TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/040891/0408000.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.5 KB | 199 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 36

SOVIET UNION

Russian Standoff


Gorbachev's authority is stretched to the breaking point as
thousands march for Yeltsin in Moscow and the miners' strike
spreads

By BRUCE W. NELAN -- Reported by James Carney/Donetsk, Ann
Simmons/Moscow and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington


    The marchers, more than 200,000 strong, simply defied the
government ban, the thousands of police, the scores of military
vehicles. As an evening snow shower dusted their faces, the
supporters of change in the Soviet Union thronged Moscow's
streets to deliver a pungent political message, savoring the act
of public assembly in the face of Mikhail Gorbachev's order
forbidding rallies, and then tramped peacefully home. For what,
then, had the Kremlin assembled an enormous security force --
to protect itself against its own people?

    Gorbachev's futile show of force surely marked another
drop in his waning popularity. Amid the ranks of uniformed men,
a solitary woman stood weeping. "This is the country I love,"
said Natalia Kositskaya, a 50-year-old doctor at a Moscow
military clinic, "and I am ashamed of it. I never would have
believed Gorbachev could do this. In the past two years, he has
become a devil." Her tears continued as she pointed at the
moving phalanx of police. "It is a crime," she said.

    Only two years ago, President Gorbachev was urging the
Soviet people to be bold, to show initiative, to carry out
demokratizatsiya at all levels. "Perestroika," he said, "is a
revolution." That definition may have seemed all too literal to
him last week as the marching Muscovites disobeyed him to prove
their support for his main rival, Russian leader Boris Yeltsin.
Just as ominously, thousands of striking miners, from the
Ukraine to western Siberia, were also resorting to politics, and
joined their city cousins in demanding Gorbachev's resignation.

    Like the whole of the ailing Soviet economy, the mine
strike has been festering for years. But Gorbachev brought last
week's confrontation in the capital on himself. Communists
inside the Russian republic's parliament had called a special
session to mount a no-confidence vote against Yeltsin. Many feel
that the maverick Russian should be dismissed for demanding
Gorbachev's resignation, for supporting the breakaway Baltic
republics and for such other sins as suggesting a separate
Russian army.

    Although Yeltsin holds support by only a thin margin in
the 1,068-seat parliament, his position was strengthened three
weeks ago by a question he inserted into the national
referendum. Seventy percent of those who voted said yes to his
idea of a popularly elected President, for which he would be the
clear favorite. Last week's rally, for which plans had been
announced even before the referendum, would burnish his image
still further.

    Gorbachev struck back with a ban on all public
demonstrations in Moscow for three weeks, suggesting that
deputies in the Russian parliament would be intimidated if they
had to wade through an ocean of yelling Yeltsinites. To make
sure the ban was enforced, the President took police powers away
from the city council and turned them over to the national
Interior Ministry, which mustered a virtual army of trucks,
water cannons and troops in riot gear. Prime Minister Valentin
Pavlov spoke of "looming threats," and Anatoli Karpychev, deputy
editor of Pravda, the party daily, charged that radicals were
planning a coup. Declared he: "Preparations for the final
storming of the Kremlin have already begun."

    On Thursday morning the streets of the capital were in the
hands of 50,000 paramilitary police, soldiers and Interior
Ministry troops. The squares and byways around the Kremlin were
blocked by hundreds of heavy trucks, and the water cannons
lurked like artillery behind the troops.

    Even before the demonstrations began, Gorbachev suffered
his first political setback of the day. The Russian parliament
voted almost 2-to-1 to overrule his decree against public
marches and seizure of law-enforcement power. Then the deputies
adjourned so Yeltsin backers could take part in the protest and
help keep it peaceful.

    The rally organizers had planned to gather their marchers
in public squares several blocks from the Kremlin and then move
into Manezh Square. The crowds found they could not make it past
the troops blocking the routes into the square, so they simply
demonstrated in several places in the center of the city, and
the police did not even try to break them up.

