Anxiety and apprehension seem to pervade Moscow whenever Mikhail Gorbachev is out of town. But for much of August, with the Soviet President off on his annual vacation in the Crimea, the capital showed symptoms of panic. Conservative members of the Politburo were warning that the country could be slipping out of control. Government officials were speculating openly about the possibility of a coup. A rock group climbed the Soviet hit parade with a song whose refrain was "We are anticipating civil war." Arriving home, Gorbachev, looking tanned and vigorous after four weeks on the Black Sea shore, went straight to the Kremlin television studio and accused conservatives and radicals of creating an atmosphere of "despair and uncertainty."
Mikhail Sergeyevich the political wizard was back onstage. With seeming effortlessness, he cashiered three full members and two nonvoting members of the ruling Politburo, foot draggers all, and promoted to their posts four men he apparently considers more reliable. He won unanimous approval of his compromise plan to bring forward the next party congress to October 1990 so he can purge still more recalcitrants on the 251-member Central Committee. With Gorbachev flexing his muscles, talk of a coup -- at least the Kremlin-corridor variety that ousted Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 -- appeared misplaced. But at the same time his virtuoso display of political control highlighted a central question: If he can hire and fire the country's most powerful men, why hasn't perestroika -- his plan to restructure the economy -- paid off in the currency the country demands, a better standard of living for Soviet citizens?
Gorbachev did his star turn during a two-day Central Committee meeting in Moscow that was 18 months in the planning. It focused on the ominous wave of nationalism that refuses to ebb: resurgent independence movements in the Baltic states, the Ukraine and Moldavia; rioting and murder among rival ethnic groups in the southern republics of Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and Uzbekistan, in which at least 232 people have been killed in the past 18 months.
It would have been unrealistic to expect the plenum to resolve chronic problems of empire that have bedeviled Czars and party leaders alike. Nevertheless, the outcome was noticeably flat and predictable. The party's new platform offered vague promises of economic and cultural autonomy to the 15 national republics but warned that secession or the revision of borders was unacceptable. Violence would be met with the "full force of Soviet laws," the platform warned. Yet all this has been said before, and seems unlikely to end the fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh or cool the breakaway passions in the Baltic states. On Friday the Lithuanian Communist Party defied Moscow with a declaration that it is "seeking independence in the course of perestroika."