When historians write the final book on perestroika, the events of the last week of 1990 should fill an entire chapter. That was the week the Congress of People’s Deputies voted to give Mikhail Gorbachev total control over the executive branch of government, and the power to rule by decree. It was the week Gorbachev nominated a colorless Communist Party hack, Gennady Yanayev, as the union’s first vice president and forced his choice–amid charges of vote rigging–past a reluctant Congress. It was the week the original architects of perestroika seemed to drift apart–and a television show devoted to the resignation of Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze was banned from the airwaves. And it was a week when Gorbachev seemed to turn from the reform movement he once so forcefully endorsed. It was the week many are calling the beginning of the end of the democracy movement in the Soviet Union.
Perestroika, launched six years ago by Gorbachev amid bold promises of renewal and economic revitalization, now seems deadlocked by political disarray and resurgent communist conservatism. The political forces that sprang forth when Gorbachev removed the tight lid of repression from the Soviet empire now threaten to sweep him aside. Groping for a solution to the deepening economic crisis that has left food shelves bare across the country (page 40), many Soviet citizens are retreating from the challenge of self-government. The nation’s mood seems dominated by its ancient impulse to concentrate power in the hands of a strong central government. But that political atavism is about to clash with the building force of nationalism in the Soviet Union’s 15 republics. In a nation where jeremiads have become the stuff of everyday political rhetoric, the direst warnings about the future come from Gorbachev himself. “This is the collapse not just of the economy, but of the whole country,” he told the Congress of People’s Deputies last week.
Gorbachev has determined that his interest lies in banging the drums of apocalypse. Given the choice between pushing for sweeping reforms whatever the risk to the Soviet empire, and throwing in his lot with the entrenched communist forces he once so boldly tackled, Gorbachev appeared to be choosing the latter. He warns of the “chaos” the Soviet Union’s new freedom has brought, positioning himself at the forefront of the movement for greater central control and turning to the Soviet military, the KGB and the Communist Party apparatus for the support he needs to ram his legislative agenda through the Congress of People’s Deputies.
To justify his new authoritarianism, Gorbachev cited the urgent need to restore order. With the economy collapsing and the republics insisting on their independence from Moscow, no one could rule out a crackup. But even armed with dictatorial powers, Gorbachev seemed helpless to prevent the ebb of his own influence. Meanwhile, demoralized by Shevardnadze’s resignation, liberal forces seemed increasingly feckless in the face of Gorbachev’s swing to the right (page 38). Some liberal deputies were too discouraged last week by the whole political process even to fight for better representation in the Supreme Soviet, or standing Parliament. “I talked to my constituents about it, and we decided it was a waste of time,” said deputy Yuri Levykin. Sensing their ascendance, Soviet reactionaries at the Congress spoke more vociferously and received heartier applause than ever before. The 561-member parliamentary group Soyuz (Union), which opposes autonomy for the republics and demands greater respect for the Communist Party and the military, has transformed itself from a fringe group of xenophobic extremists into a mainstream faction.
A crackdown on the republics could convince Gorbachev’s friends abroad that perestroika is really over, imperiling the disarmament agreements and Western economic investment that the Soviet Union so desperately needs. To counter those fears, Gorbachev and his spokesmen argued vigorously that the new law-and-order emphasis was meant to salvage perestroika, not abandon it. U.S. officials, eager not to rock the boat of East-West relations at a time when Washington needs Soviet support for its stand against Saddam Hussein, appeared willing to accept the Soviets’ assurances at face value. “There’s a determination to keep going down the path to reform, and that’s very important,” President Bush said last week. As for Shevardnadze’s charge that his old boss is moving toward dictatorship, Bush simply said, “I think they can sort all that out.”
Neither the Americans nor the Soviets were prepared to admit that Gorbachev’s new powers may turn out to be a political equivalent of a Potemkin village, the false-front peasant towns Catherine the Great’s prime minister erected to assure her that all was happy and well in the Russian countryside. While he has the appearance of tremendous power, Gorbachev may lack the political legitimacy to enforce his writ beyond the four walls of the Kremlin. Immediately, Gorbachev’s archrival, Russian Republic President Boris Yeltsin, challenged the Soviet leader to prove he isn’t a paper tiger. The Russian Republic announced it would keep for itself more than 100 billion rubles ($175 billion at the official exchange rate) in taxes it was expected to put into Soviet government coffers. Since Russia’s tax contribution pays more than half of the Soviet Union’s bills, the move endangers Gorbachev’s ability to finance pensions, state hospitals and factories–even the Army. When Gorbachev hinted he would act forcefully to reverse Russia’s decision, Yeltsin contemptuously flew off on a political trip to Siberia.
The only real authority the Soviet president still wielded, it seemed, was the power to dispatch the military to quell separatist unrest. It is looking increasingly likely he will have to do just that. On Dec. 22, Gorbachev gave Moldavia 10 days to stamp out separatism within its borders, threatening “necessary measures” if the republic did not disband its self-defense forces and rescind parts of its law declaring a Romanian dialect the state language. “It’s better not to issue such an ukase [imperial decree] if you can’t carry it out,” said liberal deputy Konstantin Lubenchenko. “And I don’t see any way of carrying it out except by tanks and guns.”
The situation in the Baltic republics was equally critical. Several bombs shattered windows last week in Riga, the Latvian capital. Latvians feared that pro-Moscow conservatives were masterminding the bombings to justify a crackdown. Many embattled military men in the Baltics would welcome that. “People throw stones at small children, at our officers,” said Adm. Vitaly Ivanov, commander of the Baltic Fleet. “How can we react when Molotov cocktails are thrown [at convoys] from passing cars?” A referendum this winter will ask the citizens of each republic whether they want to stay in the union. Gorbachev could be badly embarrassed by the results.
