Yeltsin's Big Gamble

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

JUST A COUPLE OF HOURS BEFORE Boris Yeltsin was scheduled to address the Russian people last Saturday, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last President of the Soviet Union, attended a reception at the Moscow Writers' Club. "My wish to the Russian President," he said, "is to take the initiative in his own hands." Few knew better than Gorbachev the fate of those who failed to show courage at the decisive moment: when the August coup of 1991 collapsed after three days, Gorbachev chose to closet himself in the Kremlin instead of rushing out to the barricades and embracing the man who had stood up to the plotters and vowed never to surrender.

This time there were no barricades, no marching troops, no calls for strikes or demonstrations. Nevertheless, another hour of truth had come for Boris Yeltsin. Instead of climbing on top of a tank and shaking his fist, he looked into television cameras and spoke in measured tones for 25 minutes. There was no mistaking the import of his words. He was taking the heady, reckless gamble of plunging Russia into a struggle for power as fateful as the one begun by the earlier coup attempt -- and probably even more chaotic.

Yeltsin was attempting a coup of his own in the name of democracy. Humiliated by the parliamentary opposition two weeks ago when it voted to strip him of much of his power, the Russian President struck back by announcing that he had signed orders opening a period of "special rule." For the next five weeks he proposed to govern by decree. No more futile attempts to compromise with the country's two legislative bodies, the Supreme Soviet, or parliament, and its parent, the Congress of People's Deputies. Yeltsin said he would not dissolve them -- yet. He would just ignore them. They could continue to meet and conduct legitimate legislative business, but if they tried to countermand his decrees, he would deem their acts invalid.

Then, on April 25, the people would speak. Yeltsin planned to ask them in a nationwide referendum to give him a "vote of confidence," endorse a draft of a new constitution setting up a two-chamber parliament and approve a law setting up elections for this new legislative body. If the electorate said da three times, the Supreme Soviet and Congress of People's Deputies would quietly -- in theory -- pass out of existence, and the country would enjoy a spanking new, popularly elected, democratic and legitimate government.

What a bold and perhaps foolhardy move for a man who had seemed to lose his scrappy, street-fighting spirit in the yearlong struggle with the Congress. This was the old Yeltsin again, showing rebellious parliamentarians that he was ready to absorb whatever blows they delivered -- and then hit them harder than ever before. It may have come too late. His enemies threatened to impeach him before he could even get a popular vote organized. But on Sunday he won crucial support from the entire government, including the ministers of defense and security, that could keep him safe until April 25.

The battle to be waged in the next days and weeks could decide the fate of Russia for decades. Yeltsin is asking an exhausted, impoverished people to entrust their future as a democratic, free-market country to him and to depose the neocommunist forces who cling to the politics and economics of the past. No one knows if the opposition has become too strong for him to overcome. Or if a populace worn out by political crisis would answer the President's call. Or what the Russian military, itself split, would do if the stalemate worsened.

The rest of the world has an enormous stake in a game it can influence only marginally. Yeltsin may have exaggerated when he called his opponents cold warriors eager to reignite the global arms race and return to angry confrontations with the West. But an assertive Russia under a nationalist or neocommunist banner could be a disaster for its neighbors and the West. It would force reassessment of policies thoroughly changed by the end of the cold war. The prospect of facing an unfriendly Russia once more might force the Clinton Administration not just to cancel some planned Pentagon budget cuts but to begin beefing up military spending again, dashing hopes for reducing the budget deficit.

For those reasons, the White House made up its mind to back the Russian President as strongly as it practically can. Clinton and his aides could see no alternative to Yeltsin who would not be much worse for the causes of free- market democracy in Russia and friendliness between the Kremlin and the White House. The Russian's promise of democracy as the goal of an interim semi-dictatorship gave the Administration a plausible excuse for making its support prompt and public -- though some officials confided that the backing would have been forthcoming, reluctantly, even if Yeltsin had acted more autocratically than he did.

