How Much Longer Can He Stem the Tide? : Soviet Union: As the specter of civil war haunts his country, Gorbachev is put to his biggest test. He is losing, and Moscow is losing, authority throughout the vast realm.

“In the Soviet Union today the optimists study English, the pessimists study Chinese and the new realists study the Kalashnikov.”

That grim joke, which I heard in Moscow last week, reflects a growing pessimism among many Soviet citizens. It is one of a number of signs of the specter of civil war that is haunting the Soviet Union--and not only in its southern republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia, where the danger of uncontrollable violence is more immediate.

There is a growing demand in Moscow for the imposition of martial law in Azerbaijan, even though Mikhail Gorbachev has ruled out the use of force against the peaceful nationalist movements in the Baltic republics. That latter position has not gone unchallenged within the Communist Party Central Committee. If the Lithuanians were to go so far as to declare unilaterally that they had become an independent state, there is no guarantee that those in Moscow who favor restraint would continue to prevail.

The danger for the peoples of the Baltic republics--and for Gorbachev--could increase if unrest gets further out of hand in the Caucasus and elsewhere. It would fuel a growing sense of crisis, a concern among party conservatives and the military in particular that the Soviet Union is disintegrating and descending into anarchy. The same fear is increasingly being expressed by ordinary Russian citizens, whose dissatisfaction with the grim economic situation is also growing.

Respect for Gorbachev remains high among the best-informed Soviet citizens--in a large section of the intelligentsia and especially among those who work in research institutes dealing with the humanities, social sciences and international affairs. But his popularity has taken a serious tumble at a man-on-the-street level as well as within the powerful bureaucratic structures of the party and state.

But even those who regard Gorbachev as the best Soviet leader available have come to wonder whether he has much chance of stemming a tide of events threatening to get out of control. If reason, dialogue and appeals for patience fail, there will be insistent demands for a return to more traditional methods of imposing control over a country that, it will be argued, is otherwise ungovernable.

Not only Gorbachev but the Communist Party as a whole--indeed, the party more than Gorbachev--is losing authority in the Soviet Union. But in a country with little or no tradition of democratic government, it would be facile to assume that a multiparty system would offer a speedy solution to the major political problems, not to speak of the economic ones. For the time being, the best hope for reform is the continuation of the informal alliance between Gorbachev and his reformist allies in the upper echelons of the party, on the one hand, and the intelligentsia (both party and non-party members) on the other.

Even that alliance is being challenged by a rising Russian nationalism. It could be put under further strain by workers’ strikes if material conditions are no better this summer than they were in the summer past, when the Soviet Union was given its first foretaste of large-scale industrial unrest. To forestall that, and to buy time, the Soviet leadership has significantly increased import orders for consumer goods, an emergency tactic that Gorbachev rejected two years ago.

A party congress originally scheduled for February, 1991, is due to be held this October. But now there are demands from both wings of the Communist Party--reformist and conservative--for the date to be advanced still further. It is likely that when a crucial plenary session of the Central Committee takes place later this month, that issue will be one of the items on the agenda. Both “right” and “left” of the party are afraid that time is working against them, and that at least gives Gorbachev some room to maneuver.

So far he has used every setback as a device for introducing more far-reaching political reforms. It is probable that this year will see Gorbachev concede a de facto federalization of the party (even though he may not wish to call it that) and to accept in principle a substantial devolution of power to the republics. The more radical reformers in Moscow’s research institutes are suggesting that everything except defense and major foreign policy be handed over; they do not even exclude a limited foreign-policy role for the republics.

It remains to be seen if Gorbachev will go that far and whether even such dramatic concessions would satisfy the Baltic republics in particular. They would not, in any event, provide an answer to the ethnic dispute between Armenians and Azeris, since part of the problem there is lack of agreement on their territorial republican boundaries.

Although problems are mounting faster than their solutions in today’s Soviet Union, it is too early to write Gorbachev off, as many Western commentators are now doing. Though this month’s Central Committee meeting will be perhaps the most difficult he has ever faced, he is likely to survive it with his leadership functions intact. Beyond that, he will be faced with the need to combine immediate crisis-management with longer-term measures of reform. To call it a dauntingly difficult task is an understatement. But I see no other Soviet leader on the horizon who would be likely to do it better.