A Long, Mighty Struggle
By WALTER ISAACSON
Upon returning to Moscow in 1944 after a seven-year absence, the American diplomat George Kennan was struck by the enigma of an empire both yearning for its rightful place in the modern world and clinging to the enfeebling insularity of its past. "The Anglo-Saxon instinct is to attempt to smooth away contradictions," he wrote. "The Russian tends to deal only in extremes, and he is not particularly concerned to reconcile them. To him, contradiction is a familiar thing. It is the essence of Russia."
Contradiction has also become the essence of its second revolution, the radical crusade by Mikhail Gorbachev to create nothing less than a new Soviet Union. In fits and starts, using such hybrids as socialist markets and one- party pluralism, he has directed one of the most transfixing spectacles of modern times: an encrusted political and economic system being brought, stumbling and blinking in amazement, into the light of a new era. In the tradition of Peter the Great, who opened up Russia to the West almost 300 years ago to rescue it from backwardness, Gorbachev is trying to transform, neither slowly nor surely, every aspect of his nation's political, economic and psychological life.
Gorbachev has been in power for four years. In some ways, he was running for a second term in last Sunday's election of a new Congress of People's Deputies, seeking a mandate for his three-pronged pitchfork of perestroika (economic restructuring), glasnost (openness) and demokratizatsiya (democratization). Not since the Bolsheviks were trounced in the Constituent Assembly races of November 1917 had citizens of the Soviet Union been given the chance to vote in a real national election. This time some highly visible keepers of the Bolshevik faith fared poorly. But for Gorbachev the results could be, if he uses them adroitly, the mandate he sought to move to the next stages of reform.
In a land hardly famous for political comebacks, Boris Yeltsin, the brash populist who a year ago was ousted as Moscow Communist Party boss and candidate member of the Politburo, has become a symbol of the opportunities and obstacles that Gorbachev now faces. Yeltsin's triumph, along with the defeat of party hacks from Siberia to Lithuania, represented a rousing endorsement of Gorbachev's vision of perestroika. But it also represented a feisty revolt against the failure of his reforms to improve the harsh realities of Soviet life.
Gorbachev had already secured one of the seats in the new legislature reserved for top party officials. Thus he did not have to confront personally the deflating question that dogs American candidates: Are you better off now than you were four years ago?
The answer again involves contradictions. Life is clearly far better these days: the fear that was the most oppressive aspect of daily existence has been replaced by a torrent of free expression, while experiments with market principles show faint signs of sparking economic success. Life is just as clearly no better at all: the shelves in the shops are more barren than when Gorbachev took office, the limited economic reforms serve mainly to reveal how hopelessly ossified the economy is, and the flirtation with freedom has frayed the seams binding the empire's diverse nationalities.
In fact, to pronounce perestroika either a success or a failure at this stage is to misperceive its nature. At best, it is the beginning of a protracted and massive undertaking that could take a generation or more. "During the past 70 years, a new man has been created who is obedient and easily frightened," says the poet Bulat Okudzhava, a veteran Soviet-reform advocate. "What has been created over decades cannot be undone in a day." Energizing an empire of 285 million people and turning it into a modern economy ranks among the most daunting tasks of modern times, as audacious as Deng Xiaoping's Four Modernizations or Franklin Roosevelt's creation of a new social welfare state.
Like Dr. Johnson's remark about dogs who walk upright and women who preach, the amazing thing about perestroika is not that the Soviets are doing it well but that they are doing it at all. "We so quickly and lightly overlook the remarkable existence of perestroika and focus on the obstacles," says Robert Legvold, director of Columbia University's Averell Harriman Institute, "that we underestimate the significance of the fact that it has begun at all." Whatever happens, and whatever course it finally takes, the Gorbachev revolution has already become one of the greatest dramas and most momentous events of the second half of the 20th century.
Five of the six men who have led the Soviet Union have clung to power until their deaths. But the one exception -- Nikita Khrushchev, the earthy reformer of a generation ago -- stands as a cautionary reminder of the perils of perestroika. The combination of glasnost and demokratizatsiya runs the risk of giving conservatives the chance to point to a breakdown in social order. This is a major consideration in one of the most order-obsessed regimes on earth. Gorbachev's situation, like the fate of his reforms, will thus remain precarious.
