President Mikhail Gorbachev on Wednesday angrily accused radical communist Boris Yeltsin of abandoning socialism and trying to break up the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev, his voice rising with emotion in a 45-minute speech to the Russian republic's new Congress of People's Deputies, called his radical critics "political rogues" who use "unscrupulous and dirty methods."Gorbachev said while he favors strengthening the sovereignty of the Russian republic, Yeltsin is using the guise of greater independence for Russia to promote the breakup of the Soviet Union.
"If comrade (Yeltsin's speech) is subjected to very serious analysis, then he is proposing under the banner of restoring the sovereignty of Russia a call for the dissolution of the union," Gorbachev said.
Gorbachev said he is concerned because Russia is the core of the Soviet Union's 15 republics. "How could we go on without Russia if it goes in another direction?" he asked.
"If some other republic exercises its right to secede from the union, it would infringe upon the interests of other republics, but we would survive," Gorbachev said. "But the USSR is unthinkable without Russia."
Yeltsin, a former Moscow Communist Party boss and now a leader of the radical Democratic Russia bloc in the congress, said Tuesday the Soviet Union's largest republic has "sustained the greatest damage from the obsolete administrative-command system that is desperately clinging to life."
He and other nationalist deputies have called for more independence and greater power for Russia within the Soviet Union.
The Russian legislature was to choose its chairman this week, and Yeltsin is a strong candidate for what in effect is the president of the Russian republic, which would give him a powerful base from which to challenge Gorbachev.
Gorbachev criticized Yeltsin for referring to Russia without using the formal name Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, leaving out the words "Soviet" and "Socialist."