U.S. diplomats in Moscow and other Western officials got wind of what Yeltsin was planning 24 hours in advance, and Clinton made sure to watch his fellow President's speech on a White House TV set. After several hours with his advisers, he sent communications director George Stephanopoulos before reporters to make delicately nuanced statements intended to bolster Yeltsin and the cause of reform without explicitly endorsing his particular moves. "President Yeltsin has proposed to break a political impasse by taking it to the people. That is appropriate in democracies," said Stephanopoulos. Was Yeltsin meanwhile operating outside the Russian constitution? "That is for the Russian people to decide," said Clinton's spokesman. Clinton followed up by sending Yeltsin a personal message of support, and he made clear that he still intended to hold his summit meeting with Yeltsin in Vancouver, British Columbia, as scheduled on April 3 and 4.

But would it be safe for Yeltsin to leave Russia then, amid the turmoil preceding the April 25 referendum? Could he even survive until the vote? The legislative bodies, packed with industry bosses, collective-farm managers and apparatchiks elected under the old communist system, had no intention of going quietly into what their Bolshevik forebears called the dustheap of history. The Supreme Soviet began meeting Sunday afternoon to discuss Yeltsin's actions, while the Congress of People's Deputies was likely to be called into its own session starting Wednesday.

/ Barely hours after the speech, Valeri Zorkin, the Chairman of the Constitutional Court, which is supposed to prevent the executive and legislative branches from poaching on each other's turf -- but which Yeltsin has accused of siding with the Congress -- seemed ready to hear a prospective impeachment appeal against Yeltsin from parliament. He sent Yeltsin a letter charging the President with "suspending the basis of the Russian constitution," leading "to further destabilization of society." Vice President Alexander Rutskoi, once a Yeltsin ally but increasingly a voice of opposition, refused to sign the "special rule" decrees and called them unconstitutional under the Brezhnev version still in force. The country's prosecutor general, thought to be in Yeltsin's camp, and the deputy speaker of the Congress indicated no disagreement at a meeting where Zorkin declared that Yeltsin had put himself "outside the constitution."

And so the stage was set for chaos. If the Congress voted to impeach Yeltsin, he was unlikely to recognize its authority to do so. If he then dissolved the Congress, the Deputies would probably not go home. Thus the President and the legislative bodies were likely to settle into a pattern of issuing contradictory decrees that would be accepted by parts of the government and ignored by others. It was likely, for example, that the Supreme Soviet would try to take over the national television system by putting its own men in charge. It was likely too that the TV producers would resist and look to Yeltsin to maintain freedom of the press and full civil liberties for Russians. On the other hand, Yeltsin said he would order the central bank, which is under the control of Congress, to stop printing rubles -- and it will probably go right on doing so, further fueling inflation. Yeltsin lamented in his speech that Russia has two governments, but compared with what is likely to happen now, citizens haven't seen anything yet.

The President's enemies will certainly try to block the vote or get Russians to boycott it. Earlier this month, when the Congress canceled a referendum that had been set for April 11, legislators warned Yeltsin that he had no authority to schedule any kind of nationwide vote on his own, not even a nonbinding opinion poll. He can probably count on many local executives in administrative districts around the country to organize the polling. The lawmakers can just as surely rely on local soviets, or councils, to do everything they can to thwart it.

Both sides have been assiduously wooing the military with promises of pay hikes, pension increases and other goodies. Yeltsin, legally the commander in chief, reminded the armed forces last month that their compensation was raised five times last year. In his Saturday speech he ordered the soldiers to stay in their barracks and not take any part in the political struggle, a policy that Defense Minister Pavel Grachev seems willing to follow -- for now.

Last week the top military brass flatly told Yeltsin they wanted order and demanded resolute action from him to end his power struggle with the Congress. But there is strong conservative sentiment in military ranks. Even if the top generals try to stay out of politics, many lower officers who are dismayed by the miserable living conditions of army units withdrawn from Eastern Europe and horrified by the economic and political chaos may feel otherwise. According to former KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, recent army surveys show that two-thirds or more of the officers oppose the current reforms.

