Soviets’ Focus Shifts to Rich Spoils of Victory

Amid the political and economic rubble of the Soviet Union, a broad struggle is under way to shape a new country, more democratic and prosperous than the socialist dictatorship of the past.

But there is also a second, less high-minded contest for the spoils of victory--for state enterprises that produce everything from airplanes to perfumes, for the Communist Party’s vast properties, for some of the world’s greatest reserves of oil, gas, gold and diamonds, for the nuclear arsenal of a former superpower.

The outcome of the politicians’ grab for the rich prizes won at the Moscow barricades last month will, more than the debate about the nature of the future state and the rights of man, determine what arises from the ruins of the Soviet Union.

This in turn could doom the chances of those who want to bind the Soviet Union’s constituent parts back together in a loose confederation.

“Politics are not conducted in a vacuum,” said Yevgeny G. Yasin, one of the economists trying to fashion at least a common market out of the remnants of the Soviet Union. “There is always theory, and that can be debated endlessly. But we have a new reality here, and that will be fought over.

“At this point, we cannot say what will emerge, for it will be shaped by the events, by the real political battles, that lie ahead.”

The coalition of liberal and radical reformers who defeated the conservative coup d’etat last month have fallen upon one another in laying claim to both state and party assets.

The Russian Federation’s takeover of virtually all state enterprises on its territory, including its huge oil and gas deposits, brought angry protests from the Soviet Union’s other constituent republics last week on grounds that they were developed by the central government and should be shared equitably.

Russia’s seizure of the complex of well-appointed party buildings on historic Staraya Ploshad in central Moscow drew objections from the Moscow city government, which laid claim to some of the offices itself. The party’s luxury hotel, the Oktyabrskaya, is the object of a similar struggle.

And other republics, including the Ukraine and Kazakhstan, the two wealthiest after Russia, are taking over the state-owned enterprises on their territories, breaking them off from their Moscow headquarters.

Yasin and other economists warn that these moves will accelerate economic collapse and perhaps make a common market impossible.

“The motives are understandable, but the moves themselves are very shortsighted,” said Grigory A. Yavlinsky, deputy chairman of the Soviet Union’s interim committee for economic management. “Any hope we have for political stabilization must be based, first of all, on economic stabilization. . . .

“Yet, republics are rushing ahead, ‘creating facts,’ as they say, that will be very difficult to reverse, whatever political decisions might be taken later. . . . We have to move fast, but with forethought--and we’re not.”

Discussions are continuing, however, on both the formation of the economic union proposed by Yavlinsky, Yasin and others and the “union of sovereign states” that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and leaders of 10 of the country’s republics envision as a political successor to the Soviet Union.

The conflicts here are less in Moscow than in the republics, all but four of which have declared their independence. Efforts to draw up a new union treaty, which would lay the constitutional basis for a confederation or commonwealth, have all but stalled.

“No leader is willing to commit himself to anything at this point,” a political scientist working with the committee drafting the treaty commented. “The coup changed the politics of almost every single republic, and each leader must take account of the collapse of the Communist Party and the rise of the nationalist forces.

“To put it another way, nobody is prepared to make a deal that looks the least injurious to his republic’s interests. That makes compromises very difficult.”

Yavlinsky’s proposal for an economic union to bind the Soviet republics together in a common market will be presented today to the State Council, now the country’s highest executive authority. But the real decisions will have to be made in each republic.

Those drafting the union treaty are framing a pact they describe as a “confederation of independent states.” The debate has been fierce over what powers the republics will give to the central government and whether the result will be a federation, a less tightly knit confederation or an even looser commonwealth.

Before the coup last month, Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin had already won a key concession from Gorbachev--the republics would control the purse strings, collecting all taxes and allocating a portion to the central government for an agreed-upon budget.

Now Russia is insisting on even greater powers for the republics, which would assure it, as the largest republic, the dominant voice in the new union--and the ability to ignore the new national union if it chose. Russian lawmakers will meet this week to decide their republic’s terms for the new confederation.

“If Russia is a progressive, democratic state, it will pull everyone around it along, but if it is consumed by, say, nationalism and torn by ethnic strife, then all in the new union would suffer,” Ruslan Khasbulatov, the chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet, the republic’s legislature, told callers to a radio talk show this month.

“These are decisive times for Russia and every republic, and the future of hundreds of millions of people, generations in fact, will depend on what we do and how well we do it. . . . We know the theories, but really we are feeling our way.”

