Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 31, 1993 TAG: 9311070229
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: John-Thor Dahlburg Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: MOSCOW LENGTH: Medium
There is a definite pattern here, one that disturbs Yeltsin loyalists. "Of all the people who helped him climb the Kremlin wall, none is left," says Mikhail A. Bocharov, one of the defectors, with just a pinch of hyperbole. The still-bitter Bocharov, 52, should know. He was one of the morning stars of former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's "perestroika" reforms. In the summer of 1990, Bocharov and Yeltsin discussed daily how they would uncouple Russia from the crumbling Soviet economy and who would get ministerial portfolios if Yeltsin could win election as chairman of Russia's legislature.
"Boris Nikolayevich gave his word to me, and also to coal miners and industrialists, that I would be prime minister," Bocharov says. The masonry manufacturer, who carried an icon of Jesus Christ and a roll of U.S. greenbacks in his pocket to show he was no run-of-the-mill Soviet bureaucrat, drew up a program to sweep Russia to capitalism in 500 days.
That vision was fated to remain a mere historical footnote. Yeltsin did squeak by with a four-vote margin to become chairman of the Supreme Soviet on May 29, 1990. But when the time came to endorse Bocharov for the premiership, Yeltsin kept mum, his then-colleague recalls. During a 30-minute break between rounds of balloting, Yeltsin offered Bocharov the post of first deputy premier - in a government to be headed by old-style Soviet technocrat Ivan S. Silayev. Furious, Bocharov refused, and another ally was on the way to becoming an enemy.
In the past two years, powerful defectors from the Yeltsin camp have included the former justice minister, the former Security Council secretary, the former security minister, the Constitutional Court chairman and many others. "There are so few of us left that each is gold," says Gennady E. Burbulis, Yeltsin's former state secretary and closest adviser, with a pang of regret. Ironically, it is Burbulis' high-handed and Machiavellian maneuverings that some defectors see as the most stinging blow to the unity of Russian reformers.
But Yeltsin himself must shoulder a large part of the blame for the exodus of his supporters. He was born in a society where the word "kompromiss" was most frequently translated as "sell-out." As regional party boss in his native Sverdlovsk region, he was toughness personified. While chief of the 80,000-square-mile district, he forced through construction of a highway from the main city to the north, with each local leader responsible for his own section. On the day the road was to be completed, Yeltsin picked up the local bosses in a bus and set out on the highway. If a section was not finished, Yeltsin made the offending leader get out. How he got back to Sverdlovsk was his problem.
Former Moscow mayor and Yeltsin ally Gavriil K. Popov says that leaders like Yeltsin, whose formative management experience came in the Communist system, came to believe that "subordinates must obey them automatically, that one is no different from another and that each can be instantly replaced at any moment." Georgy A. Satarov, of Yeltsin's advisory Presidential Council, said in a moment of illuminating candor that his boss, who claims to be Russia's No. 1 democrat, "has no understanding of what a political coalition is or what sacrifices it requires."
by CNB