Democracy’s Birth? If It Is In Russia, It Is A Painful One, With Many Yearning For The Past

Having just arrived from Washington, where phrases like “campaign fireworks” and “explosive attacks” are merely metaphorical, I was, I’ll admit, fairly wide-eyed when they told me that the guy who was almost certain to be Moscow’s next vice-mayor had just been blown up.

It was a quick and brutal reminder that democracy in Russia still has some pretty rough edges.

Not long after the vice-mayoral candidate, Valery Shantsev, had walked out of his Moscow apartment building to be greeted by a grenade (he survived, by the way), the city’s mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, called the bomb “an absolutely wild political terrorist act.”

More to the point, he hinted strongly that he thought the Communists were behind it.

Luzhkov, a Richard Daleyesque figure (very corrupt, very powerful, very popular) who everyone expects to win in a walk in the elections on June 16, wasn’t just being paranoid.

Campaign rules state that if Luzhkov’s running mate, Shantsev, were unable to stand for election - if, say, he were dead - Luzhkov would have to withdraw.

Luzhkov is a reformist pal of Yeltsin’s; the Communists would dearly love to see him knocked out of the race. But he is also heavily guarded, so their best chance at accomplishing that would be to go after Shantsev.

Had the Communists, on the eve of this historic Russian election, begun engaging in outright acts of terrorism?

Most striking about the possibility is how it sits next to the overriding pitch that the party has been making throughout the campaign: the nostalgia pitch.

The Communist presidential candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, promises to return Russia to the good old days, when it was a great and glorious world power.

Never mind that it was also an economic wreck and a bastion of repression. The historic transition the country has embarked on - from authoritarianism and central planning to a free-market democracy - has proven difficult and painful, as historic transitions on this scale always are.

When today hurts, romantic visions of yesterday take hold. And it’s to those visions that Zyuganov is appealing.

Such nostalgia, it seems, is very much in vogue these days in the most powerful and strategically important countries of the world.

A couple of weeks ago, Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu won his remarkable victory in Israel by peddling his own brand of nostalgia: for the days before a peace process that, to many people’s minds, has caused great disruption and much fear, and cost far too many lives.

Meanwhile, in America, Bob Dole is running as the living, breathing embodiment of the nostalgia for the idealized postwar years of American ease, affluence, and social coherence.

These three are very different animals, of course, in all kinds of ways. But there’s enough of a similarity to their appeal that I’ve been telling friends lately that 1996 could well be the year of the Nostalgia Trifecta.

When Bibi won, I couldn’t help thinking: one down, two to go.

By this time next week, we may have a much better sense whether Zyuganov has a chance to keep my little nightmare scenario chugging along.

A few weeks ago, he was leading Yeltsin in most of the polls. But now he seems to be slipping (though many pollsters here believe that their samples are biased against Zyuganov).

The appeal of nostalgia is powerful, but for all its comforts, people may be realizing that it’s a hopeless illusion.

And, as the bombing of Valery Shantsev makes horribly clear, it’s a dangerous one as well.

John Heilemann writes “Impolitic” for The Netizen, part of HotWired, Wired magazine’s World Wide Web site at http://www.netizen.com on the Internet for election coverage.