Too Close to Call

...To my mind, though, we have no reason to think that, as Ulam implies, partial freedom would have been more stable in the Soviet Union in the 1950s...

...Leonid I. Brezhnev, who bestrides the next few chapters as the restorer of orthodoxy, listlessly carried Communism to its apparent climax in the 1970s...

...Yet for some unexplained reason he does not draw the obvious conclusion: that because this monopoly had become so extensive by the late 1920s, it was impossible to modify thereafter...

...Ulam demonstrates, however, that the triumphs of this era were spurious: The creation of the Communist bloc, one of the proud achievements of Stalin's regime, became an important source of Communism's legitimacy, and this would prove disastrous...

...Growing tensions with China-Ulam concentrates on early developments, in the 1940s and '50s-further undermined this naive "belief, the core of Communism's appeal...

...In any case, we should not discount the possibility-to me, the probability-that the Soviet system was killed not by its evils but by Gorbachev's attempt to remove them...

...Memories of the revolutionary idealism of former years were not quite dead...

...It is true that other dictatorships, particularly in Latin America, have succeeded in transforming themselves into democracies by installments...

...The author himself refers to a Lithuanian Communist who maintains that "except for perestroika," the union "could have gone on peacefully and, from the point of view of the bureaucrats, very comfortably" for an additional 10-15 years...

...Perhaps Yeltsin will succeed...

...The problem may be, very simply, that it is much too soon to write history, as opposed to journalism, about the denouement of Communism, since we don't really know the story's end...

...THE wake of last summer's tragicomedy, the Soviet Union's demise was surely inevitable...

...It may be doubted whether Marxism-Leninism ever had a real capacity for reform, but it is quite clear that if it did, this was the final chance...

...Khrushchev's real goals were...

...Let us hope that Ulam is right...

...Even Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, a seemingly more believable democrat than the leaders of most of the former Soviet republics, may not find his way out of it...

...At least two scenarios are possible...

...Patiently endured so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men's minds...

...Its consequences, whatever they turn out to be, will dominate global politics for years, possibly decades...

...Ulam, to be sure, recognizes that "one party's monopoly of power" was "the main, many would say the only essential characteristic of Communism...

...In foreign policy, Khrushchev aimed to reach "an understanding with the capitalists not by making concessions but by forcing an agreement on them" through aggressive behavior that aroused their suspicions...

...Some who presided over the destinies of Soviet Communism in the post-1953 period, certainly Nikita S. Khrushchev, were genuinely committed to recapturing what they believed had been the dynamic and humanitarian features of early Communism," before 1934...

...Then," he conjectures, "there would have been a violent explosion...

...His domestic agenda (like Mikhail S. Gorbachev's) pursued the fantasy of reconciling one-party rule and glasnost...

...Much of the former Soviet Union is currently ruled by the same people who were ruling it before last August: chiefly ex-Communists who did not see the light until those summer days...

...Wouldn't the old regime have survived...

...Being left to their own devices, the local Communist parties would not have become identified with foreign oppression and might have gained genuine popular support...

...The author understood that the Soviet Union was in its death throes as he wrote, without knowing precisely when it would expire...

...Still, when Stalin died in 1953 such illusions were largely intact...

...like the one" in Romania...

...Who knows how changed or how firmly entrenched they are...

...The Soviet Communist Party, by contrast, was a huge organization requiring vast plunder and support for its members, too big to moderate its appetite...

...Terror and the most doctrinaire policies were gone [after this period], but the essential characteristics of the police state and of the ubiquitous bureaucratic rule remained...

...But those regimes, unlike the USSR, were not burdened by "leading elements" that had previously insisted upon running all government departments, all productive enterprises, and much of private life...

...Tito's break with Moscow in 1948 compromised an important premise of Marxism-Leninism: the idea that the Socialist order, despite "its unavoidably harsh initial characteristics, would abolish war" by ehminating conflict among nations...

...Yet this was certainly the most important international event since 1945, if not 1917...

...He then ridicules what he calls Gorbachev's assumption that East Europeans would accept "partial freedom" in 1988...

...From the beginning, most of the Kremlin's new associates had little popular support...

...Nor was it universally apparent that Communism was sustained solely by violence and inertia...

