Gorbachev, Heretic in the Kremlin. - book reviews

National Review, Oct 15, 1990 by Eugene H. Methvin

JOKE circulating in Moscow earlier this year captured the mood: "There are two ways to solve the crisis of the Soviet economy.

The realistic way is to have people from outer space come straighten out the mess. The fantastic way is for the Soviet people to sort it out on their own." Or, as one Red Square protestor snorted the other day, "This is the capital of Absurdistan."

So it may be too much to expect two veteran Moscow correspondents, Dusko Doder, late of the Washington Post and later of U.S. News & World Report, and Louise Branson, of the London Sunday Times, to make sense out of the scene. But they set out to do so in this book, which was conceived as a biography of Mikhail Gorbachev but became an encyclopedia of his regime at home and abroad.

With such a subject they can be forgiven, I suppose, for letting it get away from them. How can you explain a fellow who fervently vows that the Communist Party will remain forever "the leading force" in Soviet society, then compels the Party Central Committee to renounce its constitutionally guaranteed monopoly on power and pledge to compete "strictly within the framework of the democratic process"? Or who vows East Germany will never become part of NATO, then allows as how that will be okay with him since it seems inevitable? Or who kicks Boris Yeltsin out of the Kremlin, bans him from politics, helps him back in, tries to whip him in an election, loses, and then invites him into the Kremlin to help map out a massive reform?

You explain such a fellow by labeling him a politician, that's how. That means he is that admirable, contemptible, clownish, and sometimes magnificent fellow who sets out to lead a gaggle of human beings where he or they want to go. Watching and analyzing his meanderings down history's pathways is one of the occupational delights of the journalist's profession and the authors give us many useful insights. Yet there is always mystery at the core of biography that leaves us unsatisfied, for as Henry James warned: "Never say you know the last word about the human heart."

Mr. Doder and Miss Branson had the bad luck to try sending their book to press in the year of the fall of the Wall, the liberation of East Europe, the wildfire of secession in the Soviet Union, and the comeback of Boris Yeltsin. They tried to cope by adding chapters mentioning these events, but added little insight. A book half as long would have been twice as good. Through the verbiage, however, we can see the very different faces Gorbachev has shown the world as he responds to internal political pressures from the nomenklatura, ethnic strife, popular protest, and foreign pressures.

Gorbachev I is the radical reformer who recognized the bankruptcy of the old Stalinist system and wanted to "modernize" it. But the design he showed until recently was a kind of consultative plantation, in which the slaves would be allowed to report on and even vote out foremen who were lazy, incompetent, or corrupt. They would also be given a minority share of resulting productivity; the lion's share, however, would continue to go to the 450,000 or so members of the nomenklatura, the holders of power and privilege among the 19 million Communist Party members who rule the other 93 per cent of the Soviet population.

After Chernobyl Gorbachev I proclaimed glasnost, which has no precise English translation but combines aspects of publicity" and openness," a bowdlerized free-speech policy. It was an effort to enlist the slaves against the corrupt, brutal, and lazy among the nomenklatura masters.

Gorbachev Il is the Old Bolshevik who cannot resist the temptation of power. He changed the constitution to combine the two highest offices-Party general secretary and president-in himself for the first time since Stalin. This Gorbachev is also a true-believing Communist, and we had better not forget it. Last December Boris Yeltsin declared in an interview, "Those who still believe in Communism are moving in the sphere of fantasy. I regard myself as a social democrat." This provoked a passionate Gorbachev response two weeks later before the Congress of People's Deputies: "I am a Communist, a convinced Communist. For some that may be a fantasy. But for me it is my main goal." Mr. Doder and Miss Branson remind us repeatedly that Gorbachev is an idealistic reformer who tends to underestimate the frailty of man.

Gorbachev III may yet appear: the man who realizes he cannot eat his cake and have it too. The West will have much influence on which course Gorbachev III chooses. If we are patsies, panting to rush in with nostrings loans and sign sappy "armscontrol" agreements, we will tempt Gorbachev to appease the nobility of the ancien regime, to avoid the hard structural decisions necessary to strip it of control of the economy and liberate popular energies.

If we tie our loans to economic and political pluralism-if we finance small tractors for independent farmers, for example, and only if they are allowed to sell via free-market food stores-we can encourage the growth of political counterforces to the nomenklatura monopoly. We can also encourage this by speaking bluntly about the failure of its ideology and the necessity for jettisoning it in order to make real economic progress.