Upheaval: Desperate Moves

By Bruce W. Nelan

Mikhail Gorbachev did not return from his Crimean captivity a hero. Worse, he did not realize it. If he had, he might have better used the drama of his 72 hours in the hands of the secret police to advance his standing among a people disgusted with his halfhearted economic reforms and political vacillation. He could have gone out to thank the Muscovites who had struggled for him as they defied the spectral Stalinists who were trying to bring back the past. He could have publicly embraced his former foe, Boris Yeltsin, and accepted with a flourish the sudden, almost unlimited opportunity to create a new society atop the wreckage of the Soviet system.

Most obvious of all, he could have denounced the Communist Party for covertly supporting the coup against him and resigned as its leader. After such a betrayal, how could he remain a Communist and vow to "work for the renewal of the party"?

But he failed to seize the moment. Only on Saturday night, after a series of intense conversations with several close advisers, did Gorbachev come to the inescapable conclusion. He announced he could not carry on as General Secretary of the party and was resigning immediately. What's more, he recommended that the Central Committee dissolve itself, and authorized local elected councils to take control of the party's extensive property holdings around the country.

The almost 400 members of the Central Committee, once one of the country's most powerful institutions, suddenly faced the prospect of losing their jobs as well as the privileges -- from dachas to chauffeur-driven sedans -- that so infuriated the average Soviet worker. Gorbachev's decision, however, did more than rip the heart out of the once monolithic party. His move signaled that the Communist Party's influence over the country's affairs was finished once and for all, its structure shattered and its 15 million members across the country forced to reshape their political allegiances.

Analysts in the Soviet Union and the West thought they saw Yeltsin's hand in Gorbachev's move, but in a way he goes Yeltsin one better. In July the Russian president had ordered party committees out of the offices, factories, army and KGB units in Russia. Gorbachev now confirms that order -- which he had opposed until last week -- and effectively extends it to the entire country. For decades the party structures behind the scenes in government, industry and the security forces had controlled all official decisions. They had also put up some of the toughest rearguard opposition to Gorbachev's efforts to press on with perestroika.

Yet Gorbachev's decision to quit the party had the smell of desperation; it is certain to have no impact on the accelerated breakup of the Union and does little to burnish the Soviet leader's credentials as a front-rank reformer. "It would have been greatly to his advantage had he done this a year ago," said Eduard Shevardnadze, a former Gorbachev ally who angrily resigned as Foreign Minister last December and quit the party in July. "But now? It is too late."

For two days after his return to Moscow, Gorbachev had seemed out of touch with events. Shocked by his temporary ouster and perhaps distracted by his wife Raisa's poor health, he retreated into the safety of bureaucratic routine. He closed himself away in the Kremlin and used television speeches and a press conference to address his rescuers. Only well down his list did he mention Yeltsin among those to be thanked. The Russian crowds were not impressed. Just beyond the Kremlin wall in Red Square, a sea of marching, flag-waving demonstrators chanted "Yel-tsin! Yel-tsin!" and shouted for Gorbachev to resign or resume his interrupted vacation.

If Gorbachev is to have any political future at all, he will have to make common cause with Yeltsin and deliver more drastic economic reforms more quickly than he has ever contemplated. He will have to transform not only the government but the entire country as well. At his rambling press conference the day he returned, Gorbachev ducked the question of whether he or Yeltsin now holds more power. "We have been bound together by the situation," he said.

The new balance between them is already clear. Yeltsin is the senior partner. With the hard-liners in flight, the union treaty they conspired to head off will turn the country into a confederation, a "Union of Sovereign Soviet Republics." The power to govern will flow out from the central offices in Moscow to the parliaments of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and especially to the largest of all, Yeltsin's Russia. "Gorbachev is back in power," says Alex Pravda, a Soviet expert at St. Antony's College, Oxford University, "but the presidential office is shrinking under his feet."

For his part, Yeltsin erased his early reputation for buffoonery. He retains his boundless energy and larger-than-life quality, but as George Bush pointed out, "flamboyance is a very positive quality as you climb up there and encourage your people." The Russian president proved last week that he was a leader in the most demanding sense -- decisive, foresighted and courageous. When many senior officials in Moscow and the 15 republics watched and waited to test the wind, Yeltsin acted. He declared himself the guardian of democracy and fulfilled his promise. Nor did he rest on his laurels: in the hours and days after the coup, Yeltsin seized the opportunity to issue a fistful of far- reaching decrees. Some, such as temporarily suspending six newspapers, were almost as undemocratic as the old system. And Yeltsin's boorish bossing of Gorbachev in the Russian parliament carried hints of an autocratic style that may do the country more harm than good in the long run. The impassioned Yeltsin may need to be reminded at times about the importance of zakonnost (legality) in his haste to bring about rapid change.

