Yeltsin's Challenge

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By Newsweek Editors

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Back from the political dead, a scrappy iconoclast puts a scare into Mikhail (Gorbachev and confronts President Bush with an awkward dilemma

By day he is Boris the bold, scourging the Soviet Communist Party for its lies, conceit and bootlicking hypocrisy. By night he is Boris the weird, yelling that the KGB is out to kill him, relieving himself on a runway behind David Rockefeller's private jet, mourning the death of socialism in the aisles of a Texas supermarket Like a Red October blip on the radar of Soviet-American relations, he now dismays the White House almost as much as he alarms the Kremlin. But Boris Yeltsin--populist, iconoclast, fantasist--is not just a Communist flake. He is a meat-and-potatoes engineer with the drive--and finesse--of an earthmover. He has a clear sense of what is wrong with his country. He is brave enough, or cracked enough, to speak his mind. And if the Soviet Union held democratic elections tomorrow, he would give Mikhail Gorbachev a run for his money.

The Yeltsin challenge has exposed the emptiness of the party's pretense to unity, discipline and infallibility. Yeltsin has accused Gorbachev of timidity, a taste for perks and a weakness for hogging the limelight. Upon winning election as chairman of the Russian Republic's Supreme Soviet last week, he called the government's new economic program hopeless and hinted that Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov should resign. He even tinkered with the idea of having the Russian Republic join the United Nations and open its own consulates abroad. While the capital of Russia had always been Moscow, he said, perhaps the Soviet central government should start looking for a new home.

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Yeltsin's broadsides present President George Bush with an awkward dilemma. The administration has based its strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union on the understanding that Gorbachev is willing to get Soviet forces out of Europe, and eager to make deals on nuclear arms. The idea has been to help him, not hurt him. Yeltsin now upsets the conventional wisdom. He is not a leader of the muttering right, but a man around whom progressives and respectable nationalists can rally. His sense of proportion may not be as clear as his sense of ambition; but he has new ideas and vigorous backers. In Eastern Europe only leaders with popular support have been able to replace discredited Communist regimes. The same may happen in the Soviet Union. In the meantime, if Gorbachev grows weaker, the Soviet right can only grow more dangerous.

So what is to be done? Stalin would have shot Yeltsin, Khrushchev would have pensioned him off to a dacha, Brezhnev would have made him ambassador to Upper Volta--and forgotten him. Gorbachev has apparently chosen to keep him around. The future of reform now depends on the odd relationship between the two men. Gorbachev made Yeltsin: he promoted him to the Politburo, then broke him for insubordination. But he has not destroyed him. Why? It is hard to believe that Yeltsin's skills alone have saved him. Gorbachev seems to find him useful. Yeltsin's maneuvers allow Gorbachev to counterbalance the right. But Gorbachev's attacks also helped make Yeltsin a hero. The question now is whether he will try to crush Yeltsin once and for all, or to co-opt him. If the two men can't come to terms, the country won't be big enough for both of them. One will have go.

Gorbachev is ever careful, sticking to upper echelons of power. Yeltsin is rough, bruising the wrong egos, finding his political backing in the streets. He can be a charmer one moment, an oaf the next. At 59--the same age as Gorbachev--Yeltsin looks like a boxer and sounds like a foghorn. He is a man of action, not an intellectual. His speeches are dull repetitions of the same points. He lives in a four-room Moscow apartment, earns 800 rubles a month and has no savings. He works 14hour days. He goes to the neighborhood medical clinic for his chronic headaches, not the party's VIP medical facility. He scoots around town in a white Moskvich, one of the lowliest of Soviet cars, driven by a former KGB major who was fired for getting too fond of him. Doubters call him a grandstanding opportunist and demagogue. Within the working-class narod, the stronghold of plump women in cheap print dresses and blue-collar men whose tired smiles may flash an iron tooth, people adore him.

