Into The Void

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

No Soviet Union? That huge blob of blood red that dominated maps of the Eurasian landmass for 70 years now broken up into a crazy quilt of squirming lines enclosing a kaleidoscope of colors? The concept is even harder to grasp than the idea of a noncommunist Soviet Union. There had once -- for centuries, in fact -- been something like that, in the form of the Russian empire. But no monolithic state covering that immense area -- none at all?

Well, could be. Almost anything might yet emerge out of the chaos that has followed the second Russian Revolution. But on two central facts everyone is agreed: the old unitary state in which the Kremlin tightly controlled every aspect of life is dead; the Other Superpower that overshadowed the 20th century -- and the American imagination as long as most of us have lived -- is no more. "The former Union has ceased to exist, and there is no return to it," says Leningrad Mayor Anatoli Sobchak, a prime mover in attempts to devise some arrangement to replace it.

Something new is being born, improvised on a grand scale. But its final shape has yet to be chiseled. Even the greatly diminished degree of control from Moscow foreseen under the Treaty of Union, worked out between the Kremlin and nine of the Soviet Union's 15 constituent republics in June, suddenly seemed far too much. Two weeks ago, the treaty looked so radical that it triggered a coup attempt by communist hard-liners, nostalgic for the bad old days of dictatorship, who figured they dared not let the pact go into effect. Now, in the wake of the popular upheaval that defeated the putsch, the treaty has become a dead letter, judged totally inadequate to slake the republics' suddenly sharpened thirst for independence. At barest minimum, what was still officially one country on Aug. 19 will be four. The center, as Soviets call the government in the Kremlin, is no longer even trying to keep the three Baltic republics in any kind of union. A rapidly growing list of foreign governments last week formally recognized Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia as independent countries and even began talking about seating them in the United Nations. But the headlong trend toward dissolution did not stop there. At last count, seven more republics -- the number last week was changing almost daily -- had also declared independence, and they include such keystones of the Union as Ukraine and Belorussia. Ukraine, if it actually goes all the way, would be the fifth largest nation in Europe (pop. 51.8 million).

Nor is there any guarantee that the remaining five republics will hold together. Carried to its illogical extreme, in fact, the movement toward disintegration could splinter the former U.S.S.R. into upwards of 40, mostly mini, countries -- the 15 full republics plus some of the 20 autonomous republics, eight autonomous regions and 10 smaller autonomous areas. Most are homelands of distinct ethnic groups that cherish ambitions to become autonomous in fact as well as name.

To be sure, nobody expects the dissolution to go that far. Last week, indeed, saw the beginning of a countertrend toward formation of some kind of new union, spurred by somber warnings against self-destructive splintering of authority. Mikhail Gorbachev threatened to resign as Soviet President if some sort of union is not preserved, and Sobchak called a complete dissolution of the union "suicidal." Delegations of the giant Russian republic and Ukraine pledged to work out at least military and economic cooperation and invited the other republics to participate. At week's end a Russian delegation got the signatures of the leaders of Kazakhstan on a similar agreement-to-try-t o- agree.

Even if successful, such efforts may not create anything that could properly be called a central government. Some planners envision no more than a small secretariat that would coordinate the policies of what would be in effect independent nations. Nursultan Nazarbayev, president of Kazakhstan, favors a confederation, to be called the Free Union of Sovereign Republics, so loose that it would have no central parliament or Cabinet of Ministers at all. Moscow would retain responsibility for only a handful of functions, including border protection, communications, interrepublic transport, and carrying out a joint foreign policy that would be formed in consultation with the republics. About the only resemblance that this creation would bear to the present Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is that the Cyrillic initials of its Russian name would be the same: C.C.C.P.

Other models for a union of sorts include an economic common market like the 12-nation European Community; or a military alliance patterned after NATO, which for most of its 42 years has been an explicitly anti-Soviet grouping; or even the Commonwealth, whose member nations rarely do anything together anymore except talk.

What remains of the present Soviet government, meanwhile, is dissolving at breakneck speed. Institutions that had seemed both immutable and central to Soviet life are vanishing into thin air or being turned inside out at a dizzying pace. A citizen who returned last week from a fortnight out of the country might think he had awakened from a decades-long Rip van Winkle sleep, so totally had the country changed in his absence.

