Boris Yeltsin: Russia's Maverick

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A series of unexplained military maneuvers around Moscow last fall fueled rumors that the army had used scare tactics to pressure Gorbachev. A much repeated story speaks of a tense meeting of the Communist Party Politburo at which the President was forced to back away from economic reform and crack down on separatism.

Gorbachev's two liberal economic advisers, Stanislav Shatalin and Nikolai Petrakov, who were among the chief architects of the 500-Day Plan, say their handiwork "horrified" and "galvanized" the conservatives and led to a crisis session of the party leadership. According to Shatalin, one of the strongest opponents of his plan was Valentin Pavlov, who was then Finance Minister. It was Pavlov, recently appointed Prime Minister, who last month cast a chill on investors from abroad by accusing Westerners of plotting to flood the Soviet market with billions of rubles, wreck the economy and ultimately overthrow Gorbachev. Two weeks ago, the daily Moskovsky Komsomolets reported that Moscow party chief Yuri Prokofiev had said, "Gorbachev was forced to refuse the ((radical reform)) program at nighttime sessions of the Politburo."

Those stories might be true, but they are not necessary to explain Gorbachev's retreat. He is a conservative, and all his instincts must have warned him that if he swapped his stop-and-go style of reform for a plunge into a free market, there was no way to know what might happen. He could not bring himself to risk everything, including the destruction of communism.

Oleg Bogomolov, director of Moscow's Institute of International Economic and Political Research, speculates that Gorbachev then took a new look at the central bureaucracy. Bogomolov says, "Gorbachev probably recognized that the old system still showed signs of life, that it could be preserved and - reformed." In other words, it was a strategic retreat into a renewed alliance with the party, the military and the economic masters of the country.

However it happened, says Peter Frank, a Soviet expert at Britain's University of Essex, "the reactionaries' interests and Gorbachev's are now in harmony." As evidence, Frank points to the composition of the new policymaking Security Council announced recently in Moscow. In addition to the President, its members are Vice President Gennadi Yanayev and Prime Minister Pavlov, both hidebound bureaucrats; Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh, a professional diplomat with little political clout; Interior Minister Boris Pugo, Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov and KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, all hard-liners; and two token moderates, former Interior Minister Vadim Bakatin and Yevgeni Primakov, a Gorbachev adviser.

In the new Cabinet of Ministers, the Prime Minister has four First Deputies; all of them have links with the military-industrial complex. When Gorbachev's economic advisers Shatalin and Petrakov resigned after the military crackdown in the Baltics in January, he replaced them with two apparatchiks from the staff of the party Central Committee. Says Bogomolov: "Gorbachev is less the President nowadays than the Communist Party General Secretary, carrying out the decisions of the Politburo and the party plenum."