Yeltsin Backers Willing to Put Lives on the Line

Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin on Tuesday became one of the few politicians in the world for whom people are willing to die.

As the burly Siberian made his stand against the rightist coup d’etat that had deposed Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, thousands upon thousands of Muscovites flocked to protect him in the riverside headquarters of the Russian Federation, the largest Soviet republic, from an anticipated military assault.

“It’s going to be dangerous,” an organizer of the defense lines called out over a bullhorn. “Volunteers only, volunteers only!”

And before the night was over, at least three of those volunteers were dead at the hands of Soviet troops.

Despite the organizers’ warnings, in a dramatic expression of “people power” the crowds grew and grew into the evening hours, and the ordinary residents of the Soviet capital were joined by some of the country’s most illustrious democrats--former Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze and Alexander N. Yakovlev, known as the architect of perestroika reforms--and several senior Gorbachev aides.

Yeltsin, once a top leader of the Soviet Communist Party, now a radical populist dedicated to political and economic reforms, had become not only the rallying point for opponents to the Kremlin coup but a symbol of the country’s new and fragile democracy.

Elected president of Russia in June, Yeltsin found himself the only leader of national stature able and willing to stand up to the conservatives on Monday when Gorbachev was deposed.

And Yeltsin, breaking with the passivity traditional in Soviet politics, took a stand.

He clambered aboard a tank outside his headquarters on Monday morning to rally those who had gathered there in uncertainty as to how to respond to the coup. He denounced the putsch in the harshest terms.

Yeltsin was the first republic leader to condemn the coup, defying the self-proclaimed Emergency Committee with calls for nationwide protests and a general strike while others urged their people to remain calm.

And he began to use his own political network, Democratic Russia, its new ally, Communists for Democracy, and the independent trade union movement to mobilize the resistance. When normal communications were gradually cut, he broadcast his appeals on shortwave radio and made videotapes for use in the West; his assistants used cellular telephones, faxes and electronic mailboxes to reach out to other Soviet cities and abroad.

But mostly Yeltsin drew support by being Yeltsin, a leader whose willingness to stand alone had been tested repeatedly over the past five years and whose stature had grown with each test.

“In democratic Moscow, the conservatives will be stopped, and democracy will triumph,” Yeltsin declared in a brief speech on Tuesday.

Punching his fist into the air as the crowd responded with shouts of “Yeltsin! Yeltsin!” he pledged, “The junta will be stopped.”

Once a politician who was shunned by the Soviet intelligentsia as a bit of a buffoon and whose unabashed populism was regarded with some suspicion, Yeltsin now commands their respect and admiration for his effort to defend democracy.

Once regarded by foreign leaders as a rival who was undercutting Gorbachev and thus not too welcome in Western capitals, Yeltsin emerged as the best hope of restoring the deposed Soviet president and his policies.

President Bush talked with Yeltsin by telephone Tuesday morning and later praised him as “a very courageous man.”

“He said he is convinced the people will stand with him, and well they should,” Bush told a White House press conference.

British Prime Minister John Major called Yeltsin “a towering figure of strength . . . in the midst of a very grave crisis,” and Margaret Thatcher commented, “Yeltsin is handling (the crisis) marvelously and very courageously.”

But Yeltsin, 60, is as mercurial as he is charismatic, and how well he could stand up to the tremendous pressures in this crisis was a crucial question.

Brought to Moscow by Gorbachev as a reformer, Yeltsin had fought bitterly with the Soviet leader in recent years, accusing him of betraying perestroika through timid measures and futile compromises with the conservatives. A construction engineer by training and plain-spoken by inclination, Yeltsin found himself pulled increasingly toward the left and the philosophy of direct, fundamental changes in the Soviet Union rather than efforts to “reform” a system he now perceived as fatally flawed and collapsing.

Gorbachev’s repeated attempts to find a middle way led to a dramatic break four years ago, when Yeltsin was dropped as the Moscow party leader and removed from the party’s ruling Politburo.

Freed to run against the party, he proved the nation’s biggest vote-getter in the first free parliamentary election in 1989, and in June he triumphed over five other candidates, taking more than 57% of the vote, to become Russia’s first elected leader.

He and Gorbachev came only grudgingly to acknowledge that unless they cooperated, perestroika would fail.

Yeltsin had “declared war” on the Soviet president in February, once again accusing him of appeasing the conservatives. As Gorbachev drifted rightward, many of his former advisers moved to Yeltsin, seeing him as the political bulldozer who would clear the way for the fundamental transformation of the country.

Last spring, however, as conservative forces continued to gain in power, Yeltsin and Gorbachev finally came to the first of a series of understandings and a mode of cooperation that promised to pull the country out of its profound crisis.

Despite occasional sniping, their alliance had grown stronger in recent weeks as they had reached the fundamental agreements incorporated in a proposed Union Treaty that would lay a new political and constitutional basis for the Soviet Union.

Some of those compromises, however, undoubtedly led to the coup, for conservatives saw the devolution of political and economic power in the treaty as bringing about the breakup of the present Soviet state.

The treaty was due to have been signed on Tuesday by Gorbachev, Yeltsin and other republic leaders--an action that appears to have precipitated the pre-dawn coup on Monday.

Yeltsin last month had also enraged Communist Party officials with a sweeping decree prohibiting the party from maintaining its shadow management of most government agencies, state-owned enterprises and public organizations.

That, too, appears to have been one of the elements that prompted the coup leaders to oust Gorbachev, fearing that one of the last remaining elements of centralized control of the country was being lost.

But Yeltsin was clearly confirmed in the correctness of his beliefs as he addressed the huge crowd outside his headquarters on Tuesday and called later in a videotape on the country’s soldiers to rebel against the coup leaders.

Profile: Boris N. Yeltsin

Born: Feb. 1, 1931

Birthplace: Sverdlovsk, Siberia

Career highlights: Trained as construction engineer in Sverdlovsk. Joined Communist Party, 1962. Became first secretary of Sverdlovsk District Central Committee, 1976. Deputy to Supreme Soviet, secretary of Central Committee, 1985-86. First secretary of Moscow City Party Committee, 1985-87. Expelled from Politburo for attacking party leadership, 1987. Elected to Congress of People’s Deputies, 1989. Quit party in 1990. Elected first president of Russian Federation in June, 1991, and took office in July.

His challenge: To stave off a violent confrontation with the KGB and military. At the same time to mobilize his supporters.

Quote: “We will hold out here as long as we have to remove this junta from power and bring it to justice . . . “