Unrest Reaches Moscow as Communism Unravels

What used to be called the Socialist Bloc is shaking from a series of political jolts that may be the beginning of its unraveling. In quick succession, the world witnessed Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s dramatic but unsuccessful effort to thwart Lithuania’s defiant quest for independence, the Czechoslovaks’ and the Hungarians’ demands that Soviet soldiers leave their countries and the sensational banning of the Communist Party in Romania.

Pogroms in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, triggered open warfare between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, prompting large-scale Soviet military intervention. Taken together, these events, within days of one another, only underscore the already unbridgeable gulf between Moscow and Eastern Europe. More, they highlight a crisis within the Soviet Union that is spinning out of control. With a sense of Gotterdammerung descending upon the Kremlin, the question of where the Soviet Union is heading becomes urgent.

Part of the answer can be found in the lessons of the Eastern European revolutions.

The first and foremost is that communism, as practiced in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, is unreformable. Tinkering with “scientific socialism” by introducing half-hearted reforms simply hastens crisis conditions. Such efforts, recently undertaken in most Eastern European countries, inevitably ended in failure. Actually, the only reforms that show promise are those that aim to substitute political pluralism and a market-oriented economy for socialism’s existing structures. Already under way in Poland and Hungary, this transition will soon occur throughout Eastern Europe.

If communism cannot be reformed, those who seek to salvage it are doomed to failure--or irrelevance. This is the second lesson. Indeed, the record of Eastern European reformers is a sad one. Imre Poszgay of Hungary is a perfect example. Only a year ago, he was considered Hungary’s best hope. Today, with the Communist Party disbanded and the country opting for democracy, Poszgay is increasingly a political has-been.

In Poland, the first secretary of the remnants of the Communist Party and once-prominent reformer Mieczyslaw Rakowski is the object of public ridicule as the “last secretary.” A similar fate awaits Hans Modrow of East Germany, Petur Toshev Mladenov of Bulgaria and the rest of the Establishment reformers. It is a fair bet than not a single Communist Party will play a significant role in Eastern Europe by the end of the year.

The third lesson is that the patience of long-quiescent masses is limited and that those limits may be getting shorter as the regimes prove incapable of dealing with systemic crises. Alexis de Tocqueville’s remark that repressive regimes are at greatest risk of popular revolt when they try to reform--not when they are most oppressive--is especially relevant. The old Leninist propaganda shibboleth, “power to the people,” has suddenly become a reality that threatens to sweep the Leninists off the stage.

To what extent does this apply to developments in the Soviet Union and the fate of Gorbachev? A look at recent trends provides some clues.

Perhaps the most important is clear-cut evidence that Gorbachev’s reform, particularly economic, has failed. After almost five years of half-measures, the Soviet economy has progressively worsened; it may be near collapse. But rather than introduce urgently needed radical reforms, Gorbachev, in an abrupt about-face, proposes a conservative program replete with administrative measures and no hope for improvement for at least two years.

Unfortunately, the Soviet leader does not have two years. The mood in the country, where buying even basic food items has become a daily struggle, is dark, possibly turning ugly. According to recent polls, 94% of the Soviet people judge the current economic situation as critical. Only 2% believe that it will improve. Reputable Soviet economists foresee food riots, strikes and mass unrest.

This dismal picture is accompanied by a growing political polarization between the system’s guardians and its dismantlers, with Gorbachev’s hold on the middle ground decreasingly firm. A political battle royal looms, perhaps at the Central Committee plenum later this month.

Among Western Sovietologists, the conventional wisdom, no doubt reinforced by events in the Baltics and Azerbaijan, is that conservatives will again carry the day. Most Communist Party mandarins, the military and KGB hierarchy, plus the vast economic-administrative apparatus, are on the right’s side. Increasingly, these conservative forces seek to bolster popular support through jingoistic appeals to Russian imperial consciousness and plain chauvinism, the traditional scapegoats of which are foreigners, Jews and Masons. Ultimately, the hopes of conservatives rest on the reputed yearning of the Soviet masses for a “strong hand.”

Conventional wisdom may prove right for a change. But a victory of the old order is likely to be short-lived. The conservative armor has chinks. The Communist Party, deeply split along ideological and national lines, is no longer a reliable agent of central control. Similarly, the army, excluding its hierarchy, is riven with ethnic conflict and political ferment, an increasingly dubious instrument for internal repression. Reactionary nationalism, though noisy and frightening, has little mass appeal. The hard-liners are unable to come up with a promising alternative course of action or a credible leader.

Most important, the widespread assumption that Russians are congenitally predisposed to authoritarianism and collectivism, thus incapable of democratic impulses, needs to be re-examined. Confronting the conservatives--and, increasingly, Gorbachev himself--are social forces of such magnitude and intensity that they could make the demise of the Soviet system, a la Eastern Europe, a real possibility. These forces, created by the rebirth of politics under perestroika , have long since abandoned Gorbachev’s limited reform objectives in favor of radical change, such as terminating the party’s monopoly on power and introducing a market-oriented economy.

The clout of these people is difficult to assess but their numbers are vast. They have boosted the combined circulations of two radical-liberal Soviet periodicals to an unprecedented 38 million, while Pravda was losing a third of its readership last year. They are the members of 30,000 “informal” organizations currently active in the country. They are swelling the ranks of “voters associations,” an embryonic form of political opposition likely to bring serious grief to the party Establishment in elections next March. And they are taking to the streets; in Moscow alone, participants at unauthorized demonstrations jumped from 40,000 in 1988 to 500,000 last year. Most important, there is growing evidence that these largely working-class people are being radicalized, with Solidarity-like organizations already making political demands. Finally, many of these liberal activists, realizing that Russia itself is a captive of the Soviet empire, favor the decolonization unfolding in Eastern Europe.

A Soviet political upheaval of historic proportions is now inevitable. It may have already started. Whether it will be peaceful or violent is unknown. Much will depend on whether Gorbachev and his Kremlin cohorts draw proper conclusions from the lessons of Eastern Europe. Either way, perestroika has entered its endgame.