Intriguing Call for Soviet Reform : Is Manifesto of ‘Good Guys’ Genuine, and Why Was it Leaked?

Trying to puzzle out what is really happening in Soviet politics has been likened to watching a wrestling match that is taking place under a blanket. You know something is going on, but it is impossible to tell who is winning--or even who is doing the wrestling.

This is the challenge facing Western Kremlin-watchers as they try to divine the significance of an intriguing document that surfaced a few days ago in Moscow.

The document was passed to the Moscow correspondents for NBC and an English newspaper, the Guardian. It purports to represent the thinking of a heretofore-unknown group within the Soviet establishment that calls itself the Movement for Socialist Renewal.

The 17-page essay declares that the Soviet Union’s economic and political system has reached a stage of crisis, and warns that the country will become a second-rate power unless widespread economic and political reforms are adopted.

The proposed economic reforms include a turn to market mechanisms in place of tight centralized control, as well as the privatization of services and consumer-goods production.

On the political side it proposes freedom of speech and press and an end to religious persecution. Most mind-boggling of all, it suggests that “alternative political organizations,” which sound like opposition political parties in all but name, be allowed to compete with the Communist Party.

The first question is whether the document is authentic or merely a ploy by hard-line elements wanting to discredit Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s modest reform efforts. Or it could be a clever disinformation scheme aimed at persuading the West that a good-guy/bad-guy struggle is going on inside the Kremlin, with good-guy Gorbachev needing Western help on arms control and other issues if he is to fend off the hard-liners.

At this point most analysts reject both explanations. They believe that the document comes from genuine dissidents, but are not convinced that the dissidents are as important as advertised.

The Guardian is persuaded that the manifesto’s authors include senior party and government officials, as well as elements of the KGB secret police. But many Western analysts doubt that officials of significant rank are involved. They suspect that the authors really are highly nationalistic intellectuals, employed perhaps in Soviet think tanks, who are deeply worried about the future of their country.

One well-placed U.S. analyst, noting that the document was dated Nov. 21, 1985, speculated that “leaking this thing to the West was an act of desperation, taken precisely because their power-sharing ideas--which they apparently consider essential to true reform--have not been taken seriously by the people in charge.”

The emergence of the manifesto may soon be forgotten--or it could prove to be an event of historic importance, akin to Nikita S. Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956 and the emergence of the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s.

The surfacing of the document came at a time when the Soviet political system was already putting out mixed signals.

Gorbachev has talked about the desirability of a new openness in the Soviet press, and to a limited extent it is happening.

One intriguing example is the public airing of public dissatisfaction with officially approved plans for a huge, ugly war memorial on the outskirts of Moscow. Another is the acknowledgement by the party-controlled press that the Soviet Union has a drug problem. Still another was the publicity given during the Communist Party Congress a few months ago to demands for an end to the system of privilege for members of the party, government and cultural elite.

Yet old habits die hard--if at all.

U.S. Ambassador Arthur A. Hartman found it necessary to lodge a sharp protest lately with two major Soviet newspapers that carried articles charging that the disease AIDS had been engineered as part of a U.S. biological-warfare program.

When the accident occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear-power plant, the Soviet press came through as an obedient instrument of the leadership--first helping to cover up the true extent of the tragedy, then striving to insulate the Kremlin from any share of the blame.

Russian-language foreign broadcasts are still jammed. The British Broadcasting Corp. reported lately that the jamming was so pervasive that the Soviets were blocking out some of their own transmissions.

The Soviet Union is quietly trying to encourage some of its most prominent emigre artists and writers to come home from America and Western Europe. They are being told that everything has changed, that artists, writers and directors are subject to less control these days.

Indeed, attacks on censorship and calls for more honesty in treatment of shortcomings in Soviet life have become staples of meetings of the state-controlled Writers’ Union. But Yegor Ligachev, the ideology chief who oversees the cultural realm, comes through as a traditional hard-liner. Last month, in Gorbachev’s presence, the outgoing head of the Writers’ Union made a grubby speech calling on writers to glorify communist “heroes” and to struggle against “ideological imperfections.”

Meanwhile, outright persecution of dissidents continues along with iron-tight controls on emigration--only 55 Jews, for example, were allowed to leave the Soviet Union in June.

Where all this will lead remains to be seen. Refreshing pressures for change are plainly visible, but so is the resistance to change. Gorbachev, whose own calls for reform fall well short of the proposals from the Movement for Socialist Renewal, made a speech in June that seemed to reflect his mounting frustration at the forces of inertia in Soviet society.

If the movement’s manifesto is authentic, the fact that its authors--who see themselves as patriots and good communists--had to leak the document to the West in order to get the Politburo’s attention is pretty good evidence that, so far, the anti-reformists are carrying the day.