Even if Yeltsin and Gorbachev learn to work well together, they confront enormous tasks. The problems that preceded the coup -- economic decline, government deadlock, systemic decay -- are still there. At the top of the agenda is the immediate need to purge the current leadership of coup plotters, accomplices and sympathizers. It was clear last week that the country has no patience for continuing any of these men in office, yet there is a need for expertise and experience for the rebuilding that must get under way. But it is all happening faster and more roughly than many can handle.

The Vanquished Party

In its wake the coup left the kind of devastated power structure that followed the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989 and 1990. Even before Gorbachev's decision to decapitate the Communist Party, local governments had taken action. Central Committee headquarters in Moscow was sealed, party activities were banned or restricted in several republics, and leading communist publications were out of business.

A wave of public revulsion rolled across the country. Moscow party chief Yuri Prokofiev was hauled in for questioning by the state prosecutor. Demonstrators toppled statues of Lenin and other communist heroes in major cities, and some democratic reformers were worried that the rising spirit of vindictiveness might threaten the safety of party officials, especially in non-Russian republics.

A Disastrous Economy

Gorbachev's attempt to move from a centrally controlled to a market economy has been in motion for years but still remains in limbo. To push the economy ahead while the government is being repaired, Gorbachev last week appointed an executive panel. Its members include Russian Prime Minister Ivan Silayev; Arkadi Volsky, who has been pushing for conversion of defense plants to civilian production; and Grigori Yavlinsky, an economist best known for helping draft the so-called 500-Day Plan for radical reform.

Gorbachev's near zero popularity stemmed from his failure to bring even a modicum of improvement to living standards. Soviet gross national product fell 10% in the first six months of this year. Prices have risen 48%, and the distribution system has broken down completely. Though the Emergency Committee did not mention it, the defense budget is rising from 26% of the budget in 1990 to 36% in 1991. More than half of all industrial production is military.

The overarching criticism of Gorbachev's economic reforms is that he destroyed the old command system without putting anything workable in its place. Most Western economists agree that before any significant assistance is provided, the Soviet Union will have to create a new economic structure. Up to now, Gorbachev has claimed that the reactionaries held him back. But they have been flushed out. Some senior officials in Washington think Gorbachev is part of the problem. "Sure, the coup plotters were obstacles to economic reform," says an Administration foreign policy expert, "but so was Gorbachev."

Tainted Government

It was not just the people involved in the coup who were tainted; the institutions from which they came -- the party, army and KGB -- were also finally discredited last week. If Gorbachev is really intent on perestroika, which means restructuring, this is his golden moment. He can purge, break up and decentralize at will. In fact, he and the other leaders of the society will need virtually to reinvent the government and then find new people to staff it.

In his initial moves last week Gorbachev gave few signs he was willing to go that far. He declared himself "a socialist by ideology" and disclaimed any intention "to turn to a witch hunt."

Perhaps he feared that a serious search for villains would turn up his own name. He squirmed uncomfortably when he was asked at his press conference why he had appointed and retained the men who betrayed him. As his old friend Alexander Yakovlev put it, Gorbachev was partly to blame for the coup because he was "guilty of forming a team of traitors." Dmitri Yazov and Vladimir Kryuchkov had been openly plotting against him for months and still, almost incredibly, he confessed he had trusted them. "I simply didn't believe that Yazov was part of the coup," he said.

After meeting on Friday, Gorbachev and Yeltsin strode into the Russian parliament chamber together. From the moment they entered, Yeltsin seemed to loom commandingly over the Soviet President. Yeltsin made no secret of his conviction about who owed what to whom. Gorbachev began his speech like an unpopular child reading a book report before his classmates. Heckling grew so loud that he complained, "My situation is bad enough. Don't complicate it."

The classroom impression was heightened when Gorbachev announced a list of new ministers in the central government; it read as if it had been drafted by Yeltsin. The new KGB chief, Vadim Bakatin, a former Interior Minister ousted at the instigation of the hard-liners last year, had been one of the first to denounce the coup committee and come to Yeltsin's side. The next Minister of Defense, General Yevgeni Shaposhnikov, was the head of the air force last week when he refused to support the coup. Yeltsin's own interior minister, Viktor Barannikov, became national Interior Minister, the Soviet chief of police, replacing Boris Pugo.

