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                                                                                WORLD, Page 34

AMERICA ABROAD

How to Keep Divorce from Leading to War


By Strobe Talbott/Moscow


    The Kremlin, once the seat and symbol of absolute power,
now has the air of a museum, a sprawling, drafty memento mori
of the old regime. The long corridors are eerily silent; the
guards seem listless. The nameplates on most doors have been
removed. Many rooms are not just empty; they seem abandoned.
Boris Yeltsin has moved in, but a number of his advisers have
stayed behind at the Russian Parliament to massage legislators
who are restless -- if not rebellious -- over the price their
constituents are paying for reform.

    Real politics has come to Russia. Unfortunately, so has an
economic catastrophe of epic proportions. Hence, everyone is a
dissident. Several of Yeltsin's former proteges and allies are
turning against him, exploiting the widespread resentment of
shortages and the fear of hyperinflation. The government, says
an official, is printing a billion rubles a day. That figure
makes "Weimar Russia" sound all too accurate as a description
of what is happening here -- and what could happen next.

    Every bit as important as Russia's economic crisis is its
identity crisis. Now, in the dead of winter, when this country
is turning a cold shower on the grimy, corrosive residue of 73
years of communism, it is also being asked to shed virtually
overnight its centuries-old identity as the metropole of a
multinational empire. That is not easy, especially in the case
of Ukraine, which has been dominated by Moscow for more than 300
years. Most Russians haven't accepted the idea of Ukraine as a
separate country, not least because 20% of the population there
is Russian. This is an emotional issue with roots both deep and
broad, by no means confined to crazies like Vladimir
Zhirinovsky, who calls his party Liberal Democratic but who is
actually a fascistic imperialist. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's new
book, Rebuilding Russia, appeals to Ukrainians not to go their
own way: "Brothers! We have no need of this cruel partition. The
very idea comes from the darkening of minds brought on by the
communist years."

    Vladimir Lukin, who is about to become ambassador to
Washington, has impeccable reformist credentials: as a young
journalist in Czechoslovakia in 1968, he bravely opposed the
Soviet invasion. Now he is urging patience on the part of
everyone -- Ukrainians, Russians and outsiders. "An enlightened
and balanced championship of both Russian and Ukrainian
interests," he says, "is the only weapon against Zhirinovsky and
the extreme nationalists." Translation: if Yeltsin yields too
much, too fast to Kiev, he will be swept away by a coalition of
demagogues bent on exploiting the hardships of the citizenry and
die-hard believers in the old union. To be peaceful, a divorce
between Kiev and Moscow will have to be gradual.

    Yeltsin has already conceded sovereignty to Ukraine in
principle. Two months ago, he and Ukrainian President Leonid
Kravchuk, along with the leaders of nine other Soviet republics,
abolished the U.S.S.R. In its place they formed the Commonwealth
of Independent States, which is a misnomer wrapped in a
contradiction inside a political fiction. After living for so
long under the Kremlin, the new states really are not
independent at all. Their economies and infrastructures will
take years, even decades, to disentangle.

    They won't have anything like that long to sort out their
new relations. The precedents for the abrupt end of empire are
not encouraging. The division of the British Raj into India and
Pakistan in 1947 resulted in the slaughter of hundreds of
thousands of people. Outraged over Charles de Gaulle's
willingness to free Algeria, colonialists and renegade elements
in the French military stepped up a campaign of terror in an
attempt to bring him down. With that in mind, one of Yeltsin's
advisers calls the Russians in the other republics "our pieds
noirs," as French settlers in North Africa were known.

    The officers of the former Soviet Army are overwhelmingly
Russian, but many of them are unwilling to accept allegiance to
Russia alone. Their commander in chief, General Yevgeni
Shaposhnikov, is subordinate not to Yeltsin but to a fractious
committee of Commonwealth leaders. He attends its meetings as
a power in his own right.

    Everyone agrees that the Commonwealth is not a successor
state to the U.S.S.R. but only a "transitional mechanism."
Yeltsin and Kravchuk have left open the question of where the
transition is supposed to lead. Had they done otherwise, there
would have been no agreement, since the Ukrainians want a weak
Commonwealth and the Russians a strong one. During talks with
Secretary of State James Baker last week, Yeltsin called tension
between himself and Krav chuk over the future of the military
"a source of anxiety," requiring "great delicacy." He also
acknowledged that the Commonwealth is "distinguished by a
certain degree of ambiguity in its structure and prospects."
That is not all bad, since the alternative to ambiguity at this
stage could be war.

    Until now, Yeltsin has been one of history's blunt
instruments. He tried to bull his way into the Oval Office
during a visit to Washington in 1989, stormed out of the
Communist Party in 1990, shook his fist at the putschists from
atop a tank last August and poked his finger in Mikhail
Gorbachev's face a few days later. But now Yeltsin is showing
himself capable of something like finesse. He has already become
the first democratically elected Russian leader. If his
countrymen, his neighbors and the outside world will give him
time and room to maneuver, he may yet prove to be the first
nonimperial one as well.