Boris Yeltsin: Russia's Maverick

By Bruce W. Nelan

They came by the tens of thousands, some bearing posters depicting the jubilant face of Boris Yeltsin, others holding placards demanding the removal of Mikhail Gorbachev. By noon on a chilly Sunday, more than 200,000 people filled the vastness of Manezh Square outside the crenellated walls of the Kremlin. As a speaker shouted out resolutions, the crowd voted overwhelmingly for authorities to stop persecuting Yeltsin, leader of the Russian republic, and for Gorbachev to resign as Soviet President. Addressing the throng, Moscow Mayor Gavril Popov asked, "Do we trust the leadership of the country?" The crowd roared back, "No!"

The demonstration, perhaps the largest in the Soviet Union since the advent of perestroika five years ago, only served to sharpen the conflict between the country's two most prominent politicians. On one side is Mikhail Gorbachev, the father of perestroika and glasnost, the brilliant if testy infighter whose policies not only failed to put bread on the table but spurred most of the country's 15 republics to loosen if not actually break the ties that bind them to Moscow. On the other side is Boris Yeltsin, the Lazarus of Soviet politics, the blunt-spoken and somewhat erratic brawler of the streets who seems intent on leading a revolution against the Kremlin.

The battle must be particularly frustrating for Gorbachev, who prides himself on opening up his country's political process to divergent voices, but surely never expected a voice as brash as Yeltsin's to carry so much popular weight. Nothing if not spontaneous, Yeltsin demanded on live television last month that Gorbachev resign. Only a few short years ago, he would have landed in the Gulag for such an attack on the leader of the Soviet Union. Today a verbal assault on Yeltsin by Gorbachev's allies only seems to increase the Russian leader's standing among the people.

The latest battleground between the two men is the 28-word question put to the country in a referendum held on Sunday asking Soviet citizens whether the nation should be preserved as a "renewed federation of equal sovereign republics." The referendum, the first in the nation's history, had to be voted upon by a majority of the country's roughly 200 million eligible voters for the result to be valid; even then, the outcome has only symbolic meaning, since the details of the new federation must still be worked out in bargaining between the republics and Moscow.

But to hear the government's spokesmen tell it, the vote would determine nothing less than the future of the world. EITHER UNION OR CHAOS, a Pravda headline blared. "The disappearance of the Soviet Union from the world map," a TASS commentator pointed out, would "result in the disruption of the world's political and strategic balance." Certainly true, but whatever results the referendum might accomplish, eradication of the Soviet Union is not one of them.

Though Yeltsin never actually urged people to vote nyet, his refusal to endorse the measure irked Gorbachev. The day before the massive rally outside the Kremlin, Yeltsin had called upon the people to "declare war on the leadership of the country, which has led us into this quagmire." In true Yeltsin style, the Russian leader admitted several days later that perhaps he should not have used the word war, but the damage was done. Soviet officials would give Yeltsin TV time only under restrictive conditions, so the ever resourceful Russian leader took calls from citizens at the office of the liberal daily Komsomolskaya Pravda, which then published a transcript.

Complete results of the balloting were not expected until the end of this week, and even then, in spite of official predictions, it might be difficult to interpret them. Six of the Soviet Union's 15 republics -- the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, plus Georgia, Armenia and Moldavia -- have refused to participate, though some of their residents, mostly Russians, will vote anyway. Special polling places have been set up in ethnic-Russian areas in non-Russian republics. For voters in the armed forces, 6,827 military polling districts have been set up.

While the voting is only an expression of public opinion, and will have no effect on the independence of republics, most politicians see it as a referendum on Gorbachev's leadership. It is possible he sees it that way himself. The Soviet President put his personal authority on the line last week in a nationally televised plea for a yes vote. "The point at issue," he said, "is the fate of the country, the fate of our homeland, our common home, how we and our grandchildren shall live."

Gorbachev announced the referendum last December as part of his plan to push and pull the rebellious republics into signing a new treaty of union. The treaty, to replace one that created the U.S.S.R. in 1922, would redefine and somewhat loosen the relationship between member republics and the central government in Moscow. Because leaders of several independence-minded republics resisted the idea, Gorbachev decided to go over their heads to the voters. He was confident the majority would vote his way; those republics that balked still would not be allowed to secede.

As head of the largest and richest republic, Yeltsin was not prepared to fall into line until his demands for less control by the central government and more extensive sovereignty for Russia had been met. He objected to the first draft of the treaty and last week said he still had problems with the new version, which provides for sharing economic power and even for changing the name of the country (to what is artfully fudged in the text). At issue, said Yeltsin, was not simply whether to preserve the Union, but how to improve it. "If we preserve it in its present form," he said, "then we are preserving not the country but the system that is ruining the country today."

Like Gorbachev, Yeltsin hopes to bend the referendum to his own purposes. The second question on the ballot in Russia is whether the republic should establish a directly elected presidency. Voters are likely to say they do want to choose their own leader, and Yeltsin is likely to win an election. He will then be ready to do battle with Gorbachev on a more equal footing. With a huge power base and an electoral mandate, Yeltsin will face a national leader who has never been popularly elected but has massive institutional power at his command.

