Soviet Union Next: A Crackdown -- Or a Breakdown?

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

He looked and sounded weary as he mounted the podium. Bags bulged under his eyes; his thinning white hair was rumpled; his words came slowly at first. But as he warmed to his theme, his voice grew louder and shook with indignation; he waved his finger and brandished a fist over the lectern. Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, known the world over for his all-weather, ear- to-ear grin, for once was in a boiling, very public rage.

His words were even more shocking than his manner. Shocking to the nearly 2,000 members of the Congress of People's Deputies, meeting in a Kremlin auditorium; to his longtime close friend, President Mikhail Gorbachev, watching on the tribune behind Shevardnadze; and to a world that had been wondering with increasing apprehension which way the U.S.S.R. was going. Shevardnadze thought he knew: back toward the terrible past. "Reactionaries" were gaining power, he said, and nobody would speak out against them. "Comrade democrats!" Shevardnadze shouted, "You have scattered. Reformers have slunk into the bushes. A dictatorship is coming."

Then came the real bombshell: "I am resigning." As cries of outrage and surprise sounded through the hall, Shevardnadze waved his hands and added, "Don't react, and don't criticize me. Let this be my personal contribution, my protest against the advance of dictatorship. I believe that to resign is my duty as a man, as a citizen, as a communist. I cannot reconcile myself to what is happening in our country and the trials awaiting our people."

The shock waves quickly spread from the Palace of Congresses through the Soviet Union and the world. For Gorbachev, who shook his head in disbelief as his Foreign Minister spoke, it was the darkest hour of his leadership. Not only had he lost one of his closest allies in the Kremlin, but it seemed obvious that he could no longer continue walking a tightrope over the heads of reformist democrats, national separatists and proponents of a law-and-order crackdown; the splits had become too deep and envenomed for that. And Shevardnadze tossed in a warning of what might happen if Gorbachev finally came down on the side of the authoritarians. "No one knows what this dictatorship will be like," he said, "what kind of dictator will come to power and what order will be established." That sounded like a warning that the hard-liners could easily push Gorbachev aside after using him to establish their power.

Speaking to the Congress hours later, Gorbachev sounded as if he could not quite figure out what had hit him. Shevardnadze, he said, had given no inkling of what he was about to do, and that was "what hurts me." Gorbachev had in fact been planning to elevate his old friend to the new post of Vice President. The turmoil in the Soviet Union made this the worst time for Shevardnadze to jump ship, Gorbachev added, and "I condemn" him for it. . Nonetheless, he pleaded for the Foreign Minister to reconsider. But Vitali Churkin, Shevardnadze's spokesman had already said that the Foreign Minister's resignation was no snap decision but had been reached after "many sleepless nights" and was "final." Shevardnadze, however, has not ruled out taking on a new assignment for Gorbachev, perhaps dealing with the country's explosive nationalities issue.

In capitals around the world, the immediate question was whether Soviet foreign policy would change. The consensus: in basic thrust, probably not much -- for the moment. It was Gorbachev, after all, who made the fundamental decision to end the cold war, and he has since become far too dependent on Western economic aid to run any risk of going back to the old enmity.

But in nuance and emphasis -- well, who would have argued as hard as Shevardnadze did inside the Kremlin for pulling out of Afghanistan, concluding sweeping arms-control treaties with the U.S., letting Eastern Europe escape from Soviet control and go democratic? Would any other Soviet Foreign Minister have told a surprised Arab diplomat in so many words that "the Americans are our friends"? Says Alex Pravda, a Sovietologist at Oxford's St. Antony's College: "I see no danger now of the cold war returning. But probably negotiations with the Soviet Union will be more difficult; getting concessions from Moscow will be more difficult."

At a minimum, it will take time for a new Foreign Minister to rebuild the trust that Shevardnadze had established with his counterparts in the West. After meeting with Gorbachev for two hours on Friday, Shevardnadze reportedly agreed to stay on until at least Feb. 20. This would be good news for the U.S., since it means that Shevardnadze could continue to iron out technical problems that are delaying the START treaty, which would drastically cut the numbers of long-range nuclear weapons on both sides. Shevardnadze would also be able to attend the Bush-Gorbachev summit in Moscow on Feb. 11 to 13, at which the U.S. still hopes the START treaty can be signed.

