Soviet Union Time of Troubles

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

For seven decades Revolution Day on Nov. 7 has been the Soviet holiday of holidays, celebrating the 1917 dawn of the Communist empire in a pageant of regimented unity. But the observances this week seem likely to symbolize something very different -- where they are held at all. Officials in Moscow and Leningrad have criticized the traditional military parades as anachronistic wastes of money; parliamentarians in Latvia want rites honoring "victims of Communist terror"; authorities in Lvov in the western Ukraine resolved to ignore the anniversary altogether. Even after Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev ordered Moscow and other cities to hold the parades, some local leaders called for counterdemonstrations as well. No one was sure whose orders would be followed.

The cacophony over Revolution Day is only a mild symptom of the Soviet Union's potential dissolution. Perhaps this Gorbachev order will be grudgingly obeyed. But many of the edicts that he has been issuing under a law enabling him, in theory, to govern virtually by decree amount to the unheard roars of a paper tiger. In some cases the Kremlin and the republics have been playing out a ritualized farce. The center, as it is now called, issues a Gorbachev decree; one or more republics declare it to be null and void on their territory; Gorbachev issues a second order declaring that these null-and-void declarations are themselves null and void.

In the process, what was once one of the world's most tightly centralized states continues to fall apart. In the past few weeks, Kazakhstan in Central Asia became the 14th of the 15 republics to declare its sovereignty. A nationalist alliance calling itself the Round Table won 54% of the vote in parliamentary elections in the republic of Georgia on a platform that opposes signing a new treaty of union with the central government. The Ukrainian government last week began distributing coupons to be used for the purchase of various goods, a step toward introducing its own currency. The Belorussian republic recently enacted measures regulating exports to other republics or abroad, and Armenia did the same last week.

The newest fad is for even more atomization: not just republics but pieces of republics and even single cities are proclaiming themselves sovereign. Within the Russian federation, the Chuvash, Buryat, Kalmyk, Tatar, Mari, Komi, Yakut, Karelian and Bashkir autonomous republics, each the homeland of a distinct ethnic group, have all called for some form of separatism. Districts like the Irkutsk region of Siberia have adopted declarations of "equality and independence," and the city of Nizhni-Novgorod has petitioned the federation for special status.

By far the most intense and significant conflict, however, is the tug-of-war between the Kremlin and the White House. That is what Muscovites jokingly call the marble-faced skyscraper perched on an embankment along the Moscow river that houses the government of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. This immense land, stretching from the Arctic to the subtropics and from the Polish border to the North Pacific, contains 147 million of the Soviet Union's 286 million people, 75% of the land and the bulk of the U.S.S.R.'s natural resources. In the West, the Soviet Union and Russia were long regarded as two names for the same country, and that belief, though incorrect, was not altogether without foundation. The other republics were seen as appendages of the Russian heartland. There was, for example, no Russian Academy of Sciences ^ or even Russian Communist Party, only a central Soviet Academy and Soviet Party with branches in the Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Georgia and the other republics.

Nowadays it is not only misleading but also wrong to view Russia and the Soviet Union as one political entity. The Russians are leading a second revolution to dismantle the results of 73 years of Communist rule and to bring the Soviet Union, as it exists today, to an end. Historians may someday mark the true beginning of the end on May 29, when the newly elected Russian Parliament chose Boris Yeltsin as its chairman. He gave the burgeoning rebellion a charismatic leader, endearing himself to the average man as a symbol of protest against a dictatorial system. Almost immediately after his ascension, Russia declared sovereignty, an act equivalent to yanking out the foundation stone from the whole Soviet structure. Now Gorbachev and Yeltsin are locked in a personal duel that is also a pivotal test of how much control the center can exert, vs. how much independence Russia and other republics can exercise. If Gorbachev is to have any union left to govern, he must find a way to keep Russia in it.

