TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/071591/0715001.000

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                                                                                WORLD, Page 30

SOVIET UNION

Crisis of Personality


Building a new political and economic system from scratch, the
country's reformers must cope with a mind-set unaccustomed to
freedom

By GEORGE J. CHURCH -- Reported by James Carney and John Kohan/
Moscow and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington


    Speaking in New York last month, newly elected Russian
Federation president Boris Yeltsin angrily cited an example of
the kind of "exploitation" he would not allow: a middleman who
bought meat in Moscow and sold it as shashlik in a city less
than a hundred miles away for a big markup. Meeting Yeltsin
immediately after, S. Frederick Starr, president of Oberlin
College in Ohio and a Sovietologist, suggested that instead of
putting the dealer out of action, the Russian leader ought to
encourage five more hustlers to go into the business. That way
more shashlik would be distributed while competition slashed the
price. Yeltsin's face lit up. "Of course you're right," he
replied, in a gee-I-should-have-thought-of-that tone.

    That so forceful an advocate of private enterprise as
Yeltsin should need instruction in so basic a point underscores
the most troublesome question facing the Soviet Union today. It
will hover in the background at next week's Group of Seven
summit in London, when Mikhail Gorbachev asks leaders of the
world's strongest industrial powers for economic help and
submits to sharp questioning about what kind of reforms he plans
to make any aid effective. But the problem goes much deeper than
the details of this or that economic plan. It is nothing less
than a question of national character: Can the Soviets create
the political culture -- the atmosphere and habits of thought
-- that would make it possible to convert their country into a
free-market democracy?

    The Soviet Union has virtually no experience with anything
resembling such a society; at times the reformers trying to
create one seem to have only a vague idea of what it would look
and feel like. Worse still, their efforts run counter to many
traditions inculcated by Russian history; not just the 70 years
of communist attempts to create a New Soviet Man, but the
centuries of czarist oppression and frequent isolation from
outside thought before 1917. Even optimistic experts -- and
there are some, both Western and Soviet -- think creation of the
requisite political culture will take decades, perhaps
generations, with innumerable opportunities for backsliding
along the way.

    But the process at least seems to be under way. Last week
some of the country's most prominent advocates of change put
together a Democratic Reform Movement, intended to become a
unified and permanent opposition to the Communist Party, or at
least its hard-line faction. Organizers include former Foreign
Minister Eduard Shevardnadze; Alexander Yakovlev, an adviser to
President Mikhail Gorbachev who is sometimes called the
"architect of perestroika"; and Mayors Gavril Popov of Moscow
and Anatoli Sobchak of Leningrad.

    The new movement is not yet a political party. Whether it
becomes one will be determined by a founding congress in
September. But Shevardnadze made it clear that the
organization's purpose is to speed the conversion of the Soviet
Union into a "normal society." He explained: "A normal society
has an opposition as a natural feature of the political
landscape." The reaction, however, indicated that
anti-establishment politics in the U.S.S.R. is still an
undeveloped art. The founders of the Reform Movement are oddly
reluctant to break completely with the Communist Party.
Shevardnadze resigned from the party, a few steps ahead of a
move to drum him out. But he and other leaders made it clear
that they want to attract reform-minded communists who, at
least for the time being, need not quit the party to join.

    That position repelled some of the small parties that have
been springing up and split others. Nikolai Travkin, head of
the Democratic Party of Russia, withdrew promised support; he
is under fire from dissenters who accuse him of being -- to
borrow an old American term -- soft on communism. They plan to
hold a founding congress of yet another new party, an oddly
named Liberal-Conservative Union, in late September. This autumn
seems likely to witness the birth not of a unified but of a
still further splintered opposition.

    Inside the party, meanwhile, the newest trend is sternly
anti-reform. Hard-liners calling themselves the Communist
Initiative Movement met in Moscow at the end of June to demand
that the "bourgeois leadership" -- meaning Gorbachev & Co. --
be expelled and even brought to trial on charges of "high
treason."

    While a trial seems unlikely, the Initiative is
distressingly strong. It represents 3.5 million party members
and has considerable support among the apparatchiks who sit on
the Central Committee. Gorbachev could face serious trouble
later this month, when the Central Committee meets in a plenum.
Clearly worried, he published last week a speech warning that
"if the party remains in its present state, it will lose all
future political battles and elections."

    Well, maybe. But to many experts it is hardly a surprise
that dictatorial tendencies are still strong while reform
movements are splintered. Given the tragic history of Russia,
it could hardly be otherwise. The Czars retained absolutism as
a quasi-religious principle long after most other European
nations had either dethroned or put constitutional limitations
on their Kings. Almost three centuries of the so-called Tatar
Yoke, which ended around 1480, effectively walled off the
country from foreign influences, an isolation continued as a
matter of policy by the Czars and later the commissars. In the
late 16th century, Giles Fletcher the Elder, English ambassador
to the czarist court, wrote that Russians were "kept from
traveling that they may learn nothing, nor see the fashions of
other countries" -- an observation that would still have been
accurate a few years ago. Even today a powerful Slavophile
movement regards Western ways as incompatible with the Russian
character. Some Sovietologists assert apprehensively that the
Slavophiles are making common cause with hard-line communists
to form a strong anti-democratic bloc.

    Serfdom in Russia and slavery in the U.S. were both
abolished in the 1860s, but the legacy of serfdom has been even
more enduring. No wonder; only about 12% of the inhabitants of
the U.S. were enslaved in 1860, but almost two-thirds of the
Russian empire's people were serfs at the time of emancipation.
In 1918 the Bolsheviks instituted a totalitarianism more
complete than that of the Nazis, in the judgment of Soviet
sociologist Boris Grushin. "Even under Adolf Hitler, German
industry was relatively independent of the system," says
Grushin, "but in the Soviet Union, everything was swallowed up
by the state."