Gorbachev has been able to demote but not purge from the Communist Party's ruling Politburo Yegor Ligachev, his conservative thorn. Ligachev and his allies, who include former KGB chief Victor Chebrikov, could become even more antagonistic out of dismay at the fate of fellow party traditionalists in the election. None is likely to try to pull off a coup, but it is possible that they could force Gorbachev to water down the reforms.
Even if Gorbachev is reined in, or toppled, the seeds he has sown in the Soviet mind and the changes he has already wrought will leave an indelible mark. The reforms of Khrushchev and Kosygin were squelched, but the ideas they planted blossomed a quarter-century later in a new generation of leadership. As Gorbachev told Henry Kissinger when he visited Moscow earlier this year, "At any rate, things will never be the same again in the Soviet Union." Notes Kissinger: "This would be a modest result for so Herculean a task." Yes, but once again the contradiction is also true: the fact that the Soviet Union has been so deeply altered that it will never again be exactly the same is of monumental historic significance.
The Soviet people now know what it is like not to fear. They have learned the joys (and, yes, the frustrations) of a feisty press. They have had Pasternak returned to them and have openly called for the publication of Solzhenitsyn. They have tasted the fruits of private marketplaces and cooperative cafes, discovered the potential (and, yes, the frustrations) of private entrepreneurship; they have watched candidates debate on television and be asked whether they believe in God. And they have read articles brushing the dust off Trotsky, probing the demonic mind of Stalin and introducing them to the ideas of Lech Walesa.
Most significant, perhaps, is the forthright admission by the Soviets that they are trying to shed the burden of a rigidly centralized economy based on Leninist-Stalinist principles. The eulogies on the death of Communism may be premature, but there are signs that a verdict is being reached in the long twilight struggle between this century's two dominant ideologies. While scrambling to find euphemisms for such apostate phrases as "private property," the Soviets are jettisoning many of their Communist tenets in favor of some that are at the heart of democratic capitalism: contested elections, pluralism, codified individual rights, market incentives and the reward of private enterprise.
The one thing that can be said with certainty about perestroika is that it has exposed how difficult rebuilding the Soviet economy will be. The obstacles are greater, the situation more dire and the fixes more fundamental than even Gorbachev suspected four years ago. "Frankly speaking, comrades, we have underestimated the extent and gravity of the deformations," he told a Party Conference last year. Nikolai Shmelev, one of the country's radical economic gadflies, has put it more vividly: "We are now like a seriously ill man who, after a long time in bed, takes his first step with the greatest degree of difficulty and finds to his horror that he has almost forgotten how to walk."
The overall Soviet economy remains a near shambles. The budget deficit -- caused in part by transfusions to anemic factories and by subsidies for food and housing -- is about 11% of the GNP, by some estimates. The ruble, arbitrarily said to be worth $1.60 but not freely convertible into dollars or other Western currencies, brings as little as 10 cents on the black market. But price controls have repressed the latent inflation, and people have more paper money -- about 300 billion rubles in savings -- than there are goods available for purchase.
Translated to a personal level, this means that day-to-day life in the Soviet Union is as difficult as ever. Not only are big consumer items like refrigerators and washing machines in short supply -- the average wait to buy the cheapest Soviet car is seven years -- but staples of everyday life are also scarce. Long lines snake into the street for such ordinary items as sausage, rice, coffee and candy.
Gorbachev's reforms are part of the problem. He is trying to force factories to become financially profitable, so they are gussying up products in order to price them higher than the everyday models that are price-fixed by the bureaucracy. Moscow consumers were deprived for months this winter of regular soap (32 cents a bar) because enterprises wanted to produce only a luxury soap that they could price at $1.60 a bar.
This does not make perestroika popular. A middle-aged book translator in Moscow says that votes for Yeltsin were votes against the establishment and Gorbachev. But doesn't Gorbachev represent change? "Who gives a damn about change when you can't buy cheese and aspirin anymore? They've had their circus. Now we want bread." Izvestia reports that when miners in southern Russia lined up for hours to wait for their pay packets, they began to jeer, "And this is perestroika?"