Although the devolution of power gives the Soviet Union’s breakaway republics a stronger voice in shaping the new state, the scramble for power everywhere elevates many local issues to a national scale and makes politicians cautious about their commitments.

“It seems almost that we’ll get nowhere until a balance of power is achieved in every last republic,” an economist working on the proposed economic union said. “The coup upset every power structure in the country and put everything up for grabs. Until this all is sorted out and settled, we will make little progress.”

In the Ukraine, for example, nationalists are leading a drive toward full independence.

“To say you are for a ‘union,’ whatever kind of union, is to commit political suicide,” said Yuri Shcherbak, a Ukrainian member of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the Soviet Parliament. “The Ukraine wants independence--period. . . .

“Ukrainian society may turn and recognize the desirability of an economic union and even of a political union, but at present nationalism shapes our decision.”

Across the Soviet Union, local politics now predominate. Nationalist parties have pushed the discredited Communists aside in many republics, and their political agenda usually starts with independence.

“The common denominator before the coup was the broad desire to hold the Soviet Union together in some shape, some form,” a Gorbachev aide said. “That is gone, for the Soviet Union died in the wake of the coup.

“What we are searching for, and have not found, is a new common denominator, something that would be so good and promising that republics would fight to get into this new union. We feel we have little time, but everyone is pulling in quite different directions.”

In the conservative, largely Muslim republics of Central Asia, Islamic fundamentalism is suddenly more than the political sideshow it was a year ago, and local Communist leaders are quickly turning “nationalist” in order to retain power.

In Armenia and Azerbaijan, politics are largely determined by their fight over Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, and the local Communist parties have been disbanded amid the proliferation of nationalist parties.

In neighboring Georgia, there are about 100 competing political groups.

In Moldova, independence is seen as a step toward reunification with Romania, and the focus of politics there is ensuring that Russians settled in corners of the republic do not themselves secede.

And to no one’s surprise, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have made it clear to Moscow that they want nothing more than “good neighborly relations” and trade with whatever succeeds the Soviet Union.

Russia, however, is not inclined to wait for a consensus to emerge from all this.

Yeltsin has claimed for Russia virtually every state asset on its territory and taken over virtually every state enterprise. He has subordinated most central government ministries to their Russian counterparts. Russia thus now controls the Soviet economy almost as totally as did the old Soviet government.

“What Russia has already adopted in the form of presidential decrees and various government resolutions,” complained Yuri Luzhkov, a deputy mayor of Moscow and a vice chairman of the national economic management commission, “is unprecedented from the standpoint of the usurpation of the property and the rights of the republics and of the union, which has not been dissolved yet.”

This also worries Alexander Tsipko, a leading political philosopher who fears that the inherent strength of Russia and the leadership of Yeltsin will create a dominant Great Russia in place of the Soviet Union.

“If the socialist experiment has ended, what are we returning to?” Tsipko asked. “If a new Russian statehood is to be built, on what historical foundations should it rest?

“God forbid that Russian democrats reject their own principles of sovereignty and impose their will on other republics. Democratic imperialism is even more obscene than Communist imperialism.”

Latest Developments

Here’s what happened Sunday in the Soviet Union: * BAKER’S VISIT: Secretary of State James A. Baker III met with Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev at his country dacha. “You have been a leader in the efforts to reform the Soviet Union,” he told Nazarbayev, “and I know you will continue to be such a leader.”

* SECRET MEETING: Uzbekistan opposition leaders slipped across the border into Kazakhstan to meet because political gatherings in their own republic are banned. In a series of resolutions, 81 members of the Birlik (Unity) Movement accused Communists of holding power illegally. Birlik organizers fooled Uzbek police into believing the meeting would be held at a Tashkent apartment. While police surrounded the apartment, the delegates secretly boarded a bus and rode 25 miles north to the Kazakh town of Berdayevka.

* TROOP REMOVAL: Georgia’s Parliament approved a resolution demanding withdrawal of Soviet troops from the republic and asked for a seat in the United Nations. Legislators said they did not have a figure on troop levels. At the session, about 40 opposition lawmakers walked out in a dispute, including several members of President Zviad Gamsakhurdia’s coalition.

* KGB SNUB: Foreign Minister Boris D. Pankin said the KGB secret police will be barred from selecting personnel for embassy posts--as it did for much of Soviet history--in order to end the use of spies in diplomatic guise. In addition, Pankin said the size of Soviet trade missions abroad will be reduced.

Source: Times Wire Services