Kremlin Leader’s Fresh Start : Rumbles of Change Stir Soviet Union

Like a vast, frozen Siberian river cracking and groaning with the first thaw, the Soviet Union, as it turns 70, is rumbling with the promise of change.

And what follows now in the Soviet Union could be as dangerous as a flash flood, as promising as spring or as anti-climactic as a new cold snap that freezes the river solid once more.

The program that Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev has laid out for his country calls for restructuring not only the economy but virtually every aspect of national life.

Its goal is to end a generation of national stagnation in which little except the Soviet military kept up with the West, to bring a country still using the ancient abacus into the modern world of supercomputers and industrial robots and, perhaps what is most important, to revive what is now conceded to be the tarnished dream of creating a model that other societies might find worth emulating.

“There’s the Bolshevik Revolution and there’s restructuring,” Gorbachev told a street crowd in Murmansk a few weeks ago. Restructuring--or perestroika in Russian--”is a revolution without shooting,” the Kremlin chief added, “but it’s a deep and serious one.”

Indeed, European and American analysts, once convinced that Gorbachev’s reforms amounted merely to a public relations campaign to lull the West into complacency, have changed their tune. Now they describe his as the most far-reaching peacetime program for political and social change here since the late dictator Josef Stalin introduced the first five-year plan at the end of the 1920s.

What Gorbachev has set out to do is to alter fundamentally the way in which the ruling Communist Party manages Soviet society, starting with relaxation of the rigidly centralized Stalinist economic system that has survived with little significant alteration to this day.

Instead of responding to what some central planner thinks is needed, factories have been told to rely more on the basic law of supply and demand. And there is now a place for private--or, as the Soviet authorities prefer to call it, “individual”--enterprise. The idea is to give more authority to talented professionals and entrepreneurs and less to loyal but unimaginative bureaucrats.

To effect change, Gorbachev is chipping away at some of the self-imposed barriers to Western thought that have kept this one of the world’s most isolated societies since the days of the czars.

A Fresh Start

In a way, Gorbachev is trying to start over--not in the sense of questioning the results of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, which founded the Soviet state, or by giving up on Leninism, the driving force and philosophy behind the state, but in discarding some of the worst features of the Stalinist model that came to be identified as Soviet-style socialism. He is, in essence, remaking the revolution.

“1929 was really the year of the great turn . . . like a watershed between the implementation of socialism according to Lenin and according to Stalin,” said Yuri N. Afanasyev, director of Moscow’s Institute of Historical Archives. A Gorbachev supporter, Afanasyev has been providing some of the all-important ideological underpinning for the Soviet leader’s program.

Gorbachev has made clear that this new Russian revolution will take a lot longer than the one 70 years ago, which will be celebrated Nov. 7. He has compared the test it will impose on Soviet society to the stress on the metal skin of a spacecraft re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere.

In fact, the biggest threat to Gorbachev’s program is the sheer inertia of the largest nation on Earth, with 284 million people, set in their ways and scattered over a territory 2 1/2 times the size of the United States.

Many Western analysts wonder whether the Soviet leader himself can survive the test ahead. Marshall Goldman, an American Sovietologist and Wellesley College professor who has written a book entitled “Gorbachev’s Challenge,” has predicted that the Kremlin chief will last no more than two or three more years in the face of what the U.S. analyst sees as mounting resistance to his program.

Impressive Start

Nonetheless, Gorbachev is off to an impressive start.

Since he came to power less than three years ago, the Kremlin leader has managed to substantially alter the traditionally forbidding image of his country abroad. The change is vital in order to ease international tensions and gain the breathing space and Western technology he needs to carry through his reforms.

A Gallup poll commissioned by Times Mirror Co. in early September found that 40% of Americans regard Gorbachev favorably, the highest positive rating for any Soviet leader in more than 40 years. By contrast, the late Nikita S. Khrushchev, who presided over an ill-fated, earlier attempt at de-Stalinization and who visited the United States in 1959 and returned the next year to attend the U.N. General Assembly session in New York, never received higher than a 10% favorable rating.

