Soviet Union "I Am Very Guilty"

By William R. Doerner

After listening to speaker after speaker deliver withering denunciations of his performance as head of the Moscow Communist Party, starting with a personal attack by his mentor Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin was clearly stunned. "At this plenum I have heard many things, things such as I had never heard in my entire life," he said when it was his turn to speak. But Yeltsin knew better than to quarrel; instead he responded with a rambling self- criticism that echoed nothing so much as the Stalin-era show trials of the 1930s. "One of my most characteristic personal traits, ambition, has manifested itself lately," he said. "I tried to control it but, regrettably, without success. I am very guilty before the city party committee, before the Politburo and certainly before Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev."

But Yeltsin's extraordinary exercise in groveling came too late. Shortly after he spoke last week, the burly party chief was fired from his job. He can also expect to be stripped of his nonvoting seat on the 18-member ruling Politburo. He thus became the first high-ranking Kremlin official appointed by Gorbachev to tumble from grace, a milestone that at first seemed to point to a setback in the Soviet leader's own political standing. But two days after Yeltsin's downfall, in a display of glasnost unprecedented even in the Gorbachev era, the party paper Pravda ran a detailed account of the sacking. Starting on the front page and occupying the entire 16-column spread of the second and third pages, the story left no doubt that Gorbachev not only acquiesced in the political assassination of his protege but took the lead in arranging it.

A former party leader in the industrial city of Sverdlovsk, Yeltsin was brought to Moscow by Gorbachev in 1985 and quickly established himself as a supersalesman of perestroika (restructuring), Gorbachev's plan to modernize the Soviet economy. To the delight of ordinary Muscovites, he became a one-man consumer-protection agency, stopping off in stores to complain about poor- quality merchandise, calling Moscow's famed subway unsafe and criticizing state contractors for falling behind in constructing new housing. But his blunt language and grandstanding earned him enemies. Explains Marshall Goldman, associate director of Harvard's Russian Research Center: "People came to resent him as an outlander and not part of the system."

Yeltsin grew a little too outspoken at a meeting of the policymaking Central Committee in late October. Interrupting the agenda, the Moscow party chief delivered a harangue accusing senior leaders of obstructing his efforts to bring about perestroika. Exactly what he said remains unclear. Gorbachev, in his attack on Yeltsin last week, said that Yeltsin had "in fact sought to call into question the Communist Party's work on restructuring and the character of changes and went as far as to say that restructuring was giving nothing to the people." Gorbachev implied that Yeltsin brought up matters relating to the Politburo's "collective leadership." That may be a reference to a complaint by Yeltsin, according to some unofficial accounts of the session, that some of Gorbachev's subordinates were building a "cult of personality" around the Soviet leader.

Yeltsin's outburst was seen as an attack on the Politburo faction led by Ideologist Yegor Ligachev, the second-ranking member, who has frequently criticized Gorbachev's reform program. Whether Yeltsin also meant to fault Gorbachev for moving too slowly remains uncertain, but the Soviet leader clearly put that interpretation on the remarks. Gorbachev said last week that the offending speech was "politically immature, extremely confusing and contradictory." The Central Committee, Gorbachev reported, "showed complete unanimity of views in the appraisal of that speech, assessing it as politically erroneous." Yeltsin must pay the price, Gorbachev said, for "putting his personal ambition ahead of the interests of the party" and for trying "to place responsibility for his own major shortcomings on others."

While Yeltsin's downfall must have been a painful experience for Gorbachev, few U.S. Sovietologists thought he had suffered any lasting political damage or that he would hesitate to repeat the exercise on others who cross the boundaries of glasnost. "This episode is one of the first important lessons of the Gorbachev era," says Dmitri Simes, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "As soon as it became clear that Yeltsin was an unguided missile, Gorbachev threw him to the wolves." Nor could Kremlin watchers detect signs that Yeltsin's downfall held implications for the upcoming U.S.-Soviet summit in Washington. Said a Western diplomat in Moscow: "We have no indication that foreign policy was part of the discussion."

One sign that Gorbachev's political health remains robust was the choice of Yeltsin's successor: Lev Zaikov, 64, a Politburo member who oversees heavy industries and is a firm Gorbachev supporter. One of Zaikov's challenges as the capital's party boss was revealed last week by the national Socialist Industry newspaper. Under Gorbachev's plan to streamline the bureaucracy, 60,000 Moscow residents will be laid off from government ministries by 1990. Moscow, like Washington a company town, will be the Soviet city hardest hit by Gorbachev's cuts, which are aimed at eliminating one out of every two government workers. Finding jobs for that many people would be a trial for any municipal leader, even one in a country where unemployment officially does not exist.

With reporting by James O. Jackson/Moscow and Nancy Traver/Washington