Boris Yeltsin: Russia's Maverick

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Why is the creator of perestroika and glasnost so hated in the country he freed from fear? To some extent, statistics explain why. A report by the Soviet State Planning Committee predicts that Soviet GNP will fall 11.6% in 1991; it declined 3% last year. Industrial production this year will drop more than 15%, and agricultural output 5%. One state economic planner said he feared a return to "the horrible times we lived through in the past," referring to "the famine of the 1930s, the repressions of 1937." A poll published last week by the Soviet National Public Opinion Studies Center asked, "What does the Soviet Union offer its citizens?" The response given by 65% of those interviewed: "Shortages, waiting in lines and a miserable existence."

Gorbachev's tentative domestic reforms have so far succeeded only in disabling the old centrally planned economy without providing an effective replacement. He took over the Communist Party in 1985 thinking he could energize and modernize the existing machinery. He was neither a democrat nor a free-marketeer and described himself as a dedicated Communist. But in time he discovered that the party bureaucrats were blocking him because they oppose change in general and treasure their power and privileges. Gorbachev then decided to try to blast the party out of its executive positions and transfer power to a reconstructed government. Still, he said, he remained a Leninist.

His efforts failed, and the glasnost that accompanied them set loose ethnic strife, rampant nationalism and separatist movements in the republics. In March 1990 Lithuania declared its independence, and Moscow was faced with the possible breakup of the Soviet Union. This threat changed the entire debate about the country's economic and political future, for Gorbachev was not prepared to endorse the dissolution of the Union.

Restoration of order became the slogan of the day, and Gorbachev seems to believe in it as much as the party, the army and the KGB. "In some ways," says a U.S. State Department official, "it was the resurgence of nationalism that justified the resurgence of the right." Gorbachev has replaced his original team of reformers with hacks from the party Central Committee. He has shown the fist to separatists in the Baltics, and he has put joint army and police patrols onto the streets of the cities.

Such visible hardening has increased speculation that a military coup might be in the offing. Some Western experts and even some Soviets argue that a de facto coup has taken place. The reactionaries were shocked when radicals took control of city councils in Moscow, Leningrad and Sverdlovsk and several republics began talking of secession. Those developments apparently mobilized the army and its allies in the giant military-industrial production network. After 46 representatives of eight defense-related ministries signed an open letter last September warning that new laws threatened to destroy the defense industry, Gorbachev changed course. He dropped the radical 500-day economic reform plan he had praised earlier and adopted still another muddled plan for piecemeal changes.