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By Russell Watson
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Like a conqueror galloping in from the steppes, Boris Yeltsin claimed the office that Mikhail Gorbachev had occupied when he was general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. Then Yeltsin mounted his assault on Gorbachev's last stronghold: the Kremlin, about half a mile away. He went to Gorbachev's third-floor presidential office in the old fortress on Red Square to accept what amounted to the surrender of his archrival. "It's over," Yeltsin told his staff when he returned two hours later. "Mikhail Sergeyevich himself will make a statement in the near future."
Yeltsin then said to an associate: "This was the last time I will go to see him."
"You mean from now on, Gorbachev will have to come to you?" the other man asked.
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"What for?" Yeltsin replied. "Maybe for his pension."
With a fine sense of history but little patience for the niceties, Yeltsin flattened the last, demoralized defenders of the dying Soviet Union last week. Two days after his meeting with Gorbachev he took over the Kremlin itself, including Gorbachev's office and staff and even his hard currency. His Russian Federation asserted control over most Soviet ministries. Yeltsin nominated Russia for eventual membership in NATO. He made a quick trip to Italy, where he was honored as a head of state and received by the pope. Then, at a meeting in Alma-Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan, Yeltsin and the leaders of 10 other former Soviet republics formed a Commonwealth of Independent States. "The Soviet Union has ceased to exist," said a conference spokesman. Gorbachev's resignation was expected soon, but formalities aside, the Soviet president was already history.
The birth of the new commonwealth capped a year that turned Yeltsin from a discounted maverick into one of the great figures of modern history. In 1991, as democratic change swept whole quadrants of the globe, he completed a climb back from political oblivion, winning a stunning victory in Russia's presidential election. Then he scrambled atop the tanks of August to face down the makers of a military coup, rescuing Gorbachev and preserving the prospects for democratic change. Yeltsin used his newly acquired skills as a democratic politician to outmaneuver Gorbachev, and with the blessing of the people moved to dismantle the old empire. His courage and political daring also won admiration around the world, particularly in George Bush's White House, where he was originally dismissed as little more than a buffoon.
Yeltsin still has to demonstrate that he can run a democracy and make a free economy work. "I don't want to think about my destiny, " he said in an exclusive interview with NEWSWEEK (page 21). "I want our people to live better. I want their lives to improve before my own eyes." He promised to maintain central control over Soviet nuclear weapons and to accelerate market-driven economic reforms. But would people's lives improve quickly enough to keep the commonwealth from dissolving into chaos? Secretary of State James Baker heard ominous warnings when he visited five republics last week. "Virtually everyone I met was concerned with the danger of a social explosion, especially in Russia and especially in Moscow, St. Petersburg and the industrial cities of the Urals," he said afterward. Baker and his aides did not take for granted the long-term survival of any republican leader--even Yeltsin.
For the moment, however, his triumph was complete. The structure of the new commonwealth can only add to Yeltsin's power. "The commonwealth is not a state in its own right," Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk pointed out. It has no budget and no central authority and exists simply to coordinate as much as possible the policies of member states, of which Russia is by far the largest and strongest. A bit reluctantly, the other leaders agreed Russia should inherit the Soviet Union's permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. Yeltsin boasted in Alma-Ata that "we are no longer forcibly bound by the chains of the center. " No one was more liberated than Yeltsin himself.
Other countries were dealing cautiously with the commonwealth, sometimes in complete mystification. Not a single Chinese government official, for example, had ever met Yeltsin or any of his aides, and the new Chinese ambassador to Moscow didn't "know whom to present his credentials to," said a high-ranking source in Beijing. U.S. officials said Washington was likely to extend diplomatic recognition to several republics, including Russia, before the end of the year. At a meeting in Brussels, Baker told the NATO allies that Washington wanted assurances that each new nation "would truly be committed to democracy, free markets and nuclear safety." Eager for U.S. support, Yeltsin and the leaders of Ukraine, Belorussia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan had told Baker what he wanted to hear. But there were cracks in the facade of unity.
Before the meeting in Alma-Ata, Yeltsin argued that the commonwealth idea is "the optimal variant" for replacing the old union. "First of all, it makes it possible to preserve the existing borders [between republics], instead of recarving them," he said. "Second, a common economic and ruble zone remains. Third, there is a coordinated price policy and strategy for further reforms. And lastly, in this way we are able to prevent the disintegration of the armed forces into sovereign republican armies." The accord was woefully short of specifics, however, on how the commonwealth would deal with such key issues as creating a market economy and averting ethnic unrest.
The Alma-Ata meeting set up a unified military command, headed by Gen. Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, the last Soviet defense minister. But it still wasn't clear whose finger was on the nuclear button. "One question is, whom will Shaposhnikov obey?" asked Viktor Litovkin, a military-affairs writer for the daily newspaper Izvestia. The 11 republican leaders said they would meet in Minsk on Dec. 30 to make a more permanent arrangement. But already Kazakhstan was disputing Yeltsin's assertion that Russia would become the only republic with nuclear weapons. And Ukraine and Azerbaijan had set up separate commands for conventional military forces.
Headstrong republics may put even more strain on a shattered economy. Without making much effort to consult the other republics, Yeltsin planned to push ahead with free-market prices for most goods on Jan. 2. Russian officials added another dose of shock therapy last week when they said their budget would be balanced. It wasn't clear where that left the other republics--which, among other things, may have to pay a lot more for Russian oil. Ukraine, meanwhile disputed Yeltsin's assurance to Baker that there would be a single currency. Aleksandr Savchenko, a vice president of the Ukrainian National Bank, said during a visit to Paris that his republic will soon issue its own "coupons"--in effect, a separate currency. "The word commonwealth is in small letters," Savchenko added. "In a month, no one will talk about it anymore."
If the economy doesn't get better fast, democratic government may come under pressure from the military. Already, Yeltsin has fallen out with his own vice president, Col. Aleksandr Rutskoi, an Afghan war hero with a strong conservative following. Rutskoi supported Yeltsin during the abortive coup last August, but since then he has broken with him over economic reform. "There is no government or democracy in Russia," he complained recently.
Despite the commonwealth's problems, Yeltsin already has a remarkable string of firsts to his credit. He was the first Soviet politician to take advantage of Gorbachev's reforms and build a grass-roots organization. He was one of the first to challenge the Communist establishment and win a seat in Parliament, the first ever to be elected president of Russia and the first in Soviet history to turn back a coup. Now he is taking over Gorbachev's leadership of what used to be a multinational empire. And he is trying to take Gorbachev's place in the esteem of George Bush. Shrewdly adopting the president's style of personal diplomacy, Yeltsin plies Bush with letters, cables and phone calls. As the elected leader of a budding democracy, he is making some headway. "George Bush loves anybody who ever got elected to anything," a White House official says wryly. The relationship may never match Gorbachev's bonding with Bush and Ronald Reagan, but finally Boris Yeltsin is beginning to get respect.
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