Beyond Gorbachev - Mikhail Gorbachev and Soviet politics; includes related article on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

National Review, May 28, 1990 by Xan Smiley, Lawrence A. Uzzell

Western leaders-most strikingly, President Bush seem unable to contemplate life after Gorbachev. The Soviet people have no such disability.

THERE ARE worrying signs that President Bush has become hooked on President Gorbachev that he is unable to contemplate, let alone encourage, the full-blooded democratization and decolonization of the Soviet Union because the Kremlin leader seems reluctant to stomach them. Appreciating the West's embarrassing impotence in the face of the bullying of Lithuania, Gorbachev may have gained the impression that Americans consider him irreplaceable. Ritual incantations about helping him make perestroika succeed" are beginning to expose a dangerous lack of definition about what the West actually wants the Soviet Union to become-and they could encourage Gorbachev to slam on the brakes. Instead of preparing for the probability that the final consequence of Russia's reforms will be the demise of the Communist Party and of Gorbachev himself, Western policy-makers seem to be locked into the belief that Mikhail the Miracle-maker must remain in power at virtually any cost and that enlightened despotism in Russia may contribute to world stability.

Gorbachev is a very great man of immense courage and skill, whose desire to reinvigorate the Soviet Union has led to the collapse of an ideology and the unraveling of an empire. But he is not a magician. He did not plan much of what has recently happened. It might be nice if he were to stay in power for a year or so longer, wielding an authoritarian baton to keep the so-called conservatives at bay while prodding the country down the path to irreversible change. But he is replaceable.

Of course the West cannot coerce the Kremlin into doing what is right. But it should disabuse Gorbachev of any hope that he will be lauded for creating some kind of enlightened despotism. It can certainly, should the bullying get worse, deny him a host of economic bonuses on which he is relying to transform his decayed economy. And it is not just a matter of Lithuania. It is a question of Gorbachev's willingness to accede to the popular will across the Soviet Union.

An official of the State Department recently told me that Gorbachev has, anyway, got four more years as executive president to "institutionalize" the frail new structures of emerging democracy-a parliamentary forum, an independent judiciary, pluralism in the media, and so on. I would not bet on those four years. The people's assertiveness and anger are too strong.

IT MUST be remembered that Gorbachev as leader has no real legitimacy. He was secretly selected in 1985 by the then Politburo's dozen geriatrics, who saw him as the only senior figure with the dynamism save the Soviet Union's stagnant political and economic system. It should be remembered, too, that the revamped parliament (the 2,250-strong Congress of People's Deputies) which recently ratified Gorbachev's presidency was itself elected last year only after candidates had submitted to a rigorous screening by the Communist Party machine. The marvel was that a few hundred free-minded spirits did manage to slip through the net, to be cheered on by an awakening electorate. Once the Congress's debates were aired on television, the bug of free speech proved infectious. But the Congress, as a whole, was no more freely elected than Gorbachev. The Soviet people are acutely aware of this.

So pressure for proper elections, especially since Gorbachev was forced to concede the principle of multi-partyism, will surely prove irresistible long before four years are up. A real counter-revolution, with Gorbachev likely to be one of its victims, is inexorably advancing.

This is particularly relevant to the economic reforms which have so far, five years after Gorbachev took power, barely begun. Politicians like Dick Gephardt who call amiably for stronger American-Soviet business links forget that there is barely the tiniest incentive for anybody-save a few barter-traders and symbol-conscious pioneers like McDonald's who do not mind amassing millions of useless rubles-to do real business. Various advisors of Gorbachev have begun to talk truly radically about the need for converting the ruble, slashing subsidies, accepting mass unemployment, and so on, but Gorbachev understandably shrinks from inflicting greater pain on a people who already live in squalor, despite the USSR'S gargantuan natural wealth. The Poles, now swallowing horrible economic medicine, have a chance of turning their economy round. But there's the rub: the pain-injecting Polish government was genuinely elected by the Polish people. Truly representative government is a pre-condition for truly radical economic reform.

At the Party Congress due this July, Gorbachev may accept a two- or even three-way split in the Communist Party. My guess is that an orthodox wing, perhaps led by the hated Yegor Ligachev, may split one way. Gorbachev may give his new-look rump Party-Eurocommunist in style, modem and market-oriented-a new name. It would not save him, any more than it has saved the East German or Hungarian Communists. But by far the most potent breakaway group would be the embryo social democrats, who have already emerged as the fledgling opposition within the new parliament.