Yeltsin Sees Dangers in Gorbachev’s Powers

In a fiery attack on Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the radical populist politician Boris N. Yeltsin warned Wednesday that Gorbachev’s growing power as president and general secretary of the Communist Party could threaten the country with a new dictatorship, and he called for an annual vote of confidence on the president’s leadership.

“Against the background of a deteriorating economy and the sharpening of social issues, we see an increase in the personal influence and the personal power in the hands of the head of state,” Yeltsin told the Congress of People’s Deputies, the country’s new legislature, in a speech broadcast live on state radio and television from the Kremlin.

New Dictatorship Feared

“This can lead to the temptation to solve our complex problems with force, and we can again find ourselves in the sway of a new authoritarian regime, a new dictatorship, without noticing it.”

Yeltsin, who received nearly 6 million votes when he was elected in March to represent the citywide Moscow constituency in the congress, charged that people are now worse off under Gorbachev’s reforms than they were before he came to power four years ago and that there is little prospect for early improvement.

“The promised reforms and the other pledges of the past four years have not been fulfilled,” Yeltsin said, voicing the widespread complaints that perestroika, or restructuring, as Gorbachev’s political, social and economic reforms are called, has produced few material benefits. “People live worse . . . and the leadership knows it.”

Gorbachev sat in stony silence behind Yeltsin, and a succession of other speakers, as the congress debated his report on the country’s basic policies for a second day.

The Soviet Union now faces a crucial political question--the future role of the Communist Party--and the hoped-for transfer of power from the party to the congress has been stalled, if not halted, Yeltsin contended to the applause of hundreds of other deputies.

“We must determine the role and place of the party in society,” he said. “Democratization of the party is lagging behind democratization of society. The party’s authority among the masses is falling. Time is crucial--we cannot wait.”

Yeltsin’s speech was the harshest of a series of attacks on the party leadership, as the deputies, breaking again into clear progressive and conservative factions, continued to debate Gorbachev’s report.

Representatives from the Baltic republics argued strongly for a new federal system that would give them maximum autonomy while deputies from Soviet Central Asia wanted to maintain the present balance between Moscow and the outlying regions.

Party Leadership Attacked

One deputy, Yuri Vlasov, a former Olympic weightlifting champion, vehemently attacked the party leadership and then Gorbachev, to the applause of other members of the congress.

“We simply have no right to place our destinies and that of our country in the hands of a single person whose probity we must accept on faith,” Vlasov said.

Vlasov then criticized the KGB, as the Soviet secret police is known from its Russian initials, for “the mess we are in.”

The KGB is “an underground empire” that controls the fate of the country, Vlasov said, urging his fellow deputies to demand information on its strength, budget and activities in order to ensure the congress’ own independence.

“This is a highly conspiratorial organization--responsible only to the party apparatus, which in turn uses it to maintain its power,” Vlasov said. Even its headquarters should be moved from the center of Moscow, he said, and its “blood-stained building” put to other uses.

Harsh Political Language

In his indictment of Gorbachev’s leadership, Yeltsin continued in some of the harshest political language heard in a public forum, even during the election campaigns in recent months:

“The situation in the country is extremely alarming. Anti- perestroika forces have become active and are consolidating, the shadow economy is growing, corruption and crime are on the rise, the moral standards of society are becoming diluted, the problems of youth are growing more acute. . . .

“The principles of social justice and social equality are not being realized, the number of poor people is growing, the Soviet people’s belief in the real results of perestroika is falling, the contradictions in ethnic problems are becoming sharper. . . .

“With chaos in our consumer sector, inflation, queues and ration coupons, the threat of a financial collapse has become real. The system of economic administration by command has not been broken. Power still belongs to the party apparatus and the bureaucracy.”

And Gorbachev, as the party leader since March, 1985, bears full responsibility for all this, Yeltsin declared, adding that acknowledgement of the problems, itself unusual, and Gorbachev’s rare public “self-criticism” do not absolve him.

Hostage of Decisions

“The architects of stagnation,” Yeltsin continued, employing the term now used to condemn the rule of the late Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev, “have reserved zones in legislation that are still off-limits to criticism. Power is still in the hands of the party and bureaucratic apparatus. The congress itself is the hostage of decisions adopted by the old Supreme Soviet, and the most important decisions are pre-determined.”

Yeltsin quickly sketched his own approach as an alternative to Gorbachev’s program:

The current five-year economic development should be scrapped without waiting for its formal end in 1990, and new plans made. Spending on capital construction, the military and space should be cut sharply, and the money transferred to improving living conditions.

Urges Curbs on Party

The country as a whole, Yeltsin continued, should move quickly toward a decentralized federal system allowing the constituent republics and major regions full political and economic autonomy. The press should be freed from party control. And the complex system of reserving certain positions for those appointed by the party leadership, the much criticized nomenklatura, should be abolished along with the privileges that go with it.

In a challenge not only to Gorbachev but the Communist Party leadership as a whole, Yeltsin also urged the congress, which has yet to test its authority as the body of “supreme state power,” to curb the party and its network of officials, whose decisions have amounted to law here for more than 70 years, in order to break out of the country’s deepening crisis.

Power “by right should belong to the people in the form of the organ they elect--that is, the Congress of People’s Deputies,” Yeltsin said.

He then called for an early national congress of the Communist Party to review its policies and to elect a new leadership. “The party Central Committee’s current members have failed to promote perestroika, “ Yeltsin said. “Nothing has been done over four years to change this country’s political system.”

Sovereignty Proposed

In another challenge, Anatoly V. Gorbunov, the president of the Latvian republic, proposed giving the 15 constituent republics their full sovereignty so they could freely decide which functions the central government would have and which would remain with the republics.

Gorbunov then outlined a plan put forward by the three Baltic republics--Latvia plus Lithuania and Estonia--calling for constitutional changes that would bring such federalism to the Soviet Union.

Yeltsin had also raised the question of who was responsible for the action by security forces against nationalist demonstrators in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi in April, when 21 people were killed as the city’s main square was cleared.

“This was a crime, a crime against our own people,” Yeltsin said. “It is necessary to say here at the congress who in the center took the decision to use force. The leadership knows this.”