TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010190/01019005.001

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                                                                                MAN OF THE DECADE, Page 46

The Year of the People


Catalyst for reform from Moscow to Buchasrest, Gorbachev has
transformed the world

By Bruce W. Nelan


     The Gorbachev phenomenon is the result of Soviet pride and
Soviet shame. For more than a generation, the citizens of the
U.S.S.R. have lived with that contradiction. They have had the
satisfaction of knowing their country was a superpower -- and
the frustration of living in a backward economy. They made their
homes in crowded, decrepit dwellings. Shopping for necessities
was a daily despair. Citizenship itself was often an insult and
sometimes an injury. Their government would not let them express
their thoughts or travel abroad. For years they could explain
it all away: the hardship was the aftermath of the Great
Patriotic War against the Nazis; the repression was a response
to the ever present threat of capitalist imperialism.

    But over time, fewer and fewer Russians fit the stereotype
of illiterate peasants on whose bovine passivity Czar or
commissar could rely. Soviets were increasingly well educated
and well informed, in spite of the propaganda poured over them.
And while they reached political maturity, their leadership sank
into senility. The people cringed when they heard the doddering
Leonid Brezhnev try to form his words and when they learned that
his hands were so shaky he had to eat with a spoon at a state
dinner. They told scornful jokes: state radio, cynics said,
dared not play any work by Tchaikovsky in a minor key for fear
that everyone would think another General Secretary had died.

    The people -- whose name was so often taken in vain by
their rulers -- longed for a leader with verve and vision,
someone who would represent their pride rather than their shame.
There was, therefore, a national murmur of interest in 1979,
when the country got its first look at Mikhail Sergeyevich
Gorbachev at a televised awards ceremony. Not only did this new
Central Committee Secretary, then 48, seem at ease among the
ruling septuagenarians; he was the only one able to say thank
you for his medal without reading from a 3-by-5 card.

    Since his selection as party chief in 1985, Gorbachev has
exceeded both the hopes of those who longed for reinvigoration
and the fears of those, no doubt including comrades who voted
for him, who worried that he would jeopardize the power and
privileges of the elite. He has been a political dynamo,
showering sparks inside and outside the country. His commitment
to the still elusive goal of perestroika, his effort to make the
economy produce what the people want to consume, and glasnost,
an end to systematic official lying, have transformed the Soviet
Union and made possible a transformation of international
relations as well. What were long called, and accurately so, the
satellites, or captive nations of Eastern Europe, are defecting
en masse to the West. They are doing so because Gorbachev is
letting them. In the U.S.S.R. the old order is not just passing;
it is already on what Leon Trotsky called the trash heap of
history. No one, certainly including Gorbachev, knows what is
coming next. But whatever it is, it will be something new.

    Gorbachev did not invent the idea of trying to reinvent
communism, but during his formative years in obscurity he
certainly learned a lesson about the connection between internal
reform and international relations. He had seen Nikita
Khrushchev's vigorous cultural thaw of the late 1950s freeze
again in the intensified cold war that followed the Cuban
missile crisis. Alexei Kosygin, who was Prime Minister until his
death in 1980, attempted to reorient heavy industry toward
consumer goods, decentralization and profitmaking in the
mid-1960s. But, ironically, that program was aborted partly
because the Soviet crackdown on "socialism with a human face"
in Czechoslovakia triggered a backlash against liberalism in the
U.S.S.R. In Poland the creation of Solidarity, the first
independent trade union in the Soviet bloc, preceded the advent
of Gorbachev by five years. But Lech Walesa was officially
considered an outlaw. The notion of Solidarity participating in
government, not to mention dominating it, was unthinkable.

    The intellectual and biographical origins of Gorbachev's
radicalism will probably always be a mystery. In a way, they
become more mysterious as time goes on, if only because he
becomes more radical. The sweeping changes he has instigated
this past year in the U.S.S.R., particularly free expression and
democratization, and his transfusion of counterrevolution into
Eastern Europe would shock not only the late Andrei Gromyko, who
nominated Gorbachev for the general secretaryship in 1985, but
the Gorbachev of five years ago as well.

    Still, there are clues in his life story. Like the
population as a whole, he was much better educated than his
predecessors. A graduate of the law faculty of Moscow State
University, he is the first Soviet party leader since Lenin to
have earned a university degree. He is experienced in weighing
evidence and reassessing what Marxists call -- but often do not
respect -- "objective reality." His rise in the party began long
after Stalin's death, so he is less afflicted than his elders
by xenophobia and acceptance of terror as a civic norm. His
abilities were recognized by KGB chief Yuri Andropov, who
offered him counsel and support. Andropov had been a Central
Committee Secretary and, as head of intelligence, had access to
a picture of domestic and international affairs undistorted by
propaganda. He was able to brief Gorbachev on how swiftly their
country was declining.