In Western Europe, Gorbachev is more popular than President Reagan, and he, not the U.S. President, is generally credited with being the innovative force behind progress toward elimination of short- and medium-range nuclear weapons. Final agreement had been expected at a Reagan-Gorbachev summit in the United States later this year, but many Western analysts now believe that a summit is unlikely after talks in Moscow on Friday between the Soviet leader and Secretary of State George P. Shultz ended inconclusively. This could alter Gorbachev’s standing in future polls.

At home, change is more difficult, and it goes more slowly. But, in addition to a start on economic reforms, the energetic, 56-year-old Soviet leader has delighted the Soviet intelligentsia by allowing publication of once forbidden plays, poetry and prose and the release of films previously blocked by the censors. Ordinary citizens more concerned with better food, clothing and shelter say, however, that little has changed for the better in their daily lives. And many who used to find recreation in a weekly bottle or two of vodka are angry over teetotaler Gorbachev’s crackdown on drinking.

Extensive Travels

Gorbachev has traveled more extensively than any of his predecessors except Khrushchev, stumping this enormous land of 11 time zones, from Vladivostok in the Far East to Riga on the shores of the Baltic. Along the way he has pressed ordinary citizens for their opinions.

Should the Soviet Union resume nuclear testing now that the United States had done so, a young man asked the Soviet leader during a stroll in the Baltic city of Paide earlier this year.

“What is your view?” Gorbachev shot back.

“I cannot say,” the reluctant man replied.

“Well, what? How does it look to you?” the Soviet leader repeated.

“I think that we could wait a bit longer, and then see how they respond,” the young man finally offered.

Gorbachev’s message to his countrymen is that in order to unleash the latent human potential necessary to make national restructuring a success, each citizen must undergo a “personal perestroika. “ In that, he is calling for fundamental change in a national psychology whose deep roots are as much Russian as they are Soviet.

There is a cultural fear of spontaneity here dating back to the czars, a tendency to see Western-style individual freedom as the first, inevitable step toward anarchy.

“This is our Russian misfortune--to look up to the bosses, to try to see whether they like it or not, how they’ll react to this or that,” said Anatoly I. Strelyanyi, a writer and member of the editorial board of the literary monthly Novy Mir. He spoke last May at a meeting with leaders of Moscow State University’s Young Communist League.

Monopoly on Power

To break the pattern, Gorbachev calls for glasnost, usually translated as openness but more literally meaning publicity or public airing. It has come to stand for a visibly more relaxed national style, less prepackaged ideology and more public debate--particularly in the press--meant to give people a sense of participating in national decision-making.

That is not to say Gorbachev is ready to give up the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.

“The point at issue is, certainly, not any breakup of our political system,” he has said. Rather, he said, he hopes to “breathe new life” into it.

Nonetheless, Gorbachev knows that in tampering with the mechanisms of party control, he is operating in politically dangerous territory. He has proceeded cautiously, unveiling his program layer by layer, like a man peeling an onion, and never letting on exactly how far he thinks he can go. “If he’s smart, we’ll never know exactly where his limits are,” commented a senior Western official who requested anonymity.

Chosen to succeed the late Konstantin U. Chernenko in March, 1985, reportedly by a one-vote edge of the then nine-member Politburo, Gorbachev’s first task was to consolidate his position in the Communist Party leadership, getting rid of potential opponents and bringing on board new men he could trust.

In that, he has done well by Moscow standards. Eight of 13 full members and four of six non-voting “candidate” members of the current Politburo have been promoted since he took over. Nine of the 11 Central Committee secretaries, so vital to control over the day-to-day workings of the Communist Party apparatus, are also new since then, as are about two-thirds of all government ministers.

But to say Gorbachev is now out of political danger would be foolhardy. As Soviet President Andrei A. Gromyko once remarked about the Kremlin leadership: “Moscow is a little like the Bermuda Triangle. Every now and then one of us disappears.”

It’s a lesson certainly not lost on Gorbachev, whose formative political experiences, like those of a striking number of his closest advisers and supporters, were during the liberalizing “thaw” of the 1950s and early 1960s, when Khrushchev released unknown thousands of political prisoners and relaxed the censorship system.

Those experiences, plus their superior formal education, put this group of Soviet policy-makers in a different generation psychologically, as well as chronologically, from those who had gone before.

