Undoing Lenin's Legacy

By Strobe Talbott

"IT IS ONLY NOW THAT THE REAL PERESTROIKA BEGINS."

-- Mikhail Gorbachev

Feb. 5, 1990

"WE SHOULD GET RID OF IDEOLOGICAL DOGMATISM."

-- Mikhail Gorbachev

Feb. 5, 1990

The Gorbachev revolution came home last week. Many of the words and images were familiar from last year's upheavals in Eastern Europe, but the setting was new: at the geographical and political center of the Communist world. This time it was not in Prague, Budapest or Leipzig but in Moscow that citizens thronged the streets with banners that could be loosely translated THROW THE BUMS OUT! This time it was in the Kremlin that the bums themselves seemed to take heed and the custodians of absolute power began the process of giving it up. And this time Mikhail Sergeyevich, the Commissar Liberator, was not somewhere over the horizon, letting it all happen. He was on the podium, making it happen.

In the revolutionary year of 1989, the world grew accustomed to the spectacle of ruling Communists stepping onto the slippery slope of power sharing, with no more enthusiasm than a condemned man mounting a scaffold, but with no more resistance either. However, that was in Eastern Europe, not the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was different: it couldn't happen there.

The conventional wisdom was promulgated by Kremlin and Kremlinologists alike. Yes, Gorbachev had created the conditions for the end of one-party rule in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria by putting the regimes there on notice that they were on their own. But no, he could not, would not and probably should not give up the Communist monopoly in his own country.

The reasoning went like this. Despite his disillusion with "Soviet reality" and his aspirations for "humanitarian socialism," Gorbachev was neither Thomas Jefferson nor Vaclav Havel. He was Yuri Andropov's protege, the Stavropol chieftain who came to the big city and made good. He was still thought to be a devout Communist, a true believer in a creed that is, in its essence, monopolistic: there is one truth about how society should be ordered, and therefore one source of authority.

Then there was the imperial imperative for preserving the party's unchallenged position. While Gorbachev might have been willing to cut loose the U.S.S.R.'s colonies beyond its borders, he was also a Soviet patriot -- and besides, he valued his own skin. Therefore, he was emphatically not willing to let his sprawling, fractious country come apart at the seams and thus give his enemies the excuse they were looking for to cast him onto the dustheap of history.

The party, it was often said (including by one of Gorbachev's closest advisers as recently as November), was the one "all-union" institution that could exert the gravitational pull necessary to counteract the many centrifugal forces. Superimpose a multiparty system on a multinational empire, and soon Moscow would be the capital of a rump state called Russia.

Finally, there was the argument that it was part of Gorbachev's game plan to maintain two competing power structures, the party and the state; to remain in charge of both; and to manipulate the creative tension between them. As General Secretary of the party, Gorbachev was at the apex of the most entrenched and powerful apparatus in Soviet life. He could goad the traditionalists beneath him, promote the "new thinkers," purge the retrogrades, and keep an eye out for obstructionism, sabotage, insurgency. Meanwhile, as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, he was able to spearhead the loyal opposition, identify himself publicly with the forces of change, wield the gavel so as to keep all that rambunctious energy more or less under control, and stake out a position between the extremists on all sides, thus reinforcing at home and abroad his image as the centrist alternative to the crazies -- in short, the indispensable man.

So it seemed to be by the acrobat's own choice that the high wire on which he did his death-defying act was stretched between two pillars, the party and the state.

Until recently, all that made perfect sense. No doubt it made sense to Gorbachev as well. But he moves through history the way his security detail would have him move through terrain where assassins are known to lurk. Surprise is one of his bodyguards. He avoids being ambushed by constantly changing his route. He makes a virtue out of inconsistency, raising it to a political art form. Part of his genius is to make what was unthinkable yesterday seem sensible today and inevitable tomorrow. He seems to relish crossing the red lines that his own associates and foreign experts have drawn to define what he dares not do.

In that sense, last week's masterstroke -- ramming through the Central Committee an agreement to surrender its own supremacy -- was vintage Gorbachev. It may turn out to be the single most important turning point both in the transformation of the Soviet Union and in the evolution of Gorbachev himself. And while all this was happening, where was George? This time President Bush seemed to be not even a spectator on the sidelines of the real world. Instead he was playing war games and preaching prudence in California. Gorbachev's acceptance Friday of deep cuts in his armed forces made Bush's initial combination of bellicosity and caution seem all the more weird.

From the earliest days of Bolshevism under Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the / Communist Party of the Soviet Union has insisted on a guiding role in -- and over -- society, state, culture and, most important, the life of the individual. The party has called itself the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the "vanguard of the toilers." It has operated on the principle of "democratic centralism," a brazen contradiction in terms. Everyone knew which words in the Newspeak were camouflage and which meant what they said. The party was boss, and there was no other boss.

