Broadside From The Right

By Bruce W. Nelan

As parliamentarians arrived at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses one day last week, they were handed copies of an open letter to Mikhail Gorbachev demanding that he "stop the chaos" and "prevent a collapse of the country." If necessary, it said, the President should declare a state of emergency and rule by decree to halt the activities of "separatists, subversives and nationalist militias."

The letter bore 53 signatures, including those of the Minister of Culture, the Deputy Minister of Defense, the Chief of Staff of the armed forces, the commander of Interior Ministry troops, the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, two senior Communist Party officials and a collection of writers.

Startling as this screed and its official support were, it was less harsh and insubordinate than others aimed at Gorbachev lately. One of the loudest reactionaries in parliament, Air Force Colonel Viktor Alksnis has called for the abolition of the presidency and formation of a National Salvation Committee to restore order.

A similar proposal came last month from a group styling itself the Centrist bloc and claiming support from 20 political parties and associations. And only two weeks ago, Ivan Polozkov, unreconstructed head of the Communist Party of the Russian republic, wrote in Pravda that a "Union for the Salvation of the Fatherland" should be formed to unite all "patriotic forces" and "prevent a transition to a market system."

Apparently determined to put the idea to a test, a communist hard-liner named Sazhi Umalatova stepped to the podium almost as soon as the Congress of People's Deputies opened last week. Charging that Gorbachev had lost the "moral right to lead the country," she moved a vote of no confidence in him. It failed, 1,288 to 426, but the spectacle was deeply unsettling to Eduard Shevardnadze, who asked in his resignation speech, "Is this normal?"

These are the public signs of the rise of the right, symptoms of the approaching dictatorship Shevardnadze warned against. Only a year ago, the liberal Interregional Group of Deputies, led by maverick Boris Yeltsin, Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov and crusading historian Yuri Afanasyev and claiming more than 300 members, held the parliamentary center stage. The group called a meeting on the eve of this Congress session and fewer than 90 members turned up. Setting the pace now is the bloc of about 470 conservative Deputies calling themselves Soyuz, or Union, and dedicated to preventing the breakup of the U.S.S.R.

Alksnis is a leader of Soyuz, as is a fellow colonel named Nikolai Petrushenko; Shevardnadze contemptuously described the pair last week as "boys . . . with colonels' shoulder stripes" (both are in their 40s; Shevardnadze is 62). They have talked wildly of such things as an alleged CIA plot to unite national-front movements from the Black to the Baltic Seas into a single anti-Soviet confederation. Soyuz claimed credit for Gorbachev's sacking of the country's liberal Interior Minister last month, and brazenly announced that the Foreign Minister was next on its hit list.

Behind Soyuz and most other reactionary movements stands the Communist Party. The departure of thousands of reformers has left its ranks thinner but more tightly organized and more conservative than ever. In the mid-1980s the party had to take the blame for the "period of stagnation" under Brezhnev. Now the economy has flopped so badly that the Communist leftovers have regrouped and are on the offensive. Says Heinrich Vogel, director of Cologne's Federal Institute for East European and International Studies: "This is a well-organized empire striking back." It is, he says, made up of the "only systems that work -- the army, the KGB and the good old party apparat." Another German Sovietologist, Uwe Nerlich, returned from the Soviet Union last November convinced that bureaucrats were purposely holding supplies back from the stores. "There is a systematic effort to discredit the market economy," he says.

But there may be even more significant backers for a crackdown: the general public. After five years of waiting for perestroika to bear fruit, most Soviet citizens have lost faith. Appalled by the disintegrating economy and the sharp rise of violent crime, convinced that the country is falling into the hands of the black-market mafia and fearful that the dissolution of the union will bring deeper chaos and poverty, they are ready to sacrifice -- or at least postpone -- the pursuit of lofty democratic goals so that order can be restored.

"I used to believe what Gorbachev said and that he would do something good," said Sergei Popov, a Muscovite in his late 20s who quit his job as a bus driver to try to make it as a private chauffeur. "Now I don't believe anyone or anything I hear, maybe least of all Gorbachev." Reactionaries like Colonel Alksnis may get the headlines, but it is the Popovs of the country who will ultimately determine whether perestroika -- and its creator -- survive.

With reporting by James Carney/Moscow