Most Russians would have said that Yeltsin’s courageous performance last week went far beyond his job description, doing more than anyone else to deliver the country, and Gorbachev himself, from the clutches of the coup makers. But as Gorbachev’s churlish remark suggests, he and Yeltsin dislike each other intensely. Yeltsin claims that Gorbachev has flat-out hated him since 1987, when he fired the insubordinate Yeltsin from the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo. The feeling seems to be mutual; in his autobiography, Yeltsin sneers at “my perpetual opponent, the lover of half-measures and half-steps.”
Yeltsin’s supporters pronounced Gorbachev politically dead last week and, indeed, the momentum of history was unquestionably behind the president of the Russian Republic. The coup worked, the Yeltsin people said; Gorbachev had been ousted from power, but by the left rather than the right. One well-placed legislative source predicted that when the investigation of the coup began in earnest, Gorbachev would be ruined forever by revelations that he had ordered the KGB to harass the democratic movement. With the Communist Party in eclipse, he had lost his power base, his authority and his talent pool of aides, advisers and old friends. “Of course this is the end of him,” said Soviet legislator Aleksandr Yemelyanov. “It’s just a question of time.”
Gorbachev is a wily survivor, but it is probably beyond even his considerable powers to stage a comeback from the disgrace he suffered last week. “I’m afraid I think our friend Mr. Gorbachev is losing his chance to get back in charge,” said U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. “From what we’ve seen so far since Gorbachev’s return, Yeltsin is the senior partner.” Gorbachev can recoup only, said Eagleburger, “if he grabs the reform banner and runs with it. But he’s got to move quickly to get out ahead of the crowd. I don’t know if psychologically he can manage that or not.” Gorbachev’s resignation as general secretary of the Communist Party may indicate that he is willing to try. But as a practical matter, he had little choice-and by shutting down the party, he eliminated the main source of his authority.
Back in Moscow after the coup, Gorbachev and Yeltsin quickly improvised an informal power-sharing arrangement, with Yeltsin announcing changes in Gorbachev’s cabinet and issuing decrees for the Soviet president to lamely endorse. Gorbachev conceded that “we have been bound together by the situation.” The new embrace is uncomfortable for them both. They endure it because, despite their continuing differences, they cannot get along without each other. “From Day One, I have argued that Gorbachev and Yeltsin are in the same political boat-they swim together; they sink together,” says Princeton Sovietologist Stephen Cohen. “Yeltsin wrote himself two glorious chapters in history: first by becoming the first elected president of Russia and second by being willing to put his life down to defend that process. But he cannot rule the country, and Gorbachev cannot rule the country. They need each other.”
Gorbachev needs Yeltsin because there is nowhere else he can turn. But Yeltsin still needs Gorbachev, too. As Soviet president, Gorbachev controls the central government and-in theory, at least-its armed forces. Yeltsin needs him to make national decisions and to take some of the heat for the more painful consequences of reform. Gorbachev can confer legitimacy on Yeltsin, as he did last week by endorsing his emergency decrees. He also can play a helpful role as a buffer between Yeltsin and the leaders of the other Soviet republics; there still are powerful interests who want Gorbachev in place as a counterweight to Yeltsin. And Gorbachev has credibility overseas at a time when the country is desperate for foreign help.
For the last several years, Yeltsin and Gorbachev have been the yin and yang of Soviet politics, their policy proposals frequently at odds, their personal strengths and weaknesses neatly dovetailing. Gorbachev was almost universally admired overseas but increasingly detested in his own country. Yeltsin was a homespun hero to most of the Russian people but was perceived abroad as an impetuous populist given to drunken buffoonery (box). Yeltsin was the headstrong radical, Gorbachev the tentative reformer. Yeltsin was rough, Gorbachev all too smooth. The contrast served Gorbachev’s purposes; it enabled him to zigzag through one crisis after another, playing Yeltsin off against the hard-liners. Yeltsin himself wrote two years ago that “if Gorbachev didn’t have a Yeltsin, he would have had to invent one.”
Of the many differences between them, perhaps the most basic is that while both men are products of the same monolithic apparat, Gorbachev remains more loyal to the system. Gorbachev returned from his Crimean captivity insisting earnestly: “I’m an adherent of socialism,” by which he meant the communist system that has nurtured him from the cradle to the edge of his political grave. Fresh from the ordeal of the coup, he still insisted that the Communist Party needs to be reformed. Within 48 hours, he had abandoned that hope, but his declaration of fealty to the old system more likely revealed his true state of mind. Yeltsin, the congenital maverick who finally resigned from the party in July 1990, aims to simply destroy communism. And at what should have been a conciliatory meeting of the Russian Republic’s parliament last week, Yeltsin’s anti-communist supporters heaped abuse on Gorbachev.
Heckled by the Russian legislators, Gorbachev warned against “carrying out any witch hunt.” He argued that “we should apply the most severe methods permitted by law against those who prepared this putsch, but we should not permit any kind of anti-communist hysteria.” Yeltsin wasn’t convinced. First he bullied the Soviet president into reading out loud notes of last Monday’s cabinet meeting, at which almost all of Gorbachev’s appointees went along with the coup. Then, as Gorbachev fielded hostile questions, Yeltsin completed his rival’s humiliation. “On a lighter note,” he quipped, “shall we now sign a decree suspending the activities of the Russian Communist Party?” With a flourish, he signed the document on the spot, effectively closing down the party throughout the Soviet Union’s biggest republic. Gorbachev protested feebly that “to prohibit the Communist Party, I have to tell you, would be a mistake.” “It’s not a prohibition,” replied Yeltsin. “It is a decree on cessation of the activities of the Communist Party … so this can be dealt with by the courts.”
