Totalitarianism Was Simpler : * Yeltsin Shows the Party’s Really Over

The decision by Boris N. Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federation, and the members of the Democratic Platform to bolt the Soviet Communist Party poses a challenge not only for Mikhail S. Gorbachev, but also for the architects of U.S. foreign policy.

Yeltsin’s justification for his resignation is as interesting as the act itself: “In view of my . . . great responsibility toward the people of Russia and in connection with moves toward a multi-party state,” he said, “I cannot fulfill only the instructions of the Communist Party. As the highest elected figure in the republic, I have to bow to the will of all the people.”

Vyacheslav Shostakovsky, rector of the prestigious Moscow Higher Party School and a founder of Democratic Platform, said his faction decided to walk because the party “congress did not realize our hopes for the separation of party and government functions.”

Taken together, the two notions embedded in these statements--an elected official’s obligation to his constituents and the legitimacy of loyal opposition--signal a resumption of the Russian experiment with normative politics begun in that brief period between the fall of Czar Nicholas and the Bolshevik coup. For the Soviet people, who paid in blood for the party’s consolidation of power and in deprivation through the long, bleak years of its stagnation, this is a singular and welcome event. One of the lessons of the 20th Century is that democratic, multi-party politics is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for genuine material progress.

But however burdensome the Communist Party’s tyranny has been for the Soviet people, it has made Moscow a rather convenient regime with which to deal. Soviet diplomats, in fact, frequently have complained that the United States has been the unstable, unpredictable partner in the superpower relationship. In a sense, they have been correct: When a democratic nation changes governments, it can change policies, including foreign policies. The United States must now adjust to the prospect that this may occur in Moscow as well as in Washington.

Other possibilities are even more worrisome. One anxiety shared by populists like Yeltsin and Marxist democrats like Alexander V. Buzgalin of the Marxist Platform faction is the concentration of power with Gorbachev. As Buzgalin put it, Gorbachev’s election as party “general secretary without meaningful control from the Central Committee, with no right to recall him, plus his powers as Soviet president--this is a gigantic accumulation of powers in the hands of one man and very dangerous.”

So, too, are its implications for the United States. Consider this: In some future confrontation between unpredictable but democratically elected leaders like Yeltsin and a stable but authoritarian figure like Gorbachev, where would American interests rest?