Boris Yeltsin: Russia's Maverick

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Many Western experts have been speculating that when the time came for a crackdown, Gorbachev would lead it. While he is a relatively benevolent dictator -- more Peter the Great than Stalin -- and his powers to rule by decree have been handed to him legally, he remains a dictator. His idea of democracy is a reasonable amount of public debate and a limited devolution of authority to the republics, but a clear concentration of power at the center.

A man whose every move is tactical, Gorbachev is intent on one overriding goal, stability, for the country and himself. In a speech last month in Minsk, he told workers, "I am decisively in favor of political and economic stabilization, for strengthening order, so that authority is authority and not jelly." He now favors a "stable political coalition of centrist forces" that will include more than the Communist Party but exclude radical democratic groups. He apparently envisions parliament and national politics as Communist- dominated but co-opting enough dissent to keep the comrades on their toes. "It is necessary to turn the Communist Party into the integrating factor of all centrist forces," he says.

"He is in a holding operation at home and abroad," says Dimitri Simes, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "His stated purpose is stability," agrees a State Department expert, "but the situation is likely to get worse. We have to be prepared for an expanding cycle of repression."

That prediction is almost a certainty because neither of Gorbachev's crushing problems is about to go away. The referendum will do nothing to force the separatist republics to relent, and without basic reform the economy can only deteriorate. After withdrawing 50- and 100-ruble notes from circulation and setting the KGB to examining the books of offices with foreign connections, the government's next "reform" will be to raise prices on consumer goods an average 60%.

When Gorbachev summons the republics back to work on the revised Union treaty, officially titled the Treaty of the Union of Sovereign Republics, he will find them as reluctant as ever. One provision of the treaty, however, is that those republics that refuse to sign will be governed by "existing legislation of the U.S.S.R., mutual obligations and agreements." So the breakaway states that thought they could opt out of the Union by not joining the new one will still be held hostage. Undeterred, Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis says he will negotiate with Moscow only if the end result is Lithuanian independence. Rukh, the anti-Union movement in the western Ukraine, advises its supporters, "It is necessary to be independent to get rich."

Few in the Soviet Union are going to rise to riches under the Gorbachev plan, which has already shown it has no answers to the country's problems. The requirements for a better national life are a free economy and a democratic system. Without both, the future can only offer a cycle of unrest and repression. The more violence the state uses to preserve itself, the worse the economy will become and the less help the rest of the world will be willing to offer. As Gorbachev moves to the conservative camp, his course does not lead toward stability, but crisis.