Soviet Union: Fractured Hopes

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

The president goes on vacation to a seaside resort, but a crisis erupts while he is away. The vice president tries repeatedly to telephone him, but finally has to report to the legislature that he could not get through -- apparently because the president could not be bothered to pick up the phone. The public business will simply have to wait until the chief returns from his two-week vacation.

If this scenario involved George Bush, Kennebunkport, Dan Quayle and Congress, it would seem farfetched even for a satirical farce. Substitute some Russian names, and it becomes a straightforward recitation of facts. Vice President Alexander Rutskoi really did report to the Russian parliament early in October that he had tried a dozen times to reach the vacationing President Boris Yeltsin at the Black Sea resort of Sochi to ask what was to be done about a looming crisis, but failed. In reality as in fantasy, the script was singularly unfunny. As the first snows start to fall and a difficult winter looms, Russia is paralyzed by a web of incompetence. The wave of hope that swept the country at the fall of the Communist Party is giving way to resignation, despair and bitterness. The Keystone Kops behavior of the leadership is all too symbolic of the way in which the heroes of the August revolution, Yeltsin especially, have proved unable to stop the nation's slide into chaos.

Nor have matters improved since Yeltsin returned to Moscow three weeks ago. The situation that Rutskoi tried to phone him about, a movement to secede from the Russian Federation by the Chechen Ingush autonomous republic in the Caucasus, has blossomed into outright rebellion, and the secessionists last week defied a plea to lay down their arms. A much larger ethnic group in southern Russia, the Tatars, declared their region to be independent last week, and even some ethnic Russians in Siberia and the Far East are talking about setting up a breakaway republic.

The frightening economic slide keeps worsening, and no program to reverse it has been adopted or even formally introduced. There is some speculation that Yeltsin will declare a state of emergency this week, and he has huffed and puffed about drastic measures, including one freeing prices from state control. But he has not even spelled them out, much less introduced them. Meanwhile, his government and the Russian parliament have been unable to agree on whether to postpone local elections now scheduled for Dec. 8, and have left the jobs of prime minister and chairman of parliament vacant. "Russia's government is paralyzed," said Yevgeni Saburov, announcing his resignation as economic minister in early October.

Yeltsin and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev have done little better trying to reconstitute some central authority in what used to be the U.S.S.R. The indispensable first step, formation of an economic union, seemed to be at hand a few days ago, but only eight of the 12 remaining Soviet republics signed the treaty setting one up. Ukraine pulled out at the last minute, vowing to have total independence, and last week the parliament in Kiev voted to create a separate Ukrainian army, navy and air force. For good measure, it demanded to share control of all nuclear weapons on Ukrainian soil rather than hand them over to Russia or any central government -- though it reaffirmed its intention to destroy the atomic weapons eventually.

"We cannot imagine the union without Ukraine," said Yeltsin and Gorbachev in an appeal to the Ukraine supreme council last week. Indeed, Ukraine's population of 52 million and its abundant agricultural and industrial resources make it vital to any regrouping of the republics. What is supposed to be one of the key organs of a new union, a reconstituted Soviet parliament, did begin meeting last week in Moscow. But only seven republics were represented, and less than half the 450-odd members bothered to show up. In any case, complained Rutskoi, in the Russian republic "we are building mountains of laws, but no one is carrying them out."

Some degree of floundering was inevitable. Dismantling a seven-decade-old communist dictatorship and building new institutions from scratch is a Herculean task, especially for people who have no training in how to make democratic politics work. In Russia the current leaders did not attain power through a well-orchestrated plan but were thrust into a vacuum created by the failure of the reactionary putsch in August. They have been improvising ever since.

Even so, the current paralysis constitutes melancholy proof that leaders who can arouse a populace against dictatorship are not necessarily -- or even usually -- equally proficient at forming a new government. Yeltsin's sojourn in Sochi continues a distressing pattern predating the revolution: Yeltsin tends to follow two or three months of intense activity with a few weeks of idleness during which he virtually drops out of sight. Whether the cause is simple exhaustion, a recurring physical disorder (there are rumors of heart trouble) or some psychological hang-up is unclear.

On the job, writes one commentator in the weekly Moscow News, Yeltsin has displayed "three souls": those of a populist, a democratic reformer and an elitist from the old nomenklatura of the Communist Party bureaucracy. The democratic reformer became the first popularly elected leader in Russian history in June; and the populist shortly after stood on a tank to defy the coup; but lately the elitist has been in evidence. Yeltsin has appointed namestniki -- in effect, governors -- to administer regions and localities in his name, under powers ceded him by the Russian parliament last August.

Yeltsin contends that the presidential envoys are needed to override Communist apparatchiks who still control many localities and would otherwise block any changes. More generally, his supporters contend that Yeltsin, faced with the surviving party apparatus and a divided, if not splintered, parliament, must in effect initiate reforms by decree. But to opponents the * dispatch of the namestniki smacks of an old czarist practice. The parliament consequently wants them replaced by locally elected administrators; Yeltsin fears that many of those elected will be Communists, who are better organized than the democrats. Parliament refuses to postpone local elections, Yeltsin has vetoed its election bill, and no one knows what will result.

Such tussles are becoming increasingly frequent, partly because parliament is increasingly fractious. The legislators, elected in March 1990, once divided into two main groups: Communists and their opponents. They have now splintered into at least 14 registered factions, plus any number of single- issue dissidents. Lilia Shevtsova, a professor at Moscow's Institute of International Economic and Political Studies, calls many of the country's proliferating political organizations "sofa parties" because "all the members of one party can sit on one sofa."

Yeltsin's aides, some of whom were also heroes of the revolution, have been no help in resolving this confusion. On the contrary, they frequently squabble among themselves. Ruslan Khasbulatov, apparently annoyed by the failure of other Yeltsin supporters to back him for the still unfilled position of chairman of parliament, lashed out at State Secretary Gennadi Burbulis and State Counselor Sergei Shakhrai. He called them "kids who are simply not mature enough for politics."

Some of the fiercest controversy has come over what role Russia should play in a new union of the republics. Vice President Rutskoi denounced the new economic treaty as "banditry" that would allow the other republics to treat Russia as a "milch cow," then changed his mind when Ukraine pulled out. Burbulis has insisted that Russia should proclaim itself the "successor state" to the old Soviet Union and take over the institutions of central government. That has only intensified other republics' fear of being swallowed up into a new Russian empire.

Yeltsin's admirers point out that he has always been at his best in a crisis and predict that he will yet come up with a strong and effective stabilization program, maybe even this week when the Russian congress of people's deputies begins to meet. He had better not wait much longer; there are signs that traditionalist forces, which had been quiescent since the failed coup, are reviving. Official trade unions, which were bastions of the communist regime, rallied 50,000 people in Moscow last week to protest falling living standards. $ Their placards carried a warning Yeltsin and his allies cannot afford to ignore: HEY YOU IN CHARGE, STOP ALL THE EMPTY WORDS. WE'RE TIRED OF IT. The fractured forces of democracy don't have much time before "the rattle of empty cooking pans," as trade union leader Igor Klochkov warned, "may prove more terrible than the rattling of the tanks."

With reporting by John Kohan/Moscow and William Mader/London