Soviet Hopes, Fears Stirred by Gorbachev : Citizens’ Views of New Leader Run the Gamut

To Western television viewers, Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s appearance in a long and often-contentious news conference with foreign journalists in Paris may have seemed a natural, if novel, step for a modern Soviet leader.

However, for the millions of Soviet viewers who sat transfixed through the 70-minute news conference Oct. 4, in which Gorbachev repeatedly batted away questions about Moscow’s record on human rights, this was a unique experience--the first time a Kremlin leader has ever opened himself to unrestrained questioning as the Soviet nation watched on television.

Reactions from the Soviet public were as varied as they were intense to this most visible leader since Nikita S. Khrushchev.

“He really told them,” a modestly educated blue-collar worker said proudly. Like most ordinary Russians, this man has strong patriotic feelings, an awe of authority and a tendency to regard dissidents and people who want to emigrate as traitors.

‘Impudent Servant’

“He slapped the cheeks of those Western journalists just like a nobleman would deal with an impudent servant,” the man told a friend at work the next day. He added that at one point in the broadcast, his 70-year-old father leaped from his chair and shouted exuberantly at the black-and-white image of Gorbachev on the screen, “He’s a young Lenin, the new Lenin!”

Across the city, a group of intellectuals, including several Jewish scientists barred from emigrating, reacted very differently. Only a few nights before, in a tamer interview in the Kremlin with French television reporters, Gorbachev had said that Jews with access to state secrets could leave after waiting five to 10 years. Many in fact have waited much longer, and in any case this statement was deleted from published versions of the Kremlin interview.

“The Americans especially gave it to him right between the eyes,” one woman said after watching the Paris news conference. “But his reaction was terribly upsetting for all of us. There was very little honesty in his answers. You could just see the peasant cunning written on his face.”

Between these two extremes, the exuberance and the foreboding voiced by two very different Russians, lies a broad pool of conflicting emotions that Gorbachev has begun to stir in the Soviet public in the early phase of his leadership. Six months after he assumed power last March, the 54-year-old Gorbachev has aroused hopes and fears in this usually docile and complacent nation of an intensity not seen since the earthy, autocratic Khrushchev held sway 30 years ago.

Impressed by Contrast

Many ordinary, blue-collar Russians, like many Westerners, seem impressed mainly by the contrast between the relatively young Gorbachev, a man of obvious energy and intellect, and the succession of old, sick and embarrassingly feeble leaders who preceded him. For those deeply conservative Russians who still hold up Josef Stalin as the ideal, iron-willed leader they believe the Soviet Union needs--and there are many who do--Gorbachev shows great promise.

A teacher, whose neighbors are mostly factory workers, said: “Simple people hope that somehow life will be better, that there will be more order. That is the magic word, order. To them, order doesn’t mean mass purges. It means drunks off the streets and polite store clerks. They hope Gorbachev can make this possible.”

Sense of Anticipation

Better-educated Russians, the intellectuals and the white-collar workers, are under no illusion that the traditional Russian prescription of more discipline will cure the Soviet Union’s economic backwardness and its social problems. Yet even among skeptical intellectuals, who have expressed little faith in recent years in the leadership’s ability to rouse the country from its economic and cultural stagnation, Gorbachev has kindled a palpable sense of anticipation, even excitement, though often it is tempered with trepidation.

“On the positive side, we have never had a leader like this,” a young intellectual in an elite position said. “He is intelligent, young, energetic and obviously well educated. But who can say what the future holds with Gorbachev? How he will develop? We can only say that he will probably be with us for a long time. Reactions to Gorbachev are not simple. You don’t find one person excited, optimistic, and another one fearful. You see the same attitudes in one individual. They are mixed.”

Some intellectuals, not all of whom hold dissident views, fear that proletarian expectations of a Stalinesque leader may prove to be all too accurate, given Gorbachev’s close ties with the late Soviet leader and head of the KGB, Yuri V. Andropov.

Recent interviews with a variety of middle-class Muscovites indicate that a group of at least equal size is more concerned that Gorbachev may move too quickly to impose economic or social reforms, thereby unleashing latent forces in Soviet society with consequences that cannot be foreseen.

On the other hand, there is concern that if Gorbachev fails to satisfy the hopes and expectations he has begun to feed, the resulting disillusionment with the leadership--or with the Soviet political system--will be deep, painful and prolonged.

A murmur of impatience is already being heard from some Moscow intellectuals. Gorbachev is apparently preparing to unveil an economic program at the ritual party congress next February. In the meantime, in speeches from Leningrad and Minsk to the virgin lands in Kazakhstan, he has limited himself to cataloguing the nation’s economic ills and exhorting Soviet citizens to work harder and show more enthusiasm for innovation.

