Soviet Union Gorbachev's Nightmare

By Bruce W. Nelan.

While President Mikhail Gorbachev scored a victory of sorts in last week's national referendum on the Soviet Union's future, the big winner was his archrival, Boris Yeltsin. At Yeltsin's urging, voters in the Russian Republic approved the idea of a popularly elected President. Yeltsin plans to seek that post, which is likely to intensify his confrontation with the Kremlin. And at the moment he would be the odds-on favorite to win it; leaders of a fast- growing miners' strike have already pledged their support.

Record books will have to put bulky footnotes under the 3-to-1 yes vote Gorbachev won for his proposal that the U.S.S.R. be preserved as a "renewed federation." To begin with, six of the country's 15 republics, with a combined population of 21 million, officially boycotted the referendum. Of the country's 286 million people, 184 million were eligible to vote and, - nationwide, 147 million went to the polls.

So while Gorbachev's proposal was approved by 76% of the people who voted, that is only 61% of those who could have done so. There is also the question of the almost Brezhnev-level statistics from the Central Asian Republics -- all of them above 90% approval, with Turkmenistan hitting 98% -- which hint at possible vote fraud. There have been accusations of ballot tampering in some republics.

Yeltsin's electoral triumph, on the other hand, was relatively unclouded. In Russia 70% of the voters said they wanted an elected President. But the route from the chairmanship of the republic's parliament, the position Yeltsin now holds, to the presidency is not unobstructed. This week, for example, he faces a parliamentary no-confidence vote, called by conservative Communists in an attempt to dump him from the chairmanship he narrowly won last May. If Yeltsin passes that test, he must then push through constitutional changes to create the presidency.

Yeltsin is already the country's most popular politician, and his prospects at the polls, if he gets there, are improving through support from the increasingly powerful independent trade unions. Since March 1 about 300,000 miners have walked off their jobs at 160 of the country's 600 coal mines. They support Yeltsin's demand for Russian control over Russia's natural resources and demand Gorbachev's resignation. "We don't believe this government could fulfill our demands for normal working conditions," says independent union leader Pavel Shushpanov, "even if it wanted to."

Faced with this incipient revolution, Gorbachev and his colleagues in the Communist Party and the KGB are expected to do everything they can to derail Yeltsin's presidential campaign. Even without a popular mandate as leader of Russia, Yeltsin has been challenge enough in Gorbachev's eyes. As the elected head of government in the largest, wealthiest republic, he would be a Kremlin nightmare.

With reporting by James Carney and John Kohan/Moscow