From czars to commissars, Russian despots handled political opponents the old-fashioned way. But when a country moves from dictatorship to something more like pluralism, rivals must be treated with a degree of civility. One reliable tactic, as any Western pol knows, is to smother your enemy in your own embrace. It helps if the opponent isn’t as quick-witted as you are-or as devious. The process is called co-option, and that’s what happened to Boris Yeltsin last week. Archrival Mikhail Gorbachev invited him–pointedly excluding his usual advisers–to a nine-hour meeting at a villa outside Moscow. There Yeltsin and the leaders of eight other Soviet republics were smoothly drawn into the Gorbachev camp.
Shifting adroitly to the left, the Soviet president agreed to a joint program that promised the nine republics a “radical enhancement” of their role in governing the country. Yeltsin’s supporters said it was a good deal for both sides. “Gorbachev has huge authority abroad and none at home,” said Soviet Army Gen. Dmitry Volkogonov, an adviser to the Russian Republic leader. “Yeltsin has authority at home and none abroad. If they unite, they will get wide support.” But Gorbachev may have outfoxed Yeltsin. The agreement brought him critical support from progressive forces, just in time to fend off another challenge from the hard-line right. In exchange, Gorbachev gave little more than vague promises. Without advisers at his side during the negotiations, Yeltsin was at a disadvantage. “Yeltsin is a bit like Reagan: he needs to be told by his aides what to do,” said historian Roy Medvedev, a Gorbachev supporter on the Communist Party Central Committee. “When he is one-on-one, he often does not know what to say or do.”
With his left flank momentarily secure, Gorbachev faced down his hard-line critics at a two-day meeting of the Central Committee, “I cannot understand, Mikhail Sergeyevich, how you, having taken on such a big and responsible affair as perestroika [restructuring], have let the steering wheel slip from your hands,” said Ivan Polozkov, the party boss of the Russian Republic. Eventually Gorbachev lost his temper. “Seventy percent of the speakers are criticizing me,” he complained. “I offer to resign.” The play-me-or-I-quit ploy worked: the committee voted 322-13 to keep the resignation question off the agenda for the meeting. Right-wingers are fed up with Gorbachev, but they have not found anyone who would stand a chance of succeeding him as the party’s general secretary. Meantime, it serves Gorbachev’s purposes to retain the party post, along with the presidency. If the most reactionary elements take over the party, they might then make common cause with the military and overthrow Gorbachev.
Swinging between the reformers and the hard-liners, Gorbachev has tried to position himself as the indispensable man in the middle. He veered to the right last year, backing away from radical economic reform. Then, still under pressure from the conservatives, he used force in independence-minded Lithuania, authorizing a crackdown that killed 14 people last January. Then he turned back toward the middle. Last week his new prime minister, Valentin Pavlov, introduced an “anti-crisis” economic program, describing it as a “third variant” between the extremes of a centrally planned economy and a totally free market. The program, which would outlaw strikes, appeared to have little chance of shoring up the collapsing economy. But it struck a political balance that may have helped Gorbachev’s political fortunes.
“We’ve got to stabilize the situation in this country,” Yeltsin told NEWSWEEK. He also defended his deal with Gorbachev at a closed meeting of the Russian legislature, portraying Gorbachev as more conciliatory than ever before. “For the first time, he recognized that you can’t reform the Soviet Union from the top–the republics themselves have to agree, so that the process goes from the bottom up,” he said, according to a transcript obtained by NEWSWEEK. Yeltsin added: “If he deceives us-and he’s done it more than once-we agreed to sign accords with each other.”
Gorbachev’s supporters maintained that their man actually conceded nothing to Yeltsin. “It’s very vague,” Medvedev said of Gorbachev’s promise to consult with the leaders of the nine republics (Russia, the Ukraine, Belorussia, Azerbaijan and the five Central Asian states). “He can consult, but he’s not obliged to listen.” The agreement calls for prompt completion of a “new union treaty” linking “sovereign states.” But it does not grant the republics such attributes of sovereignty as separate armies, currencies or trade policies. Yeltsin said Gorbachev acknowledged that republics “have the right to secede” from the Soviet Union. But the published text doesn’t quite say so. It implicitly warns that if the other six republics (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Moldavia, Georgia and Armenia) refuse to sign the union treaty, they will be denied “most-favored-nation treatment”–which sounds like an economic threat.
The agreement’s promise to ease up on hardpressed Soviet citizens also may prove to be illusory. The pact does call for repeal of a widely unpopular 5 percent tax on everyday goods. But on the issue of indexing salaries to inflation, it promises only to “make a decision within a month.” And it puts the republican leaders on record as asking “miners and all workers to call off strikes.” The statement called work stoppages and civil disobedience “intolerable.” That may enable authorities to use force to break up protests.
Yeltsin told Russian legislators that the agreement would allow workers to end their strikes “without besmirching their honorable uniforms.” “We wear overalls, not uniforms,” replied the miners’ chief representative, Anatoly Malykhin, who stalked out of the meeting. “I left spitting,” he said later. Hundreds of thousands of coal miners remained on strike, demanding Gorbachev’s resignation. Nikolai Volkov, leader of the striking miners in the Siberian city of Kemerovo, described Yeltsin’s agreement with Gorbachev as “a useless scrap of paper.”
But the agreement was on target on one point: “Society is being torn asunder by social and interethnic conflicts,” it warned. “There is bound to be more disruption,” predicts Swedish economist Anders Aslund, “The Soviet Union is heading toward hyperinflation, The budget deficit is now running at 20 percent of GNP and is likely to get worse. The taxation system is breaking down. In the first quarter, tax revenues reaching the center were one third of what had been planned. And wage demands are running at anything from 100 to 600 percent.”
Dimitri Simes, the American Sovietologist who accompanied Richard Nixon on his recent visit to Moscow, says the country is in the throes of “a peaceful revolution … where all the institutions and all the beliefs are collapsing.” He adds: “What makes Soviet society so schizophrenic is that the old is being destroyed before the new is being created.” Harvard’s Richard Pipes, author of a new book on the Russian Revolution, says Gorbachev reminds him of Nicholas II, the last czar, and Alexander Kerensky, the revolutionary prime minister who was deposed by the Bolsheviks. Both of them ruled, Pipes says, but neither had any real authority. “The big difference is that, at that time, people believed in revolution,” Pipes says. “They believed that if you make a revolution, things will turn radically better. Today no one believes in revolution.”
“Nobody rules,” complains Yevgeny Kogan, a member of the hard-line Soyuz bloc in the Congress of People’s Deputies, the full Parliament. “We go from one extreme to another. Before, we had strong authoritarian power, and now there is no power at all.” Gorbachev and his critics at both ends of the political spectrum have lost credibility with the public at large. “A relatively high number of people support Yeltsin, but less than before,” says sociologist Viktoria Senatorova. “No one supports Gorbachev, and no one cares whether he goes or stays.” Gorbachev cares. He may have no clear idea of how to rebuild Soviet society; he seems to have no long-term vision beyond ensuring his own survival. But he has strapped himself to the tiger’s back, and so far nothing has broken his grip. Gorbachev’s skills as a political tactician still make him more than a match for Boris Yeltsin or anyone else who has yet dared to challenge him.