Now along comes the party's own boss to imply that Communists must eventually contend for the allegiance of citizens and influence on society with all manner of long-extinct or transplanted species of opponents: social and constitutional and perhaps even Christian democrats, Solidarity-like trade unionists, a peasant party of some kind and -- who knows? -- maybe monarchists and religious fundamentalists.

Such a free-for-all may now be only a gleam in the eyes of the Yeltsinite radicals. Serious competition for the Communists is still probably a long way off. (Of course, the way events move these days, that could mean several months.) But the principle of real democracy has been established; Gorbachev has dragged his comrades, many of them kicking and screaming, across a Rubicon.

In a sense he is merely broadening his experimentation with free markets. The party is to politics what Gosplan, the state central planning agency, is to the economy. For some time enterprising Georgians have been allowed to fly to Moscow in the dead of winter to sell their flowers at whatever prices they can get in the underground stations of the Metro. Latter-day kulaks sell in private stalls the vegetables they raise on private plots. Taxi drivers, restaurateurs and publishers are making money in microenclaves of capitalism called cooperatives. Even the state has got in on the act, auctioning off foreign currencies for rubles to the highest bidders. But in all these cases the invisible hand of laissez-faire has been at work only at the margins of economic life.

That is just the point -- reform has been marginal -- and it explains Gorbachev's latest, boldest move. Next month will be the fifth anniversary of his ascension. By Soviet reckoning it is the end of Gorbachev's personal first five-year plan. It is therefore a time of judgment. The judgment is harsh. The lot of the Soviet consumer is not just stagnating but deteriorating. Efficiency, incentive, initiative, competitiveness, productivity, quality, pride, "self-accountability" -- these new buzz words are beginning to sound as hollow as the old slogans about the glory of socialist labor.

What might be called Perestroika I has failed. The main reason: despite the ministrations and exhortations of its reformist rulers, the Soviet Union still has a command economy and a totalitarian political system. Managers instinctively wait for orders from above; regional leaders still look to Moscow; and everyone looks to the party, to that body that met and argued and finally bent to Gorbachev's will in Moscow last week: the Central Committee. The very word center has connotations in Russian with which Gorbachev is doing battle as he prepares for his next five years, for Perestroika II.

Decentralization may be the order of the day, but centralization has been a fact of life for decades. Old habits and old fears die hard, especially when the Communist Party is there to keep them alive. That is why Gorbachev and his principal advisers have concluded that further reform and the continued existence of an all-powerful party are incompatible. Modernization requires the devolution of central power; the party, by its irredeemable nature, resists that devolution. Gorbachev has decided that the party is an obstacle to Perestroika II. Something had to give, and it gave last week.

What about those other reasons, so persuasive sounding a short time ago, why Gorbachev would not do what he has now done? What about the party as the glue that keeps the empire together? An adviser to Gorbachev says the back-to-back crises in the Baltics and the Caucasus were a disabusing revelation for him. He saw Lithuanian Communists declare their independence from the central party. The Lithuanian party was playing a leading role all right; it was leading the way to secession. And then, at the height of the civil war in Azerbaijan, angry citizens of Baku tore up and burned their party cards in protest against Moscow's use of armed force to reassert control.

Some glue! In both cases party membership in the provinces was more like plastic explosive.

What about Gorbachev's own party card and what it means to him? For some time there has been reason to wonder whether, in the 3 o'clock in the morning of his soul, Mikhail Sergeyevich really is a Communist, or at least, in the Soviet sense, a "good" Communist. Certainly many in his audience at the Kremlin were worrying about that last week. Glasnost is an unabashedly antimonopolistic, antitotalitarian, therefore anti-Communist notion. Calling for a "revolution of the mind" before his meeting with the Pope in December, Gorbachev said, "We no longer think that we are the best and are always right, that those who disagree with us are our enemies." A multiparty democracy would be the logical extension of these sentiments.

Finally, Gorbachev has a tactical motive for forcing the party into the marketplace of political ideas. Where his own personal power is concerned, he is interested not in sharing but in consolidation. Now that he has decided the party is part of the problem and cannot be part of the solution to the country's economic ills, it makes sense for him to shift his authority toward the new presidency. If Gorbachev is going to preside over the diminishment and perhaps the eventual dismantlement of the party, it stands to reason he would want to give up the general secretaryship and move all his books, files and telephones into his other office at Supreme Soviet headquarters. It will be interesting to see if he brings along his portrait of Lenin.