From <i> Perestroika </i> to Police Power : KGB’s sweeping new powers should alarm more than Soviet reformers

Invoking his emergency powers, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has ordered Red Army troops to begin patroling the streets of the Soviet Union’s major cities alongside local police starting today. The ostensible reason is to provide greater security in the face of growing crime. The move away from heavy-handed rule over the past five years and the swelling national economic crisis have clearly helped produce a breakdown in respect for authority and a concomitant rise in general lawlessness. But critics bleakly view the turn to the army as a gambit to impose de facto martial law, and fear that its real aim is to suppress political dissent and quash economic protests. Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Republic, describes it as one more step toward dictatorship.

Certainly it is one more demonstration that the armed forces remain not just influential but increasingly indispensable in enforcing the disputed powers of the central government.

The largely conservative upper ranks of the armed forces can only welcome these roles. No longer needed to garrison a now-independent Eastern Europe, the Soviet military faced the possibility of becoming an organization lacking a mission that would justify its size, simply another bloated bureaucracy struggling to get its share of leaner budgets. While it still faces many challenges, the military has lately seen its fortunes improve considerably. Its new mission is to uphold domestic order. Gorbachev has called on the army for help in the Baltics, just as he had earlier summoned it to restore order in the Caucasus. When democratic reformers in the Soviet Union worry about the regime’s shift to the right, it is the growing dependence on the military that is much on their minds.

And not the military alone. The KGB has also been restored to an importance it has not had since glasnost forced a drastic reduction in the state’s repressive apparatus. Beginning today, the KGB will have sweeping new powers to seek out evidence of crime in economic relations. Plenty of economic crimes occur in the Soviet Union. There are also nascent business enterprises that have been officially encouraged in the hope of revivifying a collapsing economy. These could be threatened by the scrutiny of a police agency never known for its delicate touch. Whether or not Gorbachev is deliberately moving toward dictatorship, as his critics say, he is certainly taking another big step away from progressive reform. That’s something for everyone, not just Soviet reformers, to be concerned about.