May Day Suddenly Is a Distress Alert

Moscow’s Red Square has seen much but few things as astonishing as this May Day.

Mikhail Gorbachev and the other leaders of the Soviet Communist Party, gathered to celebrate the solidarity of labor in the spiritual center of the first workers’ state, were literally jeered off the top of Lenin’s mausoleum by thousands of protesters.

The insurgents’ ranks were a who’s who of the dissenters unleashed by glasnost : religious revivalists, social democrats, anti-Stalinists, supporters of Lithuanian independence and others of far more eccentric opinion.

Yet there never was a May Day parade that so accurately reflected the mood of the Soviet working class. Like their president, Soviet workers are on the horns of a dilemma. On one hand, the country faces the apparently unbreakable tether of Soviet traditionalism with all its safety--and stagnation. On the other hand, it faces the spur of reform with its promise of a better life--and threat of disorder and dislocation.

The existence of this dilemma--and its clear public expression--is a measure of how far Gorbachev has brought the Soviet Union and of how unbreachable the barriers to further advance appear to be.

He cannot go forward and yet cannot remain where he is. In one ear, the spirit of Peter the Great warns that “Russia will never be ruled without the lash.”

In the other, the shade of Russia’s greatest political thinker, Alexander Herzen, whispers once again that “the houses of free men will never be built by prison architects.”