TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/090991/0909000.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.0 KB | 175 lines

                .                                                              WORLD, Page 22

SOVIET UNION

Starting at Year Zero


By LANCE MORROW


    An entire empire careered through darkness with a load of
nuclear weapons on board. On the winding road, it could see no
farther than the beams of its headlights. And as it raced around
the corners, the vehicle was disintegrating.

    The world watched the spectacle with complicated feelings:
astonishment, relief for the people of the republics in their
deliverance from the old life, a certain fascination and some
fear about what lay ahead. The event was unprecedented. Never
before had a fully matured empire, one superpower of the world's
only two, torn loose from its foundations and sped off, at such
velocity, on such a journey.

    There came a burst of euphoria when the reactionaries' coup
failed. Then the headlong dismantling. Here was the famous domino
effect in reverse, whole peoples going uncommunist by chain
reaction: Lithuania, Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine,
Belorussia, Moldavia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kirghizia. The
future, sunny a moment earlier, suddenly looked problematic and
dangerous. What of the 27,000 nuclear warheads deployed on
missiles, bombers, submarines and at ammunition dumps across the
old Union? Would the world see a medieval fragmentation,
reversion to the old city-states of Kievan Rus and Muscovy, and
feudal warlords with nukes? What of the 25 million ethnic
Russians now intermixed with the newly nationalistic peoples of
Ukraine or Kazakhstan? What would happen if the grain harvest
proved as poor as predicted, the distribution system remained as
feckless as ever, and winter not far off?

    When the unknown is operating on a historic scale, it
conjures up apocalyptic projections. Dick Elkus, an advisory-
board member of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and
International Studies, predicted, "What has happened so far is a
6.0 earthquake on its way to becoming an 8.3 -- 900 times
greater." The Harriman Institute's Richard Ericson said, "We are
facing what is perhaps the largest man-made disaster the world
has ever seen."

    Well, "perhaps" sometimes becomes "perhaps not." What is true
is that the Russians and the peoples of the other republics are
now standing at Year Zero of some new order that they must invent
for themselves. How will they do that? According to what models?

    No one knows. Are the Russians going to emerge eventually in
a political landscape that looks like Switzerland -- different
languages and nationalities coexisting under a government
organized to make decisions at the most democratic level
possible? Or like Lebanon at its savage worst? Or like someplace
that no one has ever seen before?

    Analysts have proposed various paradigms. Some think the
republics that were the Soviet Union may rearrange themselves
into a kind of British Commonwealth, or into something like the
European Community. Some think of the Organization of African
Unity, a roster of African states each of which has declared
adherence to principles of sovereign equality and noninterference
in the internal affairs of member states. Might they become a
federation, in which the republics yield some coordinating
economic authority to a central government, or a confederation,
an alliance, some sort of cooperative? Will they adopt a cooler,
well-machined nationalism in the style of Western Europe? Or
revert to the atavistic warring tribalism that threatens
Yugoslavia?

    In the past, the concept of Year Zero has often meant that
utopians have taken over and invited the executioner to step
forward and do some housecleaning. It happened in the French
Revolution. In Cambodia the Year Zero of the Khmer Rouge's new
order witnessed a genocidal scouring away of the old, down to
anyone who wore glasses or spoke French. But Year Zero for the
people of the Soviet Union is pointed, they hope, in the
opposite direction -- away from the totalitarianism of utopia.
They have tried that, and know it is a nightmare.

    Speed unfortunately favors the worst-case possibility: a
version of Lebanese disintegration as the Soviet center gets
replaced, too quickly, by radical nationalisms. Empires -- the
Roman, the British, the Ottoman -- are good for one thing: they
impose law and order so that business and trade may flourish
undisrupted. When the empire dissolves, the deeper ethnic and
nationalistic impulses, suppressed by autocracy, may be
violently set loose. For a long time, Soviet rule restrained a
thousand primitive tribal feuds waiting to be settled in the
old-fashioned way. In the familiar argument between dictatorship
and anarchy, neither alternative has much charm.

    In a speech to the Supreme Soviet last week, Mikhail
Gorbachev suggested that the Union should be preserved in part
because it is a superpower. He may be guilty of a fallacy: a
ruler's assumption that the ordinary people really care whether
they are citizens of a superpower or not. The old Soviet Union
was clearly an untenable superpower. It was the last empire,
trying to preserve itself on a ruinous ideological and economic
system. The costs of being a superpower (25% of the Union's GNP
went for military expenses) have been eating the Soviet people
alive. The best-case scenario for them lies in a different life
in a reconfigured world.

    To a great extent they may find it in the style that
communism always called "bourgeois" and that the First World
considers ordinary. Says S. Frederick Starr, a Soviet expert who
is president of Oberlin College: "Never in history has the
phrase `normal life' had such revolutionary overtones as in the
U.S.S.R. today."

    America and the Soviet Union can be intriguing negative
images of each other. The U.S. is triumphant materialism. Russia
has a spiritual depth and resonance. V.S. Pritchett has written
of "the Romantic belief in the supreme value of suffering which
is often said to be fundamental among Slavs. Prison has the
monastic lure." Americans are virtually addicted to not
suffering, to the un-Russian idea of the pursuit of happiness.

    Tocqueville said that America, when it started out, was une
feuille blanche, a blank page of history waiting to be written
upon. The American founders -- white, male, educated, property
owning -- had certain advantages, including a continent mostly
free of those ethnic passions that crowd the Soviet republics now
and make it difficult to fashion a new order. The new page in the
old Soviet Union is smudged, messy. The American founders were
creatures of the Enlightenment and drew upon a tradition of
thought that never made its way to Russia.

    America's genius has always been its gift for self-
transcendence -- its natural resources and its dumb luck, its
almost inadvertent way of evolving out of its problems within the
original constitutional framework. The Russians have displayed a
fatal talent for reversion to autocracy. When Ivan the Terrible
was young, he was regarded as a reformer. Later he became a
brutal, accomplished executioner, who once had an elephant cut to
pieces because it refused to bow to him. That has been the
unhappy Russian paradigm.

    Yet Russian political tradition contains another strain -- of
reform, decency and individual rights. The tendency has often
been suppressed. The best hope is that now it will at last give
the people of Russia and the other republics something they have
never had before: a state built from below, a civil society in
which real citizens, not subjects, break through to govern
themselves.

    The global electronic monoculture may allow the Russians to
override their autocratic traditions. If the best of Russia's
usable past has often been buried, the examples of other
societies and their expertise are elaborately available today.
The republics, having satisfied their suppressed chauvinistic
sides with independent gestures, may return to some form of
economic union. Together they may peacefully lift their gray
economies into the black, into the open -- which most would find
nearly impossible alone. Many horizontal trade arrangements have
flourished for some time and may be easily converted into legal
market systems working in social democracies.

    As Starr says, "The Soviet Union has been a one-hub country,
with everything going through Moscow. What they are talking about
now is a multihub organization of everything. What they are
groping toward is making contact with the truths of modern
organizations -- for example, the truth that the horizontally
organized links are more important than the vertical links, the
truth that things must be built from the bottom up, not from the
top down."

    Russia and the other republics may eventually evolve into
something unique, unexpected, even brilliant. That could take a
long time. The incoherence may persist for years, and with it the
dangers. Rebuilding must go much slower than collapse, however
miraculous the collapse may have been.