What If Gorbachev Fails?

Yegor K. Ligachev is the most outspoken of Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s conservative critics. He may also be the cleverest. A highly visible member of the Politburo, Ligachev has carefully distanced himself from the reactionaries who pine for the old days of rigid and centralized rule. He is shrewd enough to acknowledge past leadership errors that produced economic stagnation. He deplores the Communist Party’s loss of moral authority. But his chief worry, he says, is that Gorbachev’s perestroika has made matters far worse by trying to do too much and by failing to maintain necessary controls. The result, Ligachev told Times correspondent Michael Parks, is that the Soviet Union could be headed for political and economic chaos.

Ligachev’s is not a lonely voice. He and other conservatives may have been outmaneuvered by Gorbachev in the party’s highest echelons and outvoted in elections where free choice has been allowed. But they are not without a significant constituency, especially among those in the military, the KGB, the party and the bureaucracy who fear Gorbachev’s reforms will cost them their jobs and their perquisites.

Ligachev doesn’t overtly cater to this self-interest. Instead, he presents himself as a man of principle, irrevocably opposed to any economic change that would allow private industry employing hired labor. In that regard he speaks for the ideological hard-liners who bitterly resent the dilution of the party’s authority and its impending loss of monopoly power. There’s no question that Ligachev stands ready to lead a retreat from perestroika if Gorbachev falters and fails.

What’s the case against Gorbachev? It helps Ligachev’s credibility that under perestroika conditions in many cases have in fact become worse. The slackening of official restraints has seen long-suppressed but never-eradicated ethnic tensions erupt with a vengeance. Economic conditions have generally deteriorated since Gorbachev came to power five years ago. Per capita income and productivity are down, inflation has soared, consumer goods remain scarce. Ligachev puts the blame squarely on Gorbachev for failing to understand the nature of the genie he was releasing from the bottle.

Most disturbing, in the view of Gorbachev’s critics, perestroika has set loose centrifugal forces of secessionism that are tearing at the country’s outer edges. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe has produced hardly a ripple of concern in Soviet military or political circles. But the possible loss of territories long held to be intrinsic parts of the Soviet Union, whether in the Baltic states, the Ukraine or Georgia, is perceived as a fundamental and intolerable threat.

The West wishes Gorbachev well, not least because an inward-looking and modernizing Soviet Union is the best hope for continued peaceful relations between the great powers and inside Europe. But perestroika’s-- and Gorbachev’s--success and survival aren’t a given. The possibility remains--it may even be growing--that the threat of imperial fragmentation or economic collapse could doom reform and the reformers, clearing the way for a right-wing takeover. What then? What is the plausible worst that might happen?

What almost surely would follow would be a move to restore the rigid controls of the Brezhnev era, with all their intolerance of dissent and insistence on the Communist Party’s unquestioned primacy. It’s likely that the military and the KGB, whose support would be vital for the success of any anti-reformist putsch , would be suitably rewarded. Predictably, the full power of the state would be used to crush independence movements in the restive republics, conceivably bringing on localized civil wars. Eastern Europe probably would be left alone, if only because the enormous economic and political costs of trying to reimpose Soviet hegemony would be self-defeating.

And then? A regressive Soviet regime would still face the same problems that led to perestroika : an enfeebled economy, a sullen, cynical populace, a system that in virtually every area of human activity has been proven not to work. Added to that would be a revival of the worst Western suspicions about the nature and intentions of Soviet communism. The implications for the U.S. defense budget would be obvious: For starters, you could kiss that putative peace dividend goodby.

There are, in short, plenty of good reasons and powerful arguments against trying to force a reversal of course. Unhappily, in the real world of power politics, of ideologically justified personal ambitions, those arguments count for little. That’s why Ligachev and those who think like him, and the risk to reform they present, must continue to be taken seriously.