NEWS ANALYSIS : Rancor in Commonwealth Dissolving Old Soviet Ties

Formed to preserve as much power and shape of the old Soviet Union as possible, the 3-month-old Commonwealth of Independent States increasingly appears to be the instrument of its final and fractious dissolution.

Each time the leaders of its 11 member states gather, as they did last week in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, the discussion turns angry with recriminations, and the incessant quarreling of Russia and Ukraine, its biggest members, tears away at the Commonwealth’s cohesion.

Each agreement they sign--17 last Friday, 16 the previous week, more than 20 others in earlier meetings--should help conserve what was valuable in the old Soviet Union or create new relationships among the Commonwealth’s members. Yet, almost none is implemented, the leaders themselves complain, and the old Soviet ties are weakening amid all the acrimony.

And while each leader, including Presidents Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia and Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine, readily proclaims his support of the Commonwealth and its goals, each yields first to the pressures of domestic politics whenever they conflict with measures that would strengthen the Commonwealth.

The Commonwealth, which Kravchuk on Friday called “an expression of a dream” of brotherhood and economic cooperation after decades of Soviet rule and centuries of Russian imperialism, consequently appears to be an idea whose time has not yet come.

“We are more of a creditors’ committee dividing up the assets of a bankrupt enterprise, in this case the Soviet Union,” a Kravchuk adviser said Sunday. “It is a salvage operation where we are all competing for what little is left, and the best you can expect is an agreement: ‘You can take that if I can have this.’ ”

Yeltsin called all this “a dynamic process that will eventually lead to the dream becoming a reality,” and Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who as the Commonwealth’s peacemaker is trying to preserve and shape it as a positive, creative force, added, “If one has dreams, he must struggle for them.”

In cold, hard political facts, however, the Commonwealth stemmed not from a grand vision but primarily from a determination to bring socialism and Soviet power to an end.

That goal the Commonwealth’s founders achieved in December when their republics withdrew from the Soviet Union, forcing its dissolution and the resignation of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

For the last three months, Commonwealth members--all of the old Soviet Union’s republics except the three Baltic states and Georgia--have struggled to find a greater purpose and so far have failed.

“The situation continues to worsen, and events since the Minsk summit (in mid-February) force us to express extreme concern over the fate of the Commonwealth and its member states,” Kravchuk said in his keynote address, opening the Kiev meeting. “Economically, we are no longer on the edge of the abyss but are actually sliding down into it.

“People place great faith in us, but we have not been able to resolve a single issue, military, economic or other, within the Commonwealth framework. Public opinion is growing that the Commonwealth has become a screen behind which each member state looks after its own needs and problems quite separately from the common needs and interest.”

Gorbachev was just as blunt. “These meetings make the Commonwealth look like a smoke- screen intended to hide the ruins,” he told the Moscow newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta before the Kiev summit. “If that is indeed so, why don’t they just say it? Be men, not only politicians. In my opinion, they should assemble every week and make the economic decisions we need now.”

Economic cooperation, though clearly a necessity after so many years of central planning, is foundering as Yeltsin, determined to pull his country out of socialist stagnation, pursues a “Russia first” policy that leaves its neighbors struggling to cope with Moscow’s unilateral decisions. On Friday, Yeltsin refused even to discuss sharing Soviet assets with other members.

Other republics have followed suit, with Turkmenistan, for example, shutting off natural gas supplies to Ukraine to extract a higher price and Ukraine imposing higher transit charges for all goods shipped across its territory. Simply keeping the old Soviet railway system running has become a major effort.

Political coordination is almost a taboo subject as the Commonwealth’s members savor their new independence, and the group has been unable to mediate in the undeclared war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Suspicion of the Kremlin runs so deep that one Central Asian member has asked Turkey rather than Russia to represent its interests abroad.

The biggest achievement of the Kiev summit was a decision to create a Commonwealth peacekeeping force, but this was marred by the failure to commit it to any of the pending crises and by the declared reservations of Ukraine and Azerbaijan, whose parliaments are unlikely to ratify it.

The fate of the once-mighty, 3.7-million-member Soviet armed forces--the loyalty of its officers and soldiers, the division of its weapons and, most of all, the control of its nuclear arsenal--has consumed the Commonwealth leaders at all of their summit meetings, for a restive military could attempt to seize power and restore the Soviet Union.

The Kiev meeting was supposed to have resolved all outstanding issues and laid the political, legal and financial basis for the Commonwealth’s continued conventional and strategic forces, but the leaders were unable to agree on what units would be part of the strategic force and how the costs would be shared.

“Our views of the Commonwealth differ fundamentally,” Mykhailo Horyn, a leading Ukrainian nationalist and member of Parliament, commented Sunday. “Russia sees the Commonwealth as a vehicle for maintaining the old union, albeit under a new name and somewhat different rules. Ukraine, however, sees it as a vehicle for independence.”

Pressure to quit the Commonwealth is rapidly building within Ukraine and Azerbaijan. And even in other members, such as Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Moldova, leaders have made clear to their increasingly nationalistic constituencies that their interests will come ahead of any Commonwealth considerations.

Galina Starovoitova, a top Yeltsin adviser and specialist on ethnic issues, sees the Commonwealth abandoning all pretenses at political and military coordination and perhaps even economic cooperation under such nationalist pressure.

“The Commonwealth is a gentlemen’s agreement between prisoners who have escaped from jail but are still linked by one chain,” she told journalists recently. “The Commonwealth is a clearly transitional structure . . . but it does not mean we want it to be a short transition.”

A political commentator on the Moscow current affairs program “Itogi” put it more cynically Sunday: “If one takes an emotional view of the Kiev summit, one would assume that the Commonwealth will remain alive as long as there is property of the former (Soviet) Union. The Commonwealth’s founding fathers have not yet devised a better instrument to saw up the collapsed empire.”