SOVIET DISARRY; GORBACHEV IS READY TO RESIGN AS POST-SOVIET PLAN ADVANCES (original) (raw)
World|SOVIET DISARRY; GORBACHEV IS READY TO RESIGN AS POST-SOVIET PLAN ADVANCES
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SOVIET DISARRY
- Dec. 13, 1991
Credit...The New York Times Archives
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December 13, 1991
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Section A, Page
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Mikhail S. Gorbachev said today that he was prepared to resign as Soviet President as momentum toward acceptance of the newly proclaimed commonwealth of former Soviet republics built rapidly. The Russian Parliament gave the commonwealth an overwhelming endorsement, and the Asian republics moved toward joining.
Mr. Gorbachev continued to argue forcefully against the commonwealth abruptly proclaimed by Russia, Ukraine and Byelorussia on Sunday. But in a three-hour session with Soviet journalists in which he was alternately angry, proud and troubled, he appeared to be steeling himself for a resignation that seemed increasingly inevitable.
If the union is disbanded, he declared, "it will be exactly what I once talked about when I said, 'There is only one situation in which I will leave, and that is if a cross is put on the union state.' " 'Others Would Have Quit'
"I did all I could," he said later. "Everything. I think that in my place, others would have long quit this business."
Questions and doubts about the hastily prepared agreement to form a Commonwealth of Independent States, signed in the Byelorussian city of Minsk last Sunday, were abundant. Not least among them was the future of the army, the mechanisms by which the new arrangement would be managed and its legality. But in the Russian Parliament and across the Soviet lands, the conclusion seemed to take root that "this may be the last chance," as the Russian President, Boris N. Yeltsin, told his Parliament.
In his brief, stern address, Mr. Yeltsin argued in effect that the edge of the abyss was not the place to be combing the fine print of an emergency agreement -- that the commonwealth accord was, in any case, a "base agreement" open to revision as other republics joined. Barbs for Gorbachev
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