TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/060589/06058900.051

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 10.4 KB | 200 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 16

COVER STORIES: Fighting The Founders


The two giants of Communism cope with an explosion of people
power

By Strobe Talbott


    Of all the conceits of Communism, none is more pervasive,
and none more dubious, than its claim to serve the interests
and fulfill the aspirations of the people. Marxist states are
given to calling themselves "people's republics." The largest
represents 1.1 billion men, women and children, nearly a fifth
of humanity. The Chinese are supposed to read the People's
Daily, entrust their security to the People's Liberation Army
and obey laws passed by the National People's Congress, which
convenes in the Great Hall of the People, situated, as it
happens, on Tiananmen Square.

    But something quite extraordinary is happening. The people
who live under Communism are rising up and asserting themselves
against the party. In China they have done so in defiance of
their rulers. In the Soviet Union they are doing so with the
help of their leader. While his Chinese counterparts were
intriguing against one another last week, Mikhail Gorbachev
officiated at the opening of a new government body called the
Congress of People's Deputies. For once the name was not
entirely a mockery of the political reality.

    For these two events to be occurring at the same time was
remarkable but not coincidental. The interaction between what
has been happening in Beijing and Moscow may lead future
historians to look back on May 1989 as the most momentous month
in the second half of the 20th century. Forces of epochal
transformation are bubbling up from below in China, while they
are being marshaled from above in the Soviet Union. But in both
cases these changes are driven by a recognition that Communism
has failed its subjects, the people, and that the only solution
is far-reaching reform of the entire system. In China it is the
demonstrators in Tiananmen Square who personify that
realization. In the Soviet Union it is Gorbachev himself.

    No less an authority than Karl Marx asserted that the
political order of a country derives from the economic relations
among its citizens (although Adam Smith had figured out the same
thing in the previous century). The leaders of the Russian and
Chinese revolutions imposed on the people a totalitarian form
of the social compact: You give up your freedom, and we'll make
sure you live decently. Bread was one of the most common words
on the banners that the workers carried through the streets of
Petrograd in 1917, and the promise of food was an important
theme in the propaganda of the Communists as they swept to
victory in China in 1949. The police state would also be a
welfare state. For 71 years in the Soviet Union and for 40 years
in China, the state has failed to deliver on its end of the
bargain. It has provided plenty of police but not much welfare.

    At first, the leader of the Great Counterrevolution was
Deng Xiaoping. He dismantled the vastly inefficient system of
communes. Farms were turned over to families. The results were
almost immediate -- and impressive. Grain output increased 44%
over eight years. Soviet economists looked to China with envy
and emulation. Kulaks -- rich peasants -- came back into
fashion.

    Deng clinched his reputation as a reformer with a witty
aphorism dismissing the value of ideology: "It doesn't matter
whether a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice."
Catching mice meant putting food on the table -- meeting the
material needs of the people. The color of the cat meant the
degree to which the economy relies on private incentive and
market forces rather than subsidies and quotas -- Adam Smith's
recommended mechanisms rather than Karl Marx's.

    Revolutionary true believers used to call Deng a
"capitalist roader." They were right in their accusation, but
he was right in his perception that the Communist road was a
dead end.

    But while Deng subordinated ideology to the goal of
"modernization," he did not downgrade the role or diffuse the
power of the Communist Party. Quite the contrary; he has
remained an absolutist in defense of the institution that Marx
and Engels aptly called the "dictatorship of the proletariat."
Farmers could work their own plots and profit from the sale of
their produce at market, but under Deng, the People's Daily
remained very much an organ of instruction rather than
information, to say nothing of debate. The doors of the Great
Hall of the People were shut, figuratively and often literally
as well, to the people themselves. Deng thought that China could
have a closed Communist Party that would preside over an open
economy.

    He was wrong. In all Communist societies, the principal
purpose of the party -- and the only thing it does well -- has
always been the preservation and enforcement of its own power.
But that naked truth has traditionally been disguised with
Marxist economics and ideology. To the extent that he
de-Communized the economy and discredited ideology, Deng
diminished the party's claim to legitimacy. He left the party
all the more vulnerable to the flood of discontent that has so
stunned the world in recent days. An improvement in living
standards is not enough to meet the needs of the people. As a
student banner in Tiananmen Square put it, WE LOVE RICE, BUT WE
LOVE DEMOCRACY MORE.

