Yeltsin Decries Use of Troops in Azerbaijan

The Kremlin was wrong to send in troops to put down the virtual civil war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, maverick Soviet politician Boris N. Yeltsin said over the weekend.

He also said that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev could soon fall from power.

“It is a mistake to dispatch troops and suppress ethnic problems by armed force,” Yeltsin told Akira Yamagishi, president of Rengo, Japan’s largest labor organization, on Saturday, the financial daily Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported Sunday.

It also quoted Yeltsin as saying that “ perestroika at present is going round and getting nowhere. Its future prospect is dark unless President Gorbachev joins forces with us. It (Gorbachev’s regime) might collapse within several months.”

Yeltsin, who arrived for an 11-day visit Jan. 13, said in an interview with the Mainichi Daily News that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has a much more austere life style than Gorbachev, who, as the leader of a socialist country, should have a standard of living closer to that of the masses.

“For example, when Thatcher visits a foreign country, she rides in the same plane that ordinary citizens use, but Gorbachev can’t do that,” he was quoted as saying.

“While Thatcher rides in a car with two other people, Gorbachev uses a procession of four luxury cars plus an escort,” he added.

“There is too much of a gap between the standard of living of ordinary people and that of the most elevated party leaders,” he said.

“Although 48 million Soviet citizens are living below the lowest standard of living, the leaders are indulging in the most unnecessary luxuries.”

He also said East European socialism became corrupted “because it was state socialism guarded by the military.”

Yeltsin, former Moscow party chief, was fired from the junior ranks of the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo for demanding faster change. But he rebounded in March, 1989, taking 89% of the Moscow vote in parliamentary elections to win the country’s largest grass-roots mandate.