Gorbachev's long journey: is Soviet reform moving too fast or not fast enough? - Mikhail Gorbachev

National Review, Dec 31, 1989 by Richard Grenier

Gorbachev's Long Journey

Moscow--"Dmitri Yazov?" my Russian host said of the Soviet defense minister, whom I'd recently met. "If you hitched him up to a brain-wave machine you'd get a flat line on the monitor. Brain dead. With a Moscow taxidriver you'd get some oscillation, but the Politburo? Flat. Nothing in the stores, panic buying, inflation, hoarding, and they don't have the faintest idea what to do."

Although I last visited Moscow only 12 months ago, I had never heard such naked contempt for the Communist regime from a Soviet citizen. And I hardly knew my host, a scientist, not involved in politics, no refusenik or dissenter. Yet he made no secret of his feelings as we drove through downtown Moscow.

"Oh, we've glasnost about the past now," he continued sourly. "But how about the future? What do you expect from these people? They study Marxism-Leninism. Have you heard of the latest dissertation from the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute? A startling revelation: Marx was not married to Friedrich Engels. A revolutionary discovery!" He laughed sardonically.

The atmosphere in Moscow has changed drastically in the last year, and in ways that have little to do with the disintegration of the Soviet colonial empire. The joke in Budapest and Warsaw is that the Soviet economy is naturally worse, "but the Russians are used to it," meaning more submissive to authority. But the sudden advent of a historically unprecedented level of free expression in the Soviet Union--with a spectacular drop in what I call the "fear factor"--has produced a sharp reduction in Russian submissiveness. Moscow is in a range about the empty shops and lowered standard of living. Those with entrepreneurial skills hate the system for holding them back. Those without, hate the successful few for moving forward. Mikhail Gorbachev, I suspect, though the Soviet people would be grateful for the new freedoms. But they're not. Above all, they want economic progress, and what they've gotten to date is ominous regression.

THERE ARE new faces in Russia now. Sergie Stankevich is a bright light of the Supreme Soviet's new oppositional "Inter-Regional Group," which includes Andrei Sakharov and Boris Yeltsin; his doctoral dissertation, he told me, was on the U.S. Congress under Richard Nixon. On the night of November 13, Stankevich came within two votes of forcing onto the legislative agenda the abolition of the Soviet constitution's notorious Article 6, which reserves a monopoly of power for the Communist Party. Vitaly Korotich, editor of the weekly Ogonyok (little flame) and another member of the Inter-Regional Group, feels the country's curse is the Communist bureaucracy's 18 million members. "What to do with them?" he asks in jovial exasperation. "Five hundred such people would destroy the economy of the United States!"

Vladislav Starkov, editor of the daily Argumenti i Facti (arguments and facts)--zooming to a staggering thirty-million circulation while that of Pravda (truth) is dropping fast to five million--admits that people's heightened expectations have led to an explosive situation. Gorbachev tried to remove Starkov for publishing an informal poll showing that the most popular leaders in the country were Sakharov and Yeltsin. He backed down only when Starkov's entire staff threatened to resign in protest, but at this writing he has again moved to dismiss him. Dmitri Zakharov, anchor of the sensational Soviet television program Vzgland (glance), has prepared a broadcast on the Bolshevik extermination of the Czar's family in which he'll cite as the number of Stalin's victims: 66 million. His authority? Just published in Russian? The Guinness Book of World Records. (The 66-million figure is in fact from Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.)

Stankevich, the Nixon scholar, favors full parliamentary democracy and all forms of private property, including the means of production (thereby violating the deepest Marxist taboo), but feels strict rationing is now inevitable. Korotich is certain that any alternative to Gorbachev would be far worse but puts the number of those bitterly hostile to perestroika (i.e., Soviet bureaucrats and their families) at sixty million. Starkov admits that many Soviet citizens still support Stanilism, and that he is "under pressure" (an understatement, given Gorbachev's enmity) and does not exclude a military coup d'etat.

I came to the Soviet Union knowing that in the past year it has seen a steep economic decline, but thinking the substantially enlarged freedoms might have brought hope. I now take a darker view.

On a side street near Moscow's City Hall is a non-descript edifice, seemingly an apartment building or the offices of a state enterprise. No neon lights are to be seen outside, no sign, no evidence of function. You knock on the door. It opens. A few more steps, if you pass muster, and you're in another world. It's a secret hotel for the use of a Soviet constituent republic's high officials during their stays in Moscow, and it is filled with marvels. Outside on the streets of Moscow, the shops are empty, with drastic national shortages of soap, toothpaste, detergent, sugar, salt, meat, fish, milk, dairy products, fruit, vegetables. But here there is everything, of high quality, and at stunningly low prices. Outside, ordinary Moscow citizens have little meat, if any; it's miserable and costly, and lines are long. But a steak dinner at this secret hotel costs exactly 21 kopeks, which at the official exchange rate comes to slightly over three cents--not bad, even on Soviet wages.