As a Young Communist League official at the time of the pivotal 20th Soviet Party Congress in 1956, Gorbachev found that one of his responsibilities was to explain the so-called secret speech in which Khrushchev for the first time revealed some of Stalin’s crimes.

Khrushchev ultimately made enough political mistakes that the late Leonid I. Brezhnev was able, in October, 1964, to lead a successful challenge for the party leadership, relegating the colorful old de-Stalinizer to political oblivion for the rest of his life.

If opposition to Gorbachev begins to coalesce, many Western analysts say the most likely magnet is Yegor K. Ligachev, the No. 2 man in the Politburo and the guardian of Communist ideology. He has already complained that “the waves of restructuring and renewal have also washed up some scum and debris.”

20 Million Deaths

Ligachev has objected particularly to what he sees as too much emphasis in the party-controlled press on the sins of the 1930s, when Stalin’s forced collectivization and brutal repressions took a disastrous toll. Western historians estimate that the famines that followed collectivization and the mass arrests of the 1930s that filled a nationwide system of forced labor camps cost 20 million lives--as many as the Soviet Union says it lost in World War II.

Fyodor Burlatsky, a journalist and consultant to the party’s Central Committee, estimated in an interview that one-third of the people actively support the Soviet leader’s program, another one-third are against it and the balance are taking a wait-and-see position.

“We’ve got to move step by step,” he said. “Haste can lead to most serious results.”

A Western analyst said he believes that support within the Central Committee for Gorbachev may break down in about the same percentages. Thus, a party conference that Gorbachev has called for next June 28, at which he may try to alter the makeup of the Central Committee, could be critical to his hold on power and his freedom to move ahead.

To hear the Soviet leader tell it, there is no time to waste. When he took over, he said, the country was already on the verge of crisis.

Low Living Standards

During the 70 years since the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet Union has changed from a backward nation with a largely illiterate peasantry into a literate, predominately urban, military superpower--but one still saddled with some of the lowest living standards in the industrialized world.

In recent years, moreover, economic growth rates have slumped badly, and perhaps even more alarmingly, the technology gap with the West has begun to widen dramatically.

Gorbachev’s reforms are at least partly motivated by concern that this gap threatens the Soviet Union’s viability as a great power. As he told a crowd in Estonia last February: “They (the West) think they will be able to devise exotic kinds of weapons which will give them the advantage. . . . We cannot permit ourselves to fall behind. The capitalists will become more insolent. They will try to order us about.”

Commented a senior Western diplomat in Moscow: “They realized that the economic and administrative policies of the past had failed to keep them on the cutting edge of technology. And they are wise enough to realize that the cutting edge of technology is where national power is for the future.”

In the 1920s and 1930s, when Stalin supervised a crash industrialization, what mattered was quantity, not quality, the Western diplomat added. “Suddenly they became the world’s biggest producer of steel and oil--but nobody gave a damn any more. Because (now) it’s not how much steel you have but how you put hundreds of thousands of semiconductors on a little chip of silicon and whether you learn to use the products of that to the advantage of your economy.”

“We are lagging behind the world level (of industrial technology) by 15 to 20 years, in my opinion,” said journalist and party consultant Burlatsky. “The same is true for living standards.”

The enormous military buildup during Brezhnev’s 18 years in power became an increasingly painful drain, drawing off resources that could otherwise have been used to provide more for Soviet consumers.

Inadequate Food Supplies

Today, rationing of such basics as meat, butter, cheese and sugar is common, while a quarter of the nation’s food supply rots between field and consumer because of inadequate transportation and storage facilities. Even good tea, once a staple of Russian life, is in short supply, and such simple, everyday conveniences as paper clips and staples are virtually impossible to find.

The system of cheap state housing, free medical care and other social services--the basis upon which the Soviet Union has long proclaimed the superiority of socialism--is now conceded to be in disarray. The government has proved unable to keep up with basic demand, much less the rising expectations of a growing and increasingly sophisticated public.

The Soviet health-care system--a principal measure of any nation’s success in serving the most basic needs of the population--is in critical condition. Life expectancy has fallen since the 1960s, infant mortality by official figures is nearly three times that in the United States and the Soviet Union is the only industrialized power that has failed to wipe out such common childhood diseases as diphtheria and whooping cough, despite the availability of vaccines for half a century.