Gorbachev also announced that he had dismissed his Foreign Minister, Alexander Bessmertnykh, who had developed a case of "coup flu" when the putsch was launched. Then Gorbachev suggested that some of his ministers had not gone along with the plot. Yeltsin promptly handed him a report on a meeting of the Cabinet of Ministers on the first night of the coup and said, "Read it." Gorbachev read aloud that all but two of some 20 ministers named had backed the junta or did not oppose it.

He also admitted that the Communist Party Central Committee had fallen in with the plotters. "You could even call them traitors," he said. Precisely the word. Kazakhstan's president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, announced that he had resigned from the Politburo and the Central Committee to protest secret instructions from the party secretariat in Moscow "to ensure that communists assist the State Committee for the State of Emergency."

A Fractured Union

Some kind of union treaty will be signed, creating a new country in place of the old Soviet Union, and at least six republics -- Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the Ukraine, Moldavia and Georgia -- may remain outside it. All three Baltic states have formally declared their independence. On Saturday, the Ukraine's parliament did the same, though it also called for a referendum on the question in December. Gorbachev had been trying to prevent Baltic secession by winking at the use of force and insisting on drawn-out legal procedures. Now he can hardly order the discredited army or Interior Ministry to hold the Baltic republics by force if they are determined to depart. The union treaty will devolve real power from the center -- and Gorbachev. Yeltsin says the coup showed him that Russia will not be safe until it has its own army. He has already created a Russian KGB that is taking over internal security duties. Other republics will do the same, and because they are assuming the power to tax, they can be expected to finance their own security forces first. This will provide less money for the central government and its uniformed services, and the lower income will in turn reduce the importance of the military-industrial complex that has dominated decisions in Moscow.

Most disgraced of all, the KGB is likely to be broken up. It may retain its foreign intelligence functions, but will see its domestic security apparatus turned into a separate, smaller organization. Other portions may be reorganized as an immigration and customs service and as a security organization for officials, similar to the U.S. Secret Service. The Interior Ministry's OMON special forces, the so-called Black Berets, are almost certain to be disbanded.

While these changes may be healthy, they will not guarantee more democratic institutions in the republics. In the Baltics they probably will, but the story could be different in Central Asia. Some southern republics that went along with the coup are uninterested in reform.

Officials in Washington and Western Europe make similar observations about Yeltsin. One of them says Yeltsin is "trying to impose at the republic level what he opposes at the national level," that is, centralized control of the vastness of Russia. The residents of Murmansk, the official argues, "don't want Yeltsin any more than Gorbachev telling them what to do." The leaders of other, smaller republics probably feel the same way.

Real Democracy

When the horizon clears after last week's turmoil, one of its most visible consequences will be the insistent question of Gorbachev's lack of democratic legitimacy. The constitutionality of his office was upheld, but not his personal claim to it. Yeltsin emerged as a formidable political force because he was elected by popular vote. The same was true of Mayor Anatoli Sobchak of Leningrad and others who rallied the hundreds of thousands to oppose the coup. Gorbachev is not even a popularly elected member of parliament, and its communist members are largely responsible for making him President.

The union treaty will provide for drafting a new constitution and holding national elections, but Gorbachev might have to speed things up. "All the central institutions lack legitimacy," says S. Frederick Starr, president of Oberlin College and a Soviet expert. Those include the Congress of People's Deputies and the Supreme Soviet. "The sole means of regaining it is through an election." The Supreme Soviet was to meet this week to begin restructuring the government. Whatever interim solution it might offer, however, will serve only to fill the gap until the country can go to the ballot box.

Outsiders like to think of Gorbachev as a democrat and free-marketeer. He is neither, in the Western sense of the terms. Nor is Yeltsin, for that matter. Gorbachev has pushed the limits of his philosophy as far as he seems able to, from the rigidities of the state Stalin invented to a relatively open, moderately free Marxism. But he is a product of his upbringing and the party cocoon that nurtured him. He believes in the state, and that democracy, like revolution, should be directed from the top.

Nevertheless, the coup ultimately failed because Gorbachev has been the leader of the Soviet Union for almost 6 1/2 years and gave life to his unique policies of perestroika, glasnost and demokratizatsiya. Blair Ruble of the Kennan Institute in Washington suggests Gorbachev's resignation from the party might signal his understanding "that he has to play a totally different role." Lately, Gorbachev foolishly made common cause with the men who tried to overthrow him. But his life and, for the time being, his job were saved by the democratic culture he created. The final irony may be that the democratic tide, swelled and strengthened by its astounding victory last week, may now sweep him away. He has done so much that it may simply be impossible for him to do much more.

With reporting by James Carney/Moscow, J.F.O. McAllister/Washington and Strobe Talbott/Washington