Yeltsin Takes Path Gorbachev Feared : Bold, dangerous program to revive Russia

Boris Yeltsin is no Mikhail Gorbachev, in many respects.

For one thing, the president of the Russian Federation seems determined to make, rather than duck, the tough decisions that an accelerating national slide into economic chaos demands. The Soviet president, by contrast, though he has spoken often in the last 6 years about the need for launching bold economic change, prefers to take refuge in a Hamlet-like indecisiveness when he is confronted with the hard and basic questions of economic change.

The reason may be as much ideological as anything else. Gorbachev, in a forthcoming book about last August’s failed coup against him, writes that he continues to believe in the socialist dream. Whatever Yeltsin may dream, he sees the destabilizing reality of a collapsing economy, and says he is determined to act.

The major action, Yeltsin told the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies, will be to free most goods from government price controls by the end of this year, letting the market determine what consumers will pay and what suppliers will produce.

Simultaneously thousands of apartments, shops, restaurants and other government-owned properties, as well as land now the property of government and state farms, are to be privatized, creating an ownership class not seen in Russia for generations.

It is a bold program, and a politically dangerous one. Yeltsin has been frank. For a time--perhaps a long time--Russians will experience shortages and disruption. Unemployment could soar as inefficient enterprises go under. Among the first in the unproductive work force to go, says the Russian president, will be many central government bureaucrats.

To the apparent relief of the Congress, Yeltsin says he will take full political responsibility for his program. In return he wants additional executive powers.

Yeltsin’s fidelity to democratic rule has been questioned before. His reach for extraordinary new powers will undoubtedly prompt fresh concerns. Still, what he proposes doing seems the only course available: swift and radical steps with the aim of guiding Russia, with half of the Soviet Union’s population, into a safe economic harbor.

No people happily accepts a decline in its living standards, especially when those standards are less than comfortable to begin with. Yet that is what Yeltsin promises, and what he accepts responsibility for. What he proposes says much about his political courage, but even more about Russia’s desperate economic conditions.