A day later Gorbachev abruptly resigned as general secretary of the party, and told the Central Committee to dissolve itself. The wonder is that it took him so long to give up on the party that failed him in his efforts to reform the Soviet system and then betrayed him with the coup. But his efforts at reform were always hobbled by orthodoxy. Although he consulted nonparty experts on the country’s economic problems, he consistently rejected or ignored their advice when it threatened his bedrock beliefs, such as his commitment to collective ownership.
His old friend Aleksandr Yakovlev, who helped to design perestroika but eventually quit the party, says Gorbachev was too “trusting” of his fellow communist apparatchiki. The party bureaucrats would “look at you with those honest blue eyes and say, ‘We’re with you, we’re the only ones who love and respect you’,” Yakovlev recalled last week. His aides would tell Gorbachev that “these democrats, they criticize you, they insult you, they are boorish,” Yakovlev said. “Gradually this affects a person.” At their last meeting, Yakovlev’s parting words were: “The people you have around you are rotten. Please, finally understand this.” Gorbachev replied: “You exaggerate.”
When he worked for Gorbachev, Yeltsin found himself “a misfit in his otherwise obedient team.” He also discovered in Gorbachev a disturbing taste for the privileges accorded to members of the Communist elite. At one point, Yeltsin was given Gorbachev’s former dacha in the countryside outside Moscow. He was appalled by the splendor of the place (“I lost count of the number of bathrooms and lavatories”) and by the fact that Gorbachev was moving to something even grander. “He likes to live well, in comfort and luxury,” Yeltsin wrote in “Against the Grain,” his 1990 autobiography. “In this he is helped by his wife.”
Their work styles also differ markedly. Gorbachev is a detail man, like Jimmy Carter; Yeltsin often displays a Reaganesque disdain for fine print. When a team of liberal economists drew up a 500-day plan for radical reform a year ago, Gorbachev read it carefully and spent hours interrogating the authors–characteristically rejecting the proposal in the end. Yeltsin reportedly adopted the plan for the Russian Republic without ever reading it.
But Yeltsin’s economic reforms have not yet produced real change. He favors privatization and other liberal measures. To spur development, the Russian Federation has promised certain regions the right to keep a greater share of their tax revenues and foreign-exchange earnings. Yeltsin has cut red tape for enterprises in Russia. His government, however, still has not come up with detailed plans for privatizing state property or for reforming the price system. In fact, many Russians voted for Yeltsin last spring under the impression that he would not allow prices to rise, which must happen under any meaningful reform. Although he has good outside advisers, Yeltsin’s own staff does not seem to fully grasp what a market economy entails. Real reform, however, is not Yeltsin’s immediate economic priority. First he must get the harvest in, cut down on strikes and put food and consumer goods on store shelves, so that over the next 18 months or so, ordinary citizens will conclude that he has improved their lives. If he fails to accomplish that, Yeltsin could become as unpopular as Gorbachev is now.
Gorbachev may yet rebound a bit. Shutting down the party must have been painful for him, but millions of people will think he did the right thing, however belatedly. He does not have to face an election until next year, when for the first time the Soviet presidency will be put to a free election. By then, Yeltsin may have shot himself in the foot. Gorbachev may have learned from his own mistakes; he seems suitably chastened, according to Soviet politicians who have talked to him since the coup. “His manner was meek, more gentle now. There’s deep suffering in his eyes,” says legislator Konstantin Lubenchenko. “He was always a man who liked to talk more than he liked to listen,” says Ecology Minister Nikolai Vorontsov, one of the few members of Gorbachev’s cabinet to oppose the coup. “Now he’s started to listen again.”
Perhaps the most serious blow that Gorbachev suffered last week was the loss of initiative. With his party in ruins, his colleagues in jail and his own reputation in tatters, he is no longer able to set the country’s agenda. “Gorbachev has deprived himself of his role as the engine of change in Soviet society,” says Viktor Kisin, a member of the Soviet Parliament. During his six years as the most powerful man in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev unleashed forces that surpassed his own expectations. When he decided to allow contested elections, he assumed that the party, with its monopoly on power, would win most of them. Yeltsin was the first leading politician to realize that a wave of pent-up hatred and frustration could be ridden by campaigning against the party. Every time the party used its clout to knock Yeltsin down, his popularity soared. Yeltsin proved to be more astute than Gorbachev in recognizing the impact of reform at the grass-roots level and in learning how to exploit it politically. While Gorbachev was trying to salvage a moribund system, Yeltsin was beating him at an entirely new game. But now the political games are over. Yeltsin and Gorbachev will have to learn how to govern together–or there may no longer be a Soviet Union to govern.
When Gorbachev and Yeltsin met in the mid-’70s, they were both reform-minded local party bosses. But on the national stage Gorbachev the compromiser would clash with the radical Yeltsin. Soon, the alliance became a contest of wills.
Gorbachev names Yeltsin Communist Party leader of Moscow and, three months later, a candidate member of the Politburo.
Following months of simmering tensions, Gorbachev ousts Yeltsin from bath party posts after Yeltsin attacks the leadership for moving too slowly on reform.
Yeltsin begins a comeback. In the first democratic elections since 1917, he wins a seat in the new Congress of People’s Deputies.
In a heated contest, Yeltsin challenges Gorbachev’s candidate for chairman of the Russian parliament. Yeltsin triumphs.
Yeltsin resigns from the Communist Party, saying, “I cannot be guided in my decisions by [the party] alone. I must obey the will of the people.”
Over Yeltsin’s objections, Gorbachev continues to shift right. At a meeting of the Congress of People’s Deputies (left), he promotes hard-liners Pugo and Yanayev.
Yeltsin is elected president of Russia–its first popularly chosen leader. A month later he and Gorbachev agree to a new union treaty.