Health Minister Yevgeny I. Chazov provided a powerful image of the system’s deterioration when he described to a Soviet television interviewer earlier this year a complicated operation in which the patient needed an unexpected blood transfusion.

‘Fact of Our Life’

There was no blood bank, and the only person around with the correct blood type was the anesthesiologist. “He held out his arm and his blood was transfused to the patient while with the other hand he controlled the anesthetic,” Chazov said. It was not an isolated example, he added. “This is a fact of our life, you understand.”

The social toll of divorce, alcoholism and, increasingly, drug abuse, is high and rising. And it comes on top of the debilitating remnants of fear from decades of political repression.

In a moving letter to the Communist Party newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, a 49-year-old father identified only as A. Shcherbakov wrote about his painful awakening to the ways in which he had passed along his fear to his 21-year-old daughter.

Frustrated by a recalcitrant bureaucracy when she sought help with a minor problem, she had shouted over the telephone at a low-level official. Thinking about it later, she got worried. “Nothing will happen to me, will it, for saying that over the telephone?” she asked her father.

“I was caught, I was unmasked,” Shcherbakov wrote to the newspaper. During all those years that he, like so many others, had said one thing but done another, his daughter had seen through the duplicity to the fear, he said.

“No one ever said anything to me about this. I was just asked a question: ‘Nothing will happen to me, will it?’ And everything became clear. We ‘ ‘60s people’ are cowards. And our children are cowards.”

‘Massive Apathy’

Summing up the country’s social ills in an astonishingly candid appraisal later endorsed publicly by Gorbachev himself, economist Nikolai P. Shmelev wrote last June that Soviet society is crippled by “massive apathy, indifference, theft, disrespect for honest labor, . . . alcoholism and idleness.”

“We must call things by their proper names,” Shmelev urged. “Foolishness as foolishness, incompetence as incompetence, Stalinism in action as Stalinism in action. Perhaps we will lose our ideological virginity, but it now exists only in the fairy-tale editorials of the newspaper.”

In a similarly self-critical vein, Alexander Bovin, senior political commentator for the government newspaper Izvestia, wrote last July that socialism is in trouble in parts of the Third World and that Communist parties in the capitalist countries lack widespread support.

“There are a number of reasons for this,” Bovin added, “and the failures, contradictions, crisis phenomena and stagnation phenomena in the development of the Soviet Union, the other socialist countries and world socialism in general doubtless figure among them. Socialism has not yet been able to acquire the force of example of which Lenin spoke.”

Regime’s Somber Mood

A senior Soviet official summed up the regime’s somber mood on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the revolution at a recent, private seminar for Sovietologists in Western Europe.

“Without perestroika, there is no future for the Soviet Union--only yesterdays,” he said. “We don’t want to live this way any more.”

According to Viktor G. Afanasyev, editor in chief of the party newspaper Pravda, the mood is more in keeping with Lenin’s view. “Anniversaries are a time to take stock of what needs to be done,” Afanasyev quoted the venerated revolutionary as saying.

Significant Resistance

What needs to be done and what Gorbachev wants--or is able--to do may be different things. Resistance to his program is significant and, by his own admission, growing. And the potential pitfalls ahead are numerous.

So far as outsiders can judge, the Kremlin leader appears to have the backing, if not the total confidence, of two important pillars of political power here--the military and the KGB security police.

However, there are probably some in the military opposed to any diversion of resources to the civilian economy. And the KGB will no doubt be watching for any evidence that the line has been breached between glasnost and outright opposition to Communist Party rule.

Old Promises

The very proletariat in whose name the party rules is a major source of worry. Some Soviet citizens are still angry at Gorbachev for sharply limiting alcohol sales. Others are simply skeptical of his reforms. They have heard exhortations and promises many times before. More concretely, millions face a significant drop in living standards as Gorbachev’s economic reforms go into force. Pay envelopes have already shrunk by 2% to 10% in some enterprises where output has plummeted under the pressure of new, minimum quality standards. Economists such as Shmelev have said price increases are inevitable to reduce staggering government subsidies on everything from public transportation to bread.

