Reconsidering Policy for the Soviet Union : Events there are moving much faster than U.S. thinking

When the Soviet Union’s Congress of People’s Deputies adjourned Thursday night, it left an anxious and divided nation in even greater uncertainty than when it convened.

It has become something of a cliche to term these sessions of the Soviets’ central deliberative body “historic.” In fact, each has been just that, in the sense that their outcomes are novel--at least in the Soviet context. But while their proceedings have been consequential, they also have been inconclusive, often contradictory.

Last week’s sesion was no exception. On the one hand, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev obtained the governmental reorganization and enhanced executive powers he says are required to move forward with perestroika. On the other hand, he suffered a series of stinging setbacks: the resignation of his foreign minister and long-time political ally Eduard A. Shevardnadze; a blunt call for a return to paranoid authoritarianism by KGB chief Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, and the near-rejection of his choice for vice president, Gennady I. Yanayev.

The worst, however, was saved for last. Thursday, Boris N. Yeltsin, president of the Russian Republic, convinced his own Parliament to reduce its payment to the national treasury by a staggering 85%, thereby leaving the central government without a budget only four days before the start of the new fiscal year. The Russian Republic, the country’s largest, usually provides more than half the federal government’s income. If Yeltsin’s gambit succeeds, national economic collapse could follow.

At the very least, he has intensified the confrontation over what has emerged as the Soviets’ most troubling structural crisis: How much power can be reserved to the center without risking a new descent into authoritarianism or dictatorship? How much power can be devolved to the constituent republics without risking national disintegration?

Gorbachev, theoretically the Soviet Union’s most powerful official, and Yeltsin, probably its most popular, began as allies in reform and now stand divided by this question. The consequences of allowing that division to persist and deepen cannot be overstated. As Anatoly A. Sobchak, the mayor of Leningrad said last week, “If we don’t find a compromise, which is the only way out, this will lead to chaos and civil war.”

The implications for the West are similarly grave. Whatever the triumphalists in the Western camp may imagine, glasnost and perestroika arose because the basic human aspirations of the Soviet people for a decent spiritual and material life could not be realized in a Communist system choked by its own internal contradictions. Unfortunately, with each passing week perestroika appears less a program than a wish.

But while the West cannot exercise a deterministic influence over events in the Soviet Union, it nonetheless has interests of the most vital sort in their outcome. So far, however, neither the United States nor any of its allies have been able to articulate a coherent notion of precisely what those interests are and which policies would further them.

As events in the Soviet Union quicken, the absence of such clarity would be not just inconvenient, but tragic.