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Text File | 1992-09-30 | 10.0 KB | 207 lines

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                                          ┘<              WORLD, Page 56

REVOLUTIONS

Farewell . . . and Hail


Even though events overtook the last Soviet President and the
country he led, his place in history is guaranteed

By BRUCE W. NELAN -- Reported by Christopher Ogden/Washington and
Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow


     Mikhail Gorbachev need feel no resentment when he hears
himself described as a transitional leader. As Winston Churchill
might have observed: some leader, some transition. Gorbachev
presided over the dissolution of a truly evil empire, brought
freedom to hundreds of millions of oppressed people and lifted
the threat of a cataclysmic nuclear war. The wonder was not that
the President of the Soviet Union, a fervent socialist to the
end, managed his revolution well but that he launched it at all.

     In his resignation speech last week, Gorbachev conceded
that he had not been a complete success. He was convinced that
the reforms he began in 1985 were "historically correct." But,
he added, "there were mistakes made that could have been
avoided, and many of the things that we did could have been done
better." His severe gaze and impenetrable self-assurance hardly
wavered as he refused to admit that he and his office had become
irrelevant. He could not even bring himself to say he was
resigning; he had decided, he said, to "discontinue my
activities" out of "considerations of principle."

     To a large extent, though not in the sense he implied, his
firmly held principles did lead to his departure from the
Kremlin. As a reformer, Gorbachev was a phenomenon, an almost
inexplicable product of the communist establishment who rose to
its pinnacle. But he was never able to rise above himself, his
socialist faith and his dedication to the Union -- always the
Union -- of Soviet Socialist Republics. His ability to go only
so far, and no further, made it inevitable that he would be the
initiator, not the final arbiter, of democratic change in the
former Soviet empire. Said the daily Izvestia: "He did all he
could."

     Despite Gorbachev's best efforts, the Soviet Union no
longer exists. It was swept away by the forces he set in motion
and then could not control. Like his own office, the remnants
of Soviet government were shunted aside or taken over by
Russia, the successor state to the U.S.S.R.

     Of all Gorbachev's admirers in the West, George Bush
supported him longest and most warmly. Only after the Soviet
leader's resignation on Christmas Day did Bush acknowledge that
12 new countries (not counting the three Baltic states) and an
11-member Commonwealth of Independent States had been created
on the soil of the former Soviet Union. He granted recognition
to all 12 and announced that diplomatic relations would be
opened immediately between the U.S. and Russia, Ukraine,
Belorussia, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia and Armenia. The other six --
Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldavia, Tadzhikistan, Turkmenistan and
Uzbekistan -- could expect diplomatic ties once they committed
themselves to "responsible security policies and democratic
principles."

     By that Bush meant that the new states must promise to
control nuclear weapons tightly, adhere to the arms-control and
troop-limitation treaties signed by the Soviet Union and advance
human rights and market economies. Governments around the world
quickly began announcing their recognition of the 12 new states,
even as they wondered what kind of future their Commonwealth,
established on only the barest sketch of a treaty signed last
month in Alma-Ata, capital of Kazakhstan, will be able to build
for itself. The Commonwealth members, with Russia and Ukraine
in the lead, are already wrangling over how to divide up the
massive Soviet armies, navies and air forces and the central
government property. There is increasing resentment of Russia's
decision to move quickly to decontrol prices and of Ukraine's
determination to introduce its own currency.

     International concern was heightened last week by heavy
fighting in the center of Tbilisi, capital of Georgia, where
political rivals of the high-handed President Zviad Gamsakhurdia
were trying to blast him out of government headquarters. More
than 50 people were killed and 200 wounded. Surprisingly, the
fire fight did not spread from the downtown area of the city,
and most of Tbilisi went about its normal business, apparently
out of exhaustion or indifference.

     Possibly because it was preoccupied with its internal
power struggle, Georgia moved only last week to join the new
Commonwealth. Yeltsin told Gamsakhurdia that his country will
not be admitted until it restores peace and respect for human
rights. Though the West was concerned that such violence could
become the norm in other former Soviet republics, recent
flare-ups have been limited to ethnically divided Moldavia and
the Caucasian states of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Most
of the population, says Russian sociologist Yuri Levada, has
proved -- for now, at least -- to be "more democratic, more
restrained and more peaceful than many expected."

