TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/090291/0902997.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.9 KB | 114 lines

                L    ╡                                                            THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, Page 49

INTERNATIONAL FALLOUT

What the West Can Do


Still split over aid to Moscow, the major powers now must decide
how to handle Yeltsin and the republics

By JAMES WALSH -- Reported by Dan Goodgame/Kennebunkport and
Priscilla Painton/New York, with other bureaus


    Though it was mercifully short-lived, the specter of a
totalitarian regime in Moscow and a revival of the cold war badly
frightened the world's major industrial powers. The nightmare
evaporated quickly, but it left the wealthy democracies facing an
urgent question: What were the best ways to help ensure that the
Soviet Union was never again hijacked by hard-liners?

    Shoring up Moscow's economy was clearly the first priority,
but there was no unanimity on how to do that. The fault line of
debate ran just north of the Bonn-Paris axis. Leaders of Germany
and France, with Italy chiming in, rebuked what they called the
stinginess toward perestroika evinced in last month's London
summit of the Group of Seven leading industrial powers. The
Germans, whose $35 billion in commitments to Moscow surpasses all
other sources of Soviet aid put together, were horrified by the
crisis that had threatened to blow up in their faces. An
unusually blunt Chancellor Helmut Kohl told his allies, "The
dumbest possible policy now would be for us to sit back as
international onlookers and say, `So, what are they doing in
Moscow?'"

    On the other side, policymakers in the U.S., Britain, Canada
and the Netherlands remained convinced that throwing money at
Gorbachev was no cure for his country's crippling economic ills.
Without major structural changes, said Dutch Foreign Minister
Hans van den Broek, even generous cash and credits were destined
to end up "like a drop of water on a hot stove."

    But the debate in its wider dimensions was not so clear-cut.
Other key issues gripping the West and Japan included Soviet
compliance with arms reductions, the security of Eastern Europe's
newborn democracies, and the plight of the Baltic republics.
Overarching those quandaries was the question of who in the
U.S.S.R. was now the worthier negotiating partner: a diminished
Gorbachev or leaders of the newly muscular, more reform-driven
republics -- especially the Russian president and hero of the
hour, Boris Yeltsin.

    Though George Bush praised Yeltsin's "tremendous courage" and
"superb" defiance, the U.S. President and other allied leaders
shied away from the legal minefield they would face in bypassing
the Kremlin's sovereign authority. Said Stephen Meyer, an M.I.T.
political science professor who is a sometime Bush adviser: "I
would not allow bilateral relations with the republics any more
than I would allow the Japanese to set up independent diplomatic
relations with Massachusetts, New York and Connecticut."

    As a morale booster, the White House was inclined to give
reformers at least some economic reward. But if Gorbachev is to
preserve his role as the leader of perestroika, a Bush
Administration official warned, "he's going to have to move and
move pretty quickly." Would greater trade, aid and investment --
pegged to concrete Soviet reforms -- make a difference? Most
analysts remained profoundly skeptical. Meyer stressed that
"there are no financial institutions in the Soviet Union capable
of absorbing in a useful way large amounts of aid, at either the
Union level or the republic level." Outside of German loans,
Western and Japanese pledges of help to date, far from being
enough to finance restructuring, fall short of making up for
Moscow's foreign-exchange deficit.

    Addressing arms cuts, an emergency NATO meeting in Brussels
last week demanded that the Soviet military honor all treaties
and cease violations and evasions of last year's Europe-wide
agreement on troop and conventional-arms rollbacks. Japanese
opinion makers, meanwhile, were hoping to extend the arms-
reduction process to Asia by sweetening Tokyo's aid offers to
Moscow. Said University of Tokyo professor Haruki Wada: "I think
there is a feeling among our people now that perestroika is of
the first importance."

    The new front-line Central European democracies, meanwhile,
argued with some trepidation that bringing them under the Western
wing was of the highest importance. The European Community seemed
to agree, offering to step up negotiations toward admitting
Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary as associate members.

    But the big question was whether Soviet reformers would wind
up feeling defeated and demoralized by hard economic realities.
Italy proposed admitting the U.S.S.R. immediately as a full
member of the International Monetary Fund. But Washington, which
had been poised to award Moscow most-favored-nation trade status,
was debating whether it might make that move contingent upon the
Kremlin's prompt fulfillment of power sharing and other reforms.
The issue, as experts saw it, was academic since the Soviets
produce virtually no exports they could sell in the U.S. now.

    Whatever is done to help the Soviets, no one was expecting a
rapid cure for the nation's profound malaise. Predicted a top
Bush Administration analyst: "In the short run, things will
probably get worse." A senior White House official wondered if
devolution of power would result in real market freedoms or just
"central control by [each of] the 15 republics." He added: "I'm
not sure even the reformers understand the difference."

    With technical advice and encouragement from the West, the
republics may yet harness their new spirit of nationalism and
develop a true market system. In that event, Bush's judgment on
the prospects for Baltic independence may turn out to have a
broader application. Asked if the Kremlin had seen the light on
the Baltics, the President replied, "Well, I think some of the
people who saw the darkness are no longer around."