How Crucial Is Mikhail Gorbachev to the West? : Despite all, he may remain the best hope at a time of great uncertainty

The Soviet Union may be about to plunge from crisis to catastrophe. A confidential official report says that this year’s gross national product could drop by 11.6%, nearly four times the decline in 1990. Industrial production is expected to fall by 15%, agricultural output by 5%. Searching for a comparison to aptly describe this threatened calamity, a Soviet official invokes memories of the famine of the 1930s and the purges and repression that followed, when millions perished.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev took power six years ago this month, boldly intending to begin rescuing his country from economic mismanagement and stifling intellectual controls. Gorbachev set in motion a great political turnaround. Eastern Europe has regained its independence, Germany has been reunited, the Cold War has ended, Soviet society has become freer. But the effort mounted to rescue the economy has been marked by consistent failure.

THE VISION THING: What Gorbachev lacked was a coherent blueprint for bringing about the necessary redemptive changes and the zeal to carry out a true revolution from above. Gorbachev was unsparing in his criticism of the postwar-era “stagnation” that had soured economic life. Yet, under Gorbachev, living standards have fallen sharply.

Gorbachev and his fellow reformers underestimated not just the enormity of the task they faced--daunting under even ideal circumstances--but the tenacious resistance they would encounter from entrenched Communist Party officials. The centralization of all economic decisions had stifled managerial initiative. The distribution system was a world-class model of waste and inefficiency. At the same time the reformers seriously overestimated their ability to control the restless independence forces that exploded into activity as restrictions eased.

It is the party, still in command of the military and security services, that is most threatened by the national movements. Millions have quit the party, but the 17 million members who remain, including increasingly vocal right-wing elements, have a vested interest in seeing much of the reform movement fail. For if authority passes from Moscow to the republics, then the party becomes irrelevant, and the privileged life that accompanies high party position becomes unjustifiable. Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, Gorbachev’s military adviser, has served chilling notice that the military won’t stand idly by if the country starts to fracture.

Sunday’s scheduled referendum on a new “federation of sovereign republics” is Gorbachev’s desperate effort to hold the empire together. The balloting, though, will be largely a sham. Six of the 15 republics have refused to take part; the vote will be non-binding; many of the terms of the proposed new arrangement remain ambiguous. The one certainty is that the vote won’t stop the push for independence.

THE GORBACHEV QUESTION: All this points to continuing problems for Gorbachev and for the West. Not long after he came to power Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher pronounced Gorbachev “a man we can do business with,” an estimate the U.S. government in time came to share. On the whole, the East-West relationship has benefited from his tenure, and on the whole, Washington has made it a point to be supportive.

But Gorbachev’s popular standing has sunk dramatically, even as the popularity of his bitter rival, Boris Yeltsin, has soared. Yeltsin, identifying himself with the democratic movement, has been in the vanguard of those warning about the rising influence of right-wing military and political figures. But Yeltsin remains president only of the Russian Republic. Gorbachev is president of the Soviet Union, the man with whom business must be done.

At some point, perhaps quite soon, Washington and its allies could confront a fateful policy decision: At what point might the West begin to distance itself from the Gorbachev regime out of sympathy for the aspirations of long repressed peoples? At what point should the decision be made not to repeat past mistakes by remaining too closely associated with a failing unpopular leader?

THE GORBACHEV ADVANTAGE: There are no easy answers. The West, by itself, can’t cause Gorbachev to fail domestically or assure that he will succeed. It can only define its own interests. Those include doing nothing to encourage chaos there or anything that would support the far-right’s ascendancy. Washington should of course continue to expand its contacts with Yeltsin and other members of the moderate opposition. But that opposition is probably a long time away from power. Gorbachev remains the responsible leader to deal with. It’s far from certain whether he can succeed in achieving the new relationship between the government and the governed that his country needs. What is clear is that the West should do whatever it can to encourage such an evolution.