National Agenda : Ending an Era at the Kremlin : A commonwealth is rapidly eliminating Gorbachev’s job. How will it work?

As Secretary of State James A. Baker III travels the republics of what was once the Soviet Union this week and as Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin jets from Moscow to Rome to the Central Asian city of Alma Ata this weekend, one question is certain to dominate their conversations: Just what is a commonwealth?

Even though Yeltsin was one of those leaders who 10 days ago proclaimed a new Commonwealth of Independent States as successor to the Soviet empire, however, neither he nor Baker is likely to have a satisfactory answer.

For the fact is that neither Western political theory nor Soviet practice provide much guidance to the citizens of the former Soviet republics or to anxious outside observers who are trying to puzzle out just what form of government it is that is supposed to be replacing the Kremlin’s sway over one-sixth of the globe.

The English term commonwealth is almost completely meaningless--a catch-all word that embraces everything from the loose affiliation among Britain and its former colonies to the American states of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, both of which are commonwealths in their formal titles.

The Russian word, sodruzhestvo , is equally vague. Derived from the word droog, meaning friend, its literal meaning is co-friendship. Russians use the word for the British Commonwealth, but also for more general concepts such as international cooperation or community.

“It doesn’t mean anything yet,” says University of Michigan historian Ronald Suny. “They’re going to have to give it meaning.”

Doing so will require answering questions from the symbolic--will the new commonwealth have its own flag, and if so, what will it look like? How about the Olympic team? A national anthem? A central president?--to such crucial substantive matters as who controls the military and who gets to print money.

Along the way, the new leadership will also have to resolve matters such as who gets the Soviet Union’s permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council? Who controls the diplomatic corps? And how many republics will have to destroy how many weapons to meet the obligations the former Soviet Union took on in international arms control treaties? Answering each of those questions will take time, warned Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze. “It is not the kind of process that needs two days of sittings and consultations and coming up with a statement or draft agreement. It is a most complex issue,” Shevardnadze said.

But time is one thing the founders of the new order may not have. For if answers remain unknown, the questions they must grapple with are clear and increasingly pressing. The overriding question, says Gabriel Schoenfeld of Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, is the most basic one: power. “Each of the republics has to grapple with how much to delegate to the center.”

In the British Commonwealth, for example, the center has no power at all. The Commonwealth serves mostly as a periodic forum for discussion and intermittent cooperation, with no authority to regulate actions of its members.

By contrast, the 12-nation European Community, another form of commonwealth, started out a generation ago with power to regulate each of its members’ policies on customs and tariffs. Ever since, the community’s central institutions have slowly gained more clout, and by the end of the decade, EC members now plan to delegate to the center broad authority over their economies, foreign policy and defense.

For the Soviets, the question of the power of the center versus the power of the republics has been at the heart of politics for more than a year. In the Baltics, for example, opposition to the center is so strong that all three former republics--Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia--have made clear they have no interest in joining the new commonwealth on any terms. The southern republic of Georgia and the western republic of Moldova may head in that same direction.

In Ukraine, which voted for independence earlier this year, resentment of central authority is also powerful. Ukrainian insistence on minimizing the central power of Moscow led to the decision to put the headquarters of the new commonwealth in the Belarussian city of Minsk, Yeltsin told the Russian Parliament last week. “Moscow should no longer pull the same weight. That is something Kiev insists on,” he said.

Any grants of significant power to the new commonwealth could generate strong internal opposition to the government of Ukrainian President Leonid M. Kravchuk.

By contrast, leaders in several of the Central Asian republics, whose poor and underdeveloped economies are dependent on trade with Russia and Ukraine, have argued in favor of retaining some sort of centralized authority.

One strong possibility is that the commonwealth will have no single structure but will serve, instead, as a framework for negotiations between individual republics, says Stanford University professor Condoleeza Rice, Soviet policy expert at the White House during the first two years of the Bush Administration. And that may result in layers of cooperation, with some republics far more closely linked than others, Rice says.

That pattern could be seen in the commonwealth’s beginnings. The first decisions on setting up the new grouping involved only the three Slavic republics--Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

Friday, after meeting in Ashkhabad, the capital of Turkmenistan, the leaders of the five Central Asian republics declared their readiness to join the commonwealth, but only if they were recognized as “equal co-founders.”