But to see only empty shelves is to miss the remarkable nature of the Soviet reforms. Gorbachev believes that the three prongs of his program are inextricably linked. Demokratizatsiya goes hand in glove with perestroika, he argues, because individual initiative is impossible in a society where decision-making is alienated from the people. And for either prong to work, there must be open discussion of ideas and criticism of the system's flaws. "It is only by combining economic reform with political changes, demokratizatsiya and glasnost that we can fulfill the tasks we have set for ourselves," Gorbachev told a party plenum in October.
On this linkage, Marx would be pleased with Gorbachev: the dialectical process requires understanding the connections between different social and economic forces. In theory, the urge to proceed on all fronts seems logical.
Does it make sense in practice? American politicians have found it more effective to ignore connections and plunge forward on just one or two initiatives at a time. That is the approach Yeltsin advocates. "By heading off in every direction at once, as we have been doing," he said in his interview with TIME in February, "we have hardly made any progress at all as far as the standard of living is concerned."
But Gorbachev's approach is probably the only way to rebuild a system so deeply corroded. The failed reforms of 1965, which attempted to introduce price and profit incentives, showed that tinkering with parts of the economy without a comprehensive overhaul of attitudes was doomed. Linkage is necessary because the economic and social problems all stem from the same root: too much centralization. A system based on bureaucratic commands has failed. Decentralization is necessary. But this cannot occur unless people are allowed the freedom to think for themselves.
One of Gorbachev's goals in the election was to get people engaged in his reforms. He did, with a vengeance. Despite 71 years without practice, Soviets plunged into the fray of open democracy. "We intellectuals always saw % ourselves as the symbol of democracy but thought the people weren't ready for it," says Andrei Voznesensky, a noted Soviet poet. "The joyful thing about all this is that in many ways we have been proved wrong."
The significance of the new Congress of People's Deputies is not yet certain. The 1,500 candidates who were up for election on March 26 will be joined by 750 selected by public organizations ranging from the Communist Party to the Society of Stamp Collectors. They will select 544 of their number for a new Supreme Soviet. This new legislature, of which Gorbachev is expected to be president, will jostle for authority with the Communist Party's hierarchy, of which Gorbachev is General Secretary. He may thus be able (if his footwork remains agile) to use the new Supreme Soviet to outmaneuver the conservatives in the Communist Party's apparatus and to use the party's Politburo to keep a lid on the insurgents in the Supreme Soviet.
Many elderly voters never mastered the principle that they were supposed to walk into a booth, pull the curtain behind them and secretly cross out the names of those they opposed. Instead, they picked up their ballots and walked straight to the box, as was the practice in past elections. Another change was that the party did not try to drum up turnout. "What kind of election is this?" a baffled older woman complained at a Moscow poll. "Where is the music, and what happened to the buffet?"
Yeltsin, 58, ran as Moscow's Huey Long, stoking populist passions with his calls for an end to the party elite's special privileges and his frontal attacks on Yegor Ligachev. "You're wrong, Boris!" Ligachev had shouted during the emotional Party Conference last year at which Yeltsin sought rehabilitation after being kicked off the Politburo. YEGOR, YOU'RE WRONG! read the buttons sported by Yeltsin's supporters as they marched through Moscow shouting "Down with party bureaucrats!" during the days leading up to the election. Yeltsin ended up with an astounding 89% of the vote in the at-large Moscow district.
One criticism of the election was that in 384 of the 1,500 districts, party hacks ran unopposed. Those who ran alone, however, still had to collect 50% of the vote. The most prominent victim: Yuri Solovyov, the Communist Party boss of the Leningrad region and a nonvoting member of the Politburo. Though Solovyov ran unopposed, almost two-thirds of the voters crossed out his name, and he lost. The mayor of Kiev also ran unopposed and lost. So did that city's , Communist Party boss.
Indeed, any notion that the election was totally controlled by the Communist bureaucracy was dispelled by the startling list of losers: the mayor of Moscow, the president and prime minister in Lithuania, the party boss in Minsk, the first deputy premier of Belorussia and the admiral of the Pacific fleet of the Soviet navy. Across the nation, almost a third of the party's 129 regional leaders lost. Estonians even had the courage to vote down the republic's KGB chief. The city party leader in Leningrad, running against an unknown 28-year-old shipyard engineer, received only 15% of the vote. In fact, the five top Communists in the Leningrad power structure tumbled to defeat. Valeri Terekhov, a member of Leningrad's Democratic Union, an opposition group, noted, "Gorbachev opened a volcano, and I don't think he realized the lava was so deep."