     Fears that nuclear weapons might be misused are also
widespread. Though Yeltsin is trying to be reassuring,
ambiguities remain over the control and dismantling of these
weapons in the treaty signed by the four republics where the
strategic missile forces are based: Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia
and Kazakhstan.

     After Gorbachev handed over custody of the nuclear arsenal
and the codes that permit strategic missiles to be launched,
Yeltsin declared himself sole inheritor of "the button," as he
called the code box. "There will be only one button," he said.
"The other republics are not going to have any other buttons."
Even so, he said, he had agreed with the Presidents of the
other three republics where the missiles are still located that
any decision to use them would have to be made unanimously by
the four.

     Apprehension about the uncertainty that fogs the former
U.S.S.R. is not misplaced. At the same time, the world should
remind itself that coexistence with a unitary Soviet state for
seven decades was not anxiety-free, and that its deconstruction
is not necessarily a bad thing. Though Gorbachev insisted that
he intended to retain the union and advance freedom, there was
no way he could do both. In the face of the republics'
passionate rejection of the central government, the Communist
Party and Russian domination, Moscow could have held the union
together only with armed force.

     But use of military force would have doomed Gorbachev's
reforms and any hope for democracy. To be democratic, the
republics had to gain their freedom. And now that they are
independent, they are also free to re-create the institutions
they believe they need to coordinate defense and economic
policies. In that experiment, they have no room for a union, a
central government -- or a Gorbachev.

     The overwhelming rejection of Gorbachev in the new
Commonwealth -- still surprising to many Westerners -- is due
mostly to his unfulfilled promises. He spoke constantly of
democracy but clung to the power and bureaucracy of the
Communist Party, which he headed long after it had been revealed
as the main obstacle to perestroika, his plan for restructuring.
Even when the party resorted to violence against him in the
aborted coup last August, Gorbachev publicly pledged his loyalty
to it. That was the moment at which Yeltsin succeeded to
Gorbachev's authority and pushed him to close down the party.

     Gorbachev also talked repeatedly about granting
"sovereignty" to the union's republics, yet he never devised a
form of qualified freedom that had any appeal for the
nationalist forces rising in all of the republics. When the
three Baltic states insisted on regaining their separate status,
he was even willing to look the other way last January as
security forces used tanks and guns to suppress the independence
movements.

     Most dismaying of all to the majority of Soviet people,
Gorbachev did not deliver on his promise that perestroika would
bring efficiency to the socialist system and prosperity to the
country. Instead, as he admitted last week, "the old system fell
apart even before the new system began to work." In fact, there
was no new system. In September 1990 he announced he favored
the so-called 500-Day Plan for a sudden switch to a free-market
system. But then he lost his nerve and reneged, opting for a
"compromise" between dramatic change and another round of
tentative tinkering with the gargantuan central-planning
apparatus.

     On the day of his resignation, Gorbachev was still talking
about finding some blend of central planning and market
economics that he called a "multi-tier economy" with "an
equality of all forms of ownership." No such halfway house
exists, and his protracted attempt to find one left the
irrational centralized system in chaos, with no replacement in
sight. Ordinary citizens paid the price for his procrastination.

     Russians are now waiting for their new government to
deliver Yeltsin's version of reform. As a first step, most
prices are to be freed from government control this week,
although the cost of basics like bread, milk, salt, medicine and
vodka will still be regulated. The results may be no more
satisfactory than those of perestroika because many state-run
monopolies, including wholesale and retail suppliers, retain
their paralyzing grip on the distribution system. With
hyperinflation a real threat, much of the population feels
menaced by poverty as well as hunger this winter.

     Though deprivation is part of the inheritance Gorbachev
leaves his people, Bush rightly observed that "his legacy
guarantees him an honored place in history." Two years ago, TIME
named Gorbachev its Man of the Decade. That decade was the
1980s, and the new world he initiated has now overtaken him. But
the title is his to keep. He is living proof that it is people
who make history, not the other way around.