‘Starting to Repeat Himself’

“He’s starting to repeat himself,” a classical musician said. “People are starting to say, ‘Six months, and all we’ve got is an anti-alcohol campaign.’ ”

Fears of a turn toward Stalinist rule stem in part from a series of cryptic evocations of the dictator that have appeared in the state-controlled press since last spring. Since May, for example, two articles in the press have deviated from customary practice by mentioning Stalin favorably not just as the supreme wartime leader but as a just and decisive prewar leader who encouraged personal initiative and the introduction of new techniques in the economy.

Gorbachev himself appeared to borrow phrases from the early rhetoric of Stalin in a speech Sept. 21 celebrating the 50th anniversary of the “Stakhanovite” movement. The movement was named for Alexei G. Stakhanov, a sturdy Ukrainian miner who set a national record for coal production in 1935, and almost overnight became a symbol of the ideal Soviet worker.

No Mention of Stalin

Gorbachev, of course, did not mention Stalin in his televised speech but, like Stalin, he recalled Stakhanov (who died an embittered alcoholic in 1977) as a “symbol of initiative, a symbol of the struggle for everything front-ranking and against what is obsolete and outmoded.”

“Particularly akin to our times,” Gorbachev said, “are the indomitable spirit of innovation of the pioneer Stakhanovites, their striving to get the most out of their equipment and their boldness in breaking with outmoded standards and psychological habits.”

More ominous, in the view of some intellectuals, is a passing reference to the mass party purges of the 1930s in a September issue of Kommunist, the party’s leading theoretical journal. In justifying the current campaign to weed out corrupt and incompetent bureaucrats from the party and government, a Kommunist editorial noted that “some readers are asking us why in the past there were mass purges, but now they have been dropped. It would seem that this is a more effective method for getting rid of those . . . whose behavior denigrates the high title of a Communist.”

1939 Party Congress

The editorial goes on to assure its readers that mass purges have been abandoned “for a number of weighty reasons.” For details, readers are referred to resolutions of the 19th party congress of March, 1939, at which Stalin presided. The resolutions, without mentioning the death or imprisonment of millions of innocent people, said simply that mass purges had served their purpose and were no longer considered necessary or “effective . . . against hostile elements insinuating themselves into party ranks.”

These evocations of Stalinist times may reflect nothing more sinister than an effort by the new leadership to co-opt and pacify Stalin’s many admirers in Soviet society. But to many Russians, who are accustomed to reading between the lines, the mere mention of mass purges in a party journal is an ominous signal.

Still Admired

“I’m really afraid of the turn our leadership is taking,” said a middle-age linguist who looks to Gorbachev’s roots in the Stavropol region of southern Russia, just north of the Caucasus mountains. “This is one of the areas where Stalin is still admired. Just two or three years ago you could even see his picture in public buses. And Gorbachev grew up there, his family is there, he still visits them.”

On the other hand, a lawyer who until recently despaired of any improvement in the Soviet economy rejects as absurd such fears of Stalin reincarnate. “They are completely different men, the times have changed, the Soviet people have changed, and the world would not permit it,” he said with conviction.

He said his greatest hope, which is shared by most of his friends, is that a confident and vigorous Gorbachev will achieve a breakthrough in relations with the United States at the November meeting with President Reagan in Geneva. Only under the conditions of an arms agreement and the beginning of a rapprochement with America, he said, will the Soviet leadership allow itself to divert resources from the military to the threadbare civilian economy.

“There was a time when our foreign policy and our domestic policy could be kept separate,” the lawyer said. “But now our economic problems are so deep that they are completely interdependent. If Reagan chooses both guns and butter, we can afford to choose only one. And I’m afraid it will be guns.”

A Modern Czar

His greatest fear, he said, is that Gorbachev will prove to be the modern counterpart of Czar Alexander I, the grandson of Catherine the Great, who is remembered as a relatively humane and liberal intellectual. The comparison, also suggested by a Soviet historian, springs to Russian minds because Alexander is best remembered for his failed attempts at social and political reforms. His failure led disillusioned members of the nobility to organize the first Russian revolutionary movement. It too, ended in disaster, with the abortive Decembrist coup of 1825.

Alexander’s experience taught that “if you give people a little more, give them better lives, even a little democracy, they will demand still more,” the lawyer said, and added: “The appetite grows. Unless it is carefully controlled, who knows where it could lead?”

Yet, the lawyer insisted, given time and more stable relations with the United States, there is a chance that Gorbachev may succeed at least in modernizing the economy.

“You must think of our economy as a dilapidated car,” he said. “The wheels are shot, the engine hardly runs, the steering mechanism is all askew. But at least we’ve finally got an intelligent driver behind the wheel. I’d say his chances of getting somewhere are 50-50.”