Nothing was being done about the problem that triggered Gorbachev’s political crisis in the first place: his country’s mounting economic disaster. The Soviet Union will enter the new year with no national budget. State enterprises could grind to a halt if they aren’t told soon how much subsidy they will be getting in 1991. One leading economist told the Congress production could fall as much as 60 percent just from economic confusion. But rather than confront the sticky question of private ownership, the Congress voted to hold a referendum on that question as well, sometime this winter.
Many Soviet liberals think the vote could fail among a populace trained for 70 years to regard “private property” as an evil capitalist phrase. “Holding a referendum is no way to solve a complex economic problem,” grumbled economist Stanislav Shatalin. His proposed reform program, the much-vaunted “500 days” to a free market that Gorbachev once seemed to support, has virtually disappeared from public discussion. And Shatalin himself says he’s “sick of politics.”
Optimists in Moscow were waiting for Gorbachev to submit his nominees for a new cabinet Jan. 8 before passing final judgment on his intentions. “Obviously, Gorbachev is trying to do a political balancing act,” said one senior Western diplomat in Moscow. “Not all the dust has settled.” Many were watching the fate of Aleksandr Yakovlev, a key liberal member of Gorbachev’s brain trust who is widely seen as the behind-the-scenes architect of perestroika. The new configuration of executive power has abolished the Presidential Council, of which Yakovlev was a member. Now he is without a high party or government post for the first time since 1985. If Gorbachev invites him into the cabinet, it could signal that the Soviet leader hasn’t moved so far to the right. But if Gorbachev continues his drift toward the policies and practices of the past, he may soon find that none of his old comrades-in-perestroika still want to be part of his team.
Call him a party animal. A lackluster apparatchik unknown outside Communist Party circles, Gennady Yanayev squeaked by on a second vote (and plenty of Gorbachevian arm-twisting) to become the first Soviet vice president. Yanayev, 53, who rose ploddingly through the ranks of the Communist Youth League and the trade unions, was described by one Soviet journalist as a “piano in the shrubbery,” a metaphor for the ever-handy lieutenant. To others, Yanayev, who has opposed a radical economic overhaul, is one more obstacle to major reform. But like his U.S. counterpart, Yanayev poses no political threat to his president.
One year ago a demonstration against dictatorship might have attracted 100,000 people. Last week organizers of a rally in downtown Moscow were lucky to get 1,000. A few people listlessly waved billboards supporting Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, who had just resigned in protest of “impending dictatorship.” Others chanted, “Party mafia, you won’t succeed.” But leading lights of Moscow’s democratic movement, men like Sergei Stankevich, didn’t show up. Why? Because Stankevich is a deputy mayor of Moscow now, and he opposed holding the rally. “I’d rather Moscow didn’t have any demonstrations this winter,” he said. “This is a very serious winter, [and] any demonstration can bring on the unpredictable, even violence.”
“You’ve hidden in the bushes,” Shevardnadze told his “Comrade democrats” in his farewell speech two weeks ago. The image was apt: the Soviet Union’s liberal opposition, so recently a driving force of reform, has become virtually invisible. At the Congress of People’s Deputies last week, only 229 deputies registered themselves as members of the Interregional Group, once the flagship of the nation’s democracy movement with twice as many members. Many erstwhile democrats voted in favor of Gorbachev’s enhanced powers, though several argued for a time limit on his dictatorship. These days polls show most citizens are more interested in order than democracy. And as the entire political spectrum has moved to the right, the democrats have gone with it.
The democrats succeeded in shifting power from Moscow to the republics. But that victory has come at a high price. While conservatives found their bedrock support among Russians who don’t want to let the union fall apart, liberals won allies among the nationalists tugging away from Moscow. Now those nationalists have shifted energies to their own republics. Many Baltic representatives considered last week’s Congress to be the parliament of a neighboring state; Georgians and Armenians boycotted the session. Even Boris Yeltsin showed far more interest in his Russian parliament, meeting simultaneously on the other side of Moscow. “We’re divided now,” says deputy Yuri Levykin. “And you know the old adage: ‘Divide and conquer’.”
Power has changed the opposition, too. Democrats who won control of local governments last spring now complain that their city and district councils have degenerated into forums for irresponsible speechifying. Like Gorbachev at the national level, city administrators seek greater influence. Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of Leningrad and one of the leading spokesmen of the left wing, now argues that executive decision making should be expanded.
Liberals fear that their failure to make effective use of their new power may discredit the very notion of democracy. Mayor Sobchak notes that in recent by-elections in Leningrad, only 20 percent of the electorate turned out to vote. “The people do not believe in the possibility of solving their problems in a democratic way,” he warned the Congress. Sobchak accuses vengeful Communist Party bureaucrats of deliberately torpedoing his initiatives– plotting the failure of democracy and their own return to power. “People are complaining that they want strong power,” says deputy Levykin. “They don’t understand that there’s such a thing as strong democratic power.”
Democratic diehards maintain that their retreat is only temporary. “A rightwing wave has rushed upon society and the democratic wave has somehow faded away,” admitted Yuri Afanasyev, a leading reformer. “But I believe the situation will change sharply in the coming months. It’s hard to see how. The democrats are at least partly to blame for their own demise: the Interregional Group is so riddled with internal disputes and ambitions that few believe it can resurrect itself. And without a strong parliamentary faction, there was no one to enunciate the democrats’ simple truth: “The concentration of so much power in the hands of one person is extremely dangerous, even if this person was the initiator of perestroika.” Those words were spoken by the late human-rights advocate Andrei Sakharov more than a year ago. No one last week seemed able to say it quite so well. CARROLL BOGERT in MOSCOW
