The Limits of Gorbachev's Reform
DANIELS, ROBERT V.
GLASNOST REVISED The Limits of Gorbachev's Reform By Robert V. Daniels Revolutions do not go on forever. Sooner or later, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's reform revolution in the Soviet...
...this is a basic strategic reversal of direction...
...The government's power to command obedience had dissolved, almost as it had in 1917, and rumors of a possible military coup could be heard...
...All the evidence is that he believed in what he was doing—up to a point...
...The liberal paper Literaturnaya Gazeta wrote just a few days ago: "Today our fate is being decided...
...Gorbachev was convinced from the start—from before the start, actually, during discussions with his liberal friends who had worked for Khrushchev—that theStalinist "command-administration" economy had to be broken up...
...Sooner or later, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's reform revolution in the Soviet Union, as he himself has styled it, had to crest...
...This Humpty Dumpty has been too thoroughly smashed and discredited...
...The turning point for Gorbachev appears to have come sometime last fall...
...Today it is being decided whether we will begin to live honorably, boldly, according to our consciences, or whether we will remain mute slaves, blindly obeying whoever tries with a devilish smirk to rule in our name...
...When the Congress of People's Deputies convened in December, Gorbachev reported: "The most important thing today...
...In addition, and most amazingly, he had persuaded the Party to surrender its constitutional monopoly of power and give up the Politburo as a serious policy-making body by enlarging it and relegating it to purely organizational matters...
...If full-scale democracy were introduced, the first thing the minorities would want to do with it— particularly those that are developed and Western-oriented—is leave the union...
...The answer lies in his two great failures...
...Despite the pictures of long queues and empty store shelves, there are ample reports that consumers somehow get by—through the underground economy, the black market, or the bartering of goods they have hoarded...
...It has been clear from the outset of the Gorbachev era that the nationality issue is the Achilles heel of democratization in the USSR...
...As he knew full well from the fate of Nikita S. Khrushchev, this was also the power that could do him in...
...A paradoxical fact, of course, is that the government of the Russian Republic, which is headed by Boris N. Yeltsin and administers over half the Soviet population as well as two-thirds of the country's area, supports free choice for the nationalities and declares its own sovereignty...
...When his economic advisers, men like Stanislav Shatalin and Nikolai Petrakov, began to advocate a crash program to revive the economy through marketization and privatization, Gorbachev balked and tried to water down their "500 days" plan...
...The Russian Republic's anti-centralism means that it is willing to forgo domination over the peripheral nationalities...
...Still, by last year Gorbachev had traversed an incredible distance...
...But the one thing many Russians and the entire conservative bureaucracy would insist on, whatever its damage to democracy, is forcibly keeping the minorities within the Union and maintaining the base for the USSR's international power...
...His model for change was the New Economic Policy instituted by Lenin in the early 1920s...
...Speculation has naturally arisen as to whether Gorbachev's turn against reform, and especially his condoning repressive military action in the Baltic states, indicates he has become a prisoner of the conservatives...
...Gorbachev remained wedded to something called "socialism," loose as that term may be...
...More plausible is what Gorbachev has stressed himself—his own ultimate commitments: Economic reform must not go so far as to eliminate everything he could call socialism, and improved relations with the national minorities must not entail the breakup of the Union...
...How far back can Gorbachev take the Soviet peoples, after having brought them so far ahead...
...The main uncertainty was whether he would fall back with the receding tide, or remain standing high and dry...
...The Soviet government cannot afford that, even if its retreat from reform and its waffling on Iraq should cool Western eagerness to send aid...
...The Russian government is pro-autonomy for two reasons: (1) It was elected more recently and more democratically, and therefore is better prepared to abandon the heritage of the past...
...That seems unlikely, considering the political strength he displayed up to last summer in chipping away at the institutions of conservative power...
...The crucial issue now is the national minorities and the future of the Soviet Union as a country...
...What about a renewal of the Cold War...
...Shevardnadze, who announced his departure on the floor of the People's Congress after warning of the country's slide toward dictatorship...
...As many Soviets now describe it, Gorbachev broke up the old economic system, but he was not able to put anything in its place...
...Friedrich Engels' words of 1885 about the revolution he saw impending in Russia could well describeGorbachev: "Peoplewho boasted that they had made a revolution have always seen the next day that they had no idea what they were doing, that the revolution made did not in the least resemble the one they would have liked to make...
...Another trouble with the economic reform seems to have been a philosophical one...
...Reversing the USSR's economic stagnation and decay was Gorbachev's first objective when he became General Secretary in 1985...
...The struggle between the Union government and the Russian government is a struggle between two authorities in Moscow, one in the Kremlin and the other on the Krasnopresnenskaya Embankment, over the question of a looser or tighter relationship between the Russian center and the minorities...
...He is willing to decentralize the economy and encourage individual initiative, but he balks at private ownership, particularly of land...
...the fourth and most astounding took large ruble bills out of circulation and effectively expropriated the savings of every grandmother who kept the family money in a mattress...
...and (2) Yeltsin has carried his enmity toward Gorbachev to the point of opposing everything the latter stands for...
...Gorbachev has achieved two epochal successes, and has suffered two painful failures...
...In recent months, though, the economy has not been Gorbachev's most serious problem...
...It cannot be autonomous from itself...
...The only surprise is that Gorbachev has managed to stave off the crisis until now...
...But within a year he realized that the political system was the major obstacle to the economic reform he termed perestroika...
