U.S. to hold international conference on Soviet aid next month; see A2.
- Amid grave uncertainty over the future shape of the Soviet Union, the Russian legislature overwhelmingly approved on Thursday Boris Yeltsin's plan for a commonwealth of independent states. But Mikhail Gorbachev warned it would lead to "chaos" and said he might resign.Yeltsin - who called the plan the last chance to stop the nation's "uncontrolled anarchic disintegration" - said support by non-Slavic republics for the commonwealth was growing.
The latest developments came as the central government was staggering from one crisis to the next. With winter closing in, millions of Soviets are worried about whether they will have enough to eat. The head of the CIA, Robert M. Gates, said in Washington this week that the Soviet Union is "dangerously unstable" and could face the worst civil disorder since the 1917 Revolution.
Other U.S. officials, including Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, have expressed concern about who controls the Soviet Union's 27,000 nuclear warheads.
The commonwealth pact won final approval on a vote of 188-6, with seven abstentions. Under it, each member can be an independent state, sharing common defense structures but eliminating nearly all other aspects of central control.
Thunderous applause followed the vote. Yeltsin, the Russian Federation president, strode to the lectern and said: "I congratulate you on this historic decision and thank you!"
The vote means the legislatures of all three Slavic participants - Russia, Byelorussia and Ukraine - have approved the agreement, which was forged Sunday by Yeltsin and the other republics' leaders.
Formation of the commonwealth effectively kills Gorbachev's proposed new Union Treaty, which would havepreserved the central government as the principal state body. At the same time, Russian legislators also renounced the 1922 Union Treaty that formed the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev, the Soviet president, indicated to local journalists in the Kremlin that he would resign if the commonwealth is formed. "I can see no place for me in it," the journalists quoted him as saying. But the independent Interfax news agency also quoted him as saying, "There is only one situation in which I'll go: if the union state is given up for lost."
Gorbachev said in an interview published Thursday that he was not seeking a role in the commonwealth and has not been offered its presidency.
"Maybe time has come to say that personally, I am not going to aspire to a role in the new structures," he told the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta.
"I don't categorically reject the commonwealth idea, but I'm not sure it will help," said Gorbachev. "In my opinion, it will lead to disintegration in chaos. I can't agree on moral grounds to support the state's falling apart."
Support for the commonwealth agreement is growing among non-Slavic republics, Yeltsin said, with Armenia, Kirgizia and Moldavia expressing interest in joining. He also said he believed Kazakhstan would become a full member.
Yeltsin said he and Gorbachev agreed at a meeting Wednesday to keep the "currently working structures" of the central government functioning until a majority of the republics join the commonwealth.
He said the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States on Sunday was made necessary because Gorbachev's plan to hold the nation together with a central government was rejected by eight of the 15 former Soviet republics - principally Ukraine.
The commonwealth was created not to eliminate the Soviet Union "arbitrarily" but to halt the "process of uncontrolled anarchic disintegration of that common space in which our nations live," he said.
The Soviet legislature was to convene late Thursday for a crucial session on the commonwealth, and representatives of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tadzhikistan and Uzbekistan were meeting to decide whether to join the commonwealth.
There was no immediate word on the two other Soviet republics - Georgia and Azerbaijan.
Despite Yeltsin's announcement of increasing support, Kirgizia's president, Askar Akayev, told his republic's lawmakers it was up to them to decide to decide the issue of membership in the commonwealth, Tass reported.
In addition, Tadzhikistan President Rakhmon Nabiyev told the newspaper Pravda that he believed Yeltsin and the other two Slavic leaders "acted hastily and unpredictably" in creating the commonwealth.
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More than half of all Soviet airports are without fuel and many flights have been canceled, touching off a new wave of chaos in the troubled air transport system, Tass said Thursday. The news agency quoted the Ministry of Aviation as saying 92 airports lacked jet fuel. "This amounts to more than half of all the airports. Traffic came to a standstill at major, medium-sized and small airports in Ukraine, the Transcaucasus, Kazakhstan and the Far East," it said. Jet fuel has been among the hardest-hit commodities.