TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/121090/1210007.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 4KB | 88 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 63

AMERICA ABROAD

The General Secretary in His Labyrinth


By Strobe Talbott


    It is harder for a traveler in the Soviet Union to find
someone who has anything good to say about Mikhail Gorbachev
than it was for Diogenes the Cynic, in his wanderings through
the streets of Athens in broad daylight with a lantern, to find
an honest man. Gorbachev's unpopularity can be understood only
as part of what is happening to the country as a whole, no
matter who tries to govern from the Kremlin.

    Gorbachev is blamed for the crisis in the economy. But the
Soviet system for providing its citizens with the basics of
life has always been a cruel and hopeless mess. Perestroika has
been largely a matter of restructuring a ruin, a contradiction
in terms that makes for a sorry spectacle. Yet the world is,
as never before, invited to watch. Glasnost has led to a kind
of reverse, and perverse, Potemkinism, a post-Soviet tendency
to portray the situation as even worse than it is.

    Take the scene of empty shelves in Moscow grocery stores
that appears on TV news programs almost every evening. At least
some of the food so conspicuously missing in state outlets is
on sale but off camera, from private vendors at higher prices
a few blocks way. That's what a transition to a market economy
is all about.

    Russians have said there are really only two words in their
language: ura (hurrah) and uvy (alas). After generations of
being forced to cheer, 286 million people now seem to be
lamenting in unison. What's more, they are booing the man who
empowered them to do so. Gorbachev may deserve criticism for
having not yet abolished the State Planning Commission, and
numerous central ministries are still obstructing reform. But
he has unquestionably dismantled the Ministry of Fear. For that
he gets astonishingly little thanks.

    Beyond the specific complaints against Gorbachev, there is
a deeper grievance. Because of both the position and the
convictions he holds, he is identified with the very idea of
a Soviet Union that stretches from Tallinn on the Baltic to
Vladivostok on the Pacific. That idea is finished. The U.S.S.R.
was kept together by force; it now has the freedom to come
apart.

    Even those few of Gorbachev's countrymen who have a kind
word for him usually qualify it with some comment to the effect
that he is yesterday's man. As usual, they exaggerate. But even
if Gorbachev is, before our eyes, passing into history, he can
be consoled by the company he will keep.

    Gabriel Garcia Marquez's new novel, The General in His
Labyrinth, is about the last days of Simon Bolivar, but it can
also be read as allegory. Having cast off the shackles of
empire, tried to found a rudimentary democracy and earned the
title of the Liberator, Bolivar dies in defeat. What he wants
most is a single South American republic reaching from Caracas
to Quito. But the passions of the revolution he led give way
to those of separatism that he cannot control. His "golden
dream of continental unity" becomes an embarrassing abstraction
to his people, who begin following regional leaders instead.

    "Let's go," Bolivar tells his closest aide. "No one loves
us here." Terminally ill, fearful of assassination, mocked on
the streets, Bolivar sets off on a mule toward self-imposed
exile.

    "It's destiny's joke," says one of his few remaining
loyalists. "It seems we planted the ideal of independence so
deep that now these countries are trying to win their
independence from each other." Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and
Ecuador go their own way.

    So will Estonia, Latvia, Georgia and the rest. But even if
Gorbachev, like Bolivar, fails as a unifier, he too will be
remembered above all as a liberator.