The Year of People

By BRUCE W. NELAN David Aikman/Washington, John Borrell/Vienna, Richard Hornik/Warsaw and John Kohan/Moscow

The Gorbachev phenomenon is the result of Soviet pride and Soviet shame. For more than a generation, the citizens of the U.S.S.R. have lived with that contradiction. They have had the satisfaction of knowing their country was a superpower -- and the frustration of living in a backward economy. They made their homes in crowded, decrepit dwellings. Shopping for necessities was a daily despair. Citizenship itself was often an insult and sometimes an injury. Their government would not let them express their thoughts or travel abroad. For years they could explain it all away: the hardship was the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis; the repression was a response to the ever present threat of capitalist imperialism.

But over time, fewer and fewer Russians fit the stereotype of illiterate peasants on whose bovine passivity Czar or commissar could rely. Soviets were increasingly well educated and well informed, in spite of the propaganda poured over them. And while they reached political maturity, their leadership sank into senility. The people cringed when they heard the doddering Leonid Brezhnev try to form his words and when they learned that his hands were so shaky he had to eat with a spoon at a state dinner. They told scornful jokes: state radio, cynics said, dared not play any work by Tchaikovsky in a minor key for fear that everyone would think another General Secretary had died.

The people -- whose name was so often taken in vain by their rulers -- longed for a leader with verve and vision, someone who would represent their pride rather than their shame. There was, therefore, a national murmur of interest in 1979, when the country got its first look at Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev at a televised awards ceremony. Not only did this new Central Committee Secretary, then 48, seem at ease among the ruling septuagenarians; he was the only one able to say thank you for his medal without reading from a 3-by-5 card.

Since his selection as party chief in 1985, Gorbachev has exceeded both the hopes of those who longed for reinvigoration and the fears of those, no doubt including comrades who voted for him, who worried that he would jeopardize the power and privileges of the elite. He has been a political dynamo, showering sparks inside and outside the country. His commitment to the still elusive goal of perestroika, his effort to make the economy produce what the people want to consume, and glasnost, an end to systematic official lying, have transformed the Soviet Union and made possible a transformation of international relations as well. What were long called, and accurately so, the satellites, or captive nations of Eastern Europe, are defecting en masse to the West. They are doing so because Gorbachev is letting them. In the U.S.S.R. the old order is not just passing; it is already on what Leon Trotsky called the trash heap of history. No one, certainly including Gorbachev, knows what is coming next. But whatever it is, it will be something new.

Gorbachev did not invent the idea of trying to reinvent communism, but during his formative years in obscurity he certainly learned a lesson about the connection between internal reform and international relations. He had seen Nikita Khrushchev's vigorous cultural thaw of the late 1950s freeze again in the intensified cold war that followed the Cuban missile crisis. Alexei Kosygin, who was Prime Minister until his death in 1980, attempted to reorient heavy industry toward consumer goods, decentralization and profitmaking in the mid-1960s. But, ironically, that program was aborted partly because the Soviet crackdown on "socialism with a human face" in Czechoslovakia triggered a backlash against liberalism in the U.S.S.R. In Poland the creation of Solidarity, the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc, preceded the advent of Gorbachev by five years. But Lech Walesa was officially considered an outlaw. The notion of Solidarity participating in government, not to mention dominating it, was unthinkable.

The intellectual and biographical origins of Gorbachev's radicalism will probably always be a mystery. In a way, they become more mysterious as time goes on, if only because he becomes more radical. The sweeping changes he has instigated this past year in the U.S.S.R., particularly free expression and democratization, and his transfusion of counterrevolution into Eastern Europe would shock not only the late Andrei Gromyko, who nominated Gorbachev for the general secretaryship in 1985, but the Gorbachev of five years ago as well.

Still, there are clues in his life story. Like the population as a whole, he was much better educated than his predecessors. A graduate of the law faculty of Moscow State University, he is the first Soviet party leader since Lenin to have earned a university degree. He is experienced in weighing evidence and reassessing what Marxists call -- but often do not respect -- "objective reality." His rise in the party began long after Stalin's death, so he is less afflicted than his elders by xenophobia and acceptance of terror as a civic norm. His abilities were recognized by KGB chief Yuri Andropov, who offered him counsel and support. Andropov had been a Central Committee Secretary and, as head of intelligence, had access to a picture of domestic and international affairs undistorted by propaganda. He was able to brief Gorbachev on how swiftly their country was declining.

