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Gorbachev used the close of the Central Committee plenum to purge one- quarter of the twelve voting members of the Politburo. He ousted three aging conservatives: Ukrainian party chief Vladimir Shcherbitsky, 71; former KGB chairman Viktor Chebrikov, 66; and agriculture specialist Viktor Nikonov, 60. Gorbachev's main nemesis, Yegor Ligachev, 68, stays on, but Western diplomats believe it suits the President to have a significant figure to his right as a counterweight to Boris Yeltsin on his left so he can bill himself as a middle-of-the-roader. Gorbachev promoted new KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, 65, and chief economic planner Yuri Maslyukov, 51. While both are considered supporters of perestroika, they are also veteran members of the party apparat, come from the same ideological mold as the men they replaced and give no hint of brilliance.
Plainly Gorbachev is hamstrung by the narrow pool of party cadres he has to choose from and uncertainty over who is capable of putting his plans into action and managing them effectively. In fact, the purged Nikonov was appointed by Gorbachev with high hopes just three years ago. Moreover, Gorbachev has never had the vast party bureaucracy and probably not even a majority of the Central Committee fully behind him.
But more important, it is not clear that he has a detailed vision of what kind of system he wants to replace the old one with -- a free market economy, a form of democratic socialism or simply a more efficient state monopoly. At last week's meeting, Gorbachev dismissed all claims "that we are unable to resolve problems facing the country without introducing capitalism into the economy." So far, though, perestroika has been a series of slogans rather than a well-structured set of programs. American Sovietologist Abraham Becker of the Rand Corp. concludes that Gorbachev came to power with a narrow view of the country's problem and what was needed to reform it. "He believed erroneously that drastic but elementary personnel changes, a shaking up of the cadres, would turn around the bureaucracy," says Becker. The Carnegie Endowment's Dimitri Simes thinks time for such tinkering is running out. "Gorbachev has to decide what kind of Soviet Union he wants, what kind of vision for it he has," Simes says.
Soviet and foreign analysts disagree on whether ethnic turmoil or economic failure is the greater threat to Gorbachev. There is no doubt, though, that the peril is real. "Even after this week," observed former British Ambassador to Washington Sir Oliver Wright, "the odds are against him." A Soviet political scientist in Moscow, Yevgeni Ambartsumov, is equally grim. "The threat of economic collapse exists," he says. "Things are getting worse."
There is no shortage of suggestions on what Gorbachev should do. Western economists advise some breathtakingly sweeping changes: decontrol prices, end huge state subsidies, expand the private sector, open a capital market with realistic interest rates. Soviet specialists call for something more elusive: effective leadership. Says Oleg Bogomolov, director of Moscow's Institute of Economics of the World Socialist System: "To sustain perestroika, a new speedup, more radical change, is required." Gorbachev, adds Ambartsumov, "talks too much and doesn't carry through his decisions."