Where Are the Reformers?

By John Kohan/Moscow

When former Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze warned the world against dictatorship in the Soviet Union, he had some harsh words as well for democrats in his country. "You have dispersed," he complained. "Reformers have slunk into the bushes." So it seemed until last week, when people by the tens of thousands reappeared on the streets of Moscow, Leningrad and other cities to protest military intervention in the Baltics. No event since the advent of perestroika has so polarized Soviet society as the bloodshed in Vilnius. It has widened the chasm between reformers and reactionaries, leaving almost no support for the centrist positions that Gorbachev claims to represent.

No one disputes which side has more muscle. The deployment of paratroops in Lithuania and black berets in Latvia has shown the range of powers at the command of what former presidential adviser Stanislav Shatalin calls the "black colonels" now surrounding Gorbachev. This is a reference to a conservative clique of officers in the Soviet parliament who opposed Shevardnadze. Their growing influence has been reflected in fiddling with weapons limits in defiance of the Conventional Arms Agreement signed in Paris last year, and in an increasingly obstinate stance on the timetable for Soviet troop withdrawals from Eastern Europe. The major obstacle to resurgent rightists is also the main achievement of Gorbachev's reforms. The Soviet Union has become, in current Moscow parlance, a "civil society," in which people power must be weighed in the balance against tanks.

A broad coalition of reformers has been in the making since last October, when the Democratic Russia movement was founded to unify a host of squabbling parties that sprang up after the Communists lost their monopoly on power. The anti-Gorbachev demonstrations that followed the crackdown in Lithuania have begun to mold the diffuse movement into a serious force capable of winning over the liberal fence straddlers, who had stuck by the Soviet President as the last bulwark against the reactionaries. The mass defection of prominent politicians, economists, writers, artists, actors and scientists from the Gorbachev camp in the last two weeks and their alignment with the democratic movement has struck a telling blow at the moral authority of the Kremlin.

The Democratic Russia movement could serve as a power base for Russian leader Boris Yeltsin, now that his republic is at the forefront of the struggle against what he calls the "reactionary turnabout." Yeltsin enjoys broad support among average Soviets, but he has no effective grass-roots political organization. He also has no reliable forum for defending himself against increasingly vicious personal attacks from Kremlin-controlled television.

The opposition has not been able to build a broad-based national structure fast enough to keep pace with events. Democratic Russia draws its support primarily from intellectuals and white-collar workers; it has not been able to make inroads among the proletariat. A strike call two weeks ago was heeded by Leningrad factories but failed to take hold in the radical Siberian mining regions. The movement has also been hurt by naive notions of political pluralism that have often verged on anarchy. Nor has it been persuasive in putting across its ideals of Western-style political freedoms and market economics in a society where prejudices against "bourgeois" democracy and capitalism run deep.

The reformers must fight a formidable Communist Party organization, dug in over seven decades, as well as the massed might of the armed forces, police and KGB. But the conservatives are not invincible. Their bungled handling of the Baltic crisis suggests they have neither the will nor the means to preserve the empire with a bloodbath. Indeed, the strongest weapon the democrats command is moral outrage, which they wielded effectively enough last week to halt -- so far -- a complete military takeover of the republics. Even Gorbachev felt compelled to come out against the "unconstitutional" overthrow of elected governments.

Stephen Cohen, Director of Russian Studies at Princeton University, believes that "Gorbachev sees the reformers as a frail reed and thinks they have abandoned him to his enemies." That may have been the case before Soviet tanks moved into Vilnius, but not afterward. Now democrats feel that Gorbachev has deserted them. The impending struggle will be a lopsided battle, in which democratic successes may be measured more by the ability of the movement to slow down the conservatives than by its ability to stop them. But the reformers must first prove they can transform the ephemeral emotions of street meetings into real political clout.

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington