Soviet Union: A Slippery Slope

What Mikhail Gorbachev wants, whether it is a policy change or an official appointment, Mikhail Gorbachev usually gets. Through nearly six years in power, he has put together an almost unbroken winning streak at contentious parliamentary sessions and Communist Party meetings. He did it again last week in the Congress of People’s Deputies — taking some nasty thumps along the way — when he managed to ram through another political reorganization that further strengthens his hand. But he acknowledged this hard-won victory with a tone of finality and a warning. “I intend to act as President,” he said, gathering up his papers on the final day of the session. “So don’t be surprised.”

Gorbachev has accumulated unprecedented powers — on paper. In practice, he is finding it increasingly difficult to rule. Only a week earlier Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze had shocked everyone by announcing his resignation in protest against what he called an approaching dictatorship. Gorbachev then proceeded to behave as if determined to lend substance to that prediction. He pushed through constitutional amendments last week that subordinate all government departments and policies to the will of the President, then forced the reluctant Deputies to accept his choice of a colorless communist loyalist as the country’s first Vice President.

The struggle over the appointment of Gennadi Yanayev to the No. 2 spot looked at first like one of Gorbachev’s rare defeats. Liberals were appalled, and even the right wing seemed stunned by Gorbachev’s selection of an unimaginative political nobody from the Communist Party hierarchy as his principal deputy. Although more than half of the 2,239 registered Deputies belong to the Communist bloc or the ultraconservative Soyuz (Union) faction, Yanayev came up 31 votes short.

Angrily, Gorbachev stumped to the rostrum and demanded another vote. Even he had struggled to find something good to say about Yanayev, managing only to call him a “mature politician, a man of firm principles.” Gorbachev was determined to have someone he could count on for absolute loyalty. “I want someone beside me I can trust,” he said. On the second ballot, Yanayev was approved by a margin of 117 ayes.

But what did Gorbachev gain? For all his organizational triumphs, the President is now flanked by a party hack and depends increasingly on the security forces for support. He has lost nearly all the front line of perestroika, the allies who stood beside him as he sought to bring reform to the U.S.S.R. Shevardnadze has quit. Alexander Yakovlev, one of reform’s philosophical fathers, no longer has an official post. Vadim Bakatin, the moderate, cautious Interior Minister, was forced out, replaced by a KGB man and a general as his deputy. And last week Gorbachev announced that the last of the old team, Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, 61, had been hospitalized after suffering a heart attack — some say brought on by all the opposition sniping.

Yanayev’s speech was indicative of the political ground he and Gorbachev now occupy. “I am a communist to the depths of my soul,” he said after his nomination. “I will fight political confusion and nihilism.” He and Gorbachev, he said, “want no dictatorship, only respect for law.”

That is a slippery distinction Soviet leaders are making more and more often, implying that enforcing order is only a matter of police work. KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov staggered the West two weeks ago with a paranoid speech that sounded as if it had been stored in a freezer since the depths of the cold war. He tried to repair the damage at a press conference but again claimed that a crackdown might be therapeutic. “If our President does introduce extraordinary measures, it will not mean going back to dictatorship,” he said. “It will just mean restoring the order that everyone craves.”

As for extraordinary measures, since last March, Gorbachev has had full power to declare martial law in any trouble spot he chooses and to rule by presidential decree. Last week’s new amendments created a Cabinet of Ministers directly under his control rather than the Prime Minister’s. They also put him in the chair of two new policymaking bodies — the Federation Council, made up of key officials from the republics; and the Security Council, which includes heads of the military and police.

Gorbachev now has more legal power in his hands than any of his communist predecessors, including the despot Joseph Stalin. Vitali Korotich, editor of the liberal weekly Ogonyok dryly observed that Gorbachev was a “British Queen and an American President rolled into one.” Korotich was concerned, however, about so much power being voted “to the President, not personally to Gorbachev.” That could be dangerous if he is replaced.

All this restructuring is not about perestroika but something more basic: the continued existence of the Soviet Union within its present boundaries. Before his heart attack, Ryzhkov defined the crisis: “Is the government short of powers now? No, the problem is that the republics are ignoring its resolutions. If the situation does not change, no presidential power will save us.” Gorbachev’s drift to the right, his increasing dependence on the old communists he once spurned and on the men in uniform, testifies to his determination to keep the union whole and the rebellious republics inside it.

At the center of that struggle is the draft treaty of union defining new power-sharing arrangements between the federal government in Moscow and the 15 member republics. The treaty was approved last week by a vote of 1,605 to 54, which illustrates how far removed the Congress of People’s Deputies is from the attitudes in the republics, where it must be ratified.

Out in the country the mood is very different. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia and Georgia have announced that they will not accept the treaty in any form. Its political and economic provisions have drawn criticism from most other republics as well. Lithuania and Estonia have also said they will not participate in the newly created Federation Council.

With KGB chief Kryuchkov railing against ethnic violence and “subversive” interventions from abroad, Gorbachev has taken the first steps toward a crackdown on separatist forces in the republics. He issued a decree ordering the nationalist leadership in Moldavia to get back in line and halt a small- scale civil war among Romanian-speaking Moldavians, Russians and Turkic minorities. Otherwise, he warned, “necessary steps will be taken” — a signal that he may impose presidential rule.

The separatist challenge, however, is far greater in the huge Russian republic, which contains half the Soviet Union’s people, 75% of its land and most of its natural resources. Just as the federal parliament was closing its 10-day session, the Russian legislature voted to cut its contribution to the national budget 83%, from 142.4 billion rubles ($80 billion at the official exchange rate) to 23.4 billion ($13 billion).

Such an enormous loss of funds by the central government would affect all areas of national life, Gorbachev declared, not just the military. “It would mean,” he said, “the collapse not only of the economy but of the country itself.” To buttress the President’s position, the federal parliament resolved that Moscow and all the republics should meet quickly to frame temporary economic agreements for 1991. The resolution would probably have no effect because, as Gorbachev said, “the Russian comrades have not understood they must change their positions.” If things go on this way, he said, “we will lose two or three months and all the people will be out in the streets.”

Unfazed, the Russian legislature convened less than a mile from the Kremlin and widened the political gap by legalizing private ownership of all kinds of businesses, a step Gorbachev has been reluctant to take. Even this measure was not enough for some Russian radicals. The republic’s Finance Minister, Boris Fyodorov, 32, resigned, charging that other important decisions like price reform are “bogged down.”

Although the U.S. and other Western governments continue to wish Gorbachev well in public, their intelligence analysts have turned gloomy. They see him on the verge of becoming the dictator Shevardnadze predicted. “It’s hard to foresee anything but a crackdown,” says a State Department expert in Washington, predicting nationwide martial law in the Soviet Union. “Gorbachev will survive,” says Madeleine Albright, president of the Center for National Policy, a Washington think tank. “But we won’t like him.”

What do the experts believe produced this transformation in Gorbachev the revolutionary? First, he is unable to find piecemeal economic reforms that work — because there aren’t any — and he is unwilling to go all the way to a free-market economy. The result is economic breakdown. Second, he has been powerless to halt ethnic unrest and nationalist moves toward independence. He senses that the country is falling apart, but has no sympathy for separatist sentiment. Third, he has been abandoned by the liberals who at first supported his reforms and goaded him to faster action. Most of the prominent democrats of yesteryear are now running cities and republics and declaring their sovereignty, fighting a “war of laws” with the central government.

Gorbachev is left with no power base except for the Marxist ideologues and militarists — the apparatchiks of the Communist Party, the KGB and the army. He is no longer advancing a planned reform. His program seems to consist of no more than his determination to keep himself in power and the union together, whatever the price.

GORBACHEV’S PARLIAMENTARY BOX SCORE

HE WON:
— His unpopular choice as Vice President
— Direct control of the Cabinet of Ministers
— Chairmanship of two new policy-planning committees
— Approval of a draft treaty of union

HE LOST:
— Face, when his vice-presidential nominee failed on the first ballot
— His request for an inspectorate to enforce Moscow’s orders
— Billions of rubles, when the Russian republic slashed its budget contribution
— Support from five republics that vow not to ratify the treaty of union