    Two Russians who agree on almost nothing else give similar
descriptions of the psychology bred by this history. Alexei
Sergeyev, a political economics professor and a founder of the
Communist Initiative Movement, believes that most of his
countrymen "don't understand anything in politics." They tend
to equate the noise and conflict of a multiparty system with
anarchy, which arose whenever the iron fist was relaxed. Though
they loathe bureaucrats, ordinary citizens have great faith in
the idea of a "benevolent czar" who will keep order. First
Gorbachev and then Yeltsin appeared to fill the bill, but
Sergeyev believes that within 18 months economic chaos will
force the masses to turn back to old-line Communists because
they can impose order with a "strong hand."

    Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a moderate reformer, agrees that
many Soviet citizens have learned to survive by "being ready to
adapt to any kind of order and to fulfill any instruction, to
forget about the morality of state policy and to accept
everything from above." Even those who have begun to shake off
this passivity have had no chance to develop the initiative and
self-reliance that democracy demands. "They are longing for
freedom, but they don't know what to do with it," says
Yevtushenko. "This is true even of some of our democrats. They
are wonderful in meetings, but they are terrible managers,
terrible decision makers."

    Another problem is that Soviets lack what Oberlin
President Starr terms "horizontal links among citizens," the
clubs, professional societies and voluntary associations that
in other countries foster the habits of political give-and-take.
At the end of the 19th century, Danish historian Georg Brandes
called czarist Russia "a bureaucratic state where official power
has destroyed all spontaneous and natural growth in the
relations of public life." His description would have fit the
Communist state even better. Partly in consequence, aspiring
leaders have had nowhere to learn the arts of compromise and
coalition building indispensable to democratic politics.

    Some American Sovietologists find it surprising and
heartening that democracy has spread as far and as rapidly as
it has in this unpromising soil. They point out that every time
Soviet citizens have been given a choice they have voted for
democratic change. One explanation, no doubt, is that the human
instinct for freedom cannot be eradicated even by the most
dismal history. A more concrete reason is the rise of an
educated populace less submissive than older generations. In the
1920s, Russians averaged only four years of schooling each;
today the average is 12 years. Says Blair Ruble, director of the
Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington:
"There has been a general trend toward increasing education,
urbanization and professionalization of the labor force. Those
trends bring with them different attitudes toward authority and
a greater desire to control one's destiny."

    A free-market economy, many experts fear, may be even
harder to build than a political democracy. The U.S.S.R. did
take what looked like a giant step last week, when the Supreme
Soviet passed a law to break the central government's
stranglehold on industrial and commercial property by
transferring most of it to other hands. But old-line Communists
watered down the bill so that it was not quite the
private-property legislation that had been advertised. Defense,
energy and other "vital" industries were exempted; priority is
to be given to transferring properties to collectives
(presumably of workers and institutions of various kinds) rather
than to private owners, and many properties will be leased by
the state rather than sold outright.

    The halfhearted legislation reflects the intense Soviet
suspicion of private entrepreneurship, which is the main barrier
to a free economy. Even in czarist times, the peasant masses
cherished an egalitarianism described as an "equality of
poverty." It was regularly violated, of course: nobles owned
vast estates that in effect encompassed whole villages and
thousands of serfs. Similarly, members of the Communist elite
accumulated palatial dachas, shopped in special stores closed
to the general public and enjoyed other privileges far out of
reach of workers. That bred an us-against-them hatred among the
masses and a bitter conviction that the only way for someone to
accumulate worldly goods in excess of those enjoyed by his
fellows was to be a crook and an exploiter. Communist dogma, if
not Communist practice, reinforced the feeling; the conviction
that hired labor is always and necessarily exploited labor sank
in deep.

    Today, sociologist Grushin reports, a majority of Soviet
citizens in opinion polls consistently rank the owners of
cooperative businesses as the "main enemy" of the people.
Unfortunately, this prejudice is not totally unfounded. Many of
the first millionaires to arise out of the limited private
enterprise that now exists have been black marketeers or
Communist bureaucrats using their connections. Even politicians
like Yeltsin, who grasp intellectually the driving role of
private ownership in producing Western prosperity, have trouble
understanding that cracking down on the sharpers, like the
shashlik dealer, risks strangling the initiative of legitimate
entrepreneurs.

    Under the best of circumstances, building a free-market
democracy from scratch, as the Soviets must, will take time. One
State Department official guesses 25 to 30 years will be needed
to finish the job. Grushin thinks it may take at least 70
years, "so that three generations will have passed and those who
were spoiled by the old system will have died out." The big
fear of both Western and Soviet experts is that reformers will
not get the time. The wrenching transition to a free market,
which will end artificially subsidized prices and close
inefficient state businesses, is likely to cause both inflation
and unemployment. After 60 years of Communist insistence that
there was no such thing as joblessness in the Soviet Union, the
government last week finally admitted that indeed there is and
opened a string of unemployment-compensation offices. Pessimists
fear that inflation and unemployment will combine to turn back
the clock not only on economic reform but on the Soviet Union's
nascent democracy as well.

    Maybe, but maybe not. Democracy has such a strong tendency
to nurture itself, and the superiority of free markets to
centrally managed communist economies has become so glaringly
obvious, that both might keep growing despite inevitable delays
and even temporary reversals. The Soviet Union is a large
country, and any two contradictory statements about it are
always true. Including the statements that the history,
traditions and ingrained ways of thought of many Soviet people
could hardly be less favorable to free-market democracy -- and
that somehow one is starting to take shape anyway.