TV Reviews : Analysis of Power Play in the Soviet Union

There is news beyond the Persian Gulf. For many media watchers, there is bigger news than the Persian Gulf. While the news machine has driven deep into Saudi Arabia, the Soviet Union--and the promise of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s double dream of glasnost and perestroika --appears to be going down the drain.

That is the inescapable conclusion of veteran correspondent Hedrick Smith’s “Frontline” report, “Guns, Tanks and Gorbachev” (tonight at 9, Channels 28 and 15; at 10, Channel 50). In no uncertain terms, Smith makes clear that behind the bloody Jan. 13 crackdown by crack KGB-trained paratroopers against Lithuanian nationalists, behind newly expanded police surveillance decrees, is a fundamental political shift under Gorbachev’s rule.

The ramifications of this change may be more profound than anything in the Middle East, but Smith chooses to look at the present, not the future. And the worst signals being sent by the Soviet right, according to Smith, are out of the Baltic states and the republic of Georgia. In each region, democratic movements have been faced with internal ethnic strife that has come seemingly from nowhere. As Georgian Eduard Gudavaexplains, such events are divide-and-conquer maneuvers by Kremlin tacticians, not genuine grass-roots struggles.

Smith’s problem, as a journalist, is the same as the liberals’: There’s no one person or cause to point the finger at, not even a clear pattern that a right-wing coup is in process. Like Jesus in Bible movies, Gorbachev is on everyone’s lips in this report, yet never seen.

The most valuable analysis in this important video dispatch is from Soviet military expert Bruce Parrott, who argues that when Gorbachev failed to pass his economic reforms last summer, he lost his left, thus creating an opening for a power grab by the Stalinist right. We are now seeing that power grab in action.