The Triumph That Wasn’t : Harried Soviet Reformers Find That the Big Tasks Lie Ahead

Events last week in the Soviet Union illustrate well just how much things have changed in the space of a few short years. What should have been a triumphant week for Mikhail S. Gorbachev and the reformers within the Soviet leadership was, however, marred by the renewed ethnic violence in Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The week had begun with the focus on the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, where mass protests had taken place. Their deputies to the session of the Supreme Soviet, which ended on Thursday, made their own contribution to the changing nature of Soviet political institutions--not only by arguing on the floor of the chamber against some of the proposed amendments to the Soviet Constitution but also by either voting against or by abstaining from voting on one of the resolutions already approved by the Politburo and Central Committee of the Communist Party. Meanwhile, the leaders of the Azerbaijani and Armenian groups of deputies harangued each other. The Armenians, viewed as the less guilty of the two parties to the dispute, received a much more sympathetic hearing from most of the members of the Supreme Soviet.

There is a real sense in which all this political argument should be counted as one of the achievements of the Gorbachev era. Nothing like it occurred in the rubber-stamp Supreme Soviet of old. And it has now happened even before the new-style Soviet parliament is elected next spring.

That body will be different from the old one in two very important respects. It will be indirectly elected by a larger body, the Congress of People’s Deputies, who will be chosen in competitive elections (a limited competition, to be sure, for although there will be more than one name on the ballot paper, the Communist Party will prevent anyone of whom it strongly disapproves from entering the lists), and it will meet for more than half of the year, unlike the present Supreme Soviet that is convened in plenary session for less than one week a year.

If only the inflamed passions could be kept at the level of debate on the floor of party meetings and of the Supreme Soviet, old and new, that would be an almost unalloyed triumph for the present Soviet leadership. But to the extent that the demands of the non-Russian nationalities spill over into mass demonstrations for outright separatism--as distinct from devolution of power within the Soviet Union (all too real a possibility for Moscow in the case of the Baltic republics) or ethnic violence (already a grim reality in the Caucasus)--the dangers for Gorbachev and his reform program become more pressing.

The Soviet leadership made clear last week that it is their intention to devolve further powers to the republics and they rewrote some of the draft amendments to the Constitution that had so alarmed the Baltic republics and the Georgians. By skillful political management, it is possible that Gorbachev will still succeed in harnessing the spontaneous movement from below in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as Georgia, to the cause of perestroika, rather than see the latter undermined.

The case of Armenia and Azerbaijan is more difficult, for it cannot be solved by granting greater power to these two southern republics. After all, the dispute is between two neighbors, rather than primarily a matter of contention between them and the central government. There are in the multinational Soviet state numerous situations in which Moscow is required to act as an honest broker. That is a task complicated by the fact that Moscow may be perceived by the parties to the dispute to be a biased broker, and that in the past it has too often appeared in the guise of a chauvinist policeman.

On the hopeful side is the fact that the reform wing of the Soviet leadership has faced up to the reality that a new, more sensitive and conciliatory approach to the problem of national relations within their vast country is required, an approach that may yet lead the Soviet Union toward becoming a genuinely, rather than merely nominally, federal state. The reformers have now accepted the bitter truth that the idea of one large, happy family of nations within the Soviet borders was more a tribute to the repressive power of the state and the mendacity of past propaganda than to the achievements of Soviet leaders from Josef Stalin to Leonid Brezhnev.

In attempting conciliation between nationalities whose differences and animosities have deep historic roots and in bringing in political reform remarkably radical by past Soviet standards (but not radical enough in the eyes of some liberal Russian intellectuals and of large numbers of people in the Baltic republics), Gorbachev needs all the political authority he can muster. His creation of a new-style state presidency, an office that he will combine with the general secretaryship of the party, should not, therefore, be read as an attempt to give himself dictatorial powers. On the contrary, the consolidation of Gorbachev’s power and authority is one of the conditions for the continuation of the reform process.

If Gorbachev loses control, he and the reformers will lose everything. There are still those with less open minds but more trigger-happy fingers waiting somewhere within the party and state structures for chaos and a power vacuum, which they would be only too happy to fill. Fortunately, Gorbachev and his supporters show no signs of being willing to oblige them with such an opportunity.

To the extent that the passage of the package of political reforms by the Supreme Soviet--accompanied by the unusual spectacle for that body of real debate--strengthened Gorbachev’s personal position, it also aided the reformist cause. If perestroika proceeds as its genuine supporters want, there will come a time when concentration of substantial political power and authority in Gorbachev’s hands (indeed, the very presence of Gorbachev) is no longer indispensable. When this happens, perestroika will have become a truly irreversible process. But that time is not yet.