    Deng also made himself vulnerable to the supreme, and
probably final, irony of his roller-coaster career. He
carefully, patiently, skillfully set the scene for Gorbachev to
visit China two weeks ago. The Soviet leader was coming on
Deng's terms to end the 30-year schism between the Communist
giants. Yet not only was this diplomatic triumph overshadowed
by the more spectacular events in Tiananmen Square, but the
demonstrators there carried banners in Russian demanding
glasnost and saying IN THE SOVIET UNION THEY HAVE GORBACHEV. IN
CHINA, WE HAVE WHOM?

    Gorbachev has not always been a champion of the kind of
people power on display in Tiananmen Square. Early in his tenure
as General Secretary, his understanding of democracy was closer
to Deng's concept of limited managerial and entrepreneurial
liberalization. However, the Soviet leader grew to realize that
as long as the Communist Party maintains its grip on all aspects
of society, significant reform is nearly impossible. The party
is too conservative, too resistant to change. At the time of the
1917 Revolution, the party was the agent of cataclysmic change
-- but on behalf of a conspiratorial elite, not, as it claimed,
on behalf of the people. Over the decades, the self-professed
vanguard of the proletariat became adept at fighting rearguard
actions against innovation.

    In a word used by a number of his own advisers, Gorbachev
was "radicalized" by the experience of trying to improve the
system. The result, two months ago, was a genuine choice for
voters in the election to the new Congress of People's Deputies.
Numerous standard-bearers of the old order were defeated,
including some who ran unopposed (they gathered too few votes
to qualify for election). A prominent Soviet historian, Leonid
Batkin, asserts that "the Communist Party lost as an
institution. Communists won not because they were Communists but
despite being Communists." The insurgents suffered a setback in
last week's election of a new parliament, or Supreme Soviet, but
Gorbachev still intends that body, over time, to serve as a
counterweight to the party. He is pulling off an amazing,
perhaps unprecedented, feat in the history of statesmanship: he
is simultaneously the leader of the entrenched power structure
and the leader of the opposition.

    Gorbachev also has the satisfaction of knowing that he has
re-established the pre-eminence of the top man in the Kremlin
as the leader of world Communism -- but with a twist. He is now
the leader of the Communist reformation. It is as though Martin
Luther had returned in triumph to Rome to be installed as Pope.

    Deng Xiaoping's predecessor Mao Zedong split with
Gorbachev's predecessor Nikita Khrushchev partly on the grounds
that Khrushchev was a "revisionist." Gorbachev has gone a long
way toward healing the rift, but not by returning to orthodoxy.
He has carried revisionism to a level unimagined by either Mao
or Khrushchev, and as a result his picture and slogans are on
the posters of Chinese demonstrators.

    The tumult in China can be used by both sides in the debate
taking place in the Soviet Union. Reformers can draw the lesson
that perestroika must be accompanied by glasnost and
demokratizatsiya or sooner or later the people will take to the
streets. The conservatives can argue that glasnost and
demokratizatsiya unleash anarchy and are a threat to the powers
that be, notably including the General Secretary of the party.

    Despite its current troubles, China has an immense
advantage over the Soviet Union, and it gives Chinese reformers
an immense advantage over their Soviet counterparts. There
really is a Chinese people; 94% belong to one ethnic group, Han
Chinese. By contrast, Russians make up only 51% of the
population of the U.S.S.R.; they are one of more than 100 ethnic
groups. Those non-Russian nationalities -- in the Caucasus, in
Central Asia, along the Baltic, in the Ukraine -- are already
straining at the ties that bind them to Moscow.

    There has been a patriotic fervor to the demonstrations in
Beijing. The protesters sang the national anthem and saluted
the country's flag. It is all but impossible to imagine
something similar happening if Latvians took over the main
square in Riga or Ukrainians mobbed downtown Kiev. They would
be singing songs and waving flags that would symbolize their
dreams of independence and their resentment of Russian
domination. Gorbachev's picture might be on their posters too.
However, that would be because the demonstrators would see him
as not just a reformer but a liberator. That is one role that
Mikhail Gorbachev does not want, since it could make him the
protagonist in a tragedy. If glasnost and democratizatsiya seem
to be tearing the Soviet Union apart, Gorbachev may be in the
position of having either to order a crackdown himself or to
yield to a successor who would do so. He, like Deng, may yet
discover that starting a counterrevolution is far easier than
determining where it leads.