The Dark Forces Are Growing Stronger: EDUARD SHEVARDNADZE

Meeting with editors at TIME's New York office, Eduard Shevardnadze, now President of Georgia, offers a bleak forecast for the old U.S.S.R.

Q. Do Boris Yeltsin -- and democracy -- have a better chance to succeed in Russia than Mikhail Gorbachev did?

A. Yeltsin is in great difficulty. He doesn't speak much about it. But I can see, as he describes it, that the dark forces are becoming stronger. It is a very dangerous moment.

Q. What are these dark forces?

A. They are even more reactionary than the former communists: the most extreme reactionaries of the communists and the chauvinists. I would put them somewhere approaching fascism.

Q. As elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, Georgia faces a separatist conflict in the...

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