ON SATURDAY MORNING BEfore Yeltsin's speech, disgruntled officers of the Moscow military district met in the parliament house to pledge their support to Yeltsin's archenemy, Ruslan Khasbulatov, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet. Vice President Rutskoi, a former general who is a hero of the Afghan war and has become more bold in challenging his boss, has far more influence with the troops than does his nominal chief Yeltsin -- and has political ambitions of his own. Of course if Yeltsin is impeached he will automatically become President. If troops do go into the streets and take sides in the power struggle, that could trigger an avalanche of strikes by miners in the Siberian Kuzbas and Vorkuta regions. Civil war is a remote but not unthinkable possibility.

If the decision is to be made by ballots rather than bullets or impeachment, Yeltsin -- the first popularly elected chief of government in 1,000 years of Russian history -- is already running hard. Parts of his Saturday address sounded like a Western campaign speech. First came bitter denunciations of his opponents and the direction in which they would take Russia -- back to communist rule, according to Yeltsin. The President repeatedly accused his opponents in the parliament of creating "chaos" that was leading to "the death of Russia," and declared grimly that the country "cannot afford another October Revolution" (the one that brought the Bolsheviks to power in 1917).

That said, Yeltsin sketched a sort of platform for his own side, prudently trying to shore up his constituencies and dangle campaign promises before voters who might be won over. His top priority during the period of "special rule," he said, would be to allow large-scale private ownership of land. He promised "a simple and understandable mechanism for handing land over to citizens." By no coincidence, that is a capitalistic reform that former communists have fought most bitterly and, so far, successfully. Yeltsin's other economic pledges were a mixture of capitalism -- making the privatization of state-run industry that has already occurred "irreversible" and offering long-overdue tax breaks to small and medium-size businesses -- and good old populist pork barrel, including public works programs to combat unemployment.

Even so, Yeltsin might be hard pressed to win a popularity contest. His ratings have risen slightly -- 36% of Muscovites polled last week approved of his job performance, up 6 points from February -- but he is not as well liked as he was two years ago. Even more worrisome, only 42% said they would vote in a referendum. That is bad news for Yeltsin; he has to attract more than 50% of the electorate to the polls if the tally is to be considered valid. And he must win a heavy majority of that majority to be unmistakably the people's choice. Says Stephen Sestanovich, director of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington: "A one-vote victory is no victory at all."

If an appeal to the people is a long-shot gamble, it is all that he has left. The great worry among Western and some Russian experts is that Yeltsin waited too long and compromised too much before firing this last desperate shot. If he had promulgated his decree on private ownership of land a year ago, says one Moscow intellectual, "he wouldn't be in the mess he is now." Robert Legvold, director of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and a supporter of Yeltsin, says, "He's in a very deep hole, so his plan is not likely to work. It's an act of extraordinary desperation. He let the situation get away from him."

Some Kremlinologists worry that the U.S. and its allies may be running a grave risk in backing Yeltsin so strongly. If he loses, as he well might, the winners of the Kremlin power struggle will be even angrier at the West for opposing them than they would be otherwise. Others doubt that; they think ; Yeltsin's successor, no matter who it is, will have to deal pragmatically with the West.

Clinton's policymakers fervently believe Yeltsin is the only player worth backing. They feel that there is no other figure in Moscow ready and able to carry reform forward. Democracy and free markets in Russia aside, they wonder how the West could abandon a leader who has tried to be a friend and instead embrace nationalists who have assailed Yeltsin in part because they see his foreign policy as a kind of kowtowing to Uncle Sam. For foreign admirers the choice is between Yeltsin and chaos; for Russians the outcome is all too likely to be chaos no matter who rules the country.

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CAPTION: WHO GOVERNS RUSSIA: A CONSTITUTION UP FOR GRABS

With reporting by John Kohan and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington