists who initiated the request, granting Boris Yeltsin lifelong immunity is contrary to the Basic Law.

The decree “On guarantees to the President of the Russian Federation, who has ceased to exercise his powers, and members of his family” was signed by Vladimir Putin on December 31 last year, immediately after the resignation of Boris Yeltsin. The opposition did not like this document (see reference) at first sight. The left especially did not like the mention of family (even with a small letter) and the clause about Yeltsin’s immunity.
True, after consulting with lawyers, the leaders of the Communist Party considered that they were unlikely to be able to convince the court of the need to abolish the provisions on lifelong pensions, medical care, state dachas and other material benefits: providing such benefits to former state leaders is a generally accepted world practice. Therefore, the communists decided to challenge in the Constitutional Court one of the most hated points for them - the personal integrity of the ex-president.
It will be extremely difficult for the left to get the 226 votes necessary to approve the request: there are few people in the Duma who want to quarrel with the new president. The leader of the Duma Unity faction, Boris Gryzlov, said yesterday that “the communists are still close to the practice of considering personal cases and organizational conclusions, and even nationwide reprisals.” The leader of the Union of Right Forces, Sergei Kiriyenko, spoke in the same spirit: “We lost the elections, the evil is taking over, and now they are thinking about what kind of nasty thing to do. We can’t do nasty things to Putin - let’s do nasty things to Yeltsin.”
The purely legal side of the request is also flawed. As noted by the head of the Legislation Committee, Pavel Krasheninnikov (SPS), the Constitutional Court has repeatedly confirmed the president’s right to issue decrees on issues not regulated by federal laws. And the head of the corruption commission, Sergei Stepashin (Yabloko), advised the communists “not to go to court, but to pass the appropriate law.”
By the way, a draft of such a law was submitted to the Duma in January 1999 by then Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov. This document provided the ex-president with even greater rights than Putin’s decree, assigning him lifelong status as a member of the Federation Council. But the Duma left then rejected both this project and the political agreement in the package with which it was proposed.
It is interesting that the Communists reacted much more calmly to the 1991 decree on guarantees to Mikhail Gorbachev. Perhaps because it did not mention immunity, Gorbachev’s non-indexed pension was soon eaten up by inflation, the number of guards decreased from 17 to 3, and the service ZIL was replaced by a Volga in the spring of 1992 without explanation. But the communists apparently do not hope that Putin, like his “spiritual father,” will also forget about his promises over time.

DMITRY Kommersant-KAMYSHEV

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 53 dated March 29, 2000, p. 2

Authors:

Dmitry Kamyshev