Like his mentor, Gorbachev could see that the creaking, centrally controlled Soviet system, under the stifling ministrations of bureaucrats, was about to expire. To oil the cogs of a restructured economic machine, he would have to inspire productivity and reclaim for the consumer sector much of the vast resources and brainpower that had been commandeered by the military. And to do that he had to overcome traditional Bolshevik paranoia and reappraise the threat to the Soviet Union from the West. "Security," he wrote in 1987, "can no longer be ensured by military means."

Initially Gorbachev believed he could restructure the country by replacing hacks with doers, offering real rewards for hard work and cutting back on the consumption of vodka. In short, he counted on the restoration of discipline. It took two years for him to discover that the problems were much deeper and that the solutions would have to be much more far-reaching and disruptive. He realized, he said, that "cosmetic measures" would not work, and so "we arrived at the concept of perestroika as the revolutionary renovation of socialism, of our entire society." What this grand but vague formulation has meant in practice is the scaling back of coercion and the introduction of an unprecedented, until recently unimaginable degree of pluralism. As he put it in his 1987 book Perestroika, "It is possible to suppress, compel, bribe, break or blast, but only for a certain period."

He has tried to apply that principle at home and in Eastern Europe, where he attributed the stagnation of the economy and the discontent of the populace to "miscalculations by the ruling parties." The East European regimes had long taken it for granted that their Big Brothers in Moscow would provide the brute force that is the substitute for political legitimacy in the Marxist- Leninist system. Now all of a sudden, the No. 1 man in the Kremlin was saying he would not back them up and that they had to find a way of making a genuine social compact with their own people, or fall. Hence the most amazing events of 1989 -- and of the decade: one after another, with breathtaking speed, the communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe came tumbling down.

A Watershed in Warsaw

Poland, where major antigovernment strikes broke out in 1956, 1968, 1970, 1976 and 1980-81, mounted the first full test of Moscow's new policy. At the beginning of 1989, Polish party leader Wojciech Jaruzelski told his Central Committee that "fundamental changes" were needed to rescue the economy from work stoppages, inflation, debt, shortages and the burden of a near worthless currency. Having suppressed Solidarity for seven years and jailed or driven underground many of its leaders, the party needed the union's help. During several weeks of so-called round-table discussions with the government, Walesa and other union leaders concluded that it was Poland that needed their help. They traded a tacit pledge to refrain from further strikes for legalization of the union, an amended constitution and freer elections than those that had been held since World War II. Solidarity turned itself into a political party -- the first true opposition in the Soviet bloc -- so it could contest all 100 seats in the new Senate and 161 of the seats in the lower chamber, the Sejm. In June Solidarity won all but one of the contested seats. In August, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, editor of Solidarity's weekly newspaper, was sworn in as the first noncommunist Prime Minister in Eastern Europe since Stalin had imposed his system there 40 years ago. Society -- led, with appropriate irony, by the workers whom Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto had exhorted to unite -- had proved stronger than the state.

Just as Poland was showing the world the best that could be hoped for in the drama of reform, China was showing the worst. Deng Xiaoping had introduced bold and promising reforms of the economy under the slogan of "Four Modernizations." But Deng kept the political system rigidly in the Stalinist mold. Inspired by their increased exposure to the outside world in general and by the example of Gorbachev's democratization in particular, the people of China appealed to their leadership for more political freedom. A demonstration by several thousand students escalated into a six-week occupation of the central square in Beijing by crowds of up to 1 million people. When the tanks rolled in on June 4, reformers in Poland suddenly had a new code word for the catastrophe they feared might still befall them: Tiananmen.

Although Gorbachev was obviously dismayed, his public reaction was muted. Talking with French academics at the Sorbonne a month later, he reminded them that the Soviet party had urged the Chinese authorities to solve the problem by "political dialogue" with the young demonstrators. "This position of ours remains unchanged," he said. In contrast, Gorbachev called the changes in Eastern Europe "inspiring."