Before he resigned. Shevardnadze had told U.S. Secretary of State James Baker he would investigate complaints that the Soviet military is evading strictures of the just signed treaty reducing conventional forces in Europe; Baker had trusted his counterpart to win full compliance. Now it is unclear whether Shevardnadze will have the time -- or clout -- to achieve that goal before he leaves office.

The biggest problem may be the Persian Gulf. Shevardnadze helped draft the U.N. resolution approving the use of force by the U.S. and its allies if Iraq does not leave Kuwait by Jan. 15. But that policy has been very unpopular with much of the Soviet military, which looks back nostalgically on the long years when Iraq was Moscow's closest ally in the Middle East. In fact, hard-liners in the Congress of People's Deputies talked up a declaration forbidding the Kremlin to send any troops to the gulf force opposing Iraq, and Shevardnadze described this as the last straw prompting his resignation. He insisted that there were no plans to send a single soldier but regarded the resolution as a blatant attempt to undermine his policy by raising doubts about it.

Now there is considerable speculation that Shevardnadze may be succeeded by Yevgeni Primakov, a Middle East expert who has insisted that Iraq must be given some face-saving way out of the crisis. German Sovietologist Uwe Nerlich, who has met with him in Moscow, says that Primakov "personally is an old buddy of ((Iraqi dictator)) Saddam Hussein's." Though Shevardnadze might still be in office on Jan. 15, the U.S. will surely need the Soviet Union's support in the gulf well after he departs his post.

Most fundamentally, the cold war would never have ended if Gorbachev had not moved the Soviet Union away from totalitarianism, and Moscow's progress toward full acceptance into the world community of nations would be difficult if not impossible to sustain if it reverted to strong-arm rule.

So the deepest questions raised by Shevardnadze's resignation, internationally as well as internally, are: Is the Soviet Union really in danger of renewed dictatorship? And if it is, does the Foreign Minister's resignation make the peril greater or less?

One small but ominous indication: Colonel Ivan Chernykh, commander of the Soviet army garrison in the Lithuanian port of Klaipeda, a hotbed of tension between ethnic Russians and Lithuanians, sent soldiers toting submachine guns to patrol city streets and gave them authority to check documents and arrest civilians. This escalation gave weight to rumors that Moscow planned a military crackdown on the rebellious Baltic republics and prompted a protest from the Lithuanian government to Gorbachev that the actions of the Soviet army brutally violate the human rights of ((Lithuanian)) citizens.

During his nearly six years in power, Gorbachev has zigzagged repeatedly / between right and left, trying to stay in command of a center that he kept moving slowly leftward, toward greater democracy. At the same time he was steadily expanding his own powers, at least on paper, but implicitly pledging to use those powers to force reform on a backward bureaucracy.

Most of the time, that strategy worked. But during the past year or so it has been falling apart. The reform forces have lost all cohesion, splintering into myriad tiny groups. All 15 Soviet republics have declared sovereignty, and so have regions and even cities within republics, producing a state of near anarchy. Gorbachev lost his best and perhaps his last chance to remain the leader of the reformists in October when he backed away from a 500-Day Plan for radical economic reform that had been worked out with Russian republic leader Boris Yeltsin, his chief domestic rival. When Gorbachev substituted a watered-down plan, Yeltsin rejected it with contempt. Though Gorbachev talked the Supreme Soviet into giving him the power to rule virtually by decree, the republics declared many of his decrees null and void, leading to what both sides rightly called an intolerable "war of laws."

While the left was splintering, the right was organizing to demand a law- and-order crackdown. Some 470 members of the Congress of People's Deputies, or just over a fifth of the total, belong to Soyuz (Union), a diverse grouping of military men, members of the powerful military-industrial complex and ethnic Russians living as minorities in various republics. As the Congress of People's Deputies meeting approached, Soyuz and conservatives generally seemed to be gaining influence with a frustrated Gorbachev. That should have been no surprise. The reformists' strength had always resided in an evanescent popular mood that has swung from euphoria to near despair as political breakdown has been mirrored in economic chaos and shortages of everything. The conservatives, in contrast, command the hard, physical tools of power: troops, tanks and vertushki, the direct telephone lines to the central authorities that are the lifeline of the government bureaucracy.

