The country is now in a state of what can only be called revolution. The Communist Party, already discredited, is being dispossessed. Its general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, has quit his post and urged that the party itself be dissolved. The KGB is losing its sting. And, in a sense Marx hardly intended, the state itself seems to be withering away. The Soviet central government lies crippled–crippled by the disgrace of the conspirators, by its own longstanding incompetence, by the inevitable shift of authority to the 15 republics and by the dramatic rise of the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin. It was Yeltsin’s heroic defiance that rallied the public, thwarted the coup and captured the world’s imagination. By comparison, Gorbachev seemed shellshocked on his return: in a crisis that called for boldness, he redoubled his natural caution. The Gorbachev Era may have effectively ended during his Crimean captivity–perhaps the plotters’ only victory. Gorbachev may be back in Moscow; but now it’s Yeltsin’s town.
Last week Yeltsin and the jubilant Moscow crowds flexed their newfound muscle. A purge of senior officials was begun. The young people who helped haul down the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, cheerily announced they’d like to give the same treatment to Lenin’s tomb. Russia’s prerevolutionary tricolor replaced the Soviet hammer and sickle on Russian government buildings. Newspapers that had carried the junta’s official line were shut down. Phone lines were cut to Communist Party headquarters and access to the building sealed off, ostensibly to prevent destruction of evidence that the party had been implicated in the coup. Dictatorial tactics were now being used against the former dictators.
One benefit of all this revolutionary zeal was a new sense of possibility in a country knotted in paralysis. Just as Monday’s announcement of the coup seemed to plunge the Soviet Union back into the dark days of repression, so Wednesday’s news of its collapse came like the first streaks of dawn. Surely, it was thought, this was the conservatives’ last stand. The country would no longer be caught in a face-off between he reformers and the old guard. In the past, Gorbachev had tacked cautiously from left to right, never moving too far for fear of antagonizing the party apparat. Now that the apparat was discredited, there would be no further excuse for these debilitating compromised. The logjam was broken.
What’s more, a new generation seemed to be rising to the fore. In the Army and government ministries, the older officers and bureaucrats were the ones most widely assumed to have supported the coup. Now they would be swept aside, and a younger generation truly committed to change would be put in charge.
There were signs of a generation shift even among the Moscow crowds that turned out to denounce the coup. Previous pro-Yeltsin rallies were made up mostly of people in their 50s and 60s, the so-called children of the 20th Party Congress whose political inspiration derives from Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin back in 1956. By contrast, most of the people who turned out to protect the Russian “White House” last week were in their 20s and 30s. This is the Soviet consumer generation, enamored of anything Western, unashamed of making money and unattached to any ideology at all. One member of the White House crowd was Ilya Reznikov, 23, student-council president at the Russian State University for the Humanities. His vision of the country’s future is not untypical: “It will be a healthy society with healthy youth. We will smoke marijuana, make money. We’ll have hippies and Yuppies–just like in the rest of the world.”
Courageous as last week’s crowds were, it’s not completely clear that they have brought the Soviet Union closer to the genuine reform it so desperately needs. The emotions let loose by the coup attempt and then by its defeat could be particularly dangerous. If last week’s revolution in the streets turns into a quest for revenge, this could goad the KGB and the Army into a truly effective crackdown–and they still have enormous firepower.
Then there is the threat of chaos. As a result of the fiasco, the normal process of government has broken down, and this in a country where the government still runs almost everything. People need food, they need clothing, they will soon need heat. Even before the coup, these essentials were in short supply. If the government crisis makes the supply crisis even worse, Soviet cities could spill over with crowds far angrier than any seen last week.
Those are the short-term worries. Beyond them lie three fundamental issues about the future shape of the Soviet Union. Who will be the nation’s real leader, Gorbachev or Yeltsin? What sort of central government will continue to exist after the republics gain new powers-and some of them, inevitably, break away.? And how to open up the economy to market forces?
These are not new questions; all of them have hung over the country for years. But after the events of last week, there is no time for further dithering. In the Soviet Union and in the world as well, expectations have heightened, a sense that the country must seize this opportunity or else fall into fresh disaster.
