Boris Yeltsin: Russia's Maverick

They came by the tens of thousands, some bearing posters depicting the jubilant face of Boris Yeltsin, others holding placards demanding the removal of Mikhail Gorbachev. By noon on a chilly Sunday, more than 200,000 people filled the vastness of Manezh Square outside the crenellated walls of the Kremlin. As a speaker shouted out resolutions, the crowd voted overwhelmingly for authorities to stop persecuting Yeltsin, leader of the Russian republic, and for Gorbachev to resign as Soviet President. Addressing the throng, Moscow Mayor Gavril Popov asked, "Do we trust the leadership of the country?" The crowd roared back, "No!"

The demonstration, perhaps the largest in the Soviet Union since the advent of perestroika five years ago, only served to sharpen the conflict between the country's two most prominent politicians. On one side is Mikhail Gorbachev, the father of perestroika and glasnost, the brilliant if testy infighter whose policies not only failed to put bread on the table but spurred most of the country's 15 republics to loosen if not actually break the ties that bind them to Moscow. On the other side is Boris Yeltsin, the Lazarus of Soviet politics, the blunt-spoken and somewhat erratic brawler of the streets who seems intent on leading a revolution against the Kremlin.

The battle must be particularly frustrating for Gorbachev, who prides himself on opening up his country's political process to divergent voices, but surely never expected a voice as brash as Yeltsin's to carry so much popular weight. Nothing if not spontaneous, Yeltsin demanded on live television last month that Gorbachev resign. Only a few short years ago, he would have landed in the Gulag for such an attack on the leader of the Soviet Union. Today a verbal assault on Yeltsin by Gorbachev's allies only seems to increase the Russian leader's standing among the people.

The latest battleground between the two men is the 28-word question put to the country in a referendum held on Sunday asking Soviet citizens whether the nation should be preserved as a "renewed federation of equal sovereign republics." The referendum, the first in the nation's history, had to be voted upon by a majority of the country's roughly 200 million eligible voters for the result to be valid; even then, the outcome has only symbolic meaning, since the details of the new federation must still be worked out in bargaining between the republics and Moscow.

But to hear the government's spokesmen tell it, the vote would determine nothing less than the future of the world. EITHER UNION OR CHAOS, a Pravda headline blared. "The disappearance of the Soviet Union from the world map," a TASS commentator pointed out, would "result in the disruption of the world's political and strategic balance." Certainly true, but whatever results the referendum might accomplish, eradication of the Soviet Union is not one of them.