The clock began ticking last Thursday on the sharpest and most important phase of that contest. On the eve of Nov. 1, the Russian Parliament launched the much touted 500-day economic program. Regardless of different plans in the Kremlin, Russia will begin instituting a free-enterprise market economy. Unprofitable collective farms are supposed to be disbanded or broken into private plots; most businesses are to be converted from state to private ownership, and most controls on prices, wages and production are to be scrapped. Says Ruslan Khasbulatov, Yeltsin's first deputy and a specialist on Western economic systems: "Russia has formally recognized the principle of private property, something Gorbachev has failed to do. Without that, there can be no market, no mixed economy."

Yeltsin may never have intended a showdown. He came away from a late August summit meeting with Gorbachev thinking the Soviet President had agreed to adopt the 500-day formula for the entire U.S.S.R. But last month Gorbachev pushed through the Supreme Soviet a watered-down plan that sets no timetable for converting from state ownership to private property and retains more subsidies to failing enterprises.

Yeltsin and his aides predict that Gorbachev's halfway measures will fail, forcing the Soviet President to adopt the 500-day plan after all. But for the moment the controversy is coming close to open economic war. The Russian parliament last week passed a law placing all property in Russian territory, except that belonging to the Soviet military or the KGB, under its control. Gorbachev had earlier got the Supreme Soviet to grant him power to fire the heads of businesses that refuse to obey orders from the central government. It remains to be seen which jurisdiction can make its claims stick.

Yeltsin meanwhile is moving on the political front to effect what ally Oleg Rumyantsev calls a peaceful democratic revolution. Rumyantsev runs a commission that is putting the finishing touches on a new Russian constitution. Yeltsin wants to submit it to the Russian Congress of People's Deputies at month's end and possibly to a popular referendum in January. The draft is modeled to a considerable extent and quite consciously on the U.S. Constitution. It declares Russia to be "a sovereign, social democratic state ruled by law" and specifically recognizes "the inviolable, natural right of private property." It establishes a presidency to be filled by popular election (guess who seems sure to be the first chosen?) and grants that office enough authority to cause some deputies to gripe about "royal powers."

The Russian Federation is also maneuvering toward some kind of power-sharing agreement with its 16 autonomous republics. Yeltsin has urged localities to claim as much authority as they can cope with, delegating the rest to the Russian Federation. At the same time, Russian leaders want to prevent their federation from splintering into mini-republics. Khasbulatov speculates that it might be enough to let local authorities keep a share of taxes and revenues.

If Russia can negotiate formal treaties with its autonomous republics in a month, as planned, Yeltsin will have stolen another march on Gorbachev. The Kremlin had hoped to have a Treaty of Union spelling out new relationships between the republics and the center ready by the end of the year. That looks increasingly unlikely. Unwilling to accept the degree of central power the Kremlin wants, the republics are negotiating with one another and forming loose groupings of their own. The Russians have already signed cooperation agreements with eight republics and plan to conclude negotiations with the remaining six by the end of the month. The five Central Asian republics have signed a similar pact setting up an economic federation.

Where will it all end? Yeltsin has sketched several alternative courses. One would be for Russia to claim its share of Soviet natural resources, establish its own currency, customs union and possibly even army if necessary. That course would amount to outright secession. If Russia took it, and other republics and then districts followed suit, almost anything could happen: chaos, anarchy, even civil war.

But there will be strong pressures driving the center and the republics toward compromise. Neither seems able to overcome the other economically; the republics can probably no more get the managers of state enterprises to obey their commands than Gorbachev can enforce his decrees. Yeltsin and his aides proclaim continued readiness to join Gorbachev in some kind of coalition government of "national trust" to guide the Union through the wrenching transition to a market economy. The Yeltsinites insist, however, that any coalition must drop Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov. So far, Gorbachev has shown no disposition to dump him.

The one outcome that seems least likely is a return to the highly centralized totalitarian dictatorship of the past. Whatever happens at the Revolution Day celebrations, Yeltsin and his allies are pushing a new Russian Revolution, one that could remake the country almost as completely as, and hopefully more happily than, did the one 73 years ago.

With reporting by John Kohan and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow