A Red Star Setting : In Communism’s Fall, Don’t Expect Clones of Our Democracy

If there were lingering doubts that we are witnessing communism’s death agony, the news reports from China have dispelled them. Forty years after Mao Tse Tung instituted the revolutionary order, people from virtually every walk of life crowd the streets of Beijing and other cities to demand democracy.

And this is not an isolated phenomenon, unconnected with the larger movement of events. It parallels historical changes in East-Central Europe and the Soviet Union itself. There, too, the communist experiment failed, not just politically and economically, but spiritually as well. In Hungary and Poland, party officials now cooperate with the opposition to recapture an ethos as well as rebuild a society. There, too, people measure past and present by the yardsticks of democracy and self-determination.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev may have described China’s demonstrators as “hotheads,” but he has charted an inflammatory, if moderately democratic course of his own. By his words and actions, in fact, he emboldens dissenters. It is a nice irony. In 1917, after three bloody years of war, his predecessor, V. I. Lenin, seized power from Alexander Kerensky’s provisional, and democratic, government. Prophet of a world transformed, the Bolshevik chieftain dismissed democracy as a cynical ploy of the ruling class and extolled the salvific powers of Marxism. The state, he promised, would soon “wither away” and all oppression would end.

But Lenin was not the only prophet to appear on the world’s stage in 1917. He had a rival in Thomas Woodrow Wilson, the cerebral President who led the United States into war--and the world arena--shortly after the czar’s government collapsed. Like Lenin, Wilson viewed politics in ideological, rather than historical, terms; unlike the Russian, he promoted democracy as the redemptive idea. And while it is true that many in the West, including anti-communists, consider Marxism to be peculiarly alluring, people in China, East-Central Europe and the Soviet Union know better. One would have to look long and hard to find a single person in communist-ruled lands who takes Lenin’s theories seriously, while entire populations share Wilson’s ideals.

There is certainly reason to be encouraged by this fact, for communism has claimed the lives of millions of innocent people, while depriving countless others of their human dignity. And yet Gorbachev may be right to chide those “who want to renovate socialism overnight.” It will require time and patient work to undo the damage of 40--or in the Soviet Union’s case, 70--years of misrule. If he and reformers elsewhere in the communist world are to succeed, they will have to do more than turn from one prophet to another. They must decide what realistic step their country should take next. For the greatest leaders are never those who dream of the future, but those who reckon with the past.

The history, and the vastness, of China and the Soviet Union argue for the emergence of a nonideological form of authoritarianism, particularly if anarchy and civil war should threaten. It was Alexander Solzhenitsyn who observed in his 1973 letter to far worse Soviet leaders, that “everything depends upon what sort of authoritarian order lies in store for us in the future. It is not authoritarianism itself that is intolerable, but the ideological lies that are daily foisted upon us. Not so much authoritarianism as arbitrariness and illegality.”

There are those in the United States today, including former President Reagan and President Bush, who speak in quasi-religious accents of a democratic imperative, the exportation of America’s form of government to the rest of the world. As Wilson’s heirs, they cannot imagine satisfactory political arrangements other than those that we have fashioned for ourselves. But those arrangements are not a certain cure for all human ills. We have much for which to be thankful, but we also face demoralizing and socially destructive problems, such as drugs and savage crime, that democracy has not solved, and may have helped to create.

And if, as Winston Churchill remarked, “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried,” we should still ask ourselves whether it can succeed in countries that have had vastly different histories. One of our wisest counselors, George F. Kennan, has already answered in the negative. “I have . . . always very emphatically rejected the concept of the universality of the American experience,” he told one interviewer. “Our national experience was never shared by any country and will never be shared by any country in the future.”

Perhaps we would do best, therefore, not to prejudge the forms of society and government that may be devised by those who are awakening from the long night of totalitarianism. For even if they should opt for democracy, it will be democracy in their national style, whether Chinese, Russian or Hungarian.