A Beijing-Like Crisis in Red Square Could Lead to a Beijing-Like Solution

President Bush was asked in a news conference the other day whether the events in China might have a chilling effect on democratic reforms in the Soviet Union and other communist countries. No, he replied, the reform movements will go forward.

Many commentators agree, arguing that the uprising in China will actually help Mikhail S. Gorbachev by demonstrating what can happen when reforms are resisted for too long. Events may well prove them right, but it’s too early to be sure.

If anything in this world is certain, it is that Gorbachev, who was in Beijing when the student demonstrations began, and his Kremlin comrades must view the breakdown of order in China with deep misgivings--and nervousness that the same thing could happen in the Soviet Union.

The initial thrust of the Chinese protests, remember, was to applaud Gorbachev’s moves toward political liberalization, and to demand similar reforms in China.

Gorbachev tried to copper his bets. On one occasion, while still in Beijing, he portrayed the popular uprising as part of the painful but necessary process of democratic reform that is under way in all communist countries. But on another he sympathized with the beleaguered Chinese leaders and criticized “hotheads” who demand change overnight.

“We are struggling with similar phenomena,” the Soviet leader said in a significant passage.

When the murderous assault on the students and their supporters came, the Kremlin did not join the United States and other Western governments in condemning the violence. Indeed, a statement rushed by the leadership through the new Congress of People’s Deputies avoided any criticism of the Chinese army or political leaders, calling the events in Beijing “an internal affair.” Soviet TV-watchers didn’t see the pictures shown in the West of soldiers gunning down unarmed citizens.

When Gorbachev was pressed for further comment in Bonn last week, he expressed hope that the reform process would not fail in China. But he still evaded direct comment on Beijing’s claim that the student protesters were “counterrevolutionaries.”

Soviet restraint reflected an anxiety not to upset the normalization of Soviet-Chinese relations--the big achievement of Gorbachev’s visit to Beijing. But some Soviet observers were quick to say that more was involved. As a Lithuanian member of the Soviet congress saw it, the Kremlin was reluctant to condemn what happened in China because of the parallel with the Soviet army’s use of deadly force against protesters in Soviet Georgia.

There are, of course, important differences in the Soviet and Chinese situations. Gorbachev is already introducing the sort of political reforms demanded by the students in Tian An Men Square. His main political opposition comes not from liberals, but from conservatives. The Kremlin must nonetheless see some uncomfortable similarities.

The uprising in China was clearly related to the spread of Western democratic ideas resulting from the dispatch of thousands of students abroad, the large-scale invasion of China by Western businessmen, academicians, journalists and students, the loosening of restraints on free speech and the reintroduction of private enterprise.

To one degree or another, all these things are also happening in the Soviet Union--generating a rise in expectations akin to that which fueled the near-revolutionary turmoil in China.

Meanwhile, Soviet leaders can look into Eastern Europe and see the virtual collapse of communist authority in Poland and the looming possibility of a non-communist coalition government in Hungary.

At home, Communist Party functionaries are still smarting from the congressional elections in March, when scores of party officials were defeated at the ballot box. Public discontent is growing over the increasing shortages of food and consumer goods. Animosities are growing among the Soviet Union’s non-Russian nationalities--animosities that, even now, are proving difficult to control without oppressive measures.

In the Soviet Union, as in China, reform has translated into reduced allocation of resources to the military. Many Western observers believe that, in China, certain military leaders supported the political faction favoring brutal suppression of the students in order to win a bigger military budget.

If a similar crisis arose in Moscow, would the Soviet military be inclined to play the role of power-broker too? Could the conservatives seize the opportunity to halt reform in the name of preserving communist rule? Where would Gorbachev himself come down?

The hopeful assumption is that Gorbachev is too well entrenched in power to be vulnerable to a conservative backlash and that he, himself, is too aware of the Soviet Union’s economic problems--and the help it needs from the West--to consider actions that would create a wave of revulsion abroad.

It’s unsettling, however, to remember that it hasn’t been long since the West was making similar assumptions about China and Deng Xiaoping. It has yet to be demonstrated that, if Beijing-size mobs show up in Red Square, communist leaders in Moscow will behave much differently from those in China.