“The commonwealth cannot be formed on ethnic, religious or any other principles violating human rights and the rights of nations,” said the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tadzhikistan, most of whose citizens are non-Slavic and Muslim. That discussion will continue this weekend when Yeltsin arrives in Alma Ata, the Kazakh capital. But in the end, those republics may find themselves cooperating primarily with each other while Russia and Ukraine concentrate on their own bilateral relationship, says Michael Mandelbaum of the Council on Foreign Relations.

“The message of the way this was formed is that the big two will look to themselves first and the others will come along if they want to,” he says. The commonwealth, he adds, may turn out to be nothing more than “an agreement by Russia and Ukraine to negotiate on questions that are important to them.”

To outsiders, the most important of those questions is control over the vast Soviet armed forces.

Baker, who arrived in Moscow on Sunday on the start of a planned four-day trip to visit Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan (formerly Kirghizia), has placed control over Soviet nuclear forces at the top of his agenda. But an even more important question may be control over the huge conventional armed forces, says Rice.

Both Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Yeltsin sought to reassure Baker and the West on Monday that there will continue to be tight control over an estimated 30,000 Soviet nuclear weapons and that there is no danger of nuclear proliferation resulting from political turmoil during the country’s political transformation.

Kravchuk said over the weekend that the four republics with nuclear weapons on their territory--Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan--should have veto power over their use. Yeltsin said all four will join the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that all but Russia “will eventually become non-nuclear states” by dismantling their nuclear weapons.

U.S. experts take comfort from the fact that with the various parts of the disintegrating union struggling simply to stay afloat, their nuclear arms may be seen as more of a burden than a benefit.

Not so the conventional forces. Virtually all the republics have border disputes with their neighbors. Many also have potentially volatile ethnic conflicts to worry about. Most seem intent on setting up their own independent armed units.

For commanders in the existing Soviet army, the result already is starting to be disintegration, Rice says. “When militaries are out in the field, you cannot get by with vague concepts of cooperation,” Rice noted. “They need standard operating procedures, manuals which tell that colonel whose phone call to take and who his commanding officer is.”

The danger, says Rice, is that if a new command structure does not take shape quickly, individual unit commanders may begin cutting their own deals with local political leaders, leading to a complete collapse of control over millions of weapons and men.

A variety of options exist, ranging from complete independence for each republic’s armed forces to the maintenance of a central military command subject to some form of commonwealth-wide executive power.

Yeltsin reiterated Monday that commonwealth members would sign a defense treaty--”a defensive alliance”-- providing for a joint armed forces command. But he said no candiate had yet been chosen to be commander in chief.

While the military questions preoccupy outsiders, the questions foremost on the mind of most citizens of the republics involve economics.

For example, asks Mandelbaum of the Council on Foreign Relations, “will they keep the ruble” as a common currency? Will the new commonwealth have powers to prevent trade barriers among the republics? Will central bodies exist to run the railroads and the air traffic control system? Will foreign trade and investment be run by each republic separately or by one authority? And most importantly, will all the republics move forward together in creating a free-market economic system or will each move at its own pace?

Some sort of common policy on trade barriers and transportation could be the single most crucial factor in making the new commonwealth work. The Soviet economy was highly integrated and every industry in each republic is intimately dependent on suppliers and markets in other republics. If more trade barriers rise between Ukraine and Russia, for example, or between Russia and the Central Asian republics, the current collapse of the Soviet economy will only accelerate.

So far, officials talk of a “common economic area” but have left most details for later. A common currency, experts say, may be less important. The European Community, for example, has developed a high degree of economic cooperation and has only this month finally agreed on setting up a common currency by the end of the ‘90s.

Since the commonwealth agreement was first reached, some Russian officials have said the ruble will remain the currency for the commonwealth, but Ukraine and Belarus already are taking steps toward setting up their own monetary systems. Control over printing money is a key power for any government since the money supply determines fundamental economic factors such as the availability of credit and the rate of inflation.

But for average citizens struggling to buy food and fuel for the winter, the important question is not how many currencies the new commonwealth will have, but whether any of them will be more stable than the now almost-worthless ruble.

“They do not necessarily need a single currency,” says Schoenfeld of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “but they need a currency.”

Times staff writer Elizabeth Shogren in Moscow contributed to this story.