TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/123091/1230001.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.4 KB | 118 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 28

AMERICA ABROAD

A State That Deserved to Die


By Strobe Talbott


    MOSCOW: I've been coming here for 23 years. That turns
out to have been about a third of the U.S.S.R.'s life-span. In
none of my previous 30-plus visits did I ever think I would
outlive the Soviet state. Yet now that it is upon us, the demise
of the Soviet Union makes both moral and historical sense.

    A country is, among other things, an idea, often dressed
up as an ism. The U.S.S.R., a hodgepodge of would-be nation
states, was based on an outmoded idea, imperialism, and a modern
one, totalitarianism. There was in the minds of those old men
in the Kremlin the conceit, personified and perfected by
Stalin, that fear makes the world go round; fear can make the
worker work, the farmer farm, the writer write and, of course,
the Latvian, the Armenian, the Uzbek and the Ukrainian all take
orders from Moscow.

    To his lasting credit, Mikhail Gorbachev knew that was a
lousy idea. He realized that the chemical reaction between
intimidation and sycophancy could not fuel a modern society or
allow even a so-called superpower to enter the 21st century as
anything other than a basket case. Gorbachev has allowed the
beginnings of real politics to take the place of terror, and the
concept of real economics to replace the institutionalized
inefficiency of central planning and massive subsidization.

    With the end of the Soviet idea comes the end of the
Soviet Union. There is no reason to mourn the death of a country
that killed millions of its own citizens in the
collectivization campaign, the purges and the famines that were
used as an instrument of government policy.

    Still, there is apprehension in the cold, sooty air here.
I feel it in the pessimism and snarliness of my Russian
friends. Only two other events in this century, World War I and
World War II, have had an impact comparable to that of the
Second Russian Revolution. In each of those earlier cases, our
side's victory left a vacuum soon filled by new villains with
big, bad ideas that made another global showdown inevitable.

    World War I put the Prussian military machine out of
business and created new nations from the wreckage of the
Habsburg Empire. But by humiliating and pauperizing Germany, the
victors contributed to the conditions out of which Nazism arose.
World War I also so weakened Czarist Russia that a band of
conspirators who called themselves Bolsheviks and who had a
blueprint to take over the world were able, for starters, to
take over the largest country on earth.

    The consequences of World War II were also ambiguous. It
destroyed the Third Reich and the Empire of the Rising Sun, but
it made possible Stalin's conquest of Eastern Europe and Mao's
triumph in China.

    Now the cold war is over, and the good guys have won
again. But can the winners this time break the pattern of the
past? More to the point, will the U.S. take the lead in ensuring
that the West does everything in its power to bring about a
transition to democracies and free markets in Eurasia?

    Karl Marx was wrong about a lot, but he was right about
one thing: politics is born of economics. The political
stability of the new Commonwealth of Independent States will
require steady, substantial infusions of cash, credits and
know-how from outside.

    The U.S. and its allies in the cold war spent trillions of
dollars keeping the Soviet Union from blowing up the world. For
a fraction of that amount, the West can help prevent the former
Soviet Union from blowing itself up, with all the political --
and perhaps literal -- fallout that would mean for the rest of
the world.

    Having slain the dragon of international communism, the
U.S. is now flirting with the distinctively American bad idea
of isolationism, just as it did after the First World War. This
turning inward is now, as it was then, dangerously
shortsighted. If worse comes to worst here, Boris Yeltsin may
give way to a Russia-Firster like Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who has
fascistic tendencies, territorial ambitions and an ominously
large popular following. The U.S. might then find itself dragged
back into another open-ended international crisis that would
make the meagerness of its current aid program seem penny-wise
and pound-foolish. After all, the Marshall Plan and other
programs to reconstruct Germany and Japan after World War II
were arguably as important to avoiding World War III as was the
containment of communism.

    It's also worth remembering that those first two
world-transforming events, the conflagrations of 1914-18 and
1939-45, resulted in the loss of approximately 60 million lives.
The political miracle of 1989-91 has also had its victims:
scores were killed in the crackdowns in Tbilisi, Baku, Vilnius
and Riga, and three young men were martyred in the August coup.
But large-scale outbreaks of violence have been fairly isolated
everywhere except in the ethnic conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh,
the Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan. By and large, the Soviet
Union has given up the ghost of the totalitarian idea with
remarkably little bloodshed.

    Usually when countries and empires die, they take vast
numbers of their own people with them. So far, at least, the
U.S.S.R. is an exception. Keeping it so is a challenge not only
for its new leaders but for the rest of the world as well.