Gorbachev will portray a yes vote in the referendum as evidence that Yeltsin is defying the will of the people by obstructing the Union treaty. Though conservative deputies have forced a vote of confidence in the Russian parliament for March 28 to threaten Yeltsin's hold on the chairmanship, his position will be greatly strengthened if Yeltsin becomes an elected president. The stalemate could then be prolonged. Yeltsin, however, has limited administrative and no police power and cannot enforce Russian laws on radical economic reform, for example, if they conflict with the Supreme Soviet's legislation.

Ideally, Yeltsin would like to see the Soviet President and his Cabinet cede power to the Federation Council, a policymaking body that includes the leaders of all 15 constituent republics, though some of them are boycotting it. To force out the powerholders, who uniformly despise him, Yeltsin may be thinking of something like Czechoslovakia's "velvet revolution," street demonstrations fueled by an overwhelming wave of people power. But no matter how great his popularity, even Yeltsin will be hard put to mobilize the Russian masses in large enough numbers. They are mostly anti-Gorbachev and antigovernment, but their political inertia has been ingrained over centuries. Already their initial excitement and interest in the open politics of Gorbachev's demokratizatsiya have given way to apathy, cynicism and exhaustion.

Even worse, the fledgling democrats cannot seem to pull themselves together. Yeltsin last week urged the splintered, squabbling opposition factions to form a single, pro-democracy party. But Yuri Afanasyev, a leader of the liberal Inter-Regional Group of Deputies in the Parliament, opposed the idea. Putting everyone into the same party, he argued, was a Bolshevik approach. "It is better for us to agree on something fundamental," he said, "rather than join something anonymous and faceless."

Yeltsin has positioned himself in the role Gorbachev formerly played so well: supporter of the common folk. When thousands of coal miners went on strike in 1989, Gorbachev associated himself with their fight against management and emerged as a hero to the working class. Miners are striking in parts of the Ukraine and Siberia once again, but their leaders have turned to Yeltsin. Last week the Russian leader met with strike coordinators, who declared their full support for Yeltsin's political position and "readiness to support it with all possible nonviolent methods." Most miners are asking for higher wages, but some say their demand is purely political: the resignation of Gorbachev.

Why is the creator of perestroika and glasnost so hated in the country he freed from fear? To some extent, statistics explain why. A report by the Soviet State Planning Committee predicts that Soviet GNP will fall 11.6% in 1991; it declined 3% last year. Industrial production this year will drop more than 15%, and agricultural output 5%. One state economic planner said he feared a return to "the horrible times we lived through in the past," referring to "the famine of the 1930s, the repressions of 1937." A poll published last week by the Soviet National Public Opinion Studies Center asked, "What does the Soviet Union offer its citizens?" The response given by 65% of those interviewed: "Shortages, waiting in lines and a miserable existence."

Gorbachev's tentative domestic reforms have so far succeeded only in disabling the old centrally planned economy without providing an effective replacement. He took over the Communist Party in 1985 thinking he could energize and modernize the existing machinery. He was neither a democrat nor a free-marketeer and described himself as a dedicated Communist. But in time he discovered that the party bureaucrats were blocking him because they oppose change in general and treasure their power and privileges. Gorbachev then decided to try to blast the party out of its executive positions and transfer power to a reconstructed government. Still, he said, he remained a Leninist.

His efforts failed, and the glasnost that accompanied them set loose ethnic strife, rampant nationalism and separatist movements in the republics. In March 1990 Lithuania declared its independence, and Moscow was faced with the possible breakup of the Soviet Union. This threat changed the entire debate about the country's economic and political future, for Gorbachev was not prepared to endorse the dissolution of the Union.

Restoration of order became the slogan of the day, and Gorbachev seems to believe in it as much as the party, the army and the KGB. "In some ways," says a U.S. State Department official, "it was the resurgence of nationalism that justified the resurgence of the right." Gorbachev has replaced his original team of reformers with hacks from the party Central Committee. He has shown the fist to separatists in the Baltics, and he has put joint army and police patrols onto the streets of the cities.

Such visible hardening has increased speculation that a military coup might be in the offing. Some Western experts and even some Soviets argue that a de facto coup has taken place. The reactionaries were shocked when radicals took control of city councils in Moscow, Leningrad and Sverdlovsk and several republics began talking of secession. Those developments apparently mobilized the army and its allies in the giant military-industrial production network. After 46 representatives of eight defense-related ministries signed an open letter last September warning that new laws threatened to destroy the defense industry, Gorbachev changed course. He dropped the radical 500-day economic reform plan he had praised earlier and adopted still another muddled plan for piecemeal changes.

A series of unexplained military maneuvers around Moscow last fall fueled rumors that the army had used scare tactics to pressure Gorbachev. A much repeated story speaks of a tense meeting of the Communist Party Politburo at which the President was forced to back away from economic reform and crack down on separatism.