There was talk last week of a new “partnership” between the two men, even a form of “coalition government.” Certainly there was a new relationship: Yeltsin came out of the coup a hero, Gorbachev something of a dupe. Particularly in the outside world, Yeltsin had gained enormous stature and Gorbachev had lost some. Last week Yeltsin was clearly in charge. Gorbachev’s dramatic abandoning of the Communist Party was plainly forced on him by Yeltsin; only the day before, he had been arguing strongly against such a drastic step. All of Gorbachev’s characteristics–caution, compromise and a penchant for wooden rhetoric-worked against him in the days following the coup, just as all of Yeltsin’s qualities-boldness, self-assertion and electric stumpspeaking–worked in his favor. It seems possible that Gorbachev may simply be cast aside as the revolution runs its course. Or he may keep his job as Soviet president in the election scheduled next year simply because Yeltsin doesn’t want it for himself. Even if Gorbachev manages to do that, the circumstances do not augur well for a constructive spirit of partnership between the two men, and they remain hugely different personalities with little mutual warmth (page 47).
Perhaps, though, neither one of them is quite so important as he seems. Stephen Cohen, a Princeton Sovietologist, thinks that all the emphasis on these individuals–both at home and in the foreign media–simply diverts the nation from its true needs. “The worst thing that we can do,” he says, “is to help the Russians indulge their own fetish for leadership cults. The problem with Russian politics for centuries is that it has been a government of leaders, not a government of institutions and laws.”
The most immediate cause of the coup was the new “union treaty” that was to have been signed last Tuesday, redefining the relationship between the central government and the 15 republics. Rightly, the old-line communists believed it would greatly weaken their authority and that of the central government. Now the treaty is almost sure to be amended to give the republics even greater power at Moscow’s expense, and this will carry the country into uncharted constitutional seas. The Soviet government could turn into little more than a ceremonial crust atop the separate republics.
Huge questions about the new relationship remain unanswered. Will the republics raise their own armies, and what obligation would these armies have to a central Soviet command? In foreign affairs, will Moscow continue to speak for the Soviet Union as a whole? Already the Russian Republic, among others, has its own foreign minister, and Yeltsin has installed envoys loyal to him in Soviet embassies abroad.
Economics and finance present even greater thickets of uncertainty. The republics will gain control over the industries and natural resources within their borders. What will be the central government’s sources of revenue? What will be its powers to tax, and those of the republics? As the newborn United States discovered under the unworkable Articles of Confederation, a government without revenue is a hollow shell. The republics also stand to gain the power to set up their own economic systems, and this could badly curdle the finances of the country as a whole.
And what of relations among the 15 republics themselves? Some of them, notably the three Baltic States and the Ukraine, have seized on the crisis to press their demands for total independence, and it seems inevitable that they will split off much more quickly than was recently supposed (page 33). Those that remain will feel tremendously overshadowed, perhaps even bullied, by the vast Russian Republic, especially now that Yeltsin has risen to such national dominance. Russia commands more than three quarters of the landmass and more than half the population of the entire Soviet Union, and its share of natural resources is similarly preponderant. Under the old regime, the central government counterbalanced Russia, steering revenue and industry to the poorer republics. Now that counterweight is fast vanishing, and the small republics may discover that the new union treaty chafes more than it liberates.
Finally, there is the overwhelming need for root-and-branch reconstruction of the failed communist economic system. The steps that need to be taken are well known: abandon price controls, break up most state monopolies, privatize most industry and agriculture, create a banking system that would loan money to entrepreneurs, remove many of the controls now imposed by government and party planners, slash government spending, open up the economy to world trade by making the ruble convertible to foreign currencies. It is such a formidable array of reforms that Gorbachev has always shrunk from them, knowing that they would cause–in the short run–towering inflation and high unemployment, not least among government and party functionaries who suddenly would have nothing to do. While Yeltsin has pushed for radical reform and may now push harder, he, too, may shy away from the really hard sacrifices.
The countries of East Europe, in the two years since their liberation from Communist rule, have proved that this economic ,‘shock therapy" can be tolerated. Until now, though, East Europe had a crucial advantage that the Soviets lacked: new governments that enjoyed genuine public support and an invigorating sense of national renaissance that made short-term privations tolerable. Today, thanks to the new Russian revolution that began last week, the Soviet Union may gain just that sense of reborn pride and patriotic elan.
And so, as in 1917, a great tide of historical change is flowing again in Russia. But this time there is a profound difference. Then, it swept into power a small band of ruthless men who claimed to speak for the people. Today, their inheritors have been swept away by a people finally able to speak for itself. And a country condemned to 74 years of impoverished isolation has come forward to rejoin the world.
Whatever the configuration of power in a postcommunist Soviet Union, some questions cannot be sidestepped.
THE RIVALS Yeltsin is the dominant actor now, and his sparring with Gorbachev could polarize the country. Many Soviets say they need each other-but do they know that?
THE REPUBLICS With new declarations of independence by Estonia, Latvia and the Ukraine, centrifugal forces are accelerating in this land of multiple nationalities. Can Yeltsin hold even the core of the union together?
