Soviet President Mikhail

Eight hard-line Soviet Communists have been named as instigators of the plot to overthrow Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. At least five have been arrested, one killed himself, one is hospitalized under guard, and there are arrest warrants for several others. Gorbachev says there will be no "witch-hunt" as in historic Soviet purges, but said there must be no danger of repeating the coup attempt.The Evening Sun wants to know what punishment you think the surviving coup leaders should face.

MOSCOW -- Former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev took the stand yesterday to set the record straight on the 1991 Kremlin coup attempt, and his main message -- publicly under oath for the first time -- was a disgusted denial that he had collaborated with the plotters."

SOVIET President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's reforms broke up the old Soviet economic machinery before anything was ready to replace it. Now the ultimate test is upon him and his fractious people. The odds against saving his economy seem formidable.Turmoil in the Soviet Union is emphatically not in the world's interest. That being the case, Washington must examine closely a gloomy assessment by the World Bank that the Soviet economy is in free fall. The Soviets will need U.S. and others' help, not to revive their economy but to soften unemployment and feed millions who might otherwise go hungry while they build a new economy.

MOSCOW -- Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin have agreed to bury the U.S.S.R. on New Year's Eve.Mr. Gorbachev, finally yielding in his battle to preserve the crumbling Soviet Union, declared yesterday that he would accept the new Commonwealth of Independent States as its constitutional successor and said he was now working for an orderly transition.Mr. Gorbachev later agreed with Mr. Yeltsin on dissolution of the central government's remaining ministries over the next two weeks so that the new commonwealth, which will probably include 10 of the remaining 12 Soviet republics, can come into formal existence Jan. 1."

The stunning ouster of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev by a hardline troika in a quasi-military coup presents the West with an exceedingly difficult dilemma: Whether to support the new regime, or to leave the Soviet Union to stew in its own juices. As distasteful as it may be, it's likely the West will simply have to swallow hard, and deal with the new "emergency committee."Why? Because there is a worse alternative to authoritarian rule in Russia, and that is the rapid, uncontrolled descent into chaos and civil war. Better to have a known authoritarian hand in control of the 30,000 nuclear weapons in the Soviet Union than to have a thousand unknown hands in control.

WASHINGTON -- Bush administration officials said yesterday that the Soviet Union had responded enthusiastically to President Bush's initiative unilaterally reducing nuclear weapons and that the prospects for a complementary reaction were promising.Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, interviewed on ABC's "This Week with David Brinkley," said that Mr. Bush telephoned both Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin before making his Oval Office address Friday night.

WASHINGTON -- Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev told President Bush yesterday that he was pursuing some new ideas for a diplomatic solution to the Persian Gulf crisis, but the White House was not optimistic about their chances for success.Mr. Gorbachev outlined his proposals to Mr. Bush in a 25-minute telephone call yesterday morning. Soviet Ambassador Alexander Bessmertnykh met twice with the president later in the day to follow up on the discussions.Mr. Bush told reporters the Soviet leader was "thinking innovatively" but would not describe the ideas in detail.

RAMBOUILLET, France -- Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev came out squarely yesterday against a military attack to force Iraq out of Kuwait, calling instead for stricter sanctions by the United Nations and a diplomatic initiative from Arab states to end the crisis.Speaking after four meetings with French President Francois Mitterrand Sunday night and yesterday, Mr. Gorbachev said that he thought Iraq was beginning "to heed the view of all the United Nations."The position of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein "is not the same as it was some time ago," Mr. Gorbachev said.

WASHINGTON -- His prescience may not help him be confirmed as CIA director, but yesterday's coup against Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev does confirm Robert M. Gates' reputation: the Bush administration's in-house pessimist was right.So was Alexander Yakovlev, once Mr. Gorbachev's top aide, who quitthe Soviet Communist Party on Friday, warning that a hard-line coup was in the works.But for the legions of American Sovietologists, the record is mixed.The effort to sort out who was right and who was wrong is a classic Washington response to an international crisis, as experts scramble to demonstrate that world events prove the soundness of whatever policy position they have been advocating.

If Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev is invited to the Big Seven economic summit in London in July, his status will be only that of an observer and any pitch for economic aid will be a lot less than "100 billion" he pointedly noted was spent to defeat Iraq. His mission, if it ever takes place, probably would be alimited one -- to convince President Bush and his fellow %o summiteers that, in fact, he really intends to reform the Soviet economy into a working, market-forces operation.Precisely what Mr. Gorbachev has in mind is to be explained to U.S. government officials within the next few days by Yevgeny Primakov, a top Kremlin economist, and Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir Shcherbakov.

