TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100289/10028900.013

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 8.5 KB | 165 lines

                ╦"à                                                          WORLD, Page 22

SOVIET UNION

His Vision Thing


A master of power politics, Gorbachev still lacks a well-
conceived blueprint for the new economic structure he so
desperately needs

By Bruce W. Nelan


    Anxiety and apprehension seem to pervade Moscow whenever
Mikhail Gorbachev is out of town. But for much of August, with
the Soviet President off on his annual vacation in the Crimea,
the capital showed symptoms of panic. Conservative members of
the Politburo were warning that the country could be slipping
out of control. Government officials were speculating openly
about the possibility of a coup. A rock group climbed the Soviet
hit parade with a song whose refrain was "We are anticipating
civil war." Arriving home, Gorbachev, looking tanned and
vigorous after four weeks on the Black Sea shore, went straight
to the Kremlin television studio and accused conservatives and
radicals of creating an atmosphere of "despair and uncertainty."

    Mikhail Sergeyevich the political wizard was back onstage.
With seeming effortlessness, he cashiered three full members and
two nonvoting members of the ruling Politburo, foot draggers
all, and promoted to their posts four men he apparently
considers more reliable. He won unanimous approval of his
compromise plan to bring forward the next party congress to
October 1990 so he can purge still more recalcitrants on the
251-member Central Committee. With Gorbachev flexing his
muscles, talk of a coup -- at least the Kremlin-corridor variety
that ousted Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 -- appeared misplaced. But
at the same time his virtuoso display of political control
highlighted a central question: If he can hire and fire the
country's most powerful men, why hasn't perestroika -- his plan
to restructure the economy -- paid off in the currency the
country demands, a better standard of living for Soviet
citizens?

    Gorbachev did his star turn during a two-day Central
Committee meeting in Moscow that was 18 months in the planning.
It focused on the ominous wave of nationalism that refuses to
ebb: resurgent independence movements in the Baltic states, the
Ukraine and Moldavia; rioting and murder among rival ethnic
groups in the southern republics of Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia
and Uzbekistan, in which at least 232 people have been killed
in the past 18 months.

    It would have been unrealistic to expect the plenum to
resolve chronic problems of empire that have bedeviled Czars and
party leaders alike. Nevertheless, the outcome was noticeably
flat and predictable. The party's new platform offered vague
promises of economic and cultural autonomy to the 15 national
republics but warned that secession or the revision of borders
was unacceptable. Violence would be met with the "full force of
Soviet laws," the platform warned. Yet all this has been said
before, and seems unlikely to end the fighting over
Nagorno-Karabakh or cool the breakaway passions in the Baltic
states. On Friday the Lithuanian Communist Party defied Moscow
with a declaration that it is "seeking independence in the
course of perestroika."

    Gorbachev used the close of the Central Committee plenum to
purge one-quarter of the twelve voting members of the
Politburo. He ousted three aging conservatives: Ukrainian party
chief Vladimir Shcherbitsky, 71; former KGB chairman Viktor
Chebrikov, 66; and agriculture specialist Viktor Nikonov, 60.
Gorbachev's main nemesis, Yegor Ligachev, 68, stays on, but
Western diplomats believe it suits the President to have a
significant figure to his right as a counterweight to Boris
Yeltsin on his left so he can bill himself as a
middle-of-the-roader. Gorbachev promoted new KGB chief Vladimir
Kryuchkov, 65, and chief economic planner Yuri Maslyukov, 51.
While both are considered supporters of perestroika, they are
also veteran members of the party apparat, come from the same
ideological mold as the men they replaced and give no hint of
brilliance.

    Plainly Gorbachev is hamstrung by the narrow pool of party
cadres he has to choose from and uncertainty over who is
capable of putting his plans into action and managing them
effectively. In fact, the purged Nikonov was appointed by
Gorbachev with high hopes just three years ago. Moreover,
Gorbachev has never had the vast party bureaucracy and probably
not even a majority of the Central Committee fully behind him.

    But more important, it is not clear that he has a detailed
vision of what kind of system he wants to replace the old one
with -- a free market economy, a form of democratic socialism
or simply a more efficient state monopoly. At last week's
meeting, Gorbachev dismissed all claims "that we are unable to
resolve problems facing the country without introducing
capitalism into the economy." So far, though, perestroika has
been a series of slogans rather than a well-structured set of
programs. American Sovietologist Abraham Becker of the Rand
Corp. concludes that Gorbachev came to power with a narrow view
of the country's problem and what was needed to reform it. "He
believed erroneously that drastic but elementary personnel
changes, a shaking up of the cadres, would turn around the
bureaucracy," says Becker. The Carnegie Endowment's Dimitri
Simes thinks time for such tinkering is running out. "Gorbachev
has to decide what kind of Soviet Union he wants, what kind of
vision for it he has," Simes says.

    Soviet and foreign analysts disagree on whether ethnic
turmoil or economic failure is the greater threat to Gorbachev.
There is no doubt, though, that the peril is real. "Even after
this week," observed former British Ambassador to Washington Sir
Oliver Wright, "the odds are against him." A Soviet political
scientist in Moscow, Yevgeni Ambartsumov, is equally grim. "The
threat of economic collapse exists," he says. "Things are
getting worse."

    There is no shortage of suggestions on what Gorbachev
should do. Western economists advise some breathtakingly
sweeping changes: decontrol prices, end huge state subsidies,
expand the private sector, open a capital market with realistic
interest rates. Soviet specialists call for something more
elusive: effective leadership. Says Oleg Bogomolov, director of
Moscow's Institute of Economics of the World Socialist System:
"To sustain perestroika, a new speedup, more radical change, is
required." Gorbachev, adds Ambartsumov, "talks too much and
doesn't carry through his decisions."

    With hindsight, some British experts suspect that Gorbachev
was led into fundamental errors by his own dynamism,
self-confidence and impatience. Says a senior British official:
"He moved on all fronts simultaneously, which has confronted him
with all the country's problems at once." Many Soviet scholars
regard the party bureaucracy as the main obstacle to reform and
argue that Gorbachev, despite top-level housecleaning, has so
far failed to sweep out conservatives and dead wood at the
middle and local levels, where things get done -- or don't.
Others say glasnost unleashed pent-up ethnic resentment. By
attacking across the board, Gorbachev only produced confusion,
resistance and rampant nationalism. Says a Foreign Office expert
in London: "You don't have to be a Soviet conservative to think
he should have exercised more control."

    Ironically, that is exactly what he did in applying
perestroika to foreign affairs. Gorbachev knew where he wanted
to go and how to get there. He moved first to improve
U.S.-Soviet relations, which he considered pivotal. To prove his
bona fides, he withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan and
supported regional settlements in Africa and Latin America. He
followed up by renouncing intervention in the affairs of Eastern
Europe. His steady march toward nuclear-arms reduction often
caught the U.S. off guard and vastly impressed Western Europe.
His sure hand on foreign policy has been so convincing that some
American congressional leaders are complaining that the Bush
Administration is responding too tentatively.

    But Gorbachev could still overestimate the practical value
of a warmer relationship with the U.S. Like so many foreign
leaders with domestic problems, Gorbachev might be looking to
Washington to bail him out of his crisis with pledges of
cooperation and signs of acceptance. That would be a mistake.
Not even a series of major triumphs abroad could compensate for
the lack of a blueprint to make perestroika work at home.


-- Ann Blackman/Moscow and William Mader/London