The Communist Party virtually disappeared overnight, its leadership disbanded, its offices padlocked, its funds frozen, its publications silenced -- though Pravda reappeared Saturday as an independent paper purportedly reflecting a "civic consensus." By a 283-to-29 vote, with 52 abstentions, the Supreme Soviet suspended party activities throughout the U.S.S.R., formalizing what had already been accomplished by decree in the individual republics. The Soviet parliament also dismissed the entire Cabinet of Ministers, which numbered around 70, after President Gorbachev announced with unaccustomed succinctness, "I cannot trust this Cabinet, and that is that." That leaves what is being called a "transitional government" -- transition to what is the question of questions -- to be run by a variety of makeshift executive bodies. The most important of these is a four-member commission headed by Ivan Silayev, prime minister of the Russian republic, that is charged with drawing up an economic-reform plan for the whole Soviet Union. In addition, Silayev will oversee the ministries of finance, defense, internal and foreign affairs, and the KGB.

That dreaded octopus was both shrunk and beheaded. The KGB's 230,000-strong armed forces were put under the control of the regular army and its governing collegium was dismissed. Remaining bosses of the agency that for decades terrorized millions of Soviet citizens were put on notice that they would themselves be investigated to determine their roles, if any, in the coup. New Defense Minister Yevgeni Shaposhnikov had earlier pledged to remove most of the ministry's collegium, its top leadership.

The moves added up to a sweeping purge that apparently still has some way to go. Fourteen alleged coup plotters, including all seven surviving members of the so-called Emergency Committee that ran the putsch, were formally accused of treason, an offense punishable by imprisonment or death. The latest to be arrested was Anatoli Lukyanov, former chairman of the Supreme Soviet, who was ! taken into custody on Friday. During a session of the parliament earlier in the week devoted largely to finger pointing or to attempts by some members to convince others that they had nothing to do with the conspiracy, Lukyanov's voice was one of the shrillest. "I could never be a traitor to a man I've known for 40 years," he said, referring to his law-school classmate. Gorbachev obviously did not believe Lukyanov -- he refused even to acknowledge his old comrade when they passed in a corridor -- and others have fingered Lukyanov as the ideological mastermind of the plot. So many other suspected conspirators are being investigated that Moscow Mayor Gavril Popov felt obliged to issue a public appeal: no citizen should denounce another as a coup supporter in order to settle a private score or to get rid of a boss whose job the informer wants. Such denunciations were among the most infamous features of Stalin's purges.

An impromptu air of back-and-forth confusion marked many of last week's activities -- understandably, since the democratic upheaval was the result not of any plan but of a spontaneous popular explosion that succeeded faster and more completely than anyone could have dreamed. One of the more endearing manifestations of revolutionary improvisation occurred on Wednesday night, when television viewers turned on their sets expecting to watch the official news show Vremya (Time). Instead they first saw a taped session in the office of Yegor Yakovlev, a reformist newspaper editor who had just been named head of state radio and television. Yakovlev had invited in several newscasters who had been barred from the airwaves by his predecessor, the hard-line Leonid Kravchenko, and asked them to put together a new evening news program, with almost no time to prepare. They did, fumbling through news copy and fluffing an occasional cue, but vowing repeatedly to tell the truth and only the truth.

Less engaging were some of the maneuvers of Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin, the anticoup hero who, like many other politicians, found it easier to lead a popular uprising than to form a government. In the name of protecting democracy, Yeltsin issued a blizzard of decrees asserting Russian control of many central government functions. He went far enough to endanger his new partnership with Gorbachev, who accepted the first batches of decrees but protested that later ones were "unacceptable."

Worse, representatives of some other republics feared that the decrees, combined with the fact that nearly all newly chosen officers of the Soviet government are Russians, meant that they had got rid of communist totalitarianism only to be swept up into a new Russian empire. "God save us from the nationalism of the Great People!" cried Genrikh Igityan, an Armenian Deputy, during one Supreme Soviet debate. Apparently realizing that he had overreached himself, Yeltsin late last week rescinded some decrees, including one asserting Russian control of state banks. That only added to the confusion: Viktor Gerashchenko, head of the Soviet central bank, Gosbank, was replaced one morning by Andrei Zverev, a deputy Russian finance minister, only to be reinstated before the day was out.