The Iron Curtain Comes Down

Nowhere were they more so than in Hungary. The Hungarian freedom fighters of 1956 had been the moral and political precursors of the martyrs of Tiananmen, defeated by tanks. After suppressing that revolt and executing the moderate communist leader Imre Nagy, Moscow tried a new form of bribery: it allowed Hungary wider latitude in economic experimentation than any other East bloc country, in exchange for political orthodoxy.

Hungarian revisionism, nicknamed "goulash communism," produced prosperity and glitter for a while, but the economy nonetheless went into a long decline because the stagnation was too widespread and deep rooted to be cured by tinkering. Party boss Janos Kadar, the quisling who had replaced Nagy, was ousted in May 1988. He was succeeded by moderate reformer Karoly Grosz. But as in the Soviet Union, moderate reform was, by definition, inadequate. Drastic measures were necessary and, in the Gorbachev era, acceptable to Moscow. In search of new ideas and a democratic image in January 1989, parliament passed legislation permitting the formation of opposition political parties for the next election, to be held in the spring. The communists, in a desperate bid to regain some legitimacy, have renamed themselves the Hungarian Socialist Party, but they are expected to capture no more than 15% to 20% of the vote.

On March 17, Hungary signed the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, pledging not to force fleeing foreigners to return to their own countries. In a year of turning points, that move had special importance. Hungary began dismantling the barbed wire on the Austrian border. Quite literally, the Iron Curtain had started to come down. The principal beneficiaries were East German travelers, who were suddenly able to keep right on moving westward. The fatal hemorrhaging of the German Democratic Republic had begun.

As East Germans flooded into Hungary by the thousands, tensions between the two supposedly "fraternal" governments came into the open. Invoking a bilateral agreement, the East Berlin regime demanded that Budapest return the refugees. The Hungarians refused, allowing 15,000 East Germans in three days to go to West Germany, where they received automatic citizenship. East Germany halted travel to Hungary. Would-be immigrants then poured into Czechoslovakia to take refuge in the West German embassy there.

The German Democratic Republic was losing its best, brightest, most promising citizens, precisely those people who socialist propaganda said were going to build a better future. They were, but not in the G.D.R. Arriving in the West, many of them explained that they had left the East not because their lives were uncomfortable, but because they were unfree.

Heading Off Bloodshed

Then in October the revolution came home to East Germany. It started with freedom marches in Leipzig. For a long moment, it looked as though there might be another Tiananmen after all. On Oct. 9 the 77-year-old party boss Erich Honecker ordered the police to use "all available force" to clear the streets, but Egon Krenz, then in charge of security, persuaded him to rescind the order. Each week the Monday demonstrations grew, to 200,000 on Oct. 23, to 480,000 on Nov. 6. The marches, always peaceful and sober, increasingly impressive, spread throughout East Germany.

Gorbachev had played a pivotal role in heading off bloodshed. Visiting East Berlin on Oct. 7, the 40th anniversary of the communist state, Gorbachev cautioned the leaders that they could not count on Soviet support if they used force to crack down, and advised them to launch their own perestroika: "Life itself punishes those who delay." Eleven days later, Honecker was forced out and replaced by Krenz, who immediately sought to appease the marching crowds and the demands from his party for faster reform. His tenure was brief but memorable, if only because he ordered the opening of the Berlin Wall, the ultimate symbol of the Iron Curtain.

On Dec. 3 the entire party leadership resigned under public pressure. A caretaker regime has set free elections for May 6. No matter how the Communist Party reorganizes or renames itself, it is finished as a significant factor in East German politics. Up to 1 million of its 2.3 million members have already turned in their party cards.

An Autumn Thaw

Shibboleths in the West were evaporating almost as fast as regimes in the East. It had long been a tenet of conventional wisdom that Czechoslovakia, the homeland of the Good Soldier Schweik, would be one of the last nations to join the march of freedom. Maybe, just maybe there would be another Prague Spring in 1990. But the thaw came in the fall instead. Demonstrations began in mid- November. The first was a legal assembly of students sponsored by the communist-dominated Socialist Union of Youth. But that organization was seething with discontent, and 3,000 of the marchers moved toward Prague's Wenceslas Square. Riot police attacked and beat them. Again there were apprehensive memories of what had happened in Beijing a few months before. The following day tens of thousands of ordinary citizens massed in the square to shout to their temporary rulers "The game is over!"