    In a display of what Gorbachev used to call "the
creativity of the masses," people turned out on sidewalks,
balconies and street corners. Thousands gathered in Mayakovsky
Square and the Old Arbat, the designated meeting points,
carrying rebellious posters: GORBACHEV RESIGN and SAVE RUSSIA
FROM THE COMMUNIST PARTY. As they assembled, they chanted,
"Yel-tsin! Yel-tsin!" and scolded the troops surrounding them,
"Shame! Shame!"

    The day proved that if they have achieved nothing else,
Gorbachev's reforms have wiped away Soviet citizens' fear of
their government. "Despite a campaign of intimidation," Nikolai
Travkin, head of the radical Democratic Party, told the crowd,
"we have gathered here and crossed the threshold of fear." Their
courage delivered another blow to Gorbachev's authority and a
boost for the man fighting the Kremlin, Boris Yeltsin.

    National television's evening news has reverted to its old
propagandistic habits, and so took the government's dismissive
view of the day's events as "nothing new." Yet even the
newsreader added, "We cannot fail to see that appeals for a
change in leadership and a change in the system are being heard
more and more frequently."

    Those appeals are also coming from important and angry
segments of the work force on whose behalf the Russian
Revolution established a "dictatorship of the proletariat." In
the office of the miners' strike committee in Donetsk, coal
capital of the Ukraine, a poster on one wall renders today's
verdict on that myth. It shows a stylized Soviet worker in
shackles, his neck ring labeled KGB, his iron waistband
PROPAGANDA and the iron ball he carries COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE
SOVIET UNION. Below is the caption: "We have nothing to lose but
our chains."

    Yuri Marakov, 52, is co-chairman of the Donetsk strike
committee and one of the leaders of the new free-union movement.
Where once trade unions existed only to transmit production
orders from the party, perestroika and the strikes of 1989 have
given rise to unions that put the worker first. They are
relatively small but influential. In addition to the miners,
groups of seamen, air-traffic controllers and journalists have
set up independent federations. Almost every mine has a
permanent workers' committee. "People just want normal working
and living conditions," says Marakov, "but they can't have
normal conditions in this system."

    When the miners struck through much of the summer two
years ago, they asked for higher pay, better housing, more
consumer goods. Gorbachev praised their enterprise and promised
to deliver. But he never did, and many miners still live in
squalor and work with old equipment in dangerous conditions.
They blame Gorbachev. "Before," says Marakov, "we made economic
demands. Now we must make political demands."

    More than 300,000 miners are on strike at 200 of the
country's 600 pits, and most of them are calling for Gorbachev's
resignation. Inspired by the miners, workers in other industries
are signaling that they are almost ready to lay down their
tools. A wave of support rallies rolled through metalworks
across the country last week, and the giant machine-building
plant Uralmash in Sverdlovsk staged a two-hour warning strike.

    Moscow's bureaucrats seem as deaf as ever to such
warnings. Asked by a TV correspondent about the merits of the
strikers' demands, Mikhail Shchadov, Minister of the Coal
Industry, replied with an obscenity. "This kind of language,"
said a miner in Kemerovo, "is the only thing the minister has
in common with us."

    Gorbachev and his unresponsive government are increasingly
threatened by the revolutionary forces he has set loose in the
land. Yeltsin failed to get his proposal for an elected
presidency on the Russian parliament's agenda last week, so that
debate will probably have to wait for the next regular session
in a few months. But the mass turnout in Moscow could strengthen
his hopes for the kind of People Power that overturned Communist
governments in Czechoslovakia and East Germany in 1989 -- or,
for that matter, Czarist Russia in 1917.

    Millions of miners and workers pre sent an even more
serious challenge. Armies might clear streets, but they cannot
dig coal, build turbines or take over entire industries. Shaky
as it is now, the Soviet economy could be paralyzed by the shock
of a summer of strikes. The country, says Michael Mandelbaum of
the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, has
"a potential for a general strike."

    The government of the Soviet Union is not able to operate
a productive economy. Last week it was unable to enforce a ban
on demonstrations in Moscow. Gorbachev has shown a penchant for
half measures in reform and an unwillingness to return fully to
the dark days of rule by the iron fist -- and that has resolved
nothing. Like the old A merican embassy that burned in Moscow
last week, this rickety structure could go up at any time.