Another cause of skepticism about the elections was the bloc of 750 seats reserved for official and public organizations. But even there, insurgency reigned. Leaders of the Soviet Academy of Sciences produced a limp slate of 23 nominees for their 20 reserved seats, pointedly excluding physicist Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel laureate and human-rights activist. But the membership voted down 15 of them, which means that the academy's leaders must come up with new candidates, presumably including Sakharov this time. The Soviet Peace Committee, a goodwill and propaganda organization, was allotted five seats. Among those elected by the group was Patriarch Pimen, head of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Between gasps, however, some caution is in order. The Soviet Union still has a one-party system. After broaching the subject of whether other parties should be permitted, Yeltsin was subjected to an official inquiry by the Central Committee, which is still under way. Gorbachev, who says that pluralism can be accommodated within the Communist Party, calls the idea of having other parties "all rubbish."
Yeltsin will quit his job in Moscow's construction ministry and work to organize a bloc of like-minded members of the Congress of People's Deputies. "They will create pressure and strengthen their voice so it will be heard," he said after his victory. They will also, he hopes, elect him to the Supreme Soviet.
In Russian the word for voting, golosovat, derives from the Russian word golos, or voice. That also happens to be the root of the word glasnost. Likewise, the election was an extension of the openness and public airing * spawned by Gorbachev's glasnost crusade. Of the reform trinity, glasnost has wrought the most tangible changes, especially for the Soviet intellectual community, Gorbachev's most solid base of support. Nowadays the only heresy is orthodoxy. Says economist Shmelev: "Four years ago, people felt themselves living behind barbed wire. Now we have a degree of freedom for intellectuals and for ordinary people that would have been unimaginable before."
But glasnost has sparked serious problems for Gorbachev, none more threatening than the release of long-festering resentments felt by various national and ethnic groups. The world's last polyglot empire now faces renewed demands from the Crimean Tatars about grievances that go back 45 years, nationalist demonstrations in Moldavia against Russification, secessionism along the Baltic coast and sectarian violence between Armenians and Azerbaijanis.
The explosion of ethnic violence in Azerbaijan a year ago caught Gorbachev without a workable nationalities policy. The Armenians are enraged by what they claim are flagrant cases of ethnic abuse against their compatriots living in Azerbaijan. Gorbachev's prestige plummeted in Armenia when he gave a finger-wagging lecture to Armenian intellectuals who had come to present their case in Moscow last summer and when he ended his snap tour of the Armenian earthquake zone last December with another outburst against nationalists.
The nationalities crisis is also acute in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the relatively prosperous Baltic States that Stalin seized in 1940. Gorbachev initially regarded the nationalist sentiments in the region as a force that he could harness on behalf of perestroika. But he underestimated the resentment. In Estonia last November, the local legislature declared the republic "sovereign," a pronouncement Moscow refused to accept. Residents in Estonia are so fed up with Russians flooding in to clean out their better- stocked stores that they now require customers to produce a passport; only Estonians are allowed to buy appliances, clothing or footwear. The Baltics produced some painful surprises for the party as nationalist candidates notched victories over pro-Moscow rivals.
Another potential problem is the festering unrest in the fertile heart of the Soviet Union, the Ukraine. Gorbachev visited the region in February and lashed out against the disastrous consequences of further nationalist stirrings there, displaying iron teeth rather than the usual smile.
Of all Gorbachev's challenges, his most critical is getting perestroika to produce some tangible economic improvements. At the core of this effort is the Law on State Enterprise, passed almost two years ago, which is designed to lift the yoke of central planning off the back of industry. In theory, factories will no longer have to fulfill Moscow-dictated quotas by churning out products with little regard for cost, efficiency or quality. Instead, factories are supposed to become "self-financing." They will contract with suppliers for materials, be responsible for selling what they produce and be allowed to share in the profit if revenue exceeds costs.