There have been reports of scattered work stoppages, ranging from the huge Kama River truck plant to Moscow’s famous Children’s World toy and clothing store, as employees walked off their jobs in protest over pay cuts and other grievances.

Wages Take Priority

“For the ordinary worker, it’s not a top priority whether he can criticize his manager or not,” commented journalist Burlatsky on the reforms. “It’s important that he can help elect his manager, but that’s still not top priority. For him the most important things are wages, working conditions and having available the goods to buy. So far in this sphere we have very little change.”

Another key source of resistance is the pervasive party and government bureaucracy, whose ranks the Gorbachev reforms would slash by 30% or more if carried through.

“We (the reformers) fight for abstractions--democracy, truth, freedom,” commented Vitaly Korotich, editor of the weekly Ogonyok magazine and a leading practitioner of Gorbachev’s glasnost policies. “They (the opponents) fight for quite normal, concrete things, like their own privileges.”

Slow strangulation by what economist Shmelev called the “unbelievable inertia” of the existing system is probably the biggest threat to Gorbachev’s perestroika as well. But potential flash points exist that could bring it to a more sudden end.

Predictions of Violence

Korotich predicted that opponents of reform from the party and state bureaucracy will try to provoke violence.

“They will try to organize clashes--maybe with the police, maybe even involving the army. . . . They want to show that democratic changes are leading to counterrevolution. Their message is: ‘If you remove us, then immediately horrible counterrevolutionaries will burst in.’ They don’t want anyone to see that it is possible to live without them.”

The Ogonyok editor added that this “middle-level leadership” will play on dissatisfaction at “the bottom of society . . . (which) will provide the foundation for any kind of demonstrations. They don’t know how to work, but they know how to smash windows.”

Others warn of possible trouble among the scores of national minorities in this multi-ethnic country, which straddles two continents and where more than 200 distinct languages and dialects are spoken.

Violence broke out earlier this year when Gorbachev replaced the regional party chief in Kazakhstan--a Kazakh--with an ethnic Russian. Demonstrators in the Baltics staged protest memorials last summer on the anniversary of the pact between Stalin and Adolf Hitler that led to the Soviet takeover of the formerly independent Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Disparate Republics

There is also an important economic aspect to the nationalities question, a concern that under economic reform the rich could tend to get richer while the poor get poorer. This would be particularly dangerous in Soviet Central Asia, which has the country’s fastest growing population and lowest living standards.

“We must be very careful to avoid serious disparities among the different republics,” conceded Burlatsky, the party consultant. Nationalism, he said, is “the most dangerous phenomenon that can occur in our situation. It’s what we are most afraid of.”

Similarly, the Kremlin leader must be constantly alert to the repercussions of his policies in Eastern Europe--a perpetual tinderbox where the Soviet Union’s postwar hegemony has been challenged periodically with uprisings in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and Poland (1980-81).

A Western intelligence source, who requested anonymity, called Eastern Europe Gorbachev’s “acid test. You can’t have perestroika in the Soviet Union and nothing in Eastern Europe. It won’t work. . . . But once he releases the forces of reform in Eastern Europe, they can run faster than in the Soviet Union. And then the pressures in Eastern Europe could reach the point where they can’t be controlled any more.”

Faced with the option of intervening or losing control of one of its East Bloc satellites, Gorbachev would assuredly intervene, this source added. But “once he intervenes militarily to crush one of the East European countries, his credibility is gone. It’s shattered to pieces.”

Years in the Making

At a minimum, summed up the former dean of Soviet dissidents, Andrei D. Sakharov, perestroika will take several years. “That’s at best, if there’s no disruption,” he said.

The situation is dangerous, he added, and it promises to remain so for some time. “I have heard that in the West, they’re saying there will be three difficult years ahead,” Sakharov said in an interview. “I am afraid this period will be longer.”

But according to Gorbachev, the Soviet Union at 70, has run out of alternatives to drastic reform.

“We need to make this decisive turn because we just don’t have the choice of another way,” he told a plenary meeting of the party leadership earlier this year. “We must not retreat and do not have anywhere to retreat to.”