    Like his mentor, Gorbachev could see that the creaking,
centrally controlled Soviet system, under the stifling
ministrations of bureaucrats, was about to expire. To oil the
cogs of a restructured economic machine, he would have to
inspire productivity and reclaim for the consumer sector much
of the vast resources and brainpower that had been commandeered
by the military. And to do that he had to overcome traditional
Bolshevik paranoia and reappraise the threat to the Soviet Union
from the West. "Security," he wrote in 1987, "can no longer be
ensured by military means."

    Initially Gorbachev believed he could restructure the
country by replacing hacks with doers, offering real rewards for
hard work and cutting back on the consumption of vodka. In
short, he counted on the restoration of discipline. It took two
years for him to discover that the problems were much deeper and
that the solutions would have to be much more far-reaching and
disruptive. He realized, he said, that "cosmetic measures" would
not work, and so "we arrived at the concept of perestroika as
the revolutionary renovation of socialism, of our entire
society." What this grand but vague formulation has meant in
practice is the scaling back of coercion and the introduction
of an unprecedented, until recently unimaginable degree of
pluralism. As he put it in his 1987 book Perestroika, "It is
possible to suppress, compel, bribe, break or blast, but only
for a certain period."

    He has tried to apply that principle at home and in Eastern
Europe, where he attributed the stagnation of the economy and
the discontent of the populace to "miscalculations by the
ruling parties." The East European regimes had long taken it for
granted that their Big Brothers in Moscow would provide the
brute force that is the substitute for political legitimacy in
the Marxist-Leninist system. Now all of a sudden, the No. 1 man
in the Kremlin was saying he would not back them up and that
they had to find a way of making a genuine social compact with
their own people, or fall. Hence the most amazing events of 1989
-- and of the decade: one after another, with breathtaking
speed, the communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe came
tumbling down.

    A Watershed in Warsaw

    Poland, where major antigovernment strikes broke out in
1956, 1968, 1970, 1976 and 1980-81, mounted the first full test
of Moscow's new policy. At the beginning of 1989, Polish party
leader Wojciech Jaruzelski told his Central Committee that
"fundamental changes" were needed to rescue the economy from
work stoppages, inflation, debt, shortages and the burden of a
near worthless currency. Having suppressed Solidarity for seven
years and jailed or driven underground many of its leaders, the
party needed the union's help. During several weeks of so-called
round-table discussions with the government, Walesa and other
union leaders concluded that it was Poland that needed their
help. They traded a tacit pledge to refrain from further strikes
for legalization of the union, an amended constitution and freer
elections than those that had been held since World War II.
Solidarity turned itself into a political party -- the first
true opposition in the Soviet bloc -- so it could contest all
100 seats in the new Senate and 161 of the seats in the lower
chamber, the Sejm. In June Solidarity won all but one of the
contested seats. In August, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, editor of
Solidarity's weekly newspaper, was sworn in as the first
noncommunist Prime Minister in Eastern Europe since Stalin had
imposed his system there 40 years ago. Society -- led, with
appropriate irony, by the workers whom Marx and Engels in The
Communist Manifesto had exhorted to unite -- had proved
stronger than the state.

    Just as Poland was showing the world the best that could be
hoped for in the drama of reform, China was showing the worst.
Deng Xiaoping had introduced bold and promising reforms of the
economy under the slogan of "Four Modernizations." But Deng kept
the political system rigidly in the Stalinist mold. Inspired by
their increased exposure to the outside world in general and by
the example of Gorbachev's democratization in particular, the
people of China appealed to their leadership for more political
freedom. A demonstration by several thousand students escalated
into a six-week occupation of the central square in Beijing by
crowds of up to 1 million people. When the tanks rolled in on
June 4, reformers in Poland suddenly had a new code word for
the catastrophe they feared might still befall them: Tiananmen.

    Although Gorbachev was obviously dismayed, his public
reaction was muted. Talking with French academics at the
Sorbonne a month later, he reminded them that the Soviet party
had urged the Chinese authorities to solve the problem by
"political dialogue" with the young demonstrators. "This
position of ours remains unchanged," he said. In contrast,
Gorbachev called the changes in Eastern Europe "inspiring."

    The Iron Curtain Comes Down

    Nowhere were they more so than in Hungary. The Hungarian
freedom fighters of 1956 had been the moral and political
precursors of the martyrs of Tiananmen, defeated by tanks.
After suppressing that revolt and executing the moderate
communist leader Imre Nagy, Moscow tried a new form of bribery:
it allowed Hungary wider latitude in economic experimentation
than any other East bloc country, in exchange for political
orthodoxy.

