The rebuke to Mikhail Gorbachev was open, even rude. Last week more than 100,000 Muscovites ignored his ban on demonstrations in the Soviet capital and poured into the streets, shouting for the Soviet president to resign. Many waved photographs of their hero, and Gorbachev’s nemesis, Russian leader Boris Yeltsin. Some 50,000 Interior Ministry troops and police sealed off the area around the Kremlin, preventing the demonstrators from marching on the seat of Soviet power. But this unprecedented display of force did not intimidate the excited crowds. Their courage breached a psychological barrier. Said Nikolai Travkin, one of the rally’s organizers, “We have crossed the threshold of fear.”
Gorbachev laid his authority on the line last week, and lost. For the first time, a mass protest was held in Moscow in the face of a three-week ban on public demonstrations. Gorbachev made a personal decision to call out the troops. Their inability to halt the illegal rally confirmed the growing impotence of his regime. At the same time, striking coal miners demanded Gorbachev’s resignation–and defied a Soviet government order to return to work. This week, steep price rises will take effect, possibly stirring up further unrest. “Gorbachev is a political corpse,” says Sergei Druganov, a deputy in the Russian parliament. “The fact that he brought troops to Moscow shows he doesn’t know what to do next.”
He’d better think fast. The new prices will hit Soviet consumers hard. Under government order, the cost of meat and bread will triple, while other essential consumer goods will go up between 100 and 200 percent. The idea is to eliminate state subsidies, stimulate production and move the moribund planned economy toward a workable free-market system. Said Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir Shcherbakov lamely, “We hope the public will understand the necessity.” But the Soviet government has prepared few measures to cushion the blow to shoppers, and Shcherbakov has admitted that “a wave of strikes is possible.” Many Soviets believe that is the real reason Gorbachev decreed the ban on protests in the capital.
The coal miners’ strike is draining an already limp Soviet economy. Since March 1, about one fourth of the nation’s mines have stopped working, and the shortfall in coal-fired energy has already cost more than $140 million in lost industrial production. Valentin Pavlov, Gorbachev’s hardline prime minister, wants tougher action against the miners. He argues that goal shortages threaten to shut down steel mills and that if the strike doesn’t end soon, “it will take years to repair the damage.” So far, the miners are standing firm against Pavlov’s threats. “I don’t think he would stoop so low as to disperse people with rifle butts,” says Vladislav Rezanov, a spokesman for Siberian miners. The two sides still cannot even agree on who should negotiate. The only good news is that winter is nearly over, and the immediate demand for coal to heat homes is no longer so acute.
But the strike is not at bottom about coal. It has become the first known political strike in Soviet history. When angry miners first downed their tools in the summer of 1989, Gorbachev was able to use their economic discontent to shake up the lethargic bureaucracy. Though he never fulfilled their demands for higher pay and better benefits, he stalled their anti-establishment drive–but only temporarily, it now seems. The miners are still seeking better pay and working conditions, but their first demand is Gorbachev’s resignation. If the strike should grow into broad-based, Solidarity-style labor unrest, he would be in more danger than ever. And the miners support Yeltsin.
Last week’s showdown gave a further lift to the 60-year-old leader of the Russian Republic. Public-opinion polls long ago established Yeltsin as the most popular politician in the country by far; his recent approval ratings have been as high as 59 percent against 13 percent for Gorbachev. The burly maverick ran into trouble by “declaring war” on Gorbachev and publicly demanding that the Soviet president resign. This prompted Gorbachev’s conservative supporters to call a special congress of the Russian Republic’s parliament last week to try to get rid of Yeltsin. At first, some thought they might prevail. Although he’d won popular approval for a direct presidential election in Russia–and was sure to win that vote if it is held later this year–Yeltsin’s hold on the parliament was shaky. He could no longer be sure of the narrow majority that won him the chairmanship of the parliament last year.
Then Gorbachev played into his rival’s hands. Fearing that Yeltsin might lose the confidence vote, progressives organized a rally to support him the same day the congress opened. When Gorbachev banned all such demonstrations, Yeltsin crowed that the Soviet president’s use of force was unconstitutional and “an insult” to Russia. Russian deputies, both conservatives and liberals, for once quickly agreed. They complained bitterly that their congress was taking place literally under the gun–that the troops outside the Kremlin walls, supposedly guarding against demonstrators, were also meant to intimidate the congress. “The streets of Moscow are bristling with military hardware,” said deputy Bella Kurkova. “This is brute psychological pressure.” In its first decision, the congress voted, 532-280, to demand that Gorbachev rescind the ban. He refused, but agreed to pull the troops off city streets the next day. Although conservatives bogged down the congress in procedural debate, Yeltsin supporters believed they’d get their way sooner or later.
No one is sure why Gorbachev miscalculated so badly. In the past, more than 300,000 Muscovites have protested against the government virtually at the gates of the Kremlin, and no massive troop presence was deemed necessary. By banning the rally, Gorbachev risked escalating the protest into a Tiananmen Square-type bloodbath that ultimately might have forced his own resignation. Gorbachev aides hinted that their boss was under strong conservative pressure to issue the ban. They said orthodox hard-liners were charging that criminal elements had masterminded the Yeltsin march, and were bent on fomenting public disorder. But it was clear that calling out the troops solved nothing. Said Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the president of Soviet Georgia, “Military equipment cannot save the world’s last empire.”
Last week’s events could still prove fatal for the Soviet Union’s onetime top reformer. Liberals have not merely stopped believing in Gorbachev; they did that a long time ago. They now see him as the adversary. “You only deploy troops against your enemy,” said Svyatoslav Fyodorov, a respected surgeon and member of parliament. “Gorbachev has deployed troops against the Russian people.” Conservatives, on the other hand, think Gorbachev has not gone far enough. That the rally went ahead, over Gorbachev’s objections, means that the increasingly assertive Russian right wing cannot regard him as a reliable instrument of power.
Gorbachev is desperately trying to portray himself as the only alternative. “The opposition has no constructive program, and from this position it cannot compete with us,” the president said on nationwide television last week. “It simply wants to exploit our economic difficulties to push the people to actions fraught with unpredictable consequences.” Prime Minister Pavlov, meanwhile, accused the Yeltsin camp of playing “risky political games” that could drive the country to complete economic collapse. They may be right: the republics’ push for sovereignty is already undermining the economic system of state monopoly. But every time Gorbachev has tried to weaken his rival, Yeltsin’s standing has only grown. Gorbachev never seems to learn that lesson.
So Yeltsin keeps getting stronger. He expects to become president of Russia in direct elections later this year. That’s a risk Gorbachev never took. Instead the Soviet president had himself elected to his post by a parliament with a built-in Communist majority. In comparison with Yeltsin, Gorbachev lacks political legitimacy, and he has yet to find a response to his rival’s challenge. The one he tried last week, calling out the troops, was likely to make things worse for him.
