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SOVIET DISARRY

SOVIET DISARRY; GORBACHEV IS READY TO RESIGN AS POST-SOVIET PLAN ADVANCES

SOVIET DISARRY; GORBACHEV IS READY TO RESIGN AS POST-SOVIET PLAN ADVANCES
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December 13, 1991, Section A, Page 1Buy Reprints
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Mikhail S. Gorbachev said today that he was prepared to resign as Soviet President as momentum toward acceptance of the newly proclaimed commonwealth of former Soviet republics built rapidly. The Russian Parliament gave the commonwealth an overwhelming endorsement, and the Asian republics moved toward joining.

Mr. Gorbachev continued to argue forcefully against the commonwealth abruptly proclaimed by Russia, Ukraine and Byelorussia on Sunday. But in a three-hour session with Soviet journalists in which he was alternately angry, proud and troubled, he appeared to be steeling himself for a resignation that seemed increasingly inevitable.

If the union is disbanded, he declared, "it will be exactly what I once talked about when I said, 'There is only one situation in which I will leave, and that is if a cross is put on the union state.' " 'Others Would Have Quit'

"I did all I could," he said later. "Everything. I think that in my place, others would have long quit this business."

Questions and doubts about the hastily prepared agreement to form a Commonwealth of Independent States, signed in the Byelorussian city of Minsk last Sunday, were abundant. Not least among them was the future of the army, the mechanisms by which the new arrangement would be managed and its legality. But in the Russian Parliament and across the Soviet lands, the conclusion seemed to take root that "this may be the last chance," as the Russian President, Boris N. Yeltsin, told his Parliament.

In his brief, stern address, Mr. Yeltsin argued in effect that the edge of the abyss was not the place to be combing the fine print of an emergency agreement -- that the commonwealth accord was, in any case, a "base agreement" open to revision as other republics joined. Barbs for Gorbachev

"For the past several days there has been an effort to raise doubts about the legality of the agreement," he said. "In the circumstances, I consider this immoral. With great effort, we found the only possible formula for a community of members of the former union. This may be the last chance." [ Excerpts, page A22. ]

The swipe at those questioning the legality of the agreement seemed aimed at Mr. Gorbachev, who has repeatedly challenged the "constitutionality" of the agreement.

The two presidents did not meet today, but the struggle between the commonwealth and the union seemed increasingly personified in the showdown between the two men whose bitter debates and dramatic reconciliations shaped so much of the Soviet political drama of the past six years.

"In Minsk, three republics stopped the disastrous, anarchic collapse of the area in which our people live," declared Mr. Yeltsin. "It was not done to destroy something. Our task was to save what was healthy, what could be salvaged, and to build a realistic model of a community."

Mr. Gorbachev told his separate audience with equal fervor: "I am convinced that we are now committing the greatest error of all the years of perestroika."

But the argument seemed to find few supporters as the major forces in the battered nation gradually, sometimes reluctantly, rallied to the new commonwealth. For all its evident weaknesses, the new model had the backing of the three core republics of the old union, and it resolved what had been the two major obstacles to a new union treaty -- Ukraine's refusal to join and the identification of Mr. Gorbachev and his proposals with a revival of the old "center."

Armenia, Azerbaijan and Kirghizia declared their interest in joining the commonwealth, and the Moldavian President flew to Moscow to discuss it with Mr. Yeltsin. Tilting Toward Commonwealth

Initial reports from Ashkhabad, the capital of Turkmenia, where leaders of five Asian republics -- Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Uzbekistan, Turkmenia and Tadzhikistan -- were gathering to discuss the commonwealth, indicated that most were leaning toward joining.

The key question at the Ashkhabad meeting was the stance of Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, the influential President of Kazakhstan who was piqued last weekend that the three Slavic presidents had excluded him from the agreement. Mr. Yeltsin indirectly acknowledged the error today when he said they were proposing to retroactively include Mr. Nazarbayev as a "co-founder" on the strength of his previous agreement with the basic idea.

The military, widely regarded as a major deciding factor between the union and the commonwealth, seemed likewise to tilt increasingly toward the commonwealth. Mr. Yeltsin told his Parliament today that senior officers had expressed support for his proposal.

An article in the military daily, Krasnaya Zvezda, discussing the conflicting loyalties, noted today that "there have been definite signs that he who pays the piper calls the tune. Well, it is Russia, the Ukraine and Byelorussia that contribute the bulk of the nation's military budget," the article noted. Yeltsin's Agony

But as the debate over the commonwealth roiled for a fourth day, the sense was not that this was a grand solution to all the accumulated problems, but rather that it was the only available means of trying to halt the frightening disintegration of the country.

Alarming new signs popped up constantly. Scores of airports were closed because of lack of fuel. The central bank was refusing to pay out dollars. Food supplies in Moscow and St. Petersburg were at critical lows. And until the Slavic leaders met near Brest last weekend, the political process seemed deadlocked and the economic situation near catastrophe.