'Tough lad': Yeltsin's boyhood reads like a story by Chekhov, his favorite author. He was born in Sverdlovsk province in 1931. The day he was baptized, the priest got drunk, dropped him in a tub of holy water and forgot to fish him out. When his mother screamed, the priest said, "Well, if he can survive such an ordeal, it means he's a good tough lad and I name him Boris." His father, a laborer, dreamed of inventing a machine that could lay bricks. In winter, the family slept huddled next to their nanny goat to keep warm. When their horse died, they hitched themselves to a wagon and set off looking for a better future.

The trip propelled Yeltsin into a lifelong war with authority. He tells this story in his just-published memoir "Against the Grain" (Summit Books), an exercise in selfcongratulation that is probably the first Soviet campaign biography. On the day of his grade-school graduation, he criticized a homeroom teacher who had made her students clean her house and feed her pig. The school took away his diploma. Eventually he won it back--with a report card that read "unsatisfactory" under "Discipline." But the teacher was fired. The very first day after he got his party card, the local committee was down on him (unjustly, he says). But in a party where one could only get along by going along, he got along quite well, learning to bob as well as jab. By the time he became the provincial party boss, he was nimble enough to talk Leonid Brezhnev into authorizing a subway for Sverdlovsk. "Just dictate what I should write," the old leader told him. "In my opinion," Yeltsin recalls, "[he] had no idea what he was doing, signing or saying."

Gorbachev brought Yeltsin up from the sticks, making him Moscow party chief and only two months later a junior member of the Politburo. At first the relationship was warm. They had both been provincial party chiefs with an eye for reform. Yeltsin had found Gorbachev "open and frank." Yeltsin plunged into the Moscow job. He queued up at food stores with ordinary Muscovites, searching for veal and carrots, firing shopkeepers who misappropriated them. He rode the Metro, took the bus, listened to "tired, wound-up workers" describe how "we, the leaders, had ruined the country."

He knew the party needed to show better results and was surprised when he saw Gorbachev hanging back. Within the Politburo, Yeltsin began to fight with Yegor Ligachev over the apparatchiks wallowing in perks: the dachas along the Moscow River with gardens, tennis courts and bodyguards under every window; the huge suites in the Kremlin hospital with porcelain, crystal, carpets and chandeliers; the private rooms in the GUM department store crammed with luxuries no ordinary Muscovite could buy; the personal planes; the ZiL limousines whizzing through Moscow traffic jams on special lanes; the seaside villas for holidays.

Toadies: Yeltsin was once offered one of Gorbachev's old dachas, a small palace with marble paneling, parquet floors, a 30foot dining table, a billiard room and more fireplaces, television sets and bathrooms than he could count. "Why has Gorbachev been unable to change this?" he wondered. He decided that the general secretary liked to live in comfort and luxury; so did Raisa. When Yeltsin turned down the dacha and other perks, his colleagues accused him of political grandstanding. He meant to do far more than that. In 1987, when Gorbachev presented the" Politburo and Central Committee his draft of a speech celebrating the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution, his toadies offered their praise. Yeltsin recalls offering nearly 20 mordant criticisms, and Gorbachev stormed out of the room. He cameback 30 minutes later to boil the rebel in oil. "At that moment," Yeltsin recalls, "Gorbachev simply hated me."

Later that year Yeltsin repeated his attack. In the very public forum of a Central Committee Plenum, he said he believed the Soviet Union needed to restructure the work of the entire party. Perestroika was in trouble, ordinary people were fed up with delays. It was the first time any party insider dared criticize Gorbachev so openly. The ironies were superb. Yeltsin was practicing the pluralism that Gorbachev himself had encouraged; the hacks denounced him for it. He lost his Moscow job and Politburo post. His health broke. Gorbachev hinted that he should retire. "It meant certain death," Yeltsin remembers with his usual hyperbole. "I would be incapable of retiring . . . to grow dill and radishes. I would go stark, raving mad--or die of boredom."