In reality, however, the quotas have been supplanted by "state orders" placed by Moscow's ministries for hefty portions of the output of most factories. The nation's entrenched bureaucrats see change as threatening, and their first priority is to preserve their jobs by clinging to their authority to meddle. That suits most managers just fine, because it means they neither have to hustle sales nor worry about scaring up the necessary raw materials. "A form of perverse social contract exists between the bureaucracy and those people who do not want to work very hard," says Shmelev.
An equally important pillar of perestroika is the encouragement of private agriculture. Gorbachev has long promoted "contract" farming, in which small groups or families enter into an agreement to handle a certain portion of a collective farm's crops, land or livestock. The latest innovation, passed by the Central Committee last month, goes much further: it allows families to take leases of 50 years or more on pieces of land, keep the profit on what they raise and even pass the leasing rights on to their children. Administration of this program, though, will be under the control of the collective farms.
This reintroduction of what Gorbachev delicately referred to as "individual property" could cause the most sweeping overhaul in Soviet agriculture since Stalin began to collectivize the farms in 1929, a process that resulted in more than 10 million deaths and wiped out the kulaks, or landed farmers, as a class. Since then the land has been unable to feed its people; the U.S.S.R. spends $105 billion, roughly 15% of its budget, subsidizing food, and it imported 36 million tons of grain last year. One Soviet collective farmer feeds only seven to nine people, in contrast to a Dutch farmer, who can feed at least 112.
^ To breed a new class of entrepreneurs, Gorbachev has allowed individuals to start cooperatives and share the profits. At first the program was limited mainly to high-visibility services such as taxis and cafes. Now more than 2 million people are employed in co-ops and private businesses. Privately operated pay toilets are set up all over Moscow. But most co-ops are still harassed by reform-resistant bureaucrats and have trouble securing permits and supplies.
Reaching beyond the country's borders, Gorbachev has attempted to start joint ventures with foreign investors. The Soviets have proved flexible: the original plan, which insisted on majority Soviet ownership, has been revised to accommodate the demands of Western companies. Last Thursday at a Kremlin ceremony, executives of a consortium of six U.S. firms -- including Chevron, Eastman Kodak and Johnson & Johnson -- signed an agreement for as many as 25 joint ventures involving about $10 billion over the next 20 years. Although the agreement specified ways that profits could be taken out of the Soviet Union in hard currency and not just held in worthless rubles, joint ventures still face enormous difficulties. Ford Motor Co. pulled out of the consortium because, a spokesman said, it was unable to persuade "the Soviets to adopt new and innovative financial arrangements."
Gorbachev's economic reforms, while radical, are nonetheless carefully circumscribed. He is not marching headlong to capitalism but is attempting to reinvent Marxism by creating socialist markets, socialist competition and cooperative ventures. Private ownership of the means of production (land, factories) is still prohibited. Individuals cannot hire workers with a view to profiting from their labor but rather must form cooperative arrangements. There is a noncompetitive banking system, and no stock market for financing private ventures. Most important of all, there is no rational price system: thousands of prices are still set by state fiat rather than supply and demand, which means that supply never seems to equal demand.
Despite what the election indicated, there is significant resistance to Gorbachev's reforms. While managers and workers realize that the present system has its flaws, they are not eager to take a leap into the unknown. Many are satisfied with a social contract in which, as Soviets cynically joke, "they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." The probability, nevertheless, is that Gorbachev will become more, not less, impatient. "Shortages exist because we are moving too slowly, halting and stepping off the road too often," says Abel Aganbegyan, an economist who helped shape Gorbachev's ideas.
The next stage of perestroika will probably be even harder than the latest. For market incentives to work, prices will have to be decontrolled -- a frightening prospect given the pent-up inflationary pressures. Rents and the prices of meat, bread and milk have been kept at the same level for decades; if decontrolled, they would be likely to rocket. Gorbachev understands the challenge. "Socialist markets cannot be formed without price reform," he told a party meeting in February. But having reached that daunting precipice, he blinked. Rents and basic food prices, he promised, will not be raised for at least two years. Until there are price reform and quality products to market, the ruble cannot become a convertible currency, which is necessary if Gorbachev is to attract more foreign investment and bring his country into international financial organizations.