    Hungarian revisionism, nicknamed "goulash communism,"
produced prosperity and glitter for a while, but the economy
nonetheless went into a long decline because the stagnation was
too widespread and deep rooted to be cured by tinkering. Party
boss Janos Kadar, the quisling who had replaced Nagy, was ousted
in May 1988. He was succeeded by moderate reformer Karoly Grosz.
But as in the Soviet Union, moderate reform was, by definition,
inadequate. Drastic measures were necessary and, in the
Gorbachev era, acceptable to Moscow. In search of new ideas and
a democratic image in January 1989, parliament passed
legislation permitting the formation of opposition political
parties for the next election, to be held in the spring. The
communists, in a desperate bid to regain some legitimacy, have
renamed themselves the Hungarian Socialist Party, but they are
expected to capture no more than 15% to 20% of the vote.

    On March 17, Hungary signed the United Nations Convention
Relating to the Status of Refugees, pledging not to force
fleeing foreigners to return to their own countries. In a year
of turning points, that move had special importance. Hungary
began dismantling the barbed wire on the Austrian border. Quite
literally, the Iron Curtain had started to come down. The
principal beneficiaries were East German travelers, who were
suddenly able to keep right on moving westward. The fatal
hemorrhaging of the German Democratic Republic had begun.

    As East Germans flooded into Hungary by the thousands,
tensions between the two supposedly "fraternal" governments came
into the open. Invoking a bilateral agreement, the East Berlin
regime demanded that Budapest return the refugees. The
Hungarians refused, allowing 15,000 East Germans in three days
to go to West Germany, where they received automatic
citizenship. East Germany halted travel to Hungary. Would-be
immigrants then poured into Czechoslovakia to take refuge in the
West German embassy there.

    The German Democratic Republic was losing its best,
brightest, most promising citizens, precisely those people who
socialist propaganda said were going to build a better future.
They were, but not in the G.D.R. Arriving in the West, many of
them explained that they had left the East not because their
lives were uncomfortable, but because they were unfree.

    Heading Off Bloodshed

    Then in October the revolution came home to East Germany.
It started with freedom marches in Leipzig. For a long moment,
it looked as though there might be another Tiananmen after all.
On Oct. 9 the 77-year-old party boss Erich Honecker ordered the
police to use "all available force" to clear the streets, but
Egon Krenz, then in charge of security, persuaded him to rescind
the order. Each week the Monday demonstrations grew, to 200,000
on Oct. 23, to 480,000 on Nov. 6. The marches, always peaceful
and sober, increasingly impressive, spread throughout East
Germany.

    Gorbachev had played a pivotal role in heading off
bloodshed. Visiting East Berlin on Oct. 7, the 40th anniversary
of the communist state, Gorbachev cautioned the leaders that
they could not count on Soviet support if they used force to
crack down, and advised them to launch their own perestroika:
"Life itself punishes those who delay." Eleven days later,
Honecker was forced out and replaced by Krenz, who immediately
sought to appease the marching crowds and the demands from his
party for faster reform. His tenure was brief but memorable, if
only because he ordered the opening of the Berlin Wall, the
ultimate symbol of the Iron Curtain.

    On Dec. 3 the entire party leadership resigned under public
pressure. A caretaker regime has set free elections for May 6.
No matter how the Communist Party reorganizes or renames itself,
it is finished as a significant factor in East German politics.
Up to 1 million of its 2.3 million members have already turned
in their party cards.

    An Autumn Thaw

    Shibboleths in the West were evaporating almost as fast as
regimes in the East. It had long been a tenet of conventional
wisdom that Czechoslovakia, the homeland of the Good Soldier
Schweik, would be one of the last nations to join the march of
freedom. Maybe, just maybe there would be another Prague Spring
in 1990. But the thaw came in the fall instead. Demonstrations
began in mid-November. The first was a legal assembly of
students sponsored by the communist-dominated Socialist Union
of Youth. But that organization was seething with discontent,
and 3,000 of the marchers moved toward Prague's Wenceslas
Square. Riot police attacked and beat them. Again there were
apprehensive memories of what had happened in Beijing a few
months before. The following day tens of thousands of ordinary
citizens massed in the square to shout to their temporary rulers
"The game is over!"

    So it was. The people were extraordinarily civil, almost
good-natured, in the way they threw out their leaders. They
welcomed Alexander Dubcek, the tragic hero of the original
Prague Spring, back into the public spotlight. But the man of
the hour was playwright Vaclav Havel, the often imprisoned
leader of dissent, who has conjured up what may be the new
nemesis of world communism: "the power of the powerless." On
Dec. 10 what Havel called the "velvet revolution" swept away the
government. In a new Cabinet of 21, there are now eleven
noncommunists. The formation of rival parties has been legalized
and Civic Forum, the noncommunist coalition, has decided to join
in free elections likely to be held in May.