When Gorbachev offered a sop--a job as deputy minister of construction--Yeltsin accepted it and started a comeback. Old friends from remote Karelia elected him a delegate to the 19th Party Conference. Gorbachev let him speak, a mistake. Blasting the party as the main obstacle to perestroika. Yeltsin called for elections by secret ballot. a limit of two terms and a top age of 60 for all major party jobs. No one, including the general secretary, should be exempt from criticism, he said, when after 70 years the party had failed to feed and clothe the Soviet Union decently, to set up a working service economy and to guarantee social justice. Gorbachev had told him he was dead in politics. Now he rose from the grave. "Rehabilitation 50 years after a person 'sdeath has now become the rule," he said. "I am asking for my personal rehabilitation while I am still alive." TV broadcast the performance--and a star was born.

Bourbon and bombast: Wobbling, Yeltsin began to rise above the horizon. He won a seat as a Moscow delegate to the new Congress of People's Deputies. But during a swing through the l: United States last year, stories about his appetite for bourbon followed him. Glassy-eyed, he delivered a few semicoherent remarks at Johns Hopkins University. He turned up for a 15-minute dropby with Bush at the White House, where he didn't seem to recognize national-security adviser Brent Scowcroft. Jim Garrison, a public-relations man for the trip, found Yeltsin a boorish and dangerous opportunist. Others disagreed. At a New York party where Yeltsin mixed with Dan Rather, Jane Pauley and other local celebrities, he gave his Moscow telephone number to everyone in the room, along with invitations to visit him. He was bombastic, but people came away liking him. He also stopped at the very sober Council on Foreign Relations, where Peter Tarnoff, the group's chief, found him a figure to be taken seriously. "If his ideas have merit," Tarnoff says, "we must be open-minded."

Yeltsin now says jet lag, sedatives and culture shock were his real nemesis. He also claims that TV engineers told him someone had doctored a videotape of his Johns Hopkins stop to make his speech look slurred. Disinformation is mother's milk to the KGB, of course. Is it trying to get him? Last fall, Yeltsin told a bizarre tale of attempted assassination: he was crossing over a river in a Moscow suburb, he said, when a car ran him off the bridge. Dripping wet and shivering, he asked a guard for help--and swore the man to secrecy. His followers would go on the rampage if they heard someone wanted to kill him, he explained later. Cynics gossip I that he had only gotten into a fight with a mistress. His loyalists call that a lie. Yeltsin himself says he "reacted calmly to what sociologists would call a drop in my ratings."

Bread: A surge of populism in the Soviet Union has restored his fortunes. His program for the Russian Republic rejects Gorbachev's latest economic reforms, which include steep price rises for bread and meat and other daily necessities. While he rejects economic shock therapy of the kind underway in Poland, he has made Vasily Selyunin, one of the Soviet Union's most radical economists, an adviser. He believes he can grease the transition to a market economy with Russian oil, which now sells within the Soviet bloc for one fifth the world price a gap he hopes to close within a year. His views envision the breakup of the Soviet Union into its constituent republics. Last week he called for 14 separate treaties with the republics covering science, culture, ethnic questions and refugees as well as economic matters. A 15th treaty with the central government would deal with national security and defense. While he didn't quite argue that the Russian Republic should drop out of the Soviet Union, he said the possibility of secession would always exist.

As de facto president of all the Russians, Yeltsin stands to become the second most powerful man in the country. He has now put a hole in Gorbachev's approach to his two most important problems: the economy and the nationalities. Gorbachev's economic package was in deep trouble anyway, but in rejecting it, Yeltsin probably sank it. Gorbachev's approach to the nationalities barred any abrupt realignment of the Soviet Union. While he had recognized the right to secede in principle, the Supreme Soviet's new secession law had postponed any such gesture for at least five years. Now his position is undermined.

The Baltic republics are already on the way out. The Moldavian parliament has voted to recognize Lithuania and begin trade relations. Gorbachev should find it harder to keep up his blockade of Lithuania now that Yeltsin's trade mission is cruising the Baltic republics. Gorbachev's blockade depends in part on the support of blue-collar railway workers. And Yeltsin may have ways of influencing them. Beyond the Baltic, the western Ukraine has become a hotbed of separatist feelings. The Caucasus is also soaked in nationalism.

