Re-Creating the Soviet Coup

It has been a little more than a year since a hapless band of coup plotters tried to stop the Soviet Union’s slide into the dust bin of history and the marketing mavens of Spectrum HoloByte rushed out the news of their upcoming political simulation “Crisis in the Kremlin.”

They promised a game as current as the headlines.

Oh well.

“Crisis,” which has been available in stores since June, is a pretty good game. Not great, and not anything worth raiding the IRA to buy, but the game makers have taken a stab at re-creating the events of 1985 and after that plagued Mikhail Gorbachev’s reign and led, ultimately, to his downfall and the collapse of his superpower.

You play one of three possible leaders of the troubled nation: a hard-line neo-Stalinist, a reform-minded Gorbachev or a nationalist liberal Boris Yeltsin. You set the government’s policies, allocate funds and react--there’s lots of reacting--to various crises and emergencies: Chernobyl, housing or food shortages, breakaway Eastern European allies.

Like politicians everywhere, your principal goal is to stay in office. Mess up, and you’re out. Hang around, and you lead the Soviet Union, or what’s left of it, into the 21st Century.

Like Russian Communism itself, the concept of “Crisis in the Kremlin” is better than the execution. The much-touted full-action video isn’t much to write about, and there is a datedness to the whole enterprise that is probably inevitable in any current-events game.

But in this U.S. political season, when for the first time in 40 years our politicians don’t have the old boys of the Kremlin to kick around, it’s nice to see some familiar faces.

(Technical note: Playing on a 386SX clone, we ran across a programming bug, something ominously called a “Divide error” that sent the screen reeling back to the “C” prompt. Spectrum HoloByte’s technical support said there was a compatibility problem that has been fixed. The company will give you a corrected disk if you have the same trouble.)

Crisis in the Kremlin

Rating: ***

IBM and compatibles; 640K RAM; mouse optional but highly recommended. List: $69.95.

Computer games are rated on a five-star system, from one star for poor to five for excellent.