‘Revolution Without Bullets’

A month from now a special Soviet Communist Party conference will convene in Moscow to consider the most extraordinary proposals for internal political change since the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. The reform plan approved the other day by the policy-making Central Committee and forwarded to the party conference would for the first time significantly diminish the party’s control over daily affairs, thus reducing its monopoly on power. It would also for the first time limit the terms in office of all elected party leaders, from General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev down to the lowest official in the most remote province. Gorbachev describes the reform package as “a revolution without bullets.” Revolutionary it certainly is, but how successful it will be is still far too early to determine.

The doubt arises not from what the party conference is expected to do--almost certainly it will endorse the plan--but from what happens once the changes are put into effect. Gorbachev and his fellow reformers have already run head first into the reality of stubborn resistance to their efforts to force greater economic efficiency while modestly liberalizing social and political life. Although perestroika seems to have general popular support, popular sentiment in Russia has always counted for little. The strongest opponents of change remain the officials who know that their incompetence, corruption or ideological conservatism are likely to cost them their jobs if the Gorbachev reforms can be made to stick. Their efforts to sabotage those reforms aren’t likely to end with next month’s party conference.

Behind the reform effort is the too-long-delayed recognition that the centralized control exercised through the party has produced intolerable inefficiencies in Soviet life. And so the party’s power would be markedly devolved and dispersed, while party officials would be held to strict new standards of accountability. To try to prevent the thinking of the governing class from becoming fossilized, competition for elective party offices would be encouraged, while officials would be limited to serving two five-year terms unless--here the Politburo has taken care to provide for itself--an official won the votes of 75% of his colleagues in a secret ballot. This is not quite the Western ideal of democracy, but it would be a major step away from what the Soviet Union has always known.

There is little question about Gorbachev’s determination to push this and other reforming steps to the limit. There can be little question either that he will continue to encounter deep and desperate opposition along the way. Three years into perestroika , it seems clear that the struggle for revolutionary change has only begun.