GORBACHEV’S GATHERING STORM : The Soviet Leader May Have Only Months to Pull His Country Out of Its Deepening Crises--or See His Reforms Consumed by Them

It was past dusk on a late winter afternoon by the time Marina Kizilova got to Food Store No. 297 in suburban Moscow to buy a few pounds of potatoes on her way home from her job as a chemical engineer. She waited about 10 minutes in the slow-moving line, but just before her turn came, the store ran out. “ Nyet , nyet , nyet ,” the salesclerk said. “We have no more potatoes.”

“I snapped--I just snapped,” Kizilova says, recalling how she launched into an angry denunciation of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet government, the Communist Party, Marxism-Leninism, socialism, the party and government apparat and finally the store’s employees, whom she suspected were hiding sacks of potatoes for themselves.

For her, this was not just another shortage, an extension of the chronic Soviet shortages of beef and pork, fish, sausage, cabbage, onions and carrots. Potatoes, as much as bread, are a staple of the Russian winter diet, and the housewife’s perennial question of “What do I cook for dinner?” suddenly became, there in the gloomy dusk in front of that dingy, barren grocery, the much more serious problem of “How will my family live?”

As far as Marina Kizilova was concerned, when Food Store No. 297 ran out of potatoes, Gorbachev ran out of luck. “Curse as we might those dark days of (late president Leonid I.) Brezhnev, we never ran out of potatoes,” she says. Kizilova has calmed down--she was hoarse for nearly a week after her diatribe--but her bitter fury at Gorbachev smolders. “When everyone else began to criticize him, oh, a year and a half or two ago, I defended him,” says Kizilova, 49. “I had faith in him. But I’ve lost all that. After six years of perestroika , democratization and glasnost , nothing has improved, and everything is getting worse. Only a fool would hope now, only a fool.”

As the Soviet Union emerges from winter, always its season of discontent, the mood across the country is one of hopelessness intensified by anger, of helplessness deepened by betrayal and, in the country’s endless lines, of just plain hatred, all of it focused on Gorbachev. The man who was lauded around the world and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his reforms and the changes that they have worked in international relations is confronted at home by the prospect of total failure.

Radicals, conservatives and people in the street believe that perestroika destroyed a political and economic system that was functioning badly--but was at least functioning-- when Gorbachev came to power and that he has failed to construct a better system as promised. Consequently, he faces three interlocking crises that, like a set of intricate equations, must be solved simultaneously if they are to be solved at all.

The Soviet economy is disintegrating far faster than even the most pessimistic analysts had forecast. This resource-rich nation is increasingly incapable of feeding, clothing or housing its 290 million people. At the same time, the political structure, dissolved when the Communist Party yielded its monopoly on power in March, 1990, and replaced by weak, ineffectual new institutions, has all but collapsed.

Most cataclysmic of all, the Soviet Union is breaking up. The Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania declared their independence a year ago, and Georgia is also likely to secede. In the remaining regions, nationalism is growing, with the greatest challenge coming from the vast Russian republic, whose populist president, Boris N. Yeltsin, wants real power for the republics, an ambition seconded by 70% of his republic’s voters in an unprecedented referendum conducted in March.

Gorbachev is determined to prevent further disintegration, for fear it could lead to massive upheavals and even civil war. But with radicals clamoring for bolder reforms, conservatives demanding order and discontent flaring on the streets, he may have only months to pull his country out of its deepening crises or see his leadership and reforms consumed by them.

The strain is showing. No longer the buoyant optimist of two or three years ago, Gorbachev is clearly tired and emotionally drained. His encounters with foreign leaders, Soviet lawmakers and ordinary citizens lack his past energy; at a meeting with British Prime Minister John Major a few weeks ago, Gorbachev’s fatigue was all the more apparent as Major, 13 years his junior, showed the kind of zest for which Gorbachev was once famous. And Gorbachev’s 60th birthday, on March 2, only prompted further discussions of how long he can remain in power. Massive rallies outside the Kremlin, some of the largest since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, have demanded that Gorbachev quit. Yeltsin, his chief rival, has launched a campaign for his resignation. Posters on the street mock Gorbachev, and comedians in cabarets tell off-color jokes about him.

“The May 1 demonstrations could turn into an uprising this year,” predicts Andrei Kravchuk, an organizer of a new independent trade union at a Moscow auto plant. “Last year,” he says, “people just shouted ‘Shame!’ and whistled as they passed by (Gorbachev and other leaders); this year, it might take a division of KGB troops to protect them. After years of Marxist rhetoric about the ‘fist of the proletariat,’ these guys are about to feel it.”

In late February, on the 73rd anniversary of the Red Army, 50,000 soldiers and policemen marched to the square just outside the Kremlin, their heavy winter overcoats like battle armor as they moved in a phalanx through the streets of Moscow. Mostly middle-ranking officers, they were joined by their commanders--the defense minister, the interior minister and the head of the KGB. “There is anarchy in our country, and we understand that the army is the only stabilizing force,” poet Mikhail Nozhkin told the rally. The warning to Gorbachev was clear: Either restore order, or the army will.

“Everyone feels every day that life is getting harder, the burden heavier and hope dimmer,” says Otto Latsis, one of the country’s most respected economists. “At the same time, everyone wants someone to blame. So, some people blame the radicals, others the bureaucrats; some blame the party, others the black marketeers. But Gorbachev stands out as the man who should have foreseen all and forestalled all. And so he gets the most blame.”

I. Power Struggles

“Does the president’s power extend beyond the Kremlin? Well, it all depends. . . .” --A Gorbachev assistant

The imposing edifice known as the “White House” rises high on the embankment above the Moscow River. Built to house the proliferating bureaucracy of the Brezhnev era, the headquarters of the Russian Federation was once considered a vulgar joke--so much white marble hiding so much decay. Last spring, in a transformation emblematic of the vast changes in Soviet politics, it was taken over by Boris Yeltsin and his coalition of liberal and radical reformers, who had just won a majority of seats in the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies.

Yeltsin, for many, has come to represent the future. His appeal stems directly from his break with the old Communist system. Ousted from the party’s ruling Politburo in 1987, Yeltsin later won two stunning election victories and then last summer walked out of the Communist Party. His popularity has increased as Gorbachev’s has declined. Reviled by most of the Soviet news media, bugged by the KGB and denounced by Gorbachev, Yeltsin gains simply by standing up to the Communist Party, attracting the reformers who, two or three years ago, were Gorbachev supporters.

Nearly a quarter-million people gathered outside the Kremlin March 10 to cheer Yeltsin’s declaration of “war” on the Soviet leadership and his call for a united democratic front to challenge the Communist Party’s stubborn hold on the government. Their chant of “Resign! Resign!” echoed off the Kremlin’s red-brick walls. Gorbachev had long ago lost the support of radicals; now he was losing that of the middle class.

Most mornings at the Yeltsin White House, there’s a long line of callers. “They are much like inventors with brilliant new gadgets, except these are ideas on how to move the country forward,” says Ruslan Khasbulatov, a visionary but wily economist who serves as Yeltsin’s vice president. “What they all have in common is the closed doors they are meeting in the central government.”

While criticizing Gorbachev’s slowness to put his pledges of economic reform into practice, Yeltsin’s government is leading the way with privatization of state-owned enterprises, the distribution of land to farmers and a network of deals with other republics to replace the old state plans. Yeltsin sees Gorbachev’s end drawing closer. “Either democracy will be extinguished, or else we democrats will not merely survive but triumph this year,” the burly Siberian told a recent rally. Conservatives also sense Gorbachev’s vulnerability, and with the backlash building against him, they have gained political muscle. They contend that Gorbachev’s reforms started on the right foot--but then he decided in 1988 to break with socialism and its principles of common ownership and state planning. He compounded these mistakes, they say, by trying to hasten political and economic change without a clear, cohesive strategy.

“A civil war is beginning in this country,” Col. Viktor Alksnis warned ominously one day between sessions of the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, where he and other conservatives increasingly shape policy. “A civil war in a nuclear state? Yes, it is quite possible. Even probable, I would say, unless strong measures are immediately taken to preserve the Soviet Union as a state and to preserve its political and economic system.”

Known as the “black colonel” for his dark hair, leather jackets and penchant for political plotting, Alksnis, 40, was until a year ago an obscure air force engineer from Latvia. So great has been the resurgence of the right that Alksnis, a leader of the conservative parliamentary bloc Soyuz, now ranks as a major political figure.

It was a threat from Alksnis last November that forced the Kremlin showdowns between liberals and conservatives and confirmed the president’s swing to the right. Gorbachev had lost the confidence of the armed forces, Alksnis declared, and Soyuz would give him no more than 30 days to correct his course.

