Soviet Union: A Call to Civil War? !

By David Aikman/Moscow

The long, tense interview was nearly at an end when the subject suddenly started to stray from the script. As the television commentator kept trying to interrupt, Boris Yeltsin, the president of the Russian republic, plunged the politics of the U.S.S.R. into turmoil by taking on the President of the Soviet Union himself. "I separate myself from the position and policies of Mikhail Gorbachev," he read in a slow, deep baritone, "and I call for his immediate resignation."

The challenge was not Yeltsin's first, but it was surely his strongest, and timed to coincide with a period of severe domestic disarray. As the economy worsens, the republics are growing more restive, the forces of order more demanding and the left more fractious. In the face of such pressure, Gorbachev's efforts to govern look increasingly feeble. Moreover, he has linked his fate to those who retain power but who most resist real change: Communist Party apparatchiks, industrial managers, army generals, KGB colonels.

Under the circumstances, Yeltsin's decision to step forward as the champion of reform should have surprised no one. The two men have been on a collision course ever since Yeltsin quit the party last July and emerged as the rallying point for the forces of democracy in the Soviet Union. His television statements marked the definitive split between the nation's two most powerful politicians. Yeltsin accused Gorbachev of "deceiving" the people by failing to enact the radical economic reforms he had promised and by accumulating enough personal power to create a dictatorship. "I have made my choice," Yeltsin said. "I believe in the support of the peoples of Russia, and I hope for it."

He will certainly need it. The opening of the breach with Gorbachev plunged the two men into a bruising struggle for political survival from which only one of them is likely to emerge. Conservatives struck back quickly. Mobilizing the full force of the Soviet media under their control, they unleashed a barrage of charges against Yeltsin. A Pravda editorial denounced the Russian leader for "resorting to all possible means to pursue his own personal ambitions and pretensions." One evening, the main television news program, Vremya, devoted its entire 17-minute opening segment to anti-Yeltsin diatribes. Soviet television even aired unusual live coverage of the Supreme Soviet as lawmakers voted to censure Yeltsin, 292 to 29, with 27 abstentions. His TV statement, said hard-line parliamentarian Anatoli Chekhoyev, "was tantamount to a declaration of civil war."

Perhaps. But with or without Yeltsin, the Soviet ship of state has been foundering. As Gorbachev has turned away from reform and sought to squelch ethnic unrest with strong-arm tactics, Yeltsin's voice has been one of the few public ones consistently opposing him. Yeltsin has said he has no desire to replace Gorbachev, but the President clearly does not trust him. After Soviet paratroops shot their way into the television tower in Lithuania last month, killing 15 demonstrators, Yeltsin flew off to neighboring Estonia and publicly condemned the deployment of soldiers against civilians. He then signed a mutual security treaty between the Russian federation and the three Baltic republics.

Who is this man who dares to challenge the Soviet President? Their rivalry has fascinated Soviets and foreigners alike ever since Yeltsin criticized Gorbachev at a Politburo meeting in 1987 and was forced to resign as party secretary for Moscow. Once regarded as a bombastic buffoon, Yeltsin has come to be seen as a serious contender for supreme power, the man most likely to win a free election for President.

In the Stalinist era, Yeltsin would probably have been shot for his insubordination. Under perestroika, though, he made an astonishing political comeback, running as Moscow's at-large candidate for the newly created Congress of People's Deputies in March 1989 and winning 89% of the city's 6 million votes. From that political base, he sniped constantly at Gorbachev for his "half-measures" and indecisiveness, and called for direct presidential elections.

Born within 30 days of each other in 1931, the two men could scarcely be more different in background and personality. Yeltsin's childhood was a grim struggle for survival in a one-room communal hut in the Ural industrial town of Sverdlovsk. At six, he was looking after his two siblings, boiling potatoes and washing dishes. "It was a fairly joyless time," he recalls, possibly also because his father frequently thrashed him with a leather belt.

Young Boris clashed often with school authorities, but his classmates regularly elected him class leader anyway. An aptitude for construction work and a province-wide reputation as an excellent volleyball player helped secure him admission to the department of civil engineering at Sverdlovsk's Ural | Polytechnic Institute in 1950. In the summer of 1952, Yeltsin hitchhiked and worked his way around the Soviet Union, sleeping where he could and stowing away on trains. "It taught me a lot," he says, "when I spent the night in sheds with poor and homeless people." Yeltsin's empathy for ordinary folk is one of his most remarkable political gifts. A woman construction worker sporting a Yeltsin button in Moscow's Pushkin Square said, "He's the first Russian leader I can understand. He speaks in a way that simple people can grasp."

That skill undoubtedly helped him during his hardscrabble rise through Sverdlovsk's construction industry in the 1950s. His relentless drive against pilfering and wage padding angered some fellow workers but eventually attracted the attention of Communist Party recruiters. Yeltsin became an ordinary member in 1961, at the age of 30, and did not join the party hierarchy full time until seven years later.

