Gorbachev OKs Coalition Rule, Yeltsin Asserts

Boris N. Yeltsin, the populist president of the Russian Federation, said Tuesday that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has agreed in principle to the formation of “a coalition government of national unity,” including Yeltsin nominees, as a way of sharing power and ending the country’s political paralysis.

Yeltsin said he told Gorbachev that Russia, the largest of the Soviet Union’s 15 constituent republics, would want the right to name the prime minister of the central government as well as its defense and finance ministers.

Recounting his five-hour Sunday meeting with Gorbachev, Yeltsin told members of the Russian legislature that he had proposed “a complete new system of state power--the formation of a coalition government of national unity”--and that Gorbachev “in principle supported the line.”

Gorbachev, addressing military officers on Tuesday, did not respond directly to Yeltsin’s proposal but said, “There were no differences with the head of the Russian Parliament on the need to create a united but renewed union of sovereign states.

“I consider that the conversation was responsible, serious and constructive,” the Soviet president said, letting stand without demur the Russian leader’s assertion that they had agreed both on a division of power between the central government and the republics and the formation of the proposed coalition Cabinet.

“And after such a fundamental exchange of opinion on this question, I think I have the confidence that we here in the center and the leadership of Russia will act in a spirit that corresponds to the interests of our national state and all its peoples.”

Vitaly N. Ignatenko, the president’s press secretary, said later that some descriptions of the Gorbachev-Yeltsin talks were “a bit sensational,” but he refused the opportunity to deny that the two leaders had, in fact, reached an agreement on a sharing of power and establishment of a coalition government.

“The discussion was very acute--polemical, I would say--but constructive,” Ignatenko said. “There were no real differences between the president and Yeltsin.”

The political and personal rivalry between Gorbachev and Yeltsin has sharpened the country’s political crisis in recent months. Gorbachev found that Yeltsin’s proposals commanded popular support where his own reforms drew increasing criticism. But Yeltsin discovered that he had little hope of implementing any of his ideas without Gorbachev’s power.

Each, however, has a sharply different vision of the country’s future and a strategy on how to get there. That difference plus old quarrels have kept them apart as the Soviet economy has continued to disintegrate, ethnic unrest has grown and social discontent deepened.

As outlined by Yeltsin, the agreement would appear to doom the moderate government of Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, who has strongly resisted the radical economic reforms favored by Yeltsin and who had persuaded Gorbachev only last month to pursue narrower reforms at a slower pace.

“I did not claim many posts before consulting with you,” Yeltsin told the Russian deputies, “but I did express the wish for three--prime minister, finance and defense.”

But the next step in cementing the new alliance between the country’s most powerful leaders was unclear.

Until now, Gorbachev has defended the increasingly unpopular Ryzhkov, leading many Soviet political observers to believe that the president needs the backing of the country’s vast military-industrial complex not only to pursue his reforms but even to remain in office himself.

The Soviet Union, moreover, has no established political or constitutional mechanism to implement the agreement outlined by Yeltsin. Nominated by the president, the country’s prime minister must be elected by the Congress of People’s Deputies, the national Parliament, and his ministers confirmed by the Supreme Soviet, the legislature.

The agreement, as sketched by Yeltsin and partially confirmed by Gorbachev, goes far beyond establishing a coalition government, however, and looks toward an entirely new political system in which the republics will have far greater authority on their own territory as well as a larger voice in the formulation of national policy.

Gorbachev said that a draft of the new treaty reconstituting the Soviet Union as a much looser federation will be published in about a week and that this will form the basis for further discussions on the division of political and economic power in the country.

Without an “active, constructive and responsible” role for Russia, now led by Yeltsin and other radical reformers, Gorbachev acknowledged that it would be impossible to conclude the new union treaty--and that this could plunge the country into chaos and even civil conflict. Russia is home to half the Soviet Union’s 290 million people and makes up two-thirds of its territory.

“This union of sovereign states is, to use a military term, the last ditch,” he told the officers. “Beyond that, the collapse of the state begins. Attempts to divide peoples who have lived together for centuries could end in a blood bath. And it is necessary to recall that the country’s economy is based on a unitary state.

“If no account is taken of this, the situation will be worse than during the Cultural Revolution in China,” Gorbachev warned.