Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 25, 1990 TAG: 9003251881
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: MOSCOW LENGTH: Medium
The 10-member first Presidential Council, a new advisory body created in the recent constitutional revisions that expanded Gorbachev's power, had a surprisingly hard-line cast, suggesting an attempt to co-opt blue-collar workers and Russian nationalists into supporting a new package of economic measures.
An unexpected recruit into Gorbachev's new inner circle was Valentin G. Rasputin, a Siberian writer whose nostalgic tales of village life, ardent environmentalism, and open disdain for the Western model have made him a leading figure among Russian nationalists.
A Russian Orthodox believer, Rasputin has praised Gorbachev for easing state restrictions on the church, but he has railed against permissiveness, Western-style democracy, and free-market economics, and has called for strengthening the army and legislating tighter moral standards.
Soviet Jews regard him with suspicion, because, like many Russian nationalists, he holds Jews responsible for the Bolshevik Revolution and for Stalinism. The latter, the nationalists argue, decimated Russian culture.
Rasputin is the only non-Communist in the Cabinet, although he has said that the party is the only organization powerful enough to prevent a breakdown of discipline in the country.
Another hardliner named to the Cabinet was Veniamin A. Yarin, a machine operator at a metallurgical center in the Ural Mountains, a member of the Soviet Parliament who is one of the organizers of a conservative blue-collar movement called the United Workers Fronts.
The movement, combining elements of Russian nationalism and a sort of blue-collar populism, has fought new forms of private enterprise and other economic changes that threaten egalitarian practices.
Gorbachev drew half of his council from the Communist Party Politburo, including the men regarded as the most ardent proponents of the Soviet leader's break with party orthodoxy, Aleksandr N. Yakovlev and Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze.
The others were Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov; the KGB chairman, Vladimir A. Kryuchkov; and Yuri D. Maslyukov, chairman of the state planning agency Gosplan and an expert on military industries.
Of those chosen from outside the party leadership, the most important was probably Stanislav S. Shatalin, a little-known figure to the public yet an economist who has been instrumental from the earliest days in pressing for transition to a market-oriented economy.
Gorbachev has said that he will use his new presidential powers to move the country more rapidly away from its centralized, planned economic legacy, and Tass on Saturday night highlighted economic policy as a major role of the new council.
The other members of the council are Albert E. Kauls, a member of Parliament from Latvia, and Chengiz Aitmatov, a liberal writer from Kirghizia who has been a Gorbachev loyalist.
Kauls was an early leader of the Latvian Popular Front, which has become an aggressive movement for independence in that Baltic republic, but he left the movement to become head of an agricultural concern in Riga. He was presumably selected for his experience in the critical food industry.
Tass did not indicate whether the Cabinet members would have specialized assignments, although their jobs and titles did not change.
The Presidential Council, the agency reported, "will work out measures to implement the main directions of the Soviet Union's internal and foreign policy and insure the country's security."
by CNB