Yeltsin's retreat, however, could not stem the stampede of republics to declare independence. Fear of Russian domination is far from the only reason for this secessionist wave. Some republics may want only to strengthen their hand in bargaining on the configuration of a new, looser union. Certainly not all republics are prepared, or want, to go all the way to true independence, with their own flags, parliaments, currencies, foreign policies and seats in the U.N. Most specifically disclaim any intention of creating their own armies, other than perhaps small militias to serve as a kind of national guard.

Nor are all devoted to democracy; some may even be declaring independence in order to avoid it. The leaders of Belorussia are widely suspected of seceding so that they can keep the republic under the tight control of the Communist Party -- under a new name, to be sure. Zviad Gamsakhurdia, president of Georgia, seems quite genuine in his fierce desire to escape control by Moscow, but within his republic he has curbed the opposition press and has been accused of putting political opponents in jail.

Much of the secessionist spirit reflects real ethnic hostility -- and indulging it could be a recipe not just for chaos but for bloodshed. Dividing the Soviet Union along ethnic lines will not be much easier than unscrambling an omelet and returning the eggs to their shells. The U.S.S.R. contains more than 100 distinct ethnic groups, intermixed in such a way as to create minorities within minorities. Some of this mixing was done deliberately in an attempt to weaken local loyalties; some resulted from the mass deportations carried out by Stalin to punish population groups he suspected of lacking fealty to Moscow. In the little republic of Moldavia (pop. 4.4 million) the predominant Romanian ethnic bloc wants the independence declared last week to be a prelude to absorption by Romania. Such a union is fiercely opposed, to the point of rioting, by minorities of Russians and Gagauzi. In Georgia 60,000 South Ossetians long to secede from the secessionist republic and join an Ossetian ethnic enclave across the border in Russia.

The Institute of Geography of the Soviet Academy of Sciences considers that of the 23 borders between Soviet republics, only three are not contested. The institute counts 75 border disputes, the great majority entangled with ethnic conflicts.

The world knows how inflamed these can become. Over the past two years, only the appearance of the Soviet Army kept Azerbaijan and Armenia from full-scale war over Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan. Last week Yeltsin went so far as to threaten to "review" the Russian republic's borders with any other republics leaving the union; an aide specified that he meant that Kazakhstan and Ukraine could not take with them border areas populated mainly by Russians. The outcry was so intense -- Kazakhstan's president Nazarbayev grumbled darkly about "interrepublican wars" -- that Yeltsin hastily backed down and pledged to respect the territorial integrity of both.

Another threat raised by the chaotic independence movement is the specter of economic collapse, possibly leading to outright famine this winter and shortages of fuel to warm the homes of people in the brutally cold northern reaches. Soviet production and distribution of food, fuel and virtually everything else are already in a deep slump because the old system of central planning and economic commands has long since broken down and nothing coherent has taken its place. A splintering of political authority among seven, 10 or heaven knows how many republics, by hindering movement of goods across republic borders, could make the situation much worse.

At a minimum, political fragmentation would delay, if not defeat, the Silayev commission's attempts to draft a thoroughgoing reform of the whole economy. It is no secret what the group is likely to recommend. Said Silayev in an interview with TIME: "We are supporters, I would cautiously say, of the classic scheme of a market economy." A plan he drafted last March for the Russian republic proposed a balanced budget, convertibility of the ruble, freeing of prices, and most important, eventual private ownership of state industries and farmlands, all to be done in stages. But how could such a plan be put into effect throughout the U.S.S.R. if it had to be done by a congeries of quarreling republics? Says a U.S. State Department analyst: "Two years ago, maybe. But now, nothing written in Moscow is going to happen. The republics are doing what matters."

One thing all the republics do agree on, though, is that they have to conclude an economic agreement almost immediately. Most simply cannot live without one another's products; even the Russian republic could do so only with extreme pain. To cite just one example, the CIA notes that "the Soviet Union's entire output of potato-, corn- and cotton-harvesting machinery comes from single factories -- all in different republics." Nor would the republics have to agree on a division of political authority to form a common market; the European Community is uniting the economies of 12 independent nations. Even the Baltics might join an economic union while having nothing to do with any other remnants of the old Union. Recognizing the need for an economic pact, however, is not the same thing as negotiating one, only an indispensable first step.

