Not Everything, but Enough : Gorbachev Has the Power--and the Problems

For the first time the Soviet Union has a base of power other than the Communist Party. It’s called the executive presidency, and it has been custom-made for its first incumbent, Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Gorbachev didn’t get all the chief-of-state authority he sought from the Parliament. But he got enough so that, if he wishes, he can govern by near-dictatorial decree as he tries to create--note the paradox--”a system of genuine people power” and “a rule-of-law country.”

To that end, his inaugural speech this week sketched an urgent plan for more radical political and economic reforms. Not once in his talk did Gorbachev lapse into the liturgical banalities of Marxist analysis. Not once did he invoke the authority of Lenin. Plainly, the Soviet Union has entered a new political era. Just as clearly, that era dawns even as the country’s problems begin more and more to look unresolvable.

In every field except foreign policy the situation facing Gorbachev today is more serious and threatening than when he came to power in 1985. Foreseen or not, his push to relax social and intellectual controls and to force modernizing reforms has acted to accelerate the collapse of an already moribund economic system, even as it helped to unleash the fracturing impulses of insistent nationalisms.

The undenied fact is that Soviet citizens today are materially worse off, more contentious, more desperate than they were five years ago. A Moscow News poll taken this week found that most citizens not only lack faith in the future, but also have no interest in achieving greater rewards by working harder. What does this mean to Gorbachev’s hopes for reversing decline by subjecting the economy to all the stresses, incentives and benefits of market forces?

Gorbachev’s immediate aims are to clear the bureaucracy of opponents of change, to “demonopolize” the economy and to forge a new federation of more autonomous Soviet republics. He will try to do all this largely without help from the discredited Communist Party but also under challenge from newly legitimized opposition groups. The newly amended constitution ends the party’s monopoly political status, clearing the way for a multiparty system.

Clearly, this is not the country the world has known for 70 years. But for now it’s easier to see what Gorbachev’s Soviet Union is in the process of un-becoming than it is to forecast what it might become. Gorbachev has a laudable vision of a better and saner future. What must be shown now is that enough of his fellow citizens believe in that vision to give it a chance to succeed.