In dramatic, late-night meetings, Gorbachev complied, according to liberal advisers who found themselves outnumbered. A tougher line was taken on law and order, the interior minister was fired, the military cracked down in the Baltics, conservatives were promoted to critical posts, and planned economic reforms, already scaled down, were modified further. By the end of the month, Gorbachev had confessed to a Moscow party meeting that he was “guilty before the working class” for mistakes made in perestroika. It was one of the biggest setbacks that liberals had suffered since Gorbachev came to power. Radicals argue that Gorbachev encouraged this conservative comeback by failing to accelerate reforms when they ran into opposition.

All of which Gorbachev acknowledges, blaming a “severe struggle for power” over the past year and a half and calling for support of his “centrism.” But that path satisfies no one, for it seems like more dithering and drifting. Gorbachev, when pressed for an outline of his plans, can only reply vaguely. At a March forum of economists and social scientists, he blandly preached patience and asked for “constructive” advice.

II. A Pig-Iron Panic

“What people now see is what economists warned was coming--a systemic collapse.” --Political scientist Anatoly Butenko

Storage Subdepot No. 6 of the First Moscow Construction Trust had slumbered through most of the winter, snow covering the unused machinery as it awaited the mid-April thaw, when construction would resume. Suddenly on a Monday morning in March, two work crews arrived and, with a flourish of government orders, loaded almost everything metal onto waiting trucks andthen hustled it off to the smelter.

The Soviet Union, the world’s largest steel producer, was running out of pig iron, and the government had launched a nationwide drive to collect scrap metal to keep its steel mills in production. A worthy goal, but bizarre when one considers that, with a long list of fundamental reforms on its agenda, the government had made the scrap-metal drive its immediate priority.

The reason, as complex as it was simple, gave full evidence of the country’s political as well as economic fragility. Angered by the government’s failure to honor promises to improve their living conditions, more than 300,000 coal miners had gone on strike. The impact was almost immediate: The metallurgical industry began to shut down its furnaces, railways cut back their long-haul trains, and power plants reduced electricity supplied to factories in many cities.

Most worrisome, however, was the closure of steel plants, which feed the military-industrial complex. But with enough scrap metal, the plants could continue operating, satisfying the powerful military-industrial managers.

The pig-iron panic is just the latest in a series of pitiful, madcap measures to shore up an economy that, just two years ago, was estimated by the CIA to be the world’s second largest. Today, it is collapsing at an accelerating speed, unchecked by attempts to halt its downward spiral.

Bread shortages are now routine in a country where bread is not only a staple but also a symbol of well-being. Despite a record grain harvest last autumn, the food shortage is now so serious that Vladimir Tikhonov, the country’s leading agricultural economist, estimates that 40 million citizens, about 14% of the population, are gravely malnourished. Nearly half of the 240-million-ton grain harvest rotted for lack of transport and storage capacity, as did about 60% of the vegetable crop. The only dependable food supplies come from the West (including expensive grain from America), China and India. The country’s GNP is likely to decline by a staggering 11.6% this year, four times the rate of last year, and perhaps by as much as 16%, according to forecasts by the State Planning Committee. With steep drops in industrial production certain, store shelves will be virtually empty except for imports, and a poor harvest is feared because planting preparations during the winter were so disorganized.

Prominent political scientist Anatoly Butenko explains the hierarchy of hopelessness: “Farmers withhold their food from the market because the rubles they get buy nothing. Factories want to be paid in dollars or other goods for the same reason. Half the goods produced in this country now reach consumers through other than the regular wholesale-retail system. All this barter, in turn, reduces the production of steel, chemicals, machinery and parts, and that reduces the production of finished goods. And, given the centralization of our economy, problems in a key industry can bring the country to a sputtering halt.”

III. Altered States

“The Soviet Union is a dying empire. None of us wants to die with it.” --Latvian President Anatolijs Gorbunovs

From Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, from Armenia and Georgia beyond the Caucasus Mountains, from Moldova and the Ukraine, those republics that can are trying to secede; those that cannot are declaring “sovereignty” and rejecting control by the central government, some even threatening to print their own money. “How can you blame those who want to get out?” Nikolai Y. Petrakov, formerly Gorbachev’s economic adviser, remarked last month. “Had we done a half-decent job on economic reforms and matched that with real autonomy and decentralization, we would not be locked in this showdown.”

