Bush and the West Acted Admirably : The coup was motivated by the conviction that the Soviet Union was disintegrating.

The replacement of Mikhail S. Gorbachev by a group of hard-line leaders in Moscow is bound to trigger a debate about whether the West could have done more to sustain Gorbachev in power. Those who believe that the Bush Administration was too hesitant about granting aid to the Soviet Union may claim that if the United States had promised Gorbachev tens of billions of dollars, he would have been able to hold onto his position. In fact, there is nothing the West could have done that would have altered Gorbachev’s fate.

When President Bush visited the Soviet Union a few weeks ago, he repeatedly expressed strong support for Gorbachev and urged the restive nationalities to go along with the Soviet leader’s reform program. Indeed, Bush came under criticism back home for having been too conciliatory toward Gorbachev.

The men who seized power on Sunday were obviously aware of the West’s firm commitment to Gorbachev. They knew that by launching a coup, they would be endangering the improvement in East-West relations that Gorbachev was so crucial in bringing about. They knew that by ousting him, they would undermine any hope of obtaining large-scale financial aid from the West. But they acted anyway.

It is clear, then, that the West’s reaction was of no relevance to the decision to launch a coup. Indeed, foreign policy concerns in general had little or nothing to do with the takeover. If foreign policy had mattered, the coup would have occurred a long time ago, before Germany was reunified and the Warsaw Pact had collapsed.

The removal of Gorbachev was motivated, instead, by domestic factors, and specifically by the growing conviction among hard-line officials that the Soviet Union was on the brink of violent disintegration. Their concerns had become particularly acute over the past few months because Gorbachev had shifted away from the coercive policies that he had adopted in late 1990 and early this year. Starting with the “nine-plus-one” agreement in April, Gorbachev had embarked on a process that was intended to transfer far-reaching power and resources from the central government to the republics.

This transfer was to be codified in a so-called Union Treaty, which would have become the highest document in the land, taking precedence even over the constitution. The Union Treaty was due to be completed and open for signature today.

Thus, the timing of the coup was far from coincidental. The takeover, which occurred while Gorbachev was on vacation, was viewed as the last possible way to forestall what hard-line officials regarded as a step that would eventually bring about the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Indeed, one of the leaders of the coup, Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, had warned several weeks ago that Gorbachev’s version of the Union Treaty would “force the central government to its knees and be the death knell of the union.”

The coup took place at a time when scenes of violent ethnic strife in Yugoslavia had been appearing on Soviet television for weeks. The vivid example of Serbs and Croats killing one another seemed to portend the sort of chaos that would befall the Soviet Union itself once the Union Treaty took effect. Fears of chaos have always been strong in the Soviet Union, and the Yugoslav crisis certainly accentuated them.

Thus, Gorbachev’s ouster resulted from a combination of factors that had nothing to do with the West. The Bush Administration deserves no blame for events beyond its control; on the contrary, the Administration did an admirable job of balancing its support for Gorbachev with encouragement of democratic forces in the republics. The hard-line officials who launched the coup did so to preserve their anachronistic vision of a centrally controlled state. Nothing the West could have done would have deterred them.