Word: yeltsin
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...past two weeks, President Clinton has been talking up the need to back Russia's reformers. By Thursday, U.S. officials were wondering if there would be any left to support. As the Congress of People's Deputies sought to strip Boris Yeltsin of his power, the problem for Washington and the West was whether their plans for nurturing the tender shoots of democracy and capitalism in Russia by bolstering his presidency were worth pursuing...
...pins and needles," acknowledges a senior U.S. official. The West has a huge stake in Yeltsin, to the extent that he has come to embody Russia's stumbling progress toward reform. If he is turned into a figurehead, the U.S. and its allies would find it extremely difficult to muster domestic support for lavishing money on a government dominated by neocommunists. If hard-boiled nationalists replace Yeltsin, an anti-Western Kremlin could reverse agreements on cutting nuclear arsenals, sell weapons to dangerous clients like Saddam Hussein, immobilize the U.N. with vetoes, slow down or reverse troop withdrawals from eastern Germany...
...what can the West do to protect its interests? If that is defined as keeping Yeltsin in power, not much. Yeltsin watchers in some NATO capitals believe that he lacks a strategy for defeating his opponents, so continuing to back him may be foolhardy. In any event, Russians, not foreigners, will determine the outcome of the struggles in the Kremlin. "Short of an official declaration that Ruslan Khasbulatov ((Yeltsin's nemesis)) has been a CIA spy for years, our ability to influence events is very small," says Paul Goble, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington. Others, like...
Even before this week's confrontation, there was a growing sense of urgency in the West that Yeltsin's reform campaign would fail without more foreign help. Clinton responded by scheduling a U.S.-Russian summit in Vancouver for April 3-4, promising innovative aid programs and calling for an emergency meeting of the Group of Seven industrial countries to map out broad-scale Western assistance. It all may be too late. "We have known since the time of Gorbachev that the Russians don't give a damn about the prestige of their leaders," says Gernot Erler, a senior German legislator...
...BORIS YELTSIN AND RUSLAN KHASBULAtov stared each other down in the Kremlin last week, and Yeltsin blinked. More to the point, he abruptly rose from his chair and walked off the stage. Russia's President and the chairman of its parliament, the Supreme Soviet, have been in direct confrontation for months over the course and pace of economic reforms -- and more fundamentally, over who should rule Russia. Yeltsin, who stands higher in public esteem than the legislature, has managed to hold his own through compromises and concessions, including the sacrifice of some of his key planners. But after four days...