To buy time for his reforms, Gorbachev has forced a significant shift of resources away from the military. He has signed a decree cutting Soviet armed forces by 500,000 men within the next two years, helping save 14% of the total military budget and living up to the promise he made in his U.N. speech last December. These cuts have been accompanied by significant changes in doctrine. Conventional forces are being reconfigured to become more defensive in deployment. In addition, the Soviets now speak of maintaining a "reasonable sufficiency" in their nuclear and conventional forces rather than attempting to match or surpass the might of the West in every category. As a Soviet arms- control official asked recently, "What do we need a huge tank park in Eastern Europe for?"
The swords-into-plowshares effort has produced some quirky situations. For example, the Ministry for Medium-Machine Building, which is responsible for building nuclear weapons, has been given the job of modernizing the dairy industry. Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov disclosed last month that the Moscow Aviation Factory will soon produce pasta.
Gorbachev also continues to advocate "new thinking" in foreign policy, which has been reflected in tangible reductions of Soviet commitments abroad. Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze is even plunging into the thicket of creating a Soviet version of the War Powers Act: he has announced that the new Supreme Soviet should have the right to debate any foreign political or military commitments.
The commanding presence that Gorbachev has been able to exert on the world stage has helped shore up his power at home. This week he is again on the road. In his visit with Cuba's Fidel Castro, who is no fan of perestroika or glasnost, the Soviet leader will have a chance to show whether his rhetoric about new thinking translates into taking concrete steps toward easing tensions in Central America. Afterward, he plans to go to London to see if Margaret Thatcher still believes, as she once said of Gorbachev, that "we can do business together."
When Gorbachev proposed his plans for perestroika, the first question was, Is he serious? He was. Then the question was, Can he succeed? That one is still open. Nowadays, as popular impatience grows, another question comes up with increasing frequency, Are his reforms permanent, or could they be reversed if he was shunted aside?
When a group of intellectuals and artists were sitting around Moscow debating this question, one of them asked what it would take for the hard- liners to reverse glasnost. "All they'd have to do is fire about six editors," someone replied. "I think one would do it," said another. But even though such a clampdown could occur, it could not erase the ideas or the taste for open discussion that has been liberated. Says Sergei Zalygin, editor of the crusading literary monthly Novy Mir: "How it will end we do not know, but there is no turning back now."
Demokratizatsiya might be easier to dampen. Conservatives simply could ensure that the popularly elected Supreme Soviet becomes mainly a ceremonial body, with real authority remaining with the Politburo. Even so, the elections of March 1989 are a watershed. Never again will the power of the party seem quite so absolute and unassailable. Never again will it be quite so easy to herd Soviet citizens to the polls to cast ballots with only one name.
As for perestroika, Gorbachev has made into a mantra the phrase "There is no alternative." Even Ligachev and the conservatives, wary as they are about the mayhem being done to Marxism, agree that something must be done. As Gorbachev well knows, one of the safeguards of perestroika is its links to glasnost: now that the economy's inherent flaws have been aired, it is impossible to retreat and pretend once again not to see them. "The notion that Ligachev or anyone else can bring perestroika to a halt now simply does not square with reality," says Soviet economist Gavril Popov. "Empty store shelves and housing problems have made the process difficult, but something absolutely vital has taken place in Russian terms: a change in our way of thinking."
This does not mean that Gorbachev will prevail or even endure. Perestroika has committed one of the most dangerous sins in politics: it has raised expectations more than living standards. Although the reforms Gorbachev has wrought can never be completely reversed, they could be suppressed by a retrograde regime. The result would be a surly Soviet Union that could threaten the world with its bulk and brawn while it seethed about the sclerotic state of its Third World economy and its inability to escape the tentacles of an ideology that does not satisfy the basic needs of 285 million people.
The alternative is not that perestroika might suddenly be pronounced a success -- even the irrepressible Boris Yeltsin should avoid holding his breath -- but that the reforms will continue. For both the Soviets and those destined to coexist with them, that is the important thing. Each new manifestation of democracy, each new opportunity for individual enterprise, each new opening for free thought and expression helps ease the repressive relationship between the Soviet state and its population. That, in turn, should make the new U.S.S.R. a far less threatening world citizen. Last week's election was another act in a lengthy drama that has already, in only four fitful years, indelibly transformed the face of the Soviet Union -- and its soul.
With reporting by Ann Blackman, John Kohan and Nancy Traver/Moscow