    As the year came to an end, events reached a velocity that
left onlookers giddy and made even some staunch anticommunists
in the West applaud a bit less gleefully and start worrying that
perhaps the resulting instability would be a greater threat to
world peace than the old, seemingly monolithic communist menace.
Yet once it happened, the whole spectacle had a look of
something like inevitability. The governments of Eastern Europe
had never been more than hollow administrations installed and
maintained by Moscow's armed forces. They were rejected as
Marxist, but even more as Russian, a double affront to the proud
nationalism of countries that believed the West ended at
Poland's eastern frontier. Once it became clear that Gorbachev
meant what he said, the opposition -- tightly organized as in
Poland or inchoate as in East Germany and Czechoslovakia -- rose
up in wrath. Without the backing of the Soviet army, local
satraps dared not use their security forces and probably did not
know if they could trust them. The communist parties tried to
buy off the people with leadership shuffles and semireforms, but
that was not the point. Communist dictatorship could not be
reformed; it could only be destroyed.

    Demonstrations in Bulgaria -- yes, Bulgaria -- began
tentatively at the end of September and then picked up
momentum. Todor Zhivkov, the country's dictator for 35 years,
was replaced on Nov. 10 by Petar Mladenov, who purged the
Stalinist leadership, promising to legalize opposition parties
and hold free elections by the end of May. That move was
something of a surprise, since Bulgaria most closely identifies
with the Soviet Union and was not expected to take reforms
further than Gorbachev himself has done. And Gorbachev draws the
line at the formation of rival parties.

    The Dilemma of Democratization

    In every case -- Poland, Hungary, East Germany,
Czechoslovakia -- a disbelieving but increasingly hopeful world
watched and waited for a crackdown that never came. In every
case, the disintegration of the communist system was hastened
by economic crises. Marx was right: politics is driven by
economics. But his 20th century followers were spectacularly
wrong. A command economy can grow only by exploiting farmers and
workers; eventually there is no incentive for the workers to
work or the farmers to farm in a society in which they have no
say in the allocation of resources. Giving them a say means
giving them a voice -- a concept best translated into Russian
as glasnost.

    Gorbachev has been badgering and cajoling ordinary citizens
to take charge of their own futures in their jobs and in
political organizations. He told Moscow editors in September
1988 that he wanted to "rid public opinion of such a harmful
complex as faith in the `good Czar,' the all-powerful center,
the notion that someone can bring about order and organize
perestroika from on high." His revamping of the legislative
organs of the government offered just such an opportunity to
assault the old conveyor-belt way of doing things.

    In March the Soviet people went to the polls to elect a new
2,250-seat Congress of People's Deputies. The Congress in turn
elected the Supreme Soviet, the country's standing parliament.
Previous parliaments were no more than tools of the party, but
this one has actively debated and even opposed government
programs. In the absence of rival political parties, some 85%
of those elected to the Congress were party members. But a
groundswell of revulsion against entrenched bureaucrats denied
almost a third of the country's regional party chiefs seats in
the Congress. In May live coverage of Congress sessions gave the
spellbound nation a crash course in democracy, as radicals and
former dissidents led by the late Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov
denounced the KGB as "the most secret and conspiratorial of all
state institutions" and counseled against giving Gorbachev, now
President of the country, too much power. Here was part of the
paradox of perestroika: democratization, so crucial to
Gorbachev's principles and strategy alike, emboldened his
critics and opponents.

    Meanwhile, the non-Russian republics of the Soviet Union
have had their own reasons for responding enthusiastically to
Gorbachev's campaign on behalf of self-reliance and
decentralization. The nationalism that had lain largely dormant
or been brutally suppressed rose to the surface. In the
Caucasus, ethnic hatreds burst into violence. In Azerbaijan,
which borders on Iran, the dominant Azerbaijanis, a Muslim,
Turkic-speaking people, are embroiled in a blood feud with the
Christian Armenians in and around the enclave of
Nagorno-Karabakh. The region has been besieged for 20 months,
its road traffic and railways under attack by Azerbaijani
nationalists. Vital supplies are ferried in by helicopter. Some
5,000 troops of the Interior Ministry have been assigned to
peacekeeping duties in the area.

    In April a peaceful demonstration by Georgian separatists
in Tbilisi turned into a horror when army and Interior Ministry
troops attacked the unarmed protesters with shovels, clubs and
poison gas, killing 20. There have been similar nationalist
flare-ups in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tadzhikistan.

    Secession, long a virtually taboo word in Soviet politics,
has become the avowed aim of several nationalist movements.
Although the Baltic states have been granted a high degree of
economic autonomy, they were rebuked by the Supreme Soviet in
November for passing laws claiming the right to decide which
legislation enacted in Moscow would apply in their territory.
A week later, Georgia passed the same law. Ukrainian
nationalists say they will soon try for economic and possibly
political autonomy.