A World of Shock and Aftershock : RUSSIA: Emboldened Expression

For Americans in Moscow the unmarked office of Anatoli Belyayev is an important stop, up a flight of dark stairs, down a quiet corridor. Americans go there because Belyayev is part of the revolutionary changes in the Soviet Union. In April he came to California and, while he was in Palo Alto, Moscow conservatives tried to close him down.

Belyayev is a round, gruff, crusty editor in chief. If you are bright he likes you; if you are not, he folds his arms across his big stomach and says, “I don’t know.”

Belyayev’s monthly journal, Twentieth Century and Peace, was once known as a propaganda rag, an arm of the Peace Committee that had blasted the United States for 40 years. But Belyayev has been changing all that, collecting a group of brilliant writers on the cutting edge of the democratic movement: Len Karpinsky has been more insightful about the failures of socialism than many Western observers. Yuri F. Karyakin has been insistent on the need for a global vision not dependent on weapons. Alex Adamovich has been hammering on Chernobyl, Stalin, conscription and war.

Circulation has climbed, last year jumping from a modest 50,000 to 120,000.

In January, 1989, Belyayev printed Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Live Not by Lies,” the first Solzhenitsyn published legally in the Soviet Union since the early ‘70s. Although legal, it upset the Peace Committee. In February the committee’s leadership told the editor to start submitting material for advance approval.

Belyayev, a stubborn man, said, “We don’t know any military secrets,” assuming that as the only legal basis for censorship. There the matter rested until April, when he came to the United States for a meeting on human rights sponsored by the Beyond War Foundation.

While he was gone, the Peace Committee chose to suppress the May issue of Twentieth Century and Peace. It was the sort of rejection calculated to send a message: too far out; other publications beware.

Belyayev was in our house on Sunday when he heard the news. He immediately called Moscow. When he got off the phone he said, “I will not panic. They do not know that I know. And they do not know that I am making calls. I can do this as well from here as from Moscow.”

Then followed days of phone calls. After each one, Belyayev sat down, drank tea and told a little more of the 1989 March-April political turmoil in Moscow. His story illuminates a patchwork of events, events so significant that another visitor, who helped engineer the March election victories in Leningrad, said: “If you haven’t been to the Soviet Union since the elections, you have never been here. Everything has changed.”

In the March 25 balloting for the Congress of Deputies, the Communist Party was humiliated. The party label itself was sufficient to sink a candidate.

Those defeats sent a wave of apprehension all the way up to the Central Committee, atop the power structure. Rapid responses followed, some bloody, some threatening:

April 8. The conservatives make a dramatic move. A decree issued by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet calls for imprisonment of up to 10 years for public advocacy of change “by methods contrary to the U.S.S.R. constitution.” There is also a provision of three years’ imprisonment for public insult or defaming “of the Soviet state or government institutions and their officials.”

“Public insult” is hard to define. Since no one knew what would be an “insult,” prosecutors could have a field day. The new decree causes dramatic alarm among glasnost proponents.

Is the “decree” law? No one knows for sure. In the hierarchical Soviet system a high-up source is treated as authoritative. All you have to know is how high up. The Supreme Soviet is very high indeed.

April 9. Georgian nationalists demonstrating in the capital city of Tbilisi are precipitously attacked by soldiers wielding sharpened shovels and using gas; 20 people, including women and children, are killed. Moscow intellectuals are outraged, charging that no local Tbilisi authorities could have given orders to kill. All fingers point to Kremlin conservatives exaggerating the dangers of disorder and, in the process, undermining Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost.

April 14. The Ministry of Internal Affairs (KGB) announces that crime in the country has jumped by 31.2% in the first three months of 1989 and calls for “decisive measures to restore order.”

April 16. The same ministry announces that it has found “explosive devices” at two Moscow subway stations. Progressives react with disbelief.

April 20. Conservatives push further. The Politburo announces that there will soon be a new law to increase media responsibility. There will also be a law on informal associations, to create “a flexible legal watchdog mechanism.” The measures appear directed at two of the most important forces behind democratization.

April 21. The Peace Committee informs Belyayev’s Moscow deputy that the May issue will be suppressed. Within that issue is an important article examining Solidarity in Poland from the workers’ point of view. The April 20 proposed law seems to be in immediate effect.

The law also affects an informal group, the Moscow Tribunal, which includes intellectuals such as Andrei Sakharov, Adamovich and Karyakin. Together with a popular group called the Democratic Union, they have been planning a demonstration in Pushkin Square for April 22.

April 21. Pravda denounces the Democratic Union. The stage is set. If these groups lose nerve the conservative tide will continue rising. Perhaps worse, if demonstrators go ahead and authorities overreact, there could be a repeat of the Georgia bloodshed in Moscow.

That night the highly prestigious Presidium of the Soviet Academy of Sciences addresses a letter to the Central Committee calling for the prosecution of the people “who made the order from Moscow to do the military violence in Georgia.” This is a strong, almost unheard of call for action by prestigious people against prestigious people. One year earlier a conservative letter in a newspaper had been enough to quiet the perestroika crowd for three weeks. Not anymore.

April 22. The Pushkin Square rally proceeds peacefully, without incident.

April 23. Belyayev, in Palo Alto, learns of the suppression of his issue. Quietly he vows a countercampaign: “We will not only publish in May,” he says with a wry smile, “we will go now for a complete reorganization of the Peace Committee.”

Belyayev opponents may think the editor is too far away to act. In fact, with the improbable help of AT&T;, the editor conducts his campaign from California. Three members of his editorial board are newly elected to the Congress of Deputies: Yuri S. Afanasiev, Adamovich and Karyakin. Belyayev rallies them and their new-found influence: They agree on a protest to the Central Committee where the real conservative power resides.

April 24. Belyayev continues calling. Unbeknown to him, but perhaps partly because of his efforts, Gorbachev is about to act against the same target.

April 25. Gorbachev engineers a breathtaking sweep, ousting 110 members of the old-guard members from the Central Committee. The “dead souls,” as progressives call them, are suddenly gone. Belyayev leans back on a couch in a Palo Alto living room: “We can have tea, now. All bad news is smashed by the results of this meeting.”

April 26. Belyayev calls to learn that his magazine has been allowed to go to press “with only minor changes.” Belyayev takes a day off, visits a San Jose flea market to buy toys for his grandchildren.

So the second Soviet revolution lurches forward. One observer suggested that “the conservatives lost as soon as the telephone was invented.”

But nothing is that easy. “In a state without property,” observes Fyodor Burlatsky, chairman of the Soviet Human Rights Commission, “the bureaucracy are the nobility. They have the power.” Giving up that power requires a struggle, one permission or regulation at a time. The success of glasnost may depend upon the people’s patience. If the people lose patience, there could be a repeat of the Chinese experience. But if they persist--as they have so far--the quiet revolution may continue.