Mr. Yeltsin, addressing his Parliament, declared that the drawn-out process of the union's dissolution turned to "agony" after the failed August coup. "At this time we began to drown in endless negotiations, in all sorts of differing discussions, consultation," he said. "It turned into a sort of idiotic infinity, and against the background of acute economic crisis and the absence of basic staples, these games irritated people more and more."

To do nothing, Mr. Yeltsin said, would have been "criminal."

In the end, the Russian Parliament voted 188-6 to approve the agreement, with seven abstentions. Yet the standing ovation after the vote and the lopsided count did not reflect the reluctance and anxiety of many deputies, asked to condemn the state they were raised in.

Ruslan Khasbulatov, the speaker of the Parliament, seemed to capture the mood: "It was a bad union, it was an ineffective union, but it was our union. Yet the bitter truth is that this union had begun to fall apart before our eyes.

"This agreement," he continued, speaking of the commonwealth, "is an adequate reflection of an alternative that may, in the current situation, halt the disintegration of this union. I am fully in accord with the position that this is the last historical chance to salvage some foundations of our links."

Among other speakers, several raised questions about the legality of pronouncing a commonwealth and suspending the laws of the old union, and more about the practical aspects of allowing the two to exist simultaneously. Changes of Substance

Other speakers expressed concern about amendments passed by the Ukrainian Parliament when it endorsed the commonwealth agreement on Tuesday. Though Mr. Yeltsin responded that these were simply editing changes, they appeared to substantially alter key provisions of the agreement.

Instead of "open borders," the Ukrainian legislators substituted "unhindered contact across borders," implying that the frontier would be open only to visits, not to free settlement. The Ukrainians also replaced language calling for coordinated foreign policy with support for non-binding "consultations" in foreign policy.

And in the most ominous alteration, Ukraine reiterated in its version of the agreement its intention to form a national army out of Soviet forces stationed on its soil. That was followed by the announcement that the Ukrainian President, Leonid M. Kravchuk, today assumed the duties of commander-in-chief of Soviet Army and Navy forces deployed in Ukraine, including the entire Black Sea Fleet.

Only the strategic nuclear weapons remained under central control.

Mr. Yeltsin sought to gloss over the questions. He described the Minsk declarations as a "base agreement" that remained open to negotiation and revision, and he said questions about the military would be decided after it was clear how many republics would participate in the commonwealth.

To questions about the legal chaos created by the dissolution of the union and its laws before new ones were in place, Mr. Yeltsin said he had agreed to keep union structures in place, and that the provisions canceling all-union "norms" were included on Ukraine's insistence.

The agreement left totally unclear how visas, passports, or other documents would be issued, or what the Foreign Ministry was supposed to do. In the absence of any instruction, the basic union bureaucracies continued to go about their business, just as Mr. Gorbachev continued to regard himself as the Soviet President.

There was also no clear definition of what was meant by commonwealth. The Russian word, sodruzhestvo, is also translated as community, but there was no indication whether the Slavic presidents perceived their new association along the lines of the British Commonwealth or European Community -- or whether they shared a single perception.

In this confusion, it was hard to make a strong distinction between the commonwealth and the union of sovereign states that Mr. Gorbachev had tried to organize. In the end, as several Russian parliamentarians pointed out, the main difference seemed to be the fate of Mr. Gorbachev.

"To get rid of Mikhail Gorbachev we got rid of the whole state," snarled Sergei Babulin, a spokesman for the conservative Rossiya faction. Another critic, the conservative cosmonaut Vitaly Sevastianov, concluded a strong denunciation of the agreement by saying: "At least we got rid of Gorbachev."

Most witnesses to the somber spectacle, however, seemed to sense the drama of the impending fall of the President who had led them through the most fateful stretch of modern Soviet history. Many of the 60-odd Soviet reporters summoned to the Kremlin this afternoon emerged moved.

"He made clear that if his resignation was not imminent, it was inevitable," said the Russian television news program, Vesti.

Mr. Gorbachev rejected the image of the Minsk agreement as a forced solution to Ukraine's stubbornness. He insisted that the Russian Government had exploited the image to push itself to the forefront, and he specifically blamed Gennadi Burbulis, a former professor of Marxism from Sverdlovsk who has become Mr. Yeltsin's top political adviser, and who is known for his strong "Russia-first" approach. 'Main Task Is Accomplished'

"The issue was not Ukraine," Mr. Gorbachev said. "The 'Ukraine factor' was used by the leadership of Russia. Its position is long familiar, and here it played its card."

Mr. Gorbachev acknowledged that the Minsk agreement in many ways duplicated his own proposals, but with the fatal flaw that it destroyed the unitary state. "That is the main issue," he declared.

But through much of the meeting, which was shown on late-evening television, Mr. Gorbachev seemed to be rehearsing his own record.

"The main task of my life is accomplished," he said. "Everything else -- well, maybe others will come, and they will do it better. But you understand, I want it to end successfully. That's my peculiarity, that I don't want there to be a failure."

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: SOVIET DISARRY; GORBACHEV IS READY TO RESIGN AS POST-SOVIET PLAN ADVANCES. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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