The Empire Lovers Strike Back, With Gorbachev Barely Holding On : Soviet Union: A coalition of totalitarians drops the socialist cliches and displays its fist. The last act of <i> perestroika </i> and <i> glasnost </i> has begun.

Obscured by the Persian Gulf War, a long-simmering counter-revolution seeking to reverse the tentative gains of democratization in the Soviet Union has burst into the open. The bloodshed in the Baltics was thus neither unexpected nor only of regional significance. Rather, the unfolding events in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are both the logical, if unnerving, culmination of a trend and the opening salvo of the last stage in the momentous struggle for the future of the last great empire.

It is not a struggle that the West can afford to simply observe from the sidelines--for its implications are vastly more important than what is happening in the gulf today. The outcome will determine whether democracy will continue its peaceful march through the “first country of socialism” or whether the world will again be faced with a Soviet Union steeped in bloody conflict, instability and oppression.

Joined in the battle that has started in the Baltics, but whose theater is the entire country, are forces that are virtually irreconcilable. Dictatorship and imperialism vs. the promises of democracy and self-determination. The system vs. the people. The past against the future.

On one side are the traditional pillars of Soviet totalitarianism: the KGB, the military and the die-hard political and economic nomenklatura . Caught up in the euphoria of perestroika , the West has somehow failed to notice that not one of these institutions has undergone much, if any, democratization during Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s six years in power.

The KGB’s top leadership has remained virtually unchanged since its Brezhnevite days of glory. Despite an occasional sop to glasnost , the agency continues to be a political police par excellence ; its jurisdiction has of late been dramatically expanded. There is ample and disturbing evidence of direct KGB involvement in the orchestration of the bloody crackdowns--from Alma Ata in 1986 to Tbilisi, Baku and Vilnius two weeks ago--on opponents of the system.

No less troubling are KGB support and succor for many of the rabidly chauvinistic and anti-Semitic Soviet organizations that have sprung up across the country. Both the so-called “International Fronts” and “National Salvation Committees” that have become the focus of efforts to overthrow the legitimately elected governments in the Baltic republics, for instance, show unmistakable signs of KGB parentage.

By contrast, the top military leadership has been shuffled and reshuffled under Gorbachev. The end result, however, is that the top brass, if anything, is even more conservative today than before. Part of the reason is that it is simply impossible for a man of liberal disposition to ever reach the top of the Soviet military profession. Second, the military establishment is increasingly the new breed of tough, hard-line veterans from Afghanistan, who, as a rule, made spectacular careers while losing a genocidal war. Experienced in waging war on innocent civilians, many of these generals have already proved that they would not hesitate to do it against their own people.

The remaining alliance partner is more amorphous and difficult to assess, but no less important. Threatened with loss of privileges and clout in the political disarray and economic deterioration plaguing the Soviet Union, functionaries of all stripes have closed ranks and joined the battle to save the system. Last December, for example, several hundred directors of the country’s largest enterprises, at a Kremlin meeting, issued a virtual ultimatum to Gorbachev to restore order and stop the disintegration of the country.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of this coalition of totalitarians is that it no longer bothers to hide its intentions behind the pious slogans of socialism. Aided and abetted by the reactionary wing of the Soviet intelligentsia, it appeals unabashedly to the darkest instincts of chauvinism, xenophobia and Russian imperialism.

Up against this partnership for “law and order” are vast numbers of people across the country who, to one degree or another, embrace the principles of freedom, democracy and national self-determination and are united in their belief that the totalitarian system cannot be reformed and must be dismantled. As a political force, they are fragmented, disorganized, uncoordinated and largely leaderless. Still, they have one asset assuring that, in the long-term, they will prevail--history is on their side.

Standing in the middle has been Gorbachev. His success at manipulating both sides, combined with his bold moves in the foreign-political area and his considerable skills in manipulating Western public opinion, have earned him unprecedented accolades in the West.

But the Gorbachev bubble has now burst, to the great shock of many a fawning pundit and Western official. The Soviet president has unmistakably cast his lot with the guardians of the system. It should not have come as a great surprise.

Some basic facts explain Gorbachev’s choice. Perestroika was never meant to reform the system, but rather to save it by reforming some of its parts. The difference is crucial. No real effort to change the Soviet Union could succeed without dismantling the coercive imperial nature of the state, doing away with the totalitarian structures and introducing private property as the precondition for a market economy. Gorbachev has refused to budge on all three fronts, despite much rhetoric to the contrary.

Instead, he has continued to tinker with half-baked reforms that have served to accelerate the economy’s precipitous decline and the Soviet nations’ determination to emancipate themselves from the straitjacket of the moribund empire. Now that the system is actually facing collapse, Gorbachev will try to save it, come what may.

This does not augur well for the Soviet people. The ultimate unraveling of the empire and the totalitarian system could be temporarily staved off only by large doses of violence and repression. In casting his lot with the conservatives, Gorbachev does not seem to realize that this is no longer feasible even in the short run. Nor does he seem to realize that once firmly identified with the conservatives, he himself becomes expendable.

Without question, the Soviet Union is at a watershed. Upheavals and violence, perhaps of cataclysmic proportions, cannot be excluded. The West and the Administration bear a degree of indirect culpability for this unfortunate turn of events.

By throwing all its political eggs in the Gorbachev basket on the false assumption that perestroika is tantamount to democracy, by shunning his democratic opponents, by vacuously exhorting “help Gorbachev” and then sending massive amounts of aid, the West may have created the dangerous illusion that the survival of Gorbachev, the man, is its key objective. Furthermore, by its failure to openly support the democratic self-determination movements in the republics, the West may have nurtured the even more dangerous belief that it would not react to Soviet efforts to hold the empire together by force. Only a year ago, for instance, Gorbachev claimed to have received assurances that Washington favors the continued cohesion of the Soviet multinational state.

The West harbors other illusions as well. For example, it should not overreact to Soviet domestic repression in order to protect important foreign-policy accomplishments. But an oppressive dictatorship, with or without Gorbachev, will inevitably engage in the “externalization of evil,” the time-honored method of conjuring up an external threat for domestic purposes. If so, the various arms-control agreements may end up worthless.

Already, there are plenty of signs of hardening attitudes. The KGB chief’s recent barrage of vicious anti-Western rhetoric was hardly accidental. A new draft for reforming the military, presented by the Defense Ministry, is replete with warnings against imperialist machinations and U.S. aggressiveness. The conciliatory foreign policy of Eduard A. Shevardnadze is now a favorite target for abuse.

Then there is the growing tendency to justify Gorbachev’s slide toward dictatorship by arguing that order must proceed reform and that a benevolent fist may be the easiest transition to democracy. This logic is perhaps best answered with the admonition of the Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin: “Any dictatorship can have only one aim: self-perpetuation.”