So it was. The people were extraordinarily civil, almost good-natured, in the way they threw out their leaders. They welcomed Alexander Dubcek, the tragic hero of the original Prague Spring, back into the public spotlight. But the man of the hour was playwright Vaclav Havel, the often imprisoned leader of dissent, who has conjured up what may be the new nemesis of world communism: "the power of the powerless." On Dec. 10 what Havel called the "velvet revolution" swept away the government. In a new Cabinet of 21, there are now eleven noncommunists. The formation of rival parties has been legalized and Civic Forum, the noncommunist coalition, has decided to join in free elections likely to be held in May.

As the year came to an end, events reached a velocity that left onlookers giddy and made even some staunch anticommunists in the West applaud a bit less gleefully and start worrying that perhaps the resulting instability would be a greater threat to world peace than the old, seemingly monolithic communist menace. Yet once it happened, the whole spectacle had a look of something like inevitability. The governments of Eastern Europe had never been more than hollow administrations installed and maintained by Moscow's armed forces. They were rejected as Marxist, but even more as Russian, a double affront to the proud nationalism of countries that believed the West ended at Poland's eastern frontier. Once it became clear that Gorbachev meant what he said, the opposition -- tightly organized as in Poland or inchoate as in East Germany and Czechoslovakia -- rose up in wrath. Without the backing of the Soviet army, local satraps dared not use their security forces and probably did not know if they could trust them. The communist parties tried to buy off the people with leadership shuffles and semireforms, but that was not the point. Communist dictatorship could not be reformed; it could only be destroyed.

Demonstrations in Bulgaria -- yes, Bulgaria -- began tentatively at the end of September and then picked up momentum. Todor Zhivkov, the country's dictator for 35 years, was replaced on Nov. 10 by Petar Mladenov, who purged the Stalinist leadership, promising to legalize opposition parties and hold free elections by the end of May. That move was something of a surprise, since Bulgaria most closely identifies with the Soviet Union and was not expected to take reforms further than Gorbachev himself has done. And Gorbachev draws the line at the formation of rival parties.

The Dilemma of Democratization

In every case -- Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia -- a disbelieving but increasingly hopeful world watched and waited for a crackdown that never came. In every case, the disintegration of the communist system was hastened by economic crises. Marx was right: politics is driven by economics. But his 20th century followers were spectacularly wrong. A command economy can grow only by exploiting farmers and workers; eventually there is no incentive for the workers to work or the farmers to farm in a society in which they have no say in the allocation of resources. Giving them a say means giving them a voice -- a concept best translated into Russian as glasnost.

Gorbachev has been badgering and cajoling ordinary citizens to take charge of their own futures in their jobs and in political organizations. He told Moscow editors in September 1988 that he wanted to "rid public opinion of such a harmful complex as faith in the 'good Czar,' the all-powerful center, the notion that someone can bring about order and organize perestroika from on high." His revamping of the legislative organs of the government offered just such an opportunity to assault the old conveyor-belt way of doing things.

In March the Soviet people went to the polls to elect a new 2,250-seat Congress of People's Deputies. The Congress in turn elected the Supreme Soviet, the country's standing parliament. Previous parliaments were no more than tools of the party, but this one has actively debated and even opposed government programs. In the absence of rival political parties, some 85% of those elected to the Congress were party members. But a groundswell of revulsion against entrenched bureaucrats denied almost a third of the country's regional party chiefs seats in the Congress. In May live coverage of Congress sessions gave the spellbound nation a crash course in democracy, as radicals and former dissidents led by the late Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov denounced the KGB as "the most secret and conspiratorial of all state institutions" and counseled against giving Gorbachev, now President of the country, too much power. Here was part of the paradox of perestroika: democratization, so crucial to Gorbachev's principles and strategy alike, emboldened his critics and opponents.

Meanwhile, the non-Russian republics of the Soviet Union have had their own reasons for responding enthusiastically to Gorbachev's campaign on behalf of self-reliance and decentralization. The nationalism that had lain largely dormant or been brutally suppressed rose to the surface. In the Caucasus, ethnic hatreds burst into violence. In Azerbaijan, which borders on Iran, the dominant Azerbaijanis, a Muslim, Turkic-speaking people, are embroiled in a blood feud with the Christian Armenians in and around the enclave of Nagorno- Karabakh. The region has been besieged for 20 months, its road traffic and railways under attack by Azerbaijani nationalists. Vital supplies are ferried in by helicopter. Some 5,000 troops of the Interior Ministry have been assigned to peacekeeping duties in the area.