Once in, Yeltsin rose rapidly. A vigorous, workaholic leader, he spared neither himself nor his subordinates. In 1976 Leonid Brezhnev unexpectedly promoted him over the heads of more senior officials to the post of Sverdlovsk provincial first secretary. He soon met and became friends with Gorbachev, by now his opposite number in Stavropol. "When I entered Gorbachev's office," Yeltsin wrote in his autobiography, "we would embrace warmly. The relationship was a good one."

It remained so for a while after Gorbachev became the party's General Secretary in March 1985. Yeltsin soon arrived in Moscow as Central Committee Secretary for Construction, and Gorbachev later selected him for the tough task of cleaning up the corrupt Moscow party apparatus. With that job came candidate membership in the Politburo and such perquisites as a marble-lined dacha, a small army of servants and access to special Kremlin consumer stores. Far from being seduced by such luxury, Yeltsin was repelled, and that led to his wildly popular denunciations of high living by Soviet leaders.

Yeltsin toiled diligently to bring the capital's food supply and distribution system under control. He traveled the city by subway -- unheard of for a Politburo member -- and commuted from distant suburbs to check on transportation conditions for workers. He would even barge into meat stores to find out who was getting the best cuts. These shock tactics delighted ordinary Muscovites but infuriated the party "Mafia," an old-boy network of distribution officials and real-life gangsters.

( Yeltsin's hard-charging approach also displeased Gorbachev, who disliked confrontation. Not until Yeltsin began to criticize Gorbachev in 1987, however, did the two former friends find themselves seriously at odds. "There can be no doubt," Yeltsin wrote, "that at that moment, Gorbachev simply hated me."

There is an air of semipermanent melodrama to Yeltsin's life and career that his own actions sometimes do little to quell. During a 10-day visit to the U.S. in 1989, Yeltsin marred an otherwise impressive performance with a gauche display of his erratic nature: his speech was badly slurred at a breakfast meeting in Baltimore, the combined result of Jack Daniel's and jet lag. That episode prompted Soviet analysts at the White House to dismiss Yeltsin as a lightweight and to underrate his political skills.

U.S. officials today say Yeltsin has matured, though they wonder whether he has a serious strategy for building a political opposition to Gorbachev. His ability to muster popular outrage against the privileged center is unrivaled: the masses are drawn to him as the personification of anti-incumbent sentiment.

Now he needs to show how he would translate that public support into a concrete way of putting reforms into action, or even unseating Gorbachev. As the economy worsens, says Dimitri Simes, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Yeltsin must do more than agitate to throw the bums out. "While people still like him, will still vote for him," says Simes, "they're losing confidence that he can make a difference." But Michael Mandelbaum, a Soviet expert at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, maintains that though Yeltsin's reform ideas may not be detailed, he has as much of a program as anyone in Soviet politics, including Gorbachev.

State Department experts believe Yeltsin has come a long way from that disastrous visit in 1989. "He seems to be quite impassioned in talking about democratic and market reform," says an official. "He's surrounded himself with a very talented stable of advisers who seem to think he's genuine. He has attained a certain credibility as principal opposition leader."

But Yeltsin's vulnerabilities remain larger than life. He retains a strain of manic eccentricity that could derail him over the long haul. People worry about his relentless energy, his tendency to work himself to the brink of exhaustion, his vision of politics as mortal combat. Yeltsin himself admits, | "I am constantly having a fight with someone."

More important, perhaps, he lacks an institutional base beyond his power to bring people into the streets. With no real sovereignty of its own, the Russian parliament has few real powers, and within it Yeltsin has many opponents. He is thoroughly despised by the nomenklatura, the great sea of 18 million bureaucrats, party officials and managers who still have power and must be either persuaded, co-opted or replaced if reform is to succeed.

Nor is it clear what Yeltsin can do to counter the relentless pressure being placed on him by Gorbachev. He has declined to oppose publicly the March 17 national referendum on the future of the Soviet Union that Gorbachev has insisted on holding -- and will probably win. But Yeltsin has managed to tack on a question for Russian voters asking whether the republic's president should be chosen by direct election. If he pulls it off, he will have a clear public mandate, something Gorbachev sorely lacks. Soviets are wondering if that deadlock might not lead to civil war.

Or total disaffection. No doubt former Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze spoke for many Soviets when he denounced further confrontation last week. "I think this war of parliaments, of laws, and now of Presidents must be ended," he said. "Everybody should think about the country, about the people, about the fate of democracy in the Soviet Union."

If Yeltsin has a strategy for that, he hasn't revealed it. For his part, Gorbachev seems determined to discredit Yeltsin and his allies so completely that they can no longer serve as a focus for opposition to the Kremlin's growing authoritarianism. With any other man, that tactic might succeed. But perhaps not with Yeltsin, whose principal political genius may be sheer survival. Says Simes: "Yeltsin is at his best not when he's governing, but when he's at the head of an angry crowd."

For Gorbachev, to use his own words, that will be "something to think about." For the Soviet Union, it could bring violence and chaos. For the rest of the world, the outcome of the Yeltsin-Gorbachev struggle could shape the next era of East-West relations.

With reporting by James Carney/Moscow and J.F.O. McAllister/ Washingt on