clarinews@clarinet.com (anderson/farm market news) (02/02/90)
(MOSCOW) The gloss is wearing awfully thin. As Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev prepares for next week's Communist party Central Committee plenum, his grip on power is in doubt, his hands are bloodied by events in Azerbaijan and the walls of some Soviet republics are threatening to crumble. The two-day plenum starting Monday was originally planned to tidy up the unfinished business of how to handle the Lithuanian Communist Party's breakaway from the national, Moscow-based party. But the issue of punishing or praising the Communists in the independence-minded Baltic republic now looks like a minor problem for the more than 300 top Communist party policymakers heading to the plenum -- the highest level of regular political meetings held in this country. Crisis is on the agenda now, with a rising toll of dead and wounded in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, where Moscow used military force two weeks ago to quell violence against the Armenian minority that grew into a threat against the southern republic's Communist government. More than 100 have died and nearly 500 have been wounded in the events that came less than a month after the Kremlin's ideology chief, Vadim Medvedev, had helped calm nervous nationalists in Lithuania with assurances that Moscow is ``against military means'' of settling political problems. ``We stand for political solutions and we will use them to solve problems in the Soviet Union,'' Medvedev had declared, leaving the mistaken impression that Gorbachev could and would extend to the people of his own country some of the tolerance shown toward eastern European countries. In Azerbaijan, street violence was met with government violence. The repeated refrain in Moscow is ``What else could we do?'' A similar kind of refrain is becoming attached to the issue of Gorbachev's grip on power: ``Who else is there?'' That's the best even his most loyal paid defenders can come up with. ``There are no alternative leaders,'' Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady Gerasimov said recently in response to questions about Gorbachev's leadership. ``There are no alternative policies.'' As events have begun to outpace Gorbachev's plans for reforms, exposing his lack of strong control over where the giant country is headed, a dark cloud of doubt has gathered about his ability to survive -- even without a backstage leader. A U.S. television report this week that Gorbachev was considering quitting as general secretary of the Communist party while remaining head of state was denied by the Soviet leader. But the denial didn't come until after the report had been circulating for about 10 hours, time enough to throw international finance markets into temporary turmoil and flush supportive comments out of Washington. Coincidentally or not, the leading Communist party newspaper, Pravda, published an article suggesting Gorbachev needs greater and tighter power if he is to push reform forward. The country's power structure is on the table at the plenum. The Central Committee is scheduled to thrash out proposals for a platform on Communist party reform in preparation for the party congress next October. The party normally holds a congress every five years but decided, at a plenum in the fall, to advance the date of the next one by six months, after Gorbachev made a case for more urgent reform of the Communist party which has lost prestige and membership, if not authority. Some critics have called for a congress even sooner. ``Party renewal'' is the buzz-phrase for the plenum, and it hasn't come fast enough for some. In the Russian city of Volvograd this week, mass protests drove local party officials to resign over a housing scandal. Local Communist party leaders have been replaced, after being removed or driven out, in several communities in recent months, usually over issues related to poor or unhealthy living conditions. The violence in Baku, which reached near-civil-war proportions, has been branded as a display of ethnic conflict and nationalist fervor. But it appears that it all started with the protests of thousands of homeless and unemployed Azerbaijanis who had reached a breaking point.