Holding the empire together

National Review, Feb 11, 1991 by Elisabeth Rubinfien

AS WESTERN eyes watched the buildup and first blasts of war in the Gulf, Soviets focused on the horror of Moscow's crackdown in the Baltic republics.

Troops stormed Vilnius on January 11 and began beating aside Lithuanian resisters. The National Salvation Committee, a murky group that springs from the tiny pro-Moscow Communist Party in Lithuania, quickly proclaimed itself in control, as the government of President Vytautas Landsbergis waited anxiously for the army to cross the barricades at the Lithuanian parliament and forcibly throw out the democratically elected government.

When Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev finally spoke publicly about the attack, three days after it began, he complained that it had been necessary because Mr. Landsbergis was impossible to work with-meaning that there was no way to reach a compromise between Mr. Gorbachev's insistence that Lithuania remain part of the Union and Mr. Landsbergis's dreams of independence. Many Soviet reformers have insisted for a long time that Westerners refuse to see the real Mr. Gorbachev. To some extent, this gap in perspective is inevitable-the undeniable breakthroughs Mr. Gorbachev brought with glasnost and in East-West relations mean more to Westerners than does the continuing economic disaster his country suffers from. But Mr. Gorbachev's reluctance to take a radical approach to economic reform is intertwined with his intolerance of republican secession: both have their roots in his consistent commitment to the preservation of the Soviet empire and its centralized government. Mr. Gorbachev has made it clear since the beginning of the Baltic sovereignty struggle that he views independence as unacceptable. "In essence it all started in March . . . there was a nighttime constitutional coup d'etat," Mr. Gorbachev told the Soviet parliament, in his first explanation of the Lithuanian crackdown. Standing on the steps of parliament during a break, decked out in fine wool coat and grey fur hat, he told reporters that Lithuania's March declaration of independence following the victory of antiCommunist forces in the elections was "anti-constitutional and illegal and should be abolished."

Lithuanians have consistently argued that the true crime occurred in 1940, when the Baltic republics were swallowed up by Moscow as its spoils from the Hitler-Stalin Pact. While the Gorbachev era has brought that ignoble moment into open discussion, the Kremlin has never acknowledged it as an imperial takeover. Instead, Moscow refers to Lithuania as an integral part of the Union and worries that if it were allowed to secede the door would be thrown open for others. Indeed, Lithuania's declaration of independence was followed briskly by similar decrees by Latvia and Estonia. Moscow responded with a broad economic blockade, but Mr. Gorbachev was forced to back down by the surprise victory of Boris Yeltsin as the leader of a Russian republic seeking its own sovereignty and supporting the Baltic drive. That alliance helped enforce an uneasy truce between Vilnius and the Kremlin and brought about opening efforts at negotiations. But in December, Mr. Gorbachev coolly began issuing a series of presidential decrees intended to provide a logical basis for overthrowing a democratically elected government on the grounds of violations of Soviet law.

The Kremlin's hard-line policy carries dangerous consequences. First, it polarizes sovereignty-minded republics and the central government even further. Mr. Gorbachev's vision of national revival has been based on acceptance of a new Union Treaty that would keep the center in control while giving the republics more say on certain issues. At least seven of the nation's 15 republics, many of which have elected non-Communist governments, have refused to sign the treaty in its current form.

The crackdown on Lithuania and Mr. Gorbachev's wily denial of responsibility for it have led to utter disillusionment among important reformist Gorbachev allies. In an open letter to the weekly Moscow News, thirty Gorbachev advisors and democrats including such figures as Stanislav Shatalin, an author of the rejected five-hundred-day plan for radical economic reform, and Moscow Mayor Gavriil Popov, lambasted Mr. Gorbachev. "Economic reform is blocked, censorship of press and TV is reanimated, and outrageous demagogic phraseology was made to flood everything," they wrote. Was there much left following the bloody Sunday in Vilnius of what we have often heard lately from the president about 'human socialism,' 'new thinking,' and 'Common European Home'? Almost nothing was left." The question of whether Mr. Gorbachev is directing this shift or being forced to go along, Soviet reformers argue, is both unanswerable and irrelevant. Either way, the result is the same.

The crackdown itself was a depressing repetition of the well-known Stalinist formula: set up a "committee" that claims to be spontaneously acting for the "working class," create chaos through strikes and demonstrations, and explain that all of this legitimizes the entry of the Red Army. (Such committees are already prepared in Latvia and Estonia, and there are signs of similar moves even in Russia.) And, in another page from the same KGB playbook, do it when the eyes of the West are turned elsewhere.