PERSPECTIVE ON THE SOVIET UNION : A Case for Making Amends With Yeltsin : <i> Perestroika</i> has reached the end of the road. Only a completely new edifice can restore something like law and order.

In the first days of this year (on the Russian Orthodox Christmas Eve, as it happens), there was a minor road accident in the Ukrainian town of Chernigov. One of the cars involved belonged to a senior Communist Party official, and it was his misfortune that the impact caused his trunk lid to spring open. Inside, inquisitive passers-by spotted cans of imported ham, bottles of cognac and other luxuries such as they could only dream of in the dog days of perestroika . A crowd gathered and towed the car to the party headquarters, where they demanded the dismissal of its occupant and then, getting into the mood of the occasion, the resignation of the regional first secretary as well. Within a few days, they had secured both.

The unfortunate Chernigov apparatchik had only been acquiring what for decades had been considered an undisputed perquisite of his job. Yet now--suddenly--ordinary people, who had always resented the privileges of the nomenklatura elite, were no longer simply tolerating them. The Chernigov incident proved to be only the first of a long series that brought large crowds out on to the streets and squares of provincial towns in the next few months, demanding the resignation of the local party bosses. The climax came on May 1, when demonstrators in Red Square confronted Mikhail Gorbachev himself with slogans like “70 years on the road to nowhere!” And a month later, the newly elected deputies of the Russian Supreme Soviet voted in Boris Yeltsin as their President.

There is no doubt that a turning point has been reached. The legacy of custom and fear, which had restrained the embitterment felt by ordinary people, has run out. Having witnessed on their television sets the overthrow of the party leaders in Leipzig and Prague, they saw no reason why a similar fate should not be visited upon their counterparts in Volgograd, Donetsk and perhaps even Moscow. They have begun the process by using the ballot box in local elections to turn out Communist-dominated administrations in many cities and to install in their place radical nominees of the Popular Fronts and Democratic Blocs.

Gorbachev has no prescription for dealing with this situation. For several years now be has been encouraging ordinary people to take action against the middle-ranking apparatchiks who were obstructing his reforms. The people have succeeded beyond his wildest dreams--and have thereby posed him problems he no longer seems capable of solving.

Perestroika has reached the end of the road. Only the construction of a completely new edifice can restore something like law and order. At times Gorbachev and his colleagues seem to accept this. They sketch out part of the blueprint. And then, disconcerted or bewildered by their own boldness, they fall back on familiar reflexes and “old thinking.” We can see this syndrome in all of the three most important aspects of policy: political reform, economic reform and the national question.

It is the national question, however, that is the most serious and potentially explosive of all. Over the last few years, as political issues stifled by decades of totalitarian rule began to come to the surface, they very often assumed an ethnic form. This was true even of many questions that are not inherently ethnic, such as environmental pollution, human rights or the legacy of the Stalinist past.

The roots of this ethnicization of all political questions go very deep, to contradictory policies the party has pursued for decades--simultaneously encouraging national cultures in order to gain the support of the non-Russians, then suppressing them again in order to hold the empire together. This blowing hot and cold has created a situation in which most non-Russians regard the sovereignty of their own nation as a prerequisite for solving all other political problems. It is not that they all wish to secede from the Soviet Union, but they do want it acknowledged that they have the right to settle the issue for themselves.

It was natural that the Baltic nations have been pioneers on this road. Their prewar experience of democracy, however truncated, their lively civic consciousness and their early creation of independent political movements all impelled them along the road to a parliamentary system and a market economy faster than their other Soviet colleagues.

The nation that has experienced the greatest difficulty in coming to terms with this ethnicization of all political issues is Russia. The Russians have been the bearers of communism rather than its victims--or so at least it certainly appears to all non-Russians. Yet is that so certain? Russian culture, Russian religion, the Russian peasant village suffered at least as much from communism as those of other nations. That Russians dominated the armed forces, the secret police and the party apparatus and that they used their own language as an instrument of domination does not change that fact.

The fact is that Russian national consciousness exists in an unstable magnetic field between the attraction of two poles. One is the state and the empire; the other is culture and ethnic tradition. Like two positively charged electrodes, the one tends to repel the other. Historically speaking, the Russian empire in its two hypostases, Czarist and Soviet, has exploited and suppressed Russians as much as any other people under its sway. The exploitation and suppression were more severe under Soviet rule, but from the 18th Century onward the czars were already importing Germans to tame their unruly subjects.

The election of Boris Yeltsin as president of the Russian Republic imparts a new dimension to the issue of Russia’s place within the Soviet Union. He wishes to assert the sovereignty of Russia as a separate entity, ready to do business with the other national republics as equal partners. He accepts that the Communist Party should, if necessary, split up into a Social Democratic party with the present Democratic Platform group as its nucleus and a conservative wing trying to preserve the Communists’ “vanguard” status. He claims to favor a market economy--though he is coy about the price rises it will inevitably entail. Though he remains to be tested on the detail, there is no doubt that he is further along the road to democratic politics than Gorbachev. Is there not scope here for fruitful cooperation between Russia and the Soviet Union?

Multiparty democracy, a market economy, a free confederation of peoples: those are the keys to the future of the Soviet Union. They cannot guarantee a future without pain, conflict and even violence. But they stand a better chance than any alternatives of creating a tolerable life for the Soviet peoples--and that means a Soviet Union able and wiling to be a full partner in the “common European home.”

Gorbachev has already recognized in principle the desirability of all three aims. But he remains reluctant to take the necessary steps to turn them into reality. He should consider what has been going on since that car trunk burst open in Chernigov on Christmas Eve; a process that has brought to power in the Soviet heartland a man whom he once hailed as a supporter and later execrated as a renegade. It is now time to move on to a third stage in his stormy relationship with Boris Yeltsin, one of cooperation as more or less equal partners. Yeltsin has committed himself to the right ideas, and he has popular support, a commodity Gorbachev badly needs.