With conflicts under way in more than 10 regions and at least 26 nationalist militias carrying arms, the country’s “Lebanization” has already begun, many believe. Deaths in ethnic clashes over the past three years number in the hundreds, but in the chaos the Interior Ministry has lost count. Lithuanians, like their neighbors in Estonia and Latvia, were determined that their secession, proclaimed a year ago after the first free elections in more than 50 years, would be peaceful. “We want no violence; it is not our way,” says Algimantas Cekuolis, a leader of the Lithuanian nationalist movement Sajudis. But Soviet troops moved against Lithuanian activists early this year on Kremlin orders, killing 19. Lithuania, too, is now an armed camp.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union is very close, many fear. “We lost, if you will, our ‘empire’ in Eastern Europe, and that has hardened the resolve of our generals not to lose our ‘internal empire,’ ” says Vitaly I. Goldansky, a leading scientist and member of the Congress of People’s Deputies. “The situation is quite desperate as the separatist and nationalist pressures on Gorbachev bring counterpressures from the conservatives. The issue is much bigger than Lithuanian independence--we are talking about the viability of the Soviet state.”

Making resolution of this crisis his first priority, Gorbachev warned in the Byelorussian capital of Minsk in March: “Disintegration and separation simply cannot, under any circumstances, happen in our country. If we start splitting, there will be . . . a dreadful war.”

Gorbachev, encountering strong opposition in his efforts to fashion a new Union Treaty to bind the republics together, asked for a mandate from voters last month in the country’s first national referendum. Despite the refusal of six republics to participate, he got the popular endorsement he wanted for a union that would be both “preserved” and “renewed.” But the crisis has grown beyond the ability of a simple referendum to renew people’s faith in the Soviet Union and Gorbachev’s leadership.

IV. Lost Promises

“There are forces pushing us hard toward civil war.” --Mikhail S. Gorbachev

Another crisis is now upon the Soviet Union--a crisis of confidence. The optimism born with perestroika has given way to a conviction that nothing has changed--except for the worse.

Doomsday scenarios abound. The Soviet press speculates endlessly about military coups, ways that Gorbachev might be ousted by party hard-liners and conspiracies by “neo-Bolsheviks” to seize power. Conservatives see parts of the country breaking away, workers storming through the streets, the army splitting--and civil war looming. Liberals, too, fear civil war, with the government sending troops to subdue secessionist republics or put down strikes, as it has increasingly in the past three years. Any conflict could quickly overflow into Eastern Europe, it is said, and unleash a flood of millions of refugees across the continent. A dozen new nuclear powers could be created if breakaway republics took possession of the Red Army’s weapons. The United States and its allies might feel compelled to intervene.

“ ‘Civil war’ is a metaphor for a great political catastrophe,” Alexander Tsipko, a leading political philosopher, explains. It means tremendous upheaval across the country, it means famine and hunger and economic collapse, it means even foreign invasions again. ‘Civil war’ is like a prophecy of all the bad things that will happen to us if we do not find our way out of this crisis.”

Proposed remedies vary with the analysis of what has gone wrong. Radical reformers, who last autumn proposed an accelerated, 500-day push to establish a market economy, argue that only such a campaign can free the country from the grip of the system built by dictator Josef V. Stalin. Conservatives, while accepting the need for further change, say the reforms must be based on socialist principles and carefully managed.

If the Communist Party still had its monopoly on power as the “vanguard of the proletariat,” the old Politburo would make the decision in secret, and if it were wrong the men who made it might be purged or simply retired. But the old decision-making mechanism has been destroyed, and the fledgling democratic institutions are too weak and inexperienced to solve such momentous problems.

With the country spinning out of control, people and politicians alike turn to the comfort of folklore: the “good czar” solution. A figure of almost mythic proportions in Russian history, a good czar modernizes and Westernizes and yet preserves the national character; he rules with a firm hand, but justly and for the good of the nation. His power is absolute but used with restraint.

Gorbachev has zigzagged unpredictably and slowly, pressured on one side by liberals who still hope he will promote their reforms and on the other by conservatives who demand a “strong hand.” There are alternatives to Gorbachev and his brand of “centrism”--such scenarios range from a military coup to a Yeltsin election victory--but each brings other, greater problems and fails to resolve the deeper crises. Even amid the present pessimism, even with the hatred seething in the lines of angry shoppers, Gorbachev remains, paradoxically, the Soviet Union’s best hope for a modern-day “good czar.”