Yeltsin’s Rule Leading to Disaster, Gorbachev Says

Former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, in his most scathing assessment yet of Boris N. Yeltsin, said in an interview published Friday that the Russian president--no “Jesus Christ”--and his subordinates are leading the country to disaster.

“The new authorities know how to destroy, but what they are capable of creating they haven’t shown yet,” Gorbachev told the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper in a remarkably outspoken, emotional interview.

“The people,” he warned, “are on the verge of a breakdown.”

Although the former Soviet president is wined and dined in Western countries, most recently in the United States, he is disliked, even despised, by many in Russia and the other nations created by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But in his interview, Gorbachev made it clearer than ever that he considers himself a force to be reckoned with in post-Soviet politics. And although he reiterated support for Yeltsin’s team, he denounced its “authoritarian tendencies,” secrecy, unwillingness to heed criticism and lack of precise plans and goals.

Ironically, many of those charges were once leveled at Gorbachev himself, often by Yeltsin.

“Now they’re making it understood that the best situation for the ex-president is that he shut up,” said Gorbachev, 61. “But I’ve already said it: I’m not leaving for the taiga (northern forest); I’m not leaving the sphere of society.”

Two days earlier, in an interview printed by the same newspaper, one of Russia’s largest and most widely read, Yeltsin asserted that Gorbachev had promised him before he resigned as Soviet president last Dec. 25 that he would stay out of politics.

“We sat at this very table, and he promised me,” Yeltsin declared to Komsomolskaya Pravda. “As far as I understand, promises are supposed to be kept.”

But Gorbachev contended he had given no such vow. “Listen,” the former Kremlin leader told his interviewers, “Yeltsin is not Jesus Christ--he’s not the person I have to give an account of myself to.”

He said he promised Yeltsin only that he would not turn his Gorbachev Foundation think tank into an opposition political party and that he would support Yeltsin as long as he held to the policies of “democratic transformation.”

In his interview, Gorbachev called Russia’s current rulers both aimless and arrogant and said their policies had bankrupted both the country’s factories and farms with terrible consequences for the populace.

“The current government acts according to circumstances” and without a clear plan, Gorbachev said. “They really don’t like it when they are told critical judgments, especially when these are expressed by people who began the reforms, and who wish them success.”

Gorbachev’s pronouncements come at a time of greatly increased political struggle in Russia: Yeltsin’s largely hard-line, Communist opposition is trying to slow or halt his privatization campaign, and Yeltsin has gone on the attack against the legislative branch.

Gorbachev, on the other hand, said it is time to seek consensus, especially among all those in favor of reform. “The government needs to attract all forces, but it doesn’t even consider it necessary to listen to advice,” he complained.

His own suggestions, he added with a note of irritation, have been rejected as “interference.”

Gorbachev noted that prices have zoomed so high since government price controls and subsidies were abolished Jan. 2 that many Russians can no longer afford some foodstuffs and products. “Yes, I am a private person, while the existing president has been elected by the people,” he acknowledged. “But how can I remain silent?”

Despite his outspoken criticism, Gorbachev said it would be stupid to seek changes at the top, because “if we try now to switch horses in midstream, things will get even worse.”