Gorbachev's two liberal economic advisers, Stanislav Shatalin and Nikolai Petrakov, who were among the chief architects of the 500-Day Plan, say their handiwork "horrified" and "galvanized" the conservatives and led to a crisis session of the party leadership. According to Shatalin, one of the strongest opponents of his plan was Valentin Pavlov, who was then Finance Minister. It was Pavlov, recently appointed Prime Minister, who last month cast a chill on investors from abroad by accusing Westerners of plotting to flood the Soviet market with billions of rubles, wreck the economy and ultimately overthrow Gorbachev. Two weeks ago, the daily Moskovsky Komsomolets reported that Moscow party chief Yuri Prokofiev had said, "Gorbachev was forced to refuse the ((radical reform)) program at nighttime sessions of the Politburo."

Those stories might be true, but they are not necessary to explain Gorbachev's retreat. He is a conservative, and all his instincts must have warned him that if he swapped his stop-and-go style of reform for a plunge into a free market, there was no way to know what might happen. He could not bring himself to risk everything, including the destruction of communism.

Oleg Bogomolov, director of Moscow's Institute of International Economic and Political Research, speculates that Gorbachev then took a new look at the central bureaucracy. Bogomolov says, "Gorbachev probably recognized that the old system still showed signs of life, that it could be preserved and - reformed." In other words, it was a strategic retreat into a renewed alliance with the party, the military and the economic masters of the country.

However it happened, says Peter Frank, a Soviet expert at Britain's University of Essex, "the reactionaries' interests and Gorbachev's are now in harmony." As evidence, Frank points to the composition of the new policymaking Security Council announced recently in Moscow. In addition to the President, its members are Vice President Gennadi Yanayev and Prime Minister Pavlov, both hidebound bureaucrats; Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh, a professional diplomat with little political clout; Interior Minister Boris Pugo, Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov and KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, all hard-liners; and two token moderates, former Interior Minister Vadim Bakatin and Yevgeni Primakov, a Gorbachev adviser.

In the new Cabinet of Ministers, the Prime Minister has four First Deputies; all of them have links with the military-industrial complex. When Gorbachev's economic advisers Shatalin and Petrakov resigned after the military crackdown in the Baltics in January, he replaced them with two apparatchiks from the staff of the party Central Committee. Says Bogomolov: "Gorbachev is less the President nowadays than the Communist Party General Secretary, carrying out the decisions of the Politburo and the party plenum."

Many Western experts have been speculating that when the time came for a crackdown, Gorbachev would lead it. While he is a relatively benevolent dictator -- more Peter the Great than Stalin -- and his powers to rule by decree have been handed to him legally, he remains a dictator. His idea of democracy is a reasonable amount of public debate and a limited devolution of authority to the republics, but a clear concentration of power at the center.

A man whose every move is tactical, Gorbachev is intent on one overriding goal, stability, for the country and himself. In a speech last month in Minsk, he told workers, "I am decisively in favor of political and economic stabilization, for strengthening order, so that authority is authority and not jelly." He now favors a "stable political coalition of centrist forces" that will include more than the Communist Party but exclude radical democratic groups. He apparently envisions parliament and national politics as Communist- dominated but co-opting enough dissent to keep the comrades on their toes. "It is necessary to turn the Communist Party into the integrating factor of all centrist forces," he says.

"He is in a holding operation at home and abroad," says Dimitri Simes, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "His stated purpose is stability," agrees a State Department expert, "but the situation is likely to get worse. We have to be prepared for an expanding cycle of repression."

That prediction is almost a certainty because neither of Gorbachev's crushing problems is about to go away. The referendum will do nothing to force the separatist republics to relent, and without basic reform the economy can only deteriorate. After withdrawing 50- and 100-ruble notes from circulation and setting the KGB to examining the books of offices with foreign connections, the government's next "reform" will be to raise prices on consumer goods an average 60%.

When Gorbachev summons the republics back to work on the revised Union treaty, officially titled the Treaty of the Union of Sovereign Republics, he will find them as reluctant as ever. One provision of the treaty, however, is that those republics that refuse to sign will be governed by "existing legislation of the U.S.S.R., mutual obligations and agreements." So the breakaway states that thought they could opt out of the Union by not joining the new one will still be held hostage. Undeterred, Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis says he will negotiate with Moscow only if the end result is Lithuanian independence. Rukh, the anti-Union movement in the western Ukraine, advises its supporters, "It is necessary to be independent to get rich."

Few in the Soviet Union are going to rise to riches under the Gorbachev plan, which has already shown it has no answers to the country's problems. The requirements for a better national life are a free economy and a democratic system. Without both, the future can only offer a cycle of unrest and repression. The more violence the state uses to preserve itself, the worse the economy will become and the less help the rest of the world will be willing to offer. As Gorbachev moves to the conservative camp, his course does not lead toward stability, but crisis.

With reporting by James Carney and John Kohan/Moscow and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington