(2 of 4)
By far the most intense and significant conflict, however, is the tug-of-war between the Kremlin and the White House. That is what Muscovites jokingly call the marble-faced skyscraper perched on an embankment along the Moscow river that houses the government of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. This immense land, stretching from the Arctic to the subtropics and from the Polish border to the North Pacific, contains 147 million of the Soviet Union's 286 million people, 75% of the land and the bulk of the U.S.S.R.'s natural resources. In the West, the Soviet Union and Russia were long regarded as two names for the same country, and that belief, though incorrect, was not altogether without foundation. The other republics were seen as appendages of the Russian heartland. There was, for example, no Russian Academy of Sciences ^ or even Russian Communist Party, only a central Soviet Academy and Soviet Party with branches in the Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Georgia and the other republics.
Nowadays it is not only misleading but also wrong to view Russia and the Soviet Union as one political entity. The Russians are leading a second revolution to dismantle the results of 73 years of Communist rule and to bring the Soviet Union, as it exists today, to an end. Historians may someday mark the true beginning of the end on May 29, when the newly elected Russian Parliament chose Boris Yeltsin as its chairman. He gave the burgeoning rebellion a charismatic leader, endearing himself to the average man as a symbol of protest against a dictatorial system. Almost immediately after his ascension, Russia declared sovereignty, an act equivalent to yanking out the foundation stone from the whole Soviet structure. Now Gorbachev and Yeltsin are locked in a personal duel that is also a pivotal test of how much control the center can exert, vs. how much independence Russia and other republics can exercise. If Gorbachev is to have any union left to govern, he must find a way to keep Russia in it.
The clock began ticking last Thursday on the sharpest and most important phase of that contest. On the eve of Nov. 1, the Russian Parliament launched the much touted 500-day economic program. Regardless of different plans in the Kremlin, Russia will begin instituting a free-enterprise market economy. Unprofitable collective farms are supposed to be disbanded or broken into private plots; most businesses are to be converted from state to private ownership, and most controls on prices, wages and production are to be scrapped. Says Ruslan Khasbulatov, Yeltsin's first deputy and a specialist on Western economic systems: "Russia has formally recognized the principle of private property, something Gorbachev has failed to do. Without that, there can be no market, no mixed economy."
Yeltsin may never have intended a showdown. He came away from a late August summit meeting with Gorbachev thinking the Soviet President had agreed to adopt the 500-day formula for the entire U.S.S.R. But last month Gorbachev pushed through the Supreme Soviet a watered-down plan that sets no timetable for converting from state ownership to private property and retains more subsidies to failing enterprises.