Soviet Union: The Empire Strikes Back

By JAMES WALSH

Nikita Khrushchev once scoffed that his country would ditch communism when "a shrimp learns to whistle." Much of the world thought it heard that unlikely music last March when Soviet legislators amended the constitution to abolish the Communist Party's guaranteed monopoly on political power. Four months later, establishment baiter Boris Yeltsin shocked a party congress by staging a dramatic walkout, leading an exodus of some 2 million disaffected members. But Khrushchev's miracle may not have been quite enough. By last week, it had become clear that die-hard disciples of Marx and Lenin were determined to regain the national whip hand, come what may.

If any doubt remained that orthodoxy was fighting back, it was dispelled by the views aired at an angry Jan. 31 party plenum. Speeches by Central Committee members roundly knocked perestroika as a policy gone astray, attacked freedom of the press and condemned the Kremlin leadership's abandonment of Marxist principles in favor of "bourgeois morality." These Communists made it plain they were not about to give way to a multiparty system. The entire tone of the gathering suggested a council of war, and there were no recorded disagreements by Mikhail Gorbachev. A few days later, the Soviet President took to the airwaves to deliver a surprise national address. Visibly distraught, with his lips trembling at times, Gorbachev pleaded for a show of unity in the face of separatist movements and political dissension. "The Soviet Union is a superpower," he said. "Huge efforts were expended to make it so powerful, and we could lose it very quickly."

The televised appeal had a particular aim: get voters to endorse the Kremlin's new Union Treaty binding the 15 Soviet republics together. Four republics -- Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia and Armenia -- have vowed not to take part in the scheduled March 17 referendum, while Latvia was leaning toward boycotting it. But Gorbachev's message also carried the kind of rally-round- the-flag overtones sounded by resurgent Communist hard-liners. Should he fail to re-create the Union with popular consent, he will be pressed by the reactionaries to resort to force -- or move aside.

Preservation of the empire has given the party a potent appeal. One notable scold on the scene last week was Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, Gorbachev's chief military adviser, who blasted fast-track reformers for aligning themselves with anti-socialist and separatist forces. His theme -- "Will we lose our homeland?" -- recalled Joseph Stalin's "Great Patriotic War" strategy of wrapping communism in the banner of saving the motherland from Nazi Germany. Akhromeyev wondered if the Soviet Union would now be "dismembered into pieces" subject to the "humiliation" of "dependence on Western governments."

After Gorbachev's accession to power, doctrinaire communism went into a six- year tailspin. But the turmoil of recent months has given the cause fresh life. Many of the party's new vanguard deny they want to turn back the clock, and yet the Kremlin has begun targeting for investigation prominent private businessman Artyom Tarasov, a self-made Moscow tycoon.

Market economics and the profit motive, linchpins of perestroika, remain deeply suspect. A U.S. State Department official recalled a visit to America last year by Yegor Ligachev, the Kremlin's former chief ideologist. While touring a grocery store, the apostle of Marxism could not believe that the manager himself set prices. "They think that kind of price setting is corruption, the equivalent of organized crime," said the official. He believes that Gorbachev "doesn't understand the free market now any better than he did five years ago." In the plenum, Ivan Polozkov, the Russian party leader, inveighed against efforts to "establish the dictatorship of private capital" and called for a return to the class struggle.

Such recrudescence of thought stems in part from the large-scale defections from the party by liberals like Yeltsin and Leningrad Mayor Anatoli Sobchak. Many other leading reformers have quit, leaving behind a 17 million-strong hard-core party that controls vast amounts of property as well as the loyalties of factory apparatchiks and military officers. It now seems bent on aborting multiparty democracy and decentralized economic management. Says Robert Legvold, a Columbia University Kremlin watcher: "They don't feel they're on the run any longer."

The biggest target -- and the emotional underpinning to the party's resurgence -- remains Soviet secession movements. Although Lithuanians voted last weekend heavily in favor of independence, Gorbachev proclaimed the plebiscite invalid in advance. In turn, Sobchak said Gorbachev's March 17 referendum should be seen as a vote of confidence in the President. If the referendum fails to pass, the Leningrad mayor suggested, Gorbachev "would be obliged to step down."

Some Communists already seem prepared for that eventuality. In a loose alliance with Russian nationalists, they agree with people like Alexander Prokhanov, an ideologue of chauvinism, that the nation has an authoritarian manifest destiny. "The people have grown tired of parliaments, and the parliaments themselves are tired," Prokhanov says. "Gorbachev will have to unplug the way for the party, which he himself plugged, or the party will unplug Gorbachev."

With reporting by James Carney/Moscow and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington