Post-Putsch Russia: Is It Still a Reasonable Bet for the West? : A year later the same problems, and opportunities, remain

A year ago a cabal of hard-liners from the highest levels of the Communist Party, the military and the secret police made a desperate grab for power in hopes of blocking the Soviet Union’s imminent dissolution into a loose confederation of sovereign states.

The attempted coup d’etat--ineptly planned and inexpertly executed--quickly collapsed. President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who was preparing to sign a new union treaty that would have greatly reduced central control over the 15 republics and so stripped the plotters of most of their power, was arrested as he vacationed in the Crimea. But Boris N. Yeltsin, the Russian president, remained free and promptly became the rallying point for anti-coup protesters, tens of thousands of whom took to the streets to defend the cause of reform. In a few days it was all over.

Today the surviving plotters await trial in Moscow’s cozily named Sailors’ Rest prison. Gorbachev, whose office was abolished by legal means when the Soviet Union ceased to exist at year’s end, is now a private citizen, given to criticizing Yeltsin from the political sidelines while hinting that he is ready to serve again if summoned. And the successor states to the Soviet Union, Russia most notably, continue to face the most onerous economic and political challenges.

In the hopeful aftermath of last year’s putsch there were many who believed that the conservative opponents of reform had been irrecoverably discredited, and that a new political day had dawned. That assessment was quickly shown to be premature at best.

Though it can boast a freely elected president and a vigorously contentious legislature, Russia remains a long way from achieving a stable and durable consensus-based democracy. Without that evolution, which almost certainly must come soon if it is to come at all, it may well prove impossible to institute and implement the sweeping economic reforms on which the country’s viability depends. The prospects do not seem overly bright.

At a recent private gathering in the United States a high Russian official was asked to identify the greatest barrier to the development of democracy in his country. “Our history,” he said simply.

A thousand years of authoritarianism cannot be said to have provided the nourishing legacy on which to build a new society where individual freedom, respect for human rights and the institutions to sustain and protect them can flourish. Russians today may well be freer than at any other time in their history; but the collapse of communism and its command economy, the lifting of government restraints on many basic liberties, the on-again, off-again partial efforts to introduce a market-based system have by no means been pain-free.

Organized crime dominates and so constricts much of the economy that is no longer under state control. Real wages, industrial output and oil production continue to fall. Huge quantities of food never make it from the field to the kitchen.

Some Russians are doing well under the new order. Many, however, have seen the conditions of their lives grow ever harder and more miserable, and their discontent could yet prove to be the fertile ground from which support for a new authoritarianism will spring.

The coming winter, now not many months away, is expected to produce even greater strains than last year’s. Once again, Russia will find itself seriously, even desperately short of food, medicine and fuel. As inefficient state industries fold, it could also find itself with as many as 10 million unemployed.

The need for aid from outside has never been more urgent. In its own political interests--to say nothing of humanitarian imperatives--the West should do all it can to increase the help it gives. There remains at least a chance that reform can be made to work. That chance is worth betting on, because the foreseeable alternatives could only be ugly and threatening.