Yeltsin Puts Job on Line in Soviet Election Bid

As deputy chairman of the Soviet State Construction Committee, Boris N. Yeltsin oversees an army of almost 12 million workers who last year put up about $328 billion worth of factories, stores, offices, housing and other buildings across the country.

He has a large paneled office in central Moscow. Special telephone lines connect him with the Council of Ministers in the Kremlin and the Communist Party’s Central Committee headquarters. A black, chauffeur-driven limousine that is emblematic of ministerial rank awaits his summons.

In short, Yeltsin has power--and all its trappings.

But Yeltsin, 58, an engineer turned politician, is ready to give up his envied executive position, its authority and attendant privileges in order to become a member of the Congress of People’s Deputies. This is the Soviet Union’s newly restructured Parliament, which is to be elected March 26 as a fundamental part of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reforms.

“If I am elected a deputy, I cannot remain a minister, and I will resign from the government,” Yeltsin said last week in an interview. “For me, the choice can be only one, because you cannot compare the trust you receive from the people to an appointment to the chair of a minister.”

Decision Could Prove Historic

If Yeltsin is correct, if real political power shifts from the black-suited, grim-faced apparatchiks of the government and party to the popularly elected members of the strengthened national Parliament, his decision to go into parliamentary politics could prove historic.

“I hope and believe that this will be an absolutely new body, a legislative organ of a completely new type, a body to which everything in the Soviet Union is subordinated,” Yeltsin said of the Congress of People’s Deputies.

“If I thought that it would become, even in the slightest degree, the supporting cast (for the party leadership), as the legislature used to be, then I would never have run.”

Yeltsin’s candidacy for the seat that represents Moscow at large demonstrates the degree to which this election--the first to be contested actively since the earliest years of the Soviet state--already has opened up politics to opposition figures. And this, in turn, may end the party’s long monopoly on decision-making.

Although the elections initially attracted five candidates for every seat, few officials have placed as much faith as Yeltsin in the new congress, now enshrined in the Soviet constitution as the highest body of state power, or in the Supreme Soviet, the much-strengthened legislature that the congress will elect.

Many Victories Assured

And while many senior officials are certain to win election to seats reserved under the constitution for party representatives, only Yeltsin, of the 100-plus members of the Council of Ministers, has put his present job on the line by running independently.

Yeltsin, looking beyond the election to the formation of the Supreme Soviet, envisions the emergence of a major bloc--he calls it the “revolutionary left”--within Parliament that “will be progressive, courageous and strong, able to conduct the political line that the people want.”

Clearly hoping to become its leader, Yeltsin said this bloc should be able to win enough support from those “who are progressively inclined but lacking enough courage to act” to defeat those placed in the new Parliament to represent the bureaucracy’s interests. A multiparty system is something that might be discussed, he added.

A maverick, Yeltsin broke with the Communist Party’s top leadership 18 months ago over the scope and pace of reform--he said it lacked “revolutionary thrust” and had grown sluggish--in a controversy that still echoes loudly and has become the basis for his campaign.

Pace of Reform Criticized

Although still a member of the party’s policy-making Central Committee, he is strongly critical of the way that perestroika , the reform program instituted by Gorbachev over the past four years, is being implemented. He contends that “the brakes have been put on, sometimes quite openly,” and that as a result perestroika is skidding.

“My view is that having resolved the basic political questions, we should begin restructuring the party but at the same time focus on the most pressing issue--raising the living standards of the people--and concentrate all available resources on that mission,” he said.

“I support Mikhail Gorbachev completely on foreign policy and on national security, and on domestic policies I support his strategic goals,” Yeltsin said. “But I differ with him on a number of points on domestic issues on what our tactics should be. This is natural, I think, because people do differ on how goals should be reached. To criticize does not mean to oppose.”

But such criticism--as well as his own hard-driving management style--led to Yeltsin’s removal in November, 1987, as the party leader in Moscow and later as a non-voting member of the Politburo.

He was criticized by Gorbachev as “politically immature, extremely confused and contradictory” and denounced by local officials for poor management of the capital. When he was rebuffed last summer at a special party conference where he sought “rehabilitation,” his political career appeared to many to be finished, except for his job as deputy chairman of the State Construction Committee.

But Yeltsin, a tall, broad-shouldered man with a mane of thick white hair and strong blue eyes, has an enormous following, particularly for his plain-spoken style and populist politics.

After the party conference, T-shirts quickly appeared saying “Fight, Boris!” along with buttons urging “You tell ‘em, Yeltsin.” Although he was virtually banned from the central Soviet press as too pugnacious, his interviews with local newspapers were avidly read.

His celebrated public feud with Yegor K. Ligachev, a senior Politburo member who has become the voice of conservatism within the Soviet leadership, has probably added to Yeltsin’s popularity. Despite the tradition of not discussing such party business openly, he continues to call for Ligachev’s resignation.

Famous Phenomenon

In a country where political leaders often seem unapproachable, where senior officials are unreachable and where the bureaucrats are simply unreasonable, Yeltsin has been a phenomenon. As party leader for a decade in his native Sverdlovsk, a major industrial center in the Ural Mountains, and then in Moscow from 1985 to 1987, he rode buses, walked through factories and stood in the food lines. He also attacked bureaucrats, abolished many of their privileges and met regularly with thousands of people in marathon, no-questions-barred sessions for which he became famous.

Opponent Well-Organized

So when campaigning started in late December for the parliamentary elections, Yeltsin was nominated in more than 200 constituencies nationwide, and he eventually chose the citywide Moscow constituency for the unique platform he would have in the capital.

His opponent, Yevgeny Brakov, 51, is director of Moscow’s giant ZIL automotive plant, and has a well-organized, well-financed team of campaign workers. Brakov is a mainstream supporter of Gorbachev, and he has the Moscow party organization behind him.