At the local level, Yeltsin has also acquired some allies. The liberal new mayors of Moscow and Leningrad--Gavriil Popov and Anatoly Sobchak--worked with Yeltsin in founding the Inter-Regional Group, a coalition of progressive parliamentary deputies. They have also mustered city-council majorities committed to radical change. They hope to wrench control of city newspapers and television stations from the party and they would like to evict the party from choice, downtown real estate--or force it to pay high rents.

'Compromise': If the talk summons up images of the 1917 soviets and smoke-filled debates in St. Petersburg's Smolny Institute, the comparison may be a hit premature. Yeltsin still has to deliver on his own program. It took him three tries before he won the chairmanship. To succeed, he offered a post or two to figures who were far from revolutionary firebrands. He now commands a majority in the Russian parliament, but his opponents say they still control 430 seats and they are masters of obstruction. The realities, he said, impressed on him "the importance of political compromise."

An important test will come in July at the 28th Party Congress Conservative delegates are already threatening to oust their "radical" opponents. Yeltsin is still a member of the Central Committee, which makes him different from other oppositionists. Progressives say that if the old regime behaves true to form, they will bolt the party. Will Yeltsin's success jolt the mossbacks into seeing that he is no longer beyond the fringe, but astride the dominant mood of the country? Will Gorbachev see that if he tries to annihilate him, support for the man from the Urals will only grow? Or will the two find a way of living with each other? Some dreamers draw up scenarios that foresee the two rivals working in tandem, Gorbachev concentrating on foreign affairs while Yeltsin deals with problems at home. That idea seems too visionary to come true. But Gorbachev now faces a significant opponent, and President Bush may have to start looking more carefully at Boris Yeltsin.

The Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) covers 76 percent of all Soviet territory. At nearly twice the size of China or the United States, it is the second largest political:unit in the world.

Population: 147 million in 1989 (51% of the U.S.S.R. total)

Energy: The RSFSR is responsible for 70% of Soviet hard-coal production, 91% of crude petroleum, 75% of natural gas.

Industry: The republic produces 58% of the nation's steel, 81% of timber, 60% of cement.

Agriculture: RSFSR lands yield 54% of all Soviet potatoes, 52% of grain, 51% of milk.

Security: Most Soviet ballistic-missile sites are on RSFSR soil. Major naval bases are at Kaliningrad, Murmansk and Vladivostok.

"I am an awkward person. I know it," Boris Yeltsin wrote Mikhail Gorbachev in l987 It was not an apology. In a brief interview last week, Yeltsin told NEWSWEEK'S Carroll Bogert why Gorbachev finds him awkward:

How do you differ from Mikhail Gorbachev, in a personal sense rather than a political one?

Gorbachev is very fond of power. He has a transcendent urge for it. But in spite of that, he doesn't have a strong character. I think that Raisa Maksimovna has a stronger character. Mikhail Sergeyevich likes it very much when people say good things about him to his face. I get flustered by it. He likes monologues very much ... I prefer dialogues. Gorbachev likes to speak and write smooth phrases, he likes to construct complex, abstract figures of speech. I use simple, understandable, short sentences. He likes luxury, he enjoys it. I am indifferent to luxury . . . He's cautious, and because of that, he's predictable. I happen to be incautious.

It's easier to be popular when you're out of power. Aren't you afraid that now, being president, you could lose some of your popularity?

So far, Russia still has to elect its president by, as we say, all the people. As for the popularity of the head of Russia, we cannot separate it from the strength, competence and political maturity of the whole government. I think that a government which is trusted by the people need not be afraid of the loss of popularity. I think we have a reserve of trust for two or three years. If we don't change Russia's life in two or three years ... total disappointment will follow.

How have you personally changed in the last five years?

The last five years have been so difficult for me, so filled with unusual events, that perhaps I've changed several times. But if you don't take into account the ripples of change, but only the squalls, well, they've pushed me to the shore of democracy. In recent years, I found in myself the courage to break, finally, with the system in which I'd been so deeply entangled ... It's a pity that so far, there are too few of us. But every day, the number of Russian democrats will grow . . . and that's why I'm looking at life with optimism and hope.

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