...Yegor K. Ligachev, the conservative Communist leader squeezed out of the power structure last summer, has watched the whole procession with open satisfaction...
...Robert V. Daniels, professor emeritus of history at the University of Vermont and a frequent NL contributor, is the author of Is Russia Reformable...
...the third stipulated that Army troops were to accompany local police on their regular patrols (above all to curb sympathy with the minorities...
...The limits to reform in the USSR are the limits in the mind of its leader...
...Regrettably, every step Gorbachev has taken since the fall to address the crisis has been in the conservative, Stalinist direction...
...He is ready to give the minorities a new Union treaty guaranteeing wide autonomy, but he won't countenance independence...
...Russia is the center...
...Clearly, all the way to intervention by authoritarian and coercive means—presidential decrees and military and police action—in addressing what he perceives to be perilous situations...
...Thus from 1986 until the summer of 1990 he campaigned tenaciously, albeit carefully, against the very Communist Party bureaucracy that had put him in office...
...They suggest that notwithstanding his reformist convictions, he has fallen back to the time-honored Russian methods of the decree and the whip now that the going has gotten tough...
...This was his first critical step in the retreat from reform...
...These are totalitarian measures, moving 180 degrees in the opposite direction from the "law-governed state" Gorbachev claims to advocate...
...By year's end Gorbachev had jettisoned the majority of his liberal advisers, including the key theorist of Perestroika Aleksandr N. Yakovlev...
...Soviet society is now far too modern, sophisticated and complex to be run in the old monolithic way...
...The reason for natural limits in any process of radical change is simple...
...they were left without any government role once he abolished the Presidential Council that he created a year ago to take over the functions of the Politburo...
...What, then, went wrong...
...A significant change came in the Ministry of the Interior in early December, when the liberal Vadim V. Bakatin was replaced by the KGB functionary Boris K. Pugo...
...He had swept the old neo-Stalinists out of the leadership, called for truly contested elections within the Party, persuaded thePartyto agree to democratic constitutional reform, held national elections that were at least partially democratic, shifted basic decision-making from the Party to the government after making himself president, and presided over a new, genuine (if not fault-free) parliament...
...Not necessarily, but there may be censorship of the media (already demonstrated on TV) and perhaps presidential rule in troubled minority republics...
...the ideology of retrenchment is more likely to be Russian nationalism in a Soviet uniform...
...Reform (or revolution) unleashes political forces that seem initially to serve the cause of the chief reformer, but that really have their own agendas...
...Some strain to go beyond the movement's original goals, while other less ambitious supporters of reform are turned off by the excesses of the zealots...
...If the results were less than spectacular, the blame can be placed on local Party bureaucrats who, with the progress of democratization at the center, ironically found themselves less under Moscow's thumb and more able to obstruct policies they opposed...
...Most dramatic of all in this series of critical events was the resignation of Foreign Minister EduardA...
...the second gave the police unlimited power to raid enterprises, including joint enterprises with foreigners, to verify the legality of their earnings...
...Russian autonomy in the Soviet context is an oxymoron...
...is to restore law and order...
...The Supreme Soviet voted Gorbachev emergency power to rule by decree ostensibly to speed up reform...
...To implement that vision Gorbachev extracted one law after another from the Supreme Soviet—a law on enterprise responsibility, a law facilitating private and cooperative business, laws on joint ventures and direct foreign dealings by Soviet firms, a law on leasing land for individual farms...
...Will there be a revival of Marxist-Leninist doctrine...
...Instead, he issued four panicky, retrogressive orders: one set up auxiliary police units of workers to assure the distribution of goods...
...If Gorbachev rejects full independence for the minorities, Yeltsin will endorse it...
...This allowed individual farming and private enterprise in trade and services, while large-scale businesses (banking, heavy industry, energy, transportation), the "commanding heights" kept under State ownership, were put on a profitand-loss, supply-and-demand basis that Leon Trotsky dubbed "market socialism...
...If we fail, greater discord, the rampage of dark forces, and a collapse of statehood are inevitable...
...By all appearances this is not one of the tactical retreats he habitually executed between leaps of reform to keep the conservatives off balance...
...The successes were virtually unprecedented: He almost completely dismantled the Stalinist totalitarian system, and he withdrew from superpower confrontation and the East European empire—in both cases without the use of force...
...Seeing the surge of democratization as threatening to get out of control both in the economy and in nationality relations, and fearing the anarchy he believes these developments portend, Gorbachev has reverted to the traditional forces of order Russian-style...
...Does that suggest an en d to glasnost and democratic elections...
...In sum, Gorbachev can stall reform for a time, but it is inconceivable that he can stop the clock indefinitely...
...But his successes contained the seeds of failure: They produced the near-paralysis of the Soviet economy, and they triggered the rapid dissolution of the Soviet Union into its constituent nationality elements—to the embitterment of those who commanded the residual instruments of coercion, the Army and the police...
...Why, after his series of triumphs in democratizing the country, has Gorbachev turned back to the people and the methods that stand for dictatorship...
...One constantly encounters variations on this theme in the Soviet press and in conversations with individual Soviet citizens: They sense catastrophe, they see the "abyss," they fear civil war...
...In the light of his record, one certainly cannot say—as some are nevertheless saying nowadays—that Gorbachev's reforms were merely a manipulative trick...
Vol. 74 • January 1991 • No. 2
