TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/110491/1104000.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.2 KB | 216 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 38

SOVIET UNION

Fractured Hopes


They were heroes during the revolution, so why are they
incompetent to stop the nation's slide into chaos and disunity?

By GEORGE J. CHURCH -- Reported by John Kohan/Moscow and
William Mader/London


    The president goes on vacation to a seaside resort, but
a crisis erupts while he is away. The vice president tries
repeatedly to telephone him, but finally has to report to the
legislature that he could not get through -- apparently because
the president could not be bothered to pick up the phone. The
public business will simply have to wait until the chief returns
from his two-week vacation.

    If this scenario involved George Bush, Kennebunkport, Dan
Quayle and Congress, it would seem farfetched even for a
satirical farce. Substitute some Russian names, and it becomes
a straightforward recitation of facts. Vice President Alexander
Rutskoi really did report to the Russian parliament early in
October that he had tried a dozen times to reach the vacationing
President Boris Yeltsin at the Black Sea resort of Sochi to ask
what was to be done about a looming crisis, but failed. In
reality as in fantasy, the script was singularly unfunny. As the
first snows start to fall and a difficult winter looms, Russia
is paralyzed by a web of incompetence. The wave of hope that
swept the country at the fall of the Communist Party is giving
way to resignation, despair and bitterness. The Keystone Kops
behavior of the leadership is all too symbolic of the way in
which the heroes of the August revolution, Yeltsin especially,
have proved unable to stop the nation's slide into chaos.

    Nor have matters improved since Yeltsin returned to Moscow
three weeks ago. The situation that Rutskoi tried to phone him
about, a movement to secede from the Russian Federation by the
Chechen Ingush autonomous republic in the Caucasus, has
blossomed into outright rebellion, and the secessionists last
week defied a plea to lay down their arms. A much larger ethnic
group in southern Russia, the Tatars, declared their region to
be independent last week, and even some ethnic Russians in
Siberia and the Far East are talking about setting up a
breakaway republic.

    The frightening economic slide keeps worsening, and no
program to reverse it has been adopted or even formally
introduced. There is some speculation that Yeltsin will declare
a state of emergency this week, and he has huffed and puffed
about drastic measures, including one freeing prices from state
control. But he has not even spelled them out, much less
introduced them. Meanwhile, his government and the Russian
parliament have been unable to agree on whether to postpone
local elections now scheduled for Dec. 8, and have left the jobs
of prime minister and chairman of parliament vacant. "Russia's
government is paralyzed," said Yevgeni Saburov, announcing his
resignation as economic minister in early October.

    Yeltsin and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev have done
little better trying to reconstitute some central authority in
what used to be the U.S.S.R. The indispensable first step,
formation of an economic union, seemed to be at hand a few days
ago, but only eight of the 12 remaining Soviet republics signed
the treaty setting one up. Ukraine pulled out at the last
minute, vowing to have total independence, and last week the
parliament in Kiev voted to create a separate Ukrainian army,
navy and air force. For good measure, it demanded to share
control of all nuclear weapons on Ukrainian soil rather than
hand them over to Russia or any central government -- though it
reaffirmed its intention to destroy the atomic weapons
eventually.

    "We cannot imagine the union without Ukraine," said
Yeltsin and Gorbachev in an appeal to the Ukraine supreme
council last week. Indeed, Ukraine's population of 52 million
and its abundant agricultural and industrial resources make it
vital to any regrouping of the republics. What is supposed to
be one of the key organs of a new union, a reconstituted Soviet
parliament, did begin meeting last week in Moscow. But only
seven republics were represented, and less than half the 450-odd
members bothered to show up. In any case, complained Rutskoi,
in the Russian republic "we are building mountains of laws, but
no one is carrying them out."

    Some degree of floundering was inevitable. Dismantling a
seven-decade-old communist dictatorship and building new
institutions from scratch is a Herculean task, especially for
people who have no training in how to make democratic politics
work. In Russia the current leaders did not attain power through
a well-orchestrated plan but were thrust into a vacuum created
by the failure of the reactionary putsch in August. They have
been improvising ever since.

    Even so, the current paralysis constitutes melancholy
proof that leaders who can arouse a populace against
dictatorship are not necessarily -- or even usually -- equally
proficient at forming a new government. Yeltsin's sojourn in
Sochi continues a distressing pattern predating the revolution:
Yeltsin tends to follow two or three months of intense activity
with a few weeks of idleness during which he virtually drops out
of sight. Whether the cause is simple exhaustion, a recurring
physical disorder (there are rumors of heart trouble) or some
psychological hang-up is unclear.

