The Gulf: Gorbachev's Home Remedy

Even for someone as optimistic as Mikhail Gorbachev, the news from the front lines of perestroika these days has been decidedly bleak. The patience of Soviet consumers has become completely shopworn, oil-industry workers are threatening to go on strike, and even army officers grumble publicly about low living standards. While a record harvest lies rotting in the fields, bread -- that staple of Russian life -- has joined the growing list of scarce goods. Meanwhile, pressure mounts for the government of Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov to resign. Most worrisome of all for the Kremlin, the once monolithic Union of Soviet Socialist Republics seems ever closer to fragmenting into bits and pieces.

Before heading off for the welcome relief of superpower summitry, Gorbachev dispatched a telegram around the country ordering local authorities to make sure that peasants deliver grain to help solve the bread shortage. To ease tensions in the army, he issued a decree on improving the legal and economic rights of military personnel. A committee of top officials from Moscow and the republics has been set to work by Gorbachev on drafting a new treaty of the union. But one major item of business, so important that it may determine Gorbachev's political future and the very fate of the country, awaits his return this week: finishing the draft of a new plan for introducing a market economy.

Since Gorbachev became President in March, he has tried to wield the extra powers of the office to steer the country away from a centralized system, where everyone took orders from above, toward a society where decisions would come from below and be coordinated with a vastly reduced administrative center. The only problem is that the old chain of command has all but collapsed, and nothing has arisen to take its place. The President's decrees have been largely ignored by the country's restive republics, determined to grab as much authority as they can from Moscow. Leading the revolt has been the country's largest republic, Russia, and Gorbachev's longtime political rival, Boris Yeltsin.

After Yeltsin became chairman of the Russian parliament in May, he vowed that the republic would follow its own radical reform program, known as the 500 Day Plan, with or without Kremlin approval. Then, in a dramatic about-face last month, Gorbachev invited the Russians to submit their scheme as the basis for a new economic program for the central government, to be drafted by a commission led by economist Stanislav Shatalin, a member of the group of Gorbachev advisers who make up the Presidential Council. The decision to join forces with Yeltsin was a masterstroke. By siding with the maverick Russian leader, who enjoys widespread popular support, Gorbachev improved his chances of pushing through reforms in an increasingly fractious country.