And Now for the Hard Part

For President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the path from suing for a truce in the Cold War to burying Marxism-Leninism was not a straight line. The future looks much the same.

Did Gorbachev know when he started out that it would come to his telling his party’s Central Committee--the second most powerful body in the Kremlin--that dogmatic communism has no future?

Only a mind reader could answer, and it is largely beside the point. Nothing could make events in Moscow in recent days any less astonishing, or more satisfying, for a world so recently under threat of mass destruction in a nuclear war.

What comes next is as unpredictable as what preceded Gorbachev’s dismissal of the utopian ideology that, backed by secret police, ruled from Moscow for more than 70 years. For example, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin has issued orders to boot out communist activities in factories, schools and government offices in his province, the largest of the 15 Soviet republics.

Gorbachev himself probably would be hard-pressed to explain how he could move in seeming contradiction from dismissing the communist ideology one day to promising the next day to prevent communist activities from being barred from factories, schools and government offices.

The only safe prediction is that more economic and political chaos is ahead. Production is plummeting. Food is scarce. It is still true that Gorbachev crippled the old social structure before he built a new one.

Gorbachev told the Central Committee that communism should be replaced by the best of the world’s socialist and democratic thought. More specifically, he urged a mixed economy run by market forces rather than Moscow planners, encouragement of entrepreneurs, an end to official atheism and a beginning of political pluralism.

But there can be no straight line to that goal, either. Gorbachev must fend off not only Yeltsin’s populist movement but also a militaristic nationalist movement, led by Col. Victor Alksnis, that is now the largest single faction in the Soviet Parliament.

Gorbachev’s challenges to date were mere scrimmages for what is coming. But without the handicap of Leninism, he has a fighting chance.