Now the Moscow Spring Is Over : My country is again a ‘normal’ dictatorship, ruled by force, by shameless scoundrels. The worst has happened.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s peaceful revolution is over. My country is again a “normal” dictatorship, a variation of Nazi-like totalitarian society ruled by force, by shameless scoundrels.

This is the end of the most dramatic chapter in the postwar history that changed the face of the world. The breeching of the Berlin Wall symbolized the highest point in the unprecedented drive for freedom. In the former communist countries, the nightmare is over. They are lucky to be protected by international law, by the might of the world democratic community led by the United States. After the Gulf War, no Soviet general would dream of restoring the world order as it had existed BG, before Gorbachev.

Not many people in this country can fully appreciate how great was the difference between Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In my country, not much had changed since the old times; Communists still were in power--and, as it is now more clear than ever, there can be no “good Communists.”

Great expectations. That would be the proper name for the Western reactions to the reform, or perestroika. One can even describe it more harshly: wishful thinking. The world was so taken by the Soviet Communist leader “with a human face” that normal, sober, rational--or, you may even say, cynical--criteria for measuring the scope of change within the Soviet Union were lost.

Mikhail Gorbachev did what he could. It would be improper, maybe, at this moment to criticize him for making the wrong moves. But how else can one explain what happened to him--and to all the people in my country?

I would confine my observations to the most obvious and minimal criticism: He couldn’t find the strength to leave the Communist Party.

He lost the support of the only political force that could stand for him, the people, so unanimous in supporting Boris Yeltsin. Nobody will die for the leader who did so much to degrade Yeltsin--another of Gorbachev’s tragic mistakes, the last, really, in a country that had expressed so evidently its anti-communism.

Gorbachev personally brought to power the most outrageous people who never even pretended that they liked democracy. Now these sinister usurpers of power will rule my country. How poor is my people! We are again a plaything in the hands of Communist manipulators. The worst has happened.

History is repeating itself. In the Prague Spring of 1968, my generation was with Alexander Dubcek, the great reformer who came to save the communist world. I was thinking at that time: Will we live to see the moment when our own “Dubcek” would come to power?

Now the Moscow Spring is over, I hope without manslaughter this time, while Czechoslovakia is free. Are we to wait 17 more years till our own “Vaclav Havel,” a staunch anti-communist, will liberate us from this scourge of humanity?

Wisdom comes with time. But there is already a leader who understood the most important truth about communism.

Boris Yeltsin is our hope for salvation.

I cannot wait 17 years more, when Communists will find themselves out of power in my country, too. At that time I would be 72, if alive and with some health still, after long years of imprisonment. Today, I am with my friends, in Moscow and in Kiev, in Tbilisi and Vilnius, in Tallinn and Yerevan, at this hour of tragedy. But I have no willingness to go to prison. I hope to be able to help my people from here, as a better alternative to torture and a total inability to act. I am to ask for political asylum in the United States of America, seeing no other way out.

God save my people!