WASHINGTON -- Bush administration officials said yesterday that the Soviet Union had responded enthusiastically to President Bush's initiative unilaterally reducing nuclear weapons and that the prospects for a complementary reaction were promising.Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, interviewed on ABC's "This Week with David Brinkley," said that Mr. Bush telephoned both Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin before making his Oval Office address Friday night.

President Bush announced yesterday as expected that the United States will establish diplomatic relations with the Baltic republics, saying he was now satisfied that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev will accede to their new status.Mr. Bush told reporters that he will dispatch a State Department emissary to assist the three Baltic nations -- Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania -- in a process he described as "irrevocable."The president had delayed his long-awaited announcement until yesterday at the request of Mr. Gorbachev, whom the White House had been strongly urging to endorse the Baltic states' independence before the United States acted.

Eight hard-line Soviet Communists have been named as instigators of the plot to overthrow Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. At least five have been arrested, one killed himself, one is hospitalized under guard, and there are arrest warrants for several others. Gorbachev says there will be no "witch-hunt" as in historic Soviet purges, but said there must be no danger of repeating the coup attempt.The Evening Sun wants to know what punishment you think the surviving coup leaders should face.

WASHINGTON -- His prescience may not help him be confirmed as CIA director, but yesterday's coup against Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev does confirm Robert M. Gates' reputation: the Bush administration's in-house pessimist was right.So was Alexander Yakovlev, once Mr. Gorbachev's top aide, who quitthe Soviet Communist Party on Friday, warning that a hard-line coup was in the works.But for the legions of American Sovietologists, the record is mixed.The effort to sort out who was right and who was wrong is a classic Washington response to an international crisis, as experts scramble to demonstrate that world events prove the soundness of whatever policy position they have been advocating.

The stunning ouster of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev by a hardline troika in a quasi-military coup presents the West with an exceedingly difficult dilemma: Whether to support the new regime, or to leave the Soviet Union to stew in its own juices. As distasteful as it may be, it's likely the West will simply have to swallow hard, and deal with the new "emergency committee."Why? Because there is a worse alternative to authoritarian rule in Russia, and that is the rapid, uncontrolled descent into chaos and civil war. Better to have a known authoritarian hand in control of the 30,000 nuclear weapons in the Soviet Union than to have a thousand unknown hands in control.

WASHINGTON -- It has taken seven months to get the date set, but George Bush is finally headed to Moscow tomorrow, with an arms-control treaty tucked under one arm and a "new agenda" for U.S.-Soviet relations under the other.The ceremonial anchor of his two-day Moscow meeting with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev will be the signing of a landmark agreement that for the first time reduces U.S. and Soviet arsenals of strategic nuclear arms -- primarily ballistic missiles.Snags in the final months of nine years of negotiating the new weapons limits and verification procedures, as well as what the United States considered to be Soviet backsliding on other issues, delayed what was to have been a snowy session in January until just days before President Bush is due to go on a monthlong summer vacation in Maine.

MOSCOW -- Former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev took the stand yesterday to set the record straight on the 1991 Kremlin coup attempt, and his main message -- publicly under oath for the first time -- was a disgusted denial that he had collaborated with the plotters."

WASHINGTON -- President Bush, saying he is convinced that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev remains committed to economic reform, hinted strongly yesterday that he is now inclined to favor some form of Western economic aid to the Soviet Union.If the Soviets come forward with an economic plan that "makes sense, we'll encourage it," Mr. Bush told reporters. "If we have some reservations about it, we owe Mr. Gorbachev, who is a friend, that 'Hey look, this has some difficulty.' "Later, he said, "Gorbachev, I am still convinced, is working the reform path, working the perestroika path, and I'm not going to pull the rug out from under him. On the other hand, we have limitations on what we can do. And when we do something, we want it to be meaningful."

President Bush goes to Moscow this week with one overriding objective in mind: he wants to bolster the domestic position of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and assure his continuation in office. We can assume that Mr. Gorbachev concurs.It is doubtful that Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy were so solicitous toward Nikita Khrushchev or Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter so committed to the survival of Leonid Brezhnev. But Mr. Bush can afford to be magnanimous. His domestic popularity ratings are as high as Mr. Gorbachev's are low. He presides over a nation that has clearly triumphed not only in the Cold War but in the hot little Persian Gulf encounter that established a certain U.S. cachet in dealing with Third World dust-ups.

Washington. -- It was just three years ago that Ronald Reagan first set foot in Red Square, allowing Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to maneuver Communism's arch-foe into a photo op with Russian school children and the admission that perhaps the Soviet empire wasn't so evil any more.At the time, it seemed extraordinary, an eye-popping picture. Now it is recalled as ancient history, part of the old business of a super-power competition, ignorance and mistrust that is rapidly being replaced by a political and economic alliance.