After 70 years of Hibernation, Soviets Select

Last week’s voting for a new Soviet Parliament--the first contested elections since November, 1918--was a staggering blow to the Soviet Communist Party and its claim to be the legitimate representative of the Soviet people. Swept to defeat by huge margins were a large number of top party officials, KGB functionaries and high-ranking military commanders. In some regions, such as the Baltic republics, rejection of party candidates assumed wholesale proportions.

While acknowledging the party defeat, many Western observers have still interpreted the results as a victory for Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his reform efforts. Not so. For among the losers in what amounted to a political revolt was not just the party bureaucracy but, in a real sense, Gorbachev’s vision of the future. The election represents a watershed in the continuing social upheaval unleashed by perestroika and sets the stage for a qualitatively new political struggle.

This stunning development is the culmination of the gradual transformation of early citizen support for Gorbachev policies into cynicism and progressive disillusionment about prospects for further progress. I was there to see it happening during 10 days of discussion with prominent members of the intelligentsia and with ordinary people, while observing various Moscow political events and street demonstrations up to election day.

Among the intelligentsia, support for Gorbachev’s stalled reforms is increasingly replaced by a belief that genuine Western-style democracy is the only way out of the political morass. At a meeting of Moscow Tribune, an informal forum of leading Moscow intellectuals, one speaker after another demanded the establishment of a justice system based on the rule of law and constitutional guarantees of basic political, economic and human rights. Political pluralism and freedom of speech, rather than perestroika from above and party-tolerated glasnost , are seen as the real answer. Marxist-Leninist ideology and party monopoly of power are openly rejected; the competition of ideas is seen as the only viable alternative.

A prominent academician said, with a straight face, that even if the ultimate goal of Soviet society is some form of socialism, it was inevitable that the country will go through a capitalist stage first; the present system, in his words, is “essentially a form of party feudalism.” Nor are such sentiments limited to the Moscow intelligentsia. A yet-to-be released opinion survey among readers of a major weekly elicited more than 200,000 responses from around the country, showing similar attitudes among a majority of the respondents.

What is also remarkable is that such views are now so widely shared and proclaimed by openly anti-communist organizations. The Democratic Union recently attracted 2,000 people to a demonstration on Mayakovski Square in the center of Moscow with slogans such as “down with the Bolshevik counterrevolutionaries” and “down with the CPSU.”

More important, the election results, and especially the landslide victory of Boris N. Yeltsin over the party-supported candidate in Moscow, have shown conclusively that ordinary people share attitudes with the intelligentsia. Yeltsin’s program, calling for debate on the merits of the multiparty political system, drastic cuts in military expenditures and land being given back to the peasants while doing away with all party privileges, runs counter not only to interests of the party bureaucracy, but Gorbachev’s reform program as well. By endorsing Yeltsin’s radical views, the millions who supported him destroyed a long-standing myth subscribed to by many a Western pundit: That the Soviet masses, Russians in particular, are characterized by a collectivist mentality with deeply ingrained authoritarian propensities, and are therefore congenitally incapable of democratic impulses.

The tremendous outpouring of political energy against the system by the long-quiescent masses, and the increasing likelihood of fusing that energy with the democratic intelligentsia and radical party reformers into a formidable opposition, is a historically significant development--the most portentous of the elections.

This does not mean that the party bureaucracy is in immediate danger. Its defeat has been largely symbolic, not likely to result in a major loss of power in the near future. Yet the election returns are certain to be perceived as an acute threat to the entrenched conservative elite that still dominates party apparatus. Gorbachev’s reforms have created a highly volatile situation as promised, and a conservative backlash against some of them--perhaps against Gorbachev himself--is all but certain. Such a backlash is likely to be aided and abetted by the military brass who were deeply humiliated in the elections.

Indeed, evidence of a conservative counteroffensive was present months before the election. A major bureaucratic campaign against the cooperative movement, a showpiece of Gorbachev’s reforms, began last December. It has left budding Soviet entrepreneurs bewildered and disillusioned. A number of cooperative activities have either been prohibited or severely restricted, while taxes were increased dramatically for the rest. Private activities in agriculture have been similarly sabotaged, along with efforts to institute quality control in industry.

Conservative forces still hold much power, but with a big weakness: They lack any promising alternative to current policies for dealing with the systemic crisis. Still, every observer agrees that they won’t surrender power and privilege without a fight.

Sitting between these two antagonistic forces, buffeted by both, are Gorbachev and his fellow reformers. His mounting difficulties are the inevitable result of a basic and insoluble contradiction in the task he set for himself: to save the Soviet system by reforming it. He realizes that the nation will continue to decline without radical political and economic reforms, yet he has shied away from many radical programs for fear they will destroy the system first. As a result, he has introduced halfhearted measures and taken contradictory positions that have failed to produce, thereby alienating both left and right.

He correctly diagnosed the disastrous state of Soviet agriculture, for instance, but at the same time vowed to preserve the state and collective farm system which is the main cause for agricultural malaise. As a solution for the critical national question, he advocated a strong center and strong republics, a contradiction in terms. He recognized the existence of different interests and solutions to society’s problems yet claimed that the party represents all Soviet people and defended its monopoly of power.

Such contradictions have hobbled reform efforts and have contributed to the polarization evidenced in the elections. Gorbachev may not have the luxury of being on both sides of the fence for long. He must soon choose one side or the other or the battle will rage without him.