Upon my word… - politics in Soviet Union and China - column

National Review, June 30, 1989 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

AS WE LIVE and breathe, there it was, right on the screen: 300,000 Chinese students begging their government to give them such freedoms as Mikhail Gorbachev has granted to the people of Soviet Russia. To dream at night of . . . waking up in the Soviet Empire, free at last. There is the problem that if you want to leave the Soviet Empire, on the east you have the ice-cold waters off Siberia, and on the west, unless you have a pass that gets you through Checkpoint Charlie, you run into the Berlin Wall, which is protected by a) machine guns, b) grenades, c) land mines, d) spotlights, e) sirens, and f) man-eating dos.

When I was first in China, in 1972, word had not yet got around that a human being had landed on the moon (three years before). You can hardly expect the Chinese students to know about the decree of April 8, issued over the signature of-their visiting democratic hero, Mikhail Gorbachev. The decree redefines the two catch-all articles of the Soviet constitution under which punishment was meted out to the dozen million Russians who got in the way of Stalin-Khrushchev-Brezhnev-AndropovChernenko. The new decree says that any person who calls for the overthrow of the Soviet system or for "its alteration in ways contradicting the USSR constitution" will be sent to prison for three years. The same punishment will be used against anyone who manufactures "with intent to distribute . . . materials" arguing for the alteration of the Soviet system in such a manner.

Moreover, anyone who uses "technical equipment" intended for "mass duplication" arguing for such illegal alterations in the Soviet system can get up to seven years, They can call that the Back to Samizdat bill. An example of advocating an illegal alteration of the Soviet system is challenging thc role of the Communist Party as "the leading and guiding force of Soviet society." For that, you get three to ten years. And the same decree condemns "incitement of ethnic or racial hostility or strife." That was there before, but the penalty used to be three years, and now it is ten which is another way of saying, no more talk about a measure of independence for tbe Soviet republics.

And, finally, the decree specifies up to three years in jail for anyone so wicked as to "insult or discredit" government or public bodies. If Gorbachevism of that kind were visited on modern China, well, that would certainly clear Tiananmen Square.

Gorbachev is something of a modern miracle worker. Marlin Fitzwater, the press secretary to President Bush, more thoughtfully characterized him drugstore cowboy." That is an interesting portraiture, though the imagination strains to recall who are tbe legendary drugstore cowboys with whom to compare Gorbachev.

BUT COWBOYS are shoot-'em-up types, no doubt about it, and the students' adulation in Peking came only a few days after Gorbachev, through his foreign minister, said that the Soviet Union would stop destroying its SS-23s unless the United States stopped urging the modernization of the Lance missiles. The Chinese students could not have known that the difference between what Gorbachev is threatening and what we are urging is tbat, under the INF treaty, the modernization of the Lance missile is perfectly legal, whereas under the same treaty it is not legal to prolong the life of the SS-23. Nor could the Chinese be expected to know that Gorbachev has not admitted that the radar facility at Krasnoyarsk is in violation of the ABM treaty; and that he agrees to destroy it only if the United States agrees to abide by an interpretation of that treaty which is pure improvisation.

Drugstore cowboys, one must suppose, walk out into the street, hail the mob, and tell them to come in for free ice-cream cones. That is how the Bush Administration clearly understands Mr. Gorbachev's lagniappe when he offered to destroy five hundred missiles, Which is to say less than 3 per cent of his inventory, reducing the threat to export glasnostian Bolshevism to Western Europe and the rest of the world by a factor of nothing, since these missiles have been redundant for years. But tbe mob hailed the gesture as evidence of the sheer . . . generosity of Mikhail Gorbachev.

And there came to pass on Tuesday, May 16, the formal end of the ChineseSoviet rift. And, heard from the lips of the Chinese premier, for the first time in Peking since 1959, the quaint coinage, "human freedom." He said that there was no reason why, under socialism, you couldn't also have economic productivity, democracy, and human rights. But then there was no reason for Mao, or for Lenin, or for Marx, or for original sin.