During the fall, Moscow was awash with rumors that the rightists had talked Gorbachev into a crackdown. German Sovietologist Nerlich, who was in Moscow in November, heard a particularly unnerving -- and unconfirmed -- story. During a Politburo meeting on Nov. 16, an army-KGB-conservative bloc supposedly presented Gorbachev with an ultimatum that Nerlich summarizes this way: "Within six weeks he had to get things under control in the republics, Moscow and Leningrad or there would be physical ways of removing him." Janis Jurkans, foreign minister of the Latvian republic, tells a different story of a November ultimatum. He said last week that 30 days earlier, hard-liners had handed Gorbachev a list of certain "democrats" whom they demanded he remove from office. Jurkans implied that Shevardnadze's name had been on the list.

Whatever might have happened behind the scenes, onstage Gorbachev moved abruptly to the right. He proposed constitutional changes, which he hopes to ram through the Congress of People's Deputies, that would further strengthen presidential authority. He announced plans to form civilian vigilante groups to combat black markets and profiteering, and put the KGB in charge of monitoring the distribution of foreign food. Most striking, he sacked Vadim Bakatin, the moderate Interior Minister, and replaced him with a two-man team: Boris Pugo, former chief of the Latvian KGB, as minister; and General Boris Gromov, an officer often said to favor a military coup (he denies it furiously), as Pugo's deputy.

Both tendencies, toward anarchy and a crackdown, gathered speed as the People's Deputies met. Five republics in effect declined to participate: Lithuania and Armenia would not send official delegations; Latvians and Estonians attended only as observers; most of the delegates from Moldova (as the Moldavian republic now calls itself) walked out in a complicated dispute over the creation of independent ethnic states within that small republic.

Gorbachev, frustrated over the refusal of many republics to accept his draft of a new treaty of union, asserted that he would submit it to a popular referendum within each republic; the Baltic republics promptly declared that they would not let such a referendum be held on their turf. Most ominous, Gorbachev announced that he might introduce a "state of emergency or presidential rule" in areas where the "situation becomes especially tense and there is a serious threat to the state and to people's well-being." That might have been the trigger for Shevardnadze's resignation. One of the first targets could be his home republic of Georgia, where ethnic animosities are boiling high and a newly elected noncommunist, nationalist government appears to be on a collision course with the central government.

It is possible that Shevardnadze's resignation will give Gorbachev a salutary shock that will arrest any further drift to the right. But it is equally possible that it will accentuate such a drift by removing one of the last and most eloquent advocates of perestroika from Gorbachev's inner circle. Among a parade of speakers to the Congress podium after Shevardnadze's speech, Vladimir Chernyak, a Ukrainian economist, gave a new twist to warnings of a coup: "At the head of the coup stands Gorbachev. It's possible he himself doesn't know it. By demanding for himself more and more powers, he is creating the legal basis for a dictatorship -- maybe not for himself personally."

Chernyak hit on a central irony. While Gorbachev seems to be relying more and more on the army, KGB and other conservatives to buttress his presidential powers and save what remains of perestroika, the right seems convinced that it can do very well without Gorbachev. Many of its members regard him with open contempt as a leader who has reduced the Soviet Union, once a proud superpower, to literal beggary, making it dependent on food and other economic aid from the West.

Partly at Shevardnadze's urging, the West has placed all its hopes for a new world order on Gorbachev. French and German authorities last week even urged that aid be accelerated, arguing that at this critical time for the survival of perestroika Gorbachev needs all the help he can get. But what if the next figure to follow Shevardnadze to a podium and announce that a triumphant right has left him no choice but to resign were Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev?

With reporting by Daniel Benjamin/Bonn, John Kohan/Moscow and Christopher Ogden/Washington