Another point on which nearly all the republics are agreed is the necessity of some sort of common defense policy. Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan suggests a NATO-like unified army to be composed of contingents contributed by and under the control of each republic. He adds, however, that it could be activated only to face a common threat -- as if a unified army could be thrown together overnight, even if 12 republics agreed that there was such a threat. Various other ideas for a defense alliance exist; one is for a single army in which soldiers from any republic serve, in peacetime, only within that republic.

Beyond that, and between the two extremes of four and 40-odd countries, an almost endless variety of combinations and deconstructions is foreseeable. Some experts expect whatever union emerges to be less a country than a web of bilateral treaties between republics. One group of republics might form some sort of central government, though a weak one. That group might link with other republics in an economic market, and with different ones in a military alliance. Still other republics might be totally independent. Moldavia might indeed be willingly swallowed up by Romania.

Alternatively, of course, there is the possibility of complete chaos, civil % war or both. Sovietologists almost unanimously bring up the unhappy example of Yugoslavia, which is courting all-out civil war as its republics struggle for a new identity. Though Russia by sheer size is bound to dominate any grouping of former Soviet states, however loose or tight, scholars express a fervent hope that it does not try to be as overbearing as Serbia has been in Yugoslavia.

All of which presents a dilemma to Western supporters of the new Russian revolution. Recognizing the Baltics was the easy decision -- even though the U.S. will not get around to doing so until this week. They had been independent countries until 1940, when they were incorporated into the Soviet Union by force, and most Western countries had never recognized that annexation to begin with. But when and under what conditions -- if ever -- should foreign nations recognize the independence of Ukraine, or Kazakhstan, or Moldavia? The question of aid is also sticky. The revolution has prompted some renewed interest, at least in the U.S., in the Grand Bargain, a trade of massive Western economic aid for thoroughgoing Soviet reform creating a true market economy. In one way, the upheaval has increased prospects for such a deal. It broke, presumably completely and for good, the power of doctrinaire communists who opposed capitalism out of Marxist principle and used their network of party cells in factories, collective farms and distribution facilities throughout the country to frustrate the partial reforms that were attempted.

But the revolution, and the chaos that has followed it, has also raised a new argument for delay. Says Neil Malcolm, a Sovietologist at the London-based Royal Institute of International Affairs: "We do have to wait with massive financial aid till things are sorted out in the Soviet Union. We don't even know at this point whom the money should be sent to." Should it be distributed through a central government that is losing power every day but is still the legally constituted authority in the country? Or should it be channeled directly to the republics, regardless of their new arrangements? And if so, how can the West decide which republics should get how much and under what conditions?

Basically, the West is still split along the lines that emerged at a July meeting of the seven strongest industrial powers in London a month before the upheaval. Now, as then, Germany, France and Italy are urging the start of an immediate, coordinated program of massive aid -- $30 billion a year over five years is the most frequently cited figure. They argue that quick action is needed to nurture the nascent Soviet democracy. Now, as then, the U.S., Britain, Canada and Japan are insisting that such a program should not be begun until the aid givers can be assured that the money will not be wasted; sweeping economic reform must really be carried out.

The seven have unbent to the extent of preparing to make major food and medical-aid shipments this winter to save lives. For the first time they intend to bypass the center and distribute at least some of it to the republics. But when British Prime Minister John Major visited Kennebunkport last week, George Bush repeated some other conditions for a more general aid program: substantial cuts in Soviet military spending and a reduction in Moscow's aid to Cuba. Major agreed, and was prepared to pass along that message on a Sunday visit to Moscow, where he was slated to become the first Western head of government to confer with both Gorbachev and Yeltsin since the failed coup.

Whatever is done about aid, though, outside powers have only marginal ability to influence what happens inside what must be called the former Soviet Union. Soviet citizens must decide their fate themselves, while the world holds its breath. The failed coup and the turmoil that has followed are fundamentally enormously hopeful events. If the immediate results are chaotic -- well, revolutions by their nature cannot be tidy. The trouble is that the most democratic revolutions can so easily degenerate into lasting chaos, out of which a new dictatorship can be born. Remember the February 1917 revolution that overthrew the Czar, the chaos that followed, and the November 1917 Bolshevik coup, which established the tyranny that has only now been broken -- maybe.

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