Yeltsin Sets Clock on Constitution

President Boris Yeltsin on Monday set the schedule for constitutional reform, but it remained unclear whether unruly legislators would follow his lead.


Yeltsin signed a series of resolutions on Monday calling for legislators to speed up constitutional reform in order to ensure that a new charter is adopted by the entire Russian Federation by next fall.


The issue is important because, despite the immense changes in Russia since the coup last year, the country's law is still based on a constitution adopted under Leonid Brezhnev at the height of the "era of stagnation". This has often complicated Yeltsin's attempts to push ahead with reform.


As chairman of Russia's Constitutional Commission, Yeltsin formally asked parliament on Monday to reconsider its decision of 10 days ago to postpone work on the constitution.


Yeltsin asked legislators to review the draft constitution during the winter instead, and to adopt it in a first reading at a session of the Congress of People's Deputies, which he would like to be held next March.


The next steps would be a popular referendum on the document in June 1993, and a final vote in the Congress the following October, Oleg Rumyantsev, executive secretary of the Constitutional Commission, told reporters on Monday.


That schedule, however, is far from approval.


The 1042-member Congress, Russia's highest legislative body, which has the authority to amend and adopt the constitution, is currently set to convene on Dec. 1.


Legislators have already voted to put a review of acting Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar's economic policies at the top of the agenda of the December Congress. The majority in the Supreme Soviet, the Congres's smaller working parliament, are committed to keeping the constitution a secondary issue.


In framing the agenda for the upcoming Congress, they have limited the discussion of constitutional reforms to making amendments to the existing 1978 constitution, aiming to create a "transitional constitution" that would see the country through the current times of trouble.


Speaking to reporters on Monday,


Rumyantsev denounced this idea, warning that legislators should make adopting the new constitution a top priority if they did not want to preside over the dissolution of the Russian Federation.


A transitional constitution "would amount to a basic law of a transitional government, which is making the transition to its own destruction", he said.


One of Yeltsin's resolutions released Monday cited the Russian Federation republics of Yakutia and Bashkiria as having already adopted constitutions of their own that clash with Russia's draft constitution on a number of points.


Yeltsin has called a Nov. 26 meeting with republican leaders on the progress of constitutional reform in the republics. There, the president will presumably remind republican leaders that their constitutions have to correspond with Russia's in order to be acceptable.


Rumyantsev said that if the Congress opened in December, it was unlikely to accept the draft constitution. At its last session in April of this year, the Congress of People's Deputies approved the basic principles of the draft constitution.


But it ordered the Constitutional Commission to make a series of amendments and submit the draft for preliminary approval by parliament this fall.


Rumyantsev, who sides with the Yeltsin on most questions concerning the constitution, is not the only voice in the commission, however. It has 96 delegates, including members of opposition parliamentary factions and the leaders of some of the very republics that have approved their own breakaway constitutions.