...In Eastern Europe, the author writes in a similar vein, the "threat of a rebirth of German militarism would still have made" even non-Communist rulers "look to Moscow for support" had it agreed to give them domestic independence on the Finnish model...

...Most of what we objected to in Soviet Communism-its despotism, arbitrariness, imperialism, and incompetence-was well advanced under the Tsars...

...Ukraine and the other territorial entities emerging from the Soviet breakup have so far not proven that they are truly nations...

...Indeed, we already have the first of what will ultimately be many thousands of works, The Communists: The Story of Power and Lost Illusions, 1948-1991 (Scribner's, 528 pp., $27.50) by Adam Ulam, the much esteemed director of Harvard's Russian Research Center...

...Unhappily, he was also the "last true believer," incapable of rejecting the fundamentals of the mentality he had embraced in 1918...

...In fact, speculates Ulam rather questionably, only the "good luck" of taking power at a time when Moscow's chief rivals were enfeebled by the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution may have saved Brezhnev from disaster...

...A counterrevolution would make the specifically Communist dimension in the failure of reform seem less important than it does now, and the Russian element-a matter Ulam ignores-a lot more so...

...More impressively, perhaps, than any event in history, the end of the Soviet Union illustrates Tocqueville's brilliant observation in The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856) "that, generally speaking, the most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways...

...Suppose, however, that in 1985 a conservative, rather than Gorbachev, had succeeded Konstantin U. Chernenko as head of the Soviet Union...

...Had the Politburo named an old-line successor to Chernenko, he would be ruling today, at least if he hadn't died of old age...

...He may not be...

...This, Ulam remonstrates, is an "unanswerable question," which of course doesn't mean we can't try to answer it...

...Ulam ends his story with the August coup and Gorbachev's subsequent attempts to refloat the Union, never mentioning the final collapse in December...

...As for the stronger governments, they quickly asserted their independence...

...In the 1950s, Ulam contends, "Communism was in a better condition to absorb the shock" of glasnost and perestroika than it was to be in the late '80s...

...perhaps, too, he will remain a democrat...

...The comrades "could not have retained the monopoly of power" permanently either at home or in Eastern Europe, he continues, "but the chances of the Communist Party retaining a significant role in the life of society would have been immeasurably greater" if it had tried a "radical cure" earlier...

...But if an alliance of conservative ex-Marxist-Leninists and Russian nationalists overthrows Yeltsin, the era covered by this book will look very different...

...In all likelihood it had been for at least a year...

...Whether or not the Communists were bound to fail, by the mid-1980s they were bound to fail at reform...

...economic and political reform at home that would advance the welfare of the Soviet consumer and rid society of the remnants of Stalinism...

...Poland and Yugoslavia made similarly futile attempts to transform themselves in the '50s...

...Although Ulam apparently stopped writing before the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus finally killed off the old Union, he tells us that his book was conceived as a history of the "decline and disintegration" of Soviet and international Communism...

...According to Ulam, that chimerical objective-glasnost plus one-party rule-doomed all of Gorbachev's reforms...

...In most respects, that ideology appeared to be at the peak of its fortunes when his story opens, in the late 1940s...

...Partial freedom would continue to be seen as a reason for the collapse-but because freedom of any kind would then appear to have been unworkable in the former Soviet Union, not because glasnost whetted appetites that couldn't be satisfied under a semiauthoritarian system...

...He also argues that "If in 1987-88 the Kremlin had offered an imaginative plan to restructure the USSR by granting real and substantial autonomy to the 15 republics, it would have, in all likelihood, been spared the subsequent demands for full independence...

...And the unpleasant fact is that reform to date has been a mess...

...In reality, says Ulam, vulnerable and needy allies like Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia added "nothing but vast expense and new dangers" to a USSR burdened with its own problems: poverty, backwardness, internal divisions, and the hostility of the great majority of states outside the Soviet orbit as well as of the peoples within it...

...In that case the author's version of the events of 1985-91, emphasizing the contradictions of partial freedom under Gorbachev and the debacle of Communist idealism, will be basically correct...

...Describing and explaining it will be a major historical undertaking for a generation...

...The USSR had to divert much of its wealth to bribing the subject peoples and "standing guard over them...