
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, October 31, 1993                   TAG: 9311070228
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: C1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: MOSCOW                                 LENGTH: Medium

THE ROOTS OF RUTSKOI'S REBELLION

Russian President Bors N. Yeltsin's failings as a personnel manager reached their nadir with the alienation, and finally the armed mutiny, of Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi, who hunkered down in the Parliament building during this month's rebellion, vowing to resist Yeltsin's "fascist regime" with his Kalashnikov assault rifle. In the end, he was arrested and clapped in Lefortovo prison, ending a political marriage that had originally seemed a master stroke for the president.

Yeltsin, Russia's preeminent foe of the status quo, was running against five other candidates for the presidency when, in May 1991, he invited Rutskoi, then 44, a decorated Hero of the Soviet Union and head of the reformist Communists for Democracy faction, to be his running mate. At first, Rutskoi said this year, he refused, objecting that "I won't fit in." Yeltsin then gave him a copy of his platform. The bushy-mustached Afghan War veteran came back the next day, won over. "I could put my own signature on the program," he said.

Yeltsin, reinforced by a running mate more palatable to otherwise hostile constituencies such as Communist Party members and the military brass, won a smashing 57.3 percent of the vote in the first presidential election ever held in Russia. However, it wasn't long before Rutskoi, who on the campaign trail cautioned that marketization needed to be gradual ("not everybody is capable of earning a living"), made it clear he intended to be more than a U.S.-style veep.

"When President Yeltsin proposed that I be his vice president, he should have been aware that, in fact, he was proposing a political coalition," Rutskoi said later. It was equally obvious that Yeltsin and other members of his entourage thought Rutskoi was of no greater value than the czarist naval captain who in a tale by 19th century writer Anton Chekhov is invited to a wedding reception solely to brighten it with his uniform.

In December 1991, six months after the election, it was abruptly announced that Rutskoi was being removed by presidential decree from the chairmanship of five special government committees. The blunt-tongued combat pilot who began high office by criticizing Yeltsin's economic guru Yegor T. Gaidar's policies as an inhumane "experiment" ended up branding Yeltsin a lush and a crook.

Their parting of the ways climaxed in the absurdity of Rutskoi's claiming the mantle of "acting president" and his exhortation to followers this month to storm a Moscow broadcast center, oppose the "virtually fascist regime" of Yeltsin and revive the Soviet Union.

None of this had to happen, some members of Yeltsin's entourage admit. Politicians who know Rutskoi doubt he has the stuff of a statesman. But when one listens to this telegenic former pilot's complaints, it is painfully obvious that the deepest roots of his revolt lie not in policy disagreements but in his rankling resentment at having been treated like Chekhov's captain.

by CNB