Common ground was more likely to be found on policy than on the allocation of positions. Yeltsin’s ideas about economic and socioeconomic change continued to be sketchy. For some months in 1990, he backed a wacky plan, put forward by economic counselors Igor Nit and Pavel Medvedev, for motivating workers through the emission of a counter-currency they termed “red money.” Implementation in the agrarian sector divided the Silayev cabinet, and a more presentable alternative came up. The Five Hundred Days Program for economic reform furnished the last best chance for collaboration with the center. Drawn up between February and August of 1990 by a group of economists headed by Stanislav Shatalin and Yevgenii Yasin of Gorbachev’s camp and Grigorii Yavlinskii of Yeltsin’s, it called on Russia and the Soviet Union to move decisively to market harmonization of economic activity. In the space of a year and a half, it would have nullified most price controls, made a start on privatization of property (for which it used the euphemism “destatization”), scrapped the USSR’s industrial ministries, and relegated regulatory and overhead functions to an “interrepublic economic committee,” after agreement on a “treaty of economic union.” The project, Yeltsin assured crowds in the Volga basin and the Urals in August, would stabilize the economy in two years and lead to growth and improved consumer welfare in the third year. The Russian Supreme Soviet passed on it on September 11, at which point Gorbachev got cold feet. On October 16 he abandoned Five Hundred Days, saying it would emasculate the federal government. Yeltsin declared Russia would have to make reform on its own, which Kremlin conservatives took as evidence that it was impossible ever to cooperate with him.46 Yavlinskii left his position as deputy premier of the RSFSR in frustration with Gorbachev but also with Yeltsin. Yeltsin was to vow in a private aside to Yelena Bonner, Andrei Sakharov’s widow, that “I will not play the dupe
Gorbachev’s backpedaling bore on more than economics. He bit off extra powers for his executive presidency, promoted hard-liners to positions such as prime minister (where he replaced Ryzhkov with the Soviet finance minister, Valentin Pavlov), and made spasmodic use of troops against nationalist unrest in the Baltic and Caucasus areas. In the consultations on a new “union treaty” for the Soviet federation, the necessity for which he announced on June 11, 1990, the day before the Russian sovereignty declaration, Gorbachev ceded nothing to the republics.
In November 1990 Yeltsin visited Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, the secondranking Soviet republic, where he addressed its parliament and dealt with Ukrainian officials as equals. He signed a ten-year cooperation treaty with his counterpart, Leonid Kravchuk, on November 19. It recognized existing borders, which gave weight to Ukraine’s claim to Crimea, the idyllic peninsula in the Black Sea, populated chiefly by Russian speakers and home to the Black Sea Fleet, arbitrarily shifted from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian republic by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954. Yeltsin, said a leading nationalist, Vyacheslav Chornovil, had “injected a very constructive note” by holding out the prospect of greater Ukrainian autonomy from Moscow without severing ties with Russia.48 A month later, Yeltsin’s Russia and Kravchuk’s Ukraine, with Belarus (Belorussia) and Kazakhstan (the fifth- and fourth-ranking republics, Uzbekistan being the third), formed a “council of four” to work on a bottom-up treaty as a counter to Gorbachev’s. In January 1991 the Soviet military put on a show of force in Lithuania and Latvia, slaying twenty people in firefights at a television tower in Vilnius and an office building in Riga. In fear of a crackdown that would be lethal to democratization, Yeltsin called down hellfire on it and issued an appeal to Russian soldiers in the Baltic garrisons not to take “a wrong step.” Anatolii Chernyayev, in a draft letter he kept to himself, reproached Gorbachev: “You started the process of returning the country to civilization, but it has come up against your line on the ‘unified and indivisible [USSR].’ You have said many times to me and other comrades of yours that the Russians will never forgive anyone for ‘breaking up the empire.’ But here is Yeltsin insolently doing it in Russia’s name, and very few Russians are protesting.”49 On February 19 Yeltsin issued his first call for Gorbachev to resign. Gorbachev assured his assistants that “Yeltsin’s song has been sung” and time was working against him.50
