TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/032591/0325002.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.3 KB | 114 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 33

AMERICA ABROAD

The Conductor of Discord


By Strobe Talbott


    Mikhail Gorbachev specializes in the politics of the
impossible. Even his job description -- to preside over a
country that is falling apart -- is a contradiction in terms:
He may be the most widely disliked figure in the Soviet Union,
yet he is convinced that he alone can avert outright warfare
among tribes and factions that hate one another even more than
they hate him.

    Traditionally, politicians build coalitions of supporters.
Gorbachev has done the opposite. He has managed to make a
peculiar virtue out of having detractors on all sides.

    Reactionaries will never forgive him for his earlier
policies, while democrats feel betrayed and threatened by his
current ones. Nationalists see him as thwarting their drive for
independence, while imperialists blame him for tolerating the
very idea of secession.

    So far he has been able to play these complaints off each
other and position himself in the middle as the conductor of
a discordant choir. What he has done that infuriates the left
also makes him tolerable to the right, albeit just barely. And
vice versa. Remove him from the equation, and the result could
be a cataclysmic struggle between forces that are intolerable
to each other.

    Boris Yeltsin has supplanted Gorbachev as the Soviet
politician who seems most committed to following through on
reform. Unlike Gorbachev, Yeltsin has openly broken with the
Communist Party, and he wants to legalize private property and
introduce a real free market. His vision for the future --
independence for some republics, a loose confederation for the
rest -- is, in the long run, probably more realistic than
Gorbachev's. But in the near term it tempts disaster in the
form of a much more serious backlash than what has already
occurred. While Yeltsin's boldness resonates with the impatience
of much of the populace, it also terrifies, antagonizes and
provokes the reactionaries. Yeltsin has people power, but his
enemies have the power that comes from the barrel of a gun.

    No doubt largely because Yeltsin is so popular, Gorbachev
detests him, and Yeltsin heartily reciprocates the sentiment.
They are trying to vanquish each other with public
denunciations, parliamentary maneuvers, resolutions on ballots
and demonstrations in the streets. But vicious as their rivalry
is, it is nothing compared with the way politics used to be in
the Soviet Union -- and might be again if the advocates of a
return to repression were to prevail.

    Bloody Sunday, Jan. 13, when Soviet soldiers killed unarmed
civilians in Lithuania, is often cited as proof that Gorbachev
has already thrown in with the ultraconservatives. Actually,
in the aftermath of the massacre, he showed his determination
to preserve an equilibrium between right and left, between
centrifugal and centripetal forces. If the hard-liners had
really had their way in Vilnius, the night of horror would have
stretched into a week, a month, perhaps a new era. Vytautas
Landsbergis would now be dead, in jail or, if he were extremely
lucky, back to teaching music. Instead he remains President of
Lithuania.

    The Baltic affair is a reminder that the outside world has
an unusual claim on the man in the Kremlin and hence some
limited influence on the policies that emanate from there.
Especially now that Gorbachev has alienated or disillusioned
his constituencies at home, he is desperate to preserve the
ones he has built abroad. He was aghast when his pals George
Bush, Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand warned that the
violence in Vilnius jeopardized not only Western economic
assistance to perestroika but also Gorbachev's personal standing
in the club of world leaders.

    In the midst of that uproar, Gorbachev had to replace
Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, who anticipated the use
of force against nationalists and resigned in pre-emptive
protest. The resurgent Old Guard's choice for the post was the
Politburo ideologist, Alexander Dzasokhov; on the eve of Bloody
Sunday he had the inside track. But at the last minute, to
reassure the international community, Gorbachev picked instead
a Shevardnadze protege, the smooth, English-speaking ambassador
to Washington, Alexander Bessmertnykh.

    Of course, if Gorbachev had heeded Shevardnadze in the first
place, there might never have been a massacre in Vilnius or a
vacancy at the Foreign Ministry. Still, Gorbachev did call off
the tanks, leaving Landsbergis' government in the Lithuanian
parliament and Soviet troops around the republic's main TV
station several blocks away -- a standoff that captures in
microcosm the state of the U.S.S.R. as a whole. And in
Bessmertnykh, the Soviet Union has ended up with a Foreign
Minister who is a comedown from Shevardnadze but a considerable
improvement on Dzasokhov.

    Thus the outcome of the latest crisis has been worse than
anyone would have liked but better than many had feared. That
seems to be the appropriate judgment about the U.S.S.R. these
days. The blame and credit due Gorbachev are, like so many
contradictory elements over which he presides, in a rough,
precarious balance.