In April a peaceful demonstration by Georgian separatists in Tbilisi turned into a horror when army and Interior Ministry troops attacked the unarmed protesters with shovels, clubs and poison gas, killing 20. There have been similar nationalist flare-ups in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tadzhikistan.

Secession, long a virtually taboo word in Soviet politics, has become the avowed aim of several nationalist movements. Although the Baltic states have been granted a high degree of economic autonomy, they were rebuked by the Supreme Soviet in November for passing laws claiming the right to decide which legislation enacted in Moscow would apply in their territory. A week later, Georgia passed the same law. Ukrainian nationalists say they will soon try for economic and possibly political autonomy.

The Empire's Fatal Flaw

The dilemma for Gorbachev is acute. On the one hand, he dares not permit violent chaos to spread, nor preside over the breakup of the U.S.S.R. On the other, he knows that resorting to force would probably provoke even greater resistance to Moscow's rule and would certainly spell the end of his liberal reform program as a whole. A crackdown could also revive the cold war and end his plans to transfer resources from the military to the civilian sector.

The U.S.S.R.'s identity as the world's last multinational empire may be the tragic flaw in Gorbachev's vision. It may prevent him from going as far as he would like -- and as far as he must to succeed. Certainly the imperative of maintaining order and preventing the breakup of the country is a large part of his reason for opposing the removal from the Soviet constitution of Article 6, which gives the Communist Party a monopoly on political power. A confrontation looms with the Baltic states over their intention to cancel Article 6 and declare their own communist parties independent. The Lithuanian party voted last week to split from Moscow and declared its intention to create "an independent, democratic Lithuanian state." One-party rule, Gorbachev says, is vital to the success of perestroika. He opposed debate on the issue at the opening of the People's Congress in mid-December, saying it would have to wait until constitutional revision as a whole is considered. But he may not get his way in that respect -- as well as in many others. The Soviet Communist Party has already split into so many factions -- rightist, leftist, nationalist -- that it is less a single entity than an umbrella organization in which policy battles are being fought out. Pluralism in one party could precede the development of separate parties in the U.S.S.R.

The country hovers at the edge of the definitive changes that have swept Eastern Europe, but hesitates to take the plunge. Moscow's latest five-year economic plan, announced two weeks ago, still retains central control of production quotas and postpones vital price reforms until 1992. Gorbachev denies that he intends to move to a totally Western-style, free-market system. He insists that his perestroika can in time deliver democracy in a one-party state and efficiency in a planned economy.

In the meantime, Gorbachev's vision of an independent but cooperative international system has allowed five East European countries to emerge from communist dictatorship. They are fledglings, with no established economic or commercial systems, and even with help from Western governments and corporations, it is not certain they all will succeed. Their work should be eased by large newly formed national-unity coalitions such as New Forum in East Germany, Civic Forum in Czechoslovakia and the Union of Democratic Forces in Bulgaria. Still, it is possible that after 40 years of Marxism ordinary workers will view the profit motive with hostility and insist that the government owes them a living. If that is the case, increasing penury could push Eastern Europe back into its 19th century bad habits: ethnic hatreds, border feuds, military juntas.

Yet it is by no means certain that will happen, and that is definitely not the message the people of Eastern Europe sent their leaders and the world when they filled the streets with powerful yet peaceful protests. Governments, even ones as ruthless as the now toppled Rumanian regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, realized that they cannot ignore the voices of their citizens. They must now think seriously about the consent of the governed and, mirabile dictu, about getting elected.

Historians and political scientists debate whether great forces or great men move the world. By unleashing the forces of democracy, Gorbachev gave new luster to the great-man theory. He may not be able to control those forces himself. They could even sweep him away, just as they did Egon Krenz and Karoly Grosz and Milos Jakes. But no matter what happens next in the great Eurasian land mass where 1.8 billion people live under communism -- and no matter what happens to Gorbachev himself -- he has established his place in history as the catalyst of a new European reality. "Any nation has the right to decide its fate by itself," he said last month in a parliamentary statement on events in Eastern Europe. It is one thing for the most powerful communist on earth to speak those words. It is momentous when he not only means them but also puts them into practice.