    On the job, writes one commentator in the weekly Moscow
News, Yeltsin has displayed "three souls": those of a populist,
a democratic reformer and an elitist from the old nomenklatura
of the Communist Party bureaucracy. The democratic reformer
became the first popularly elected leader in Russian history in
June; and the populist shortly after stood on a tank to defy the
coup; but lately the elitist has been in evidence. Yeltsin has
appointed namestniki -- in effect, governors -- to administer
regions and localities in his name, under powers ceded him by
the Russian parliament last August.

    Yeltsin contends that the presidential envoys are needed
to override Communist apparatchiks who still control many
localities and would otherwise block any changes. More
generally, his supporters contend that Yeltsin, faced with the
surviving party apparatus and a divided, if not splintered,
parliament, must in effect initiate reforms by decree. But to
opponents the dispatch of the namestniki smacks of an old
czarist practice. The parliament consequently wants them
replaced by locally elected administrators; Yeltsin fears that
many of those elected will be Communists, who are better
organized than the democrats. Parliament refuses to postpone
local elections, Yeltsin has vetoed its election bill, and no
one knows what will result.

    Such tussles are becoming increasingly frequent, partly
because parliament is increasingly fractious. The legislators,
elected in March 1990, once divided into two main groups:
Communists and their opponents. They have now splintered into
at least 14 registered factions, plus any number of single-issue
dissidents. Lilia Shev tsova, a professor at Moscow's Institute
of International Economic and Political Studies, calls many of
the country's proliferating political organizations "sofa
parties" because "all the members of one party can sit on one
sofa."

    Yeltsin's aides, some of whom were also heroes of the
revolution, have been no help in resolving this confusion. On
the contrary, they frequently squabble among themselves. Ruslan
Khasbulatov, apparently annoyed by the failure of other Yeltsin
supporters to back him for the still unfilled position of
chairman of parliament, lashed out at State Secretary Gennadi
Burbulis and State Counselor Sergei Shakhrai. He called them
"kids who are simply not mature enough for politics."

    Some of the fiercest controversy has come over what role
Russia should play in a new union of the republics. Vice
President Rutskoi denounced the new economic treaty as
"banditry" that would allow the other republics to treat Russia
as a "milch cow," then changed his mind when Ukraine pulled out.
Burbulis has insisted that Russia should proclaim itself the
"successor state" to the old Soviet Union and take over the
institutions of central government. That has only intensified
other republics' fear of being swallowed up into a new Russian
empire.

    Yeltsin's admirers point out that he has always been at
his best in a crisis and predict that he will yet come up with
a strong and effective stabilization program, maybe even this
week when the Russian congress of people's deputies begins to
meet. He had better not wait much longer; there are signs that
traditionalist forces, which had been quiescent since the
failed coup, are reviving. Official trade unions, which were
bastions of the communist regime, rallied 50,000 people in
Moscow last week to protest falling living standards. Their
placards carried a warning Yeltsin and his allies cannot afford
to ignore: HEY YOU IN CHARGE, STOP ALL THE EMPTY WORDS. WE'RE
TIRED OF IT. The fractured forces of democracy don't have much
time before "the rattle of empty cooking pans," as trade union
leader Igor Klochkov warned, "may prove more terrible than the
rattling of the tanks."


________________________________________________________________
MOSCOW YEARNS WHILE HEROES SCRIBBLE

    In Russia apparently nothing stimulates the creative juices
as much as a good putsch. While the government flounders, some
of the major actors in the summer revolution have chosen to write
instead.

    -- MIKHAIL GORBACHEV will be out first with The August Coup,
to be published by HarperCollins later this month. He will
reportedly earn $500,000 but at least he stayed on the job while
writing it.

    -- BORIS YELTSIN abandoned Moscow for two weeks to draft his
version of events, tentatively titled The Three Days. It is
reported to be on sale for around $1 million.

    -- Democratic leaders EDUARD SHEVARDNADZE and ANATOLI SOCHAK,
whose literary efforts were overtaken by the coup, have rushed
epilogues into print.

    -- Even hard-line hero YEGOR LIGACHEV wants to tell it his
way, in a book said to be titled The Riddle of Gorbachev.