For angry Soviet consumers, Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov has come to personify just about everything that is wrong with perestroika. Twice in the past nine months he has tried to come up with an economic plan to save the floundering Soviet economy -- without success. As lines for basic staples, including bread, grow ever longer, confidence in his government has dipped so precipitously that even President Mikhail Gorbachev decided last month to join forces with longtime rival Boris Yeltsin, leader of the Russian Republic, in drafting an alternative plan. Thus when Ryzhkov stepped to the podium of the Supreme Soviet last week to present his latest plan to bail out the economy, parliamentary deputies, just back from the summer recess and visits with cranky voters, were not about to let him off lightly.
The Prime Minister had barely finished explaining his new "moderate- radical' ' program for a gradual, state-regulated move toward a market economy when his critics began sounding off. "I listened, and can't understand what has been presented to us," snapped radical Leningrad Mayor Anatoli Sobchak. "Is this a government program or criticism of the alternative plan that we have yet to hear?" Armenian Deputy Genrikh Igityan was even more brutal. "I have sympathy with you," he said, tvurning to Ryzhkov, "but are you capable of bringing this country out of crisis?" Ryzhkov, said worker Leonid Sukhov, would "certainly have to step down." Nikolai Ivanov, the controversial public prosecutor and Kremlin gadfly, went even further. Gorbachev, he said, would also have to go.
When the clamor reached a climax, the Soviet President, sitting glumly on a back bench of the tribunal, decided he had heard enough. Gorbachev intervened to defend his embattled Prime Minister. His voice quavering with emotion, he warned against "shaking up all political institutions" in the country. "If someone proves incompetent," said Gorbachev, "let's remove him. But in a normal fashion. Not by pushing him up against the wall." All the "insults and insinuations," he charged, left a "bad odor."
But then the Soviet President delivered what was probably the unkindest cut of all to Ryzhkov. He indicated that he preferred not his Prime Minister's proposals but a radical plan drafted by the Yeltsin-Gorbachev commission, under the leadership of economist Stanislav Shatalin. "If you ask me," he said, "I am more impressed by the Shatalin plan." The Ryzhkov proposals, he noted, reflected an "uncertainty" about carrying out measures to rebuild economic confidence. Explained Gorbachev: "If there is a real plan to stabilize finances, money circulation, the ruble and the market, then we should adopt the Shatalin idea."
That would be a breathtaking plunge. The 500-day Shatalin program would reverse the basic aim of the Bolshevik revolution and Stalin's brutal overlay of collectivism by creating a nation of shopkeepers -- or more accurately, a federation of republics with economies built on private businesses, individually owned farms, entrepreneurial investments, and stock markets trading shares in competitive companies.