Soviet Union: The Bad Old Days Again

By Bruce W. Nelan

The kind of new world George Bush was ready to fight for is supposed to be founded on "the rule of law, not the law of the jungle." But the government of the Soviet Union, the essential partner in such a future order, still seems to favor the feral approach. Knowing the world was looking somewhere else, its army stamped a bloody boot on separatist Lithuania -- a no-nonsense warning that the union of Soviet republics will not be allowed to splinter. President Mikhail Gorbachev's verbal shrug at the violence looked like a casual reactivation of the Brezhnev Doctrine -- in his own country.

Watchers could only wonder if the crackdown marked an ominous turning point for Gorbachev's commitment to liberalize his troubled nation. Has he chosen to sacrifice his promises of change to demands for order? He appeared to have decided that Soviet unity was worth any cost. The bloodletting in Vilnius was plainly intended to warn other restive republics to draw back from demands for sovereignty -- before the troops arrive there too. Some in the West were beginning to divine a different message: a betrayal of their investment in Gorbachev's leadership. Even his well-wishers fear Gorbachev has embarked on an accelerating downward spiral.

The events in Lithuania should not have come as a real surprise. Ethnic separatism has always been Gorbachev's blind spot, a yearning for which the Soviet President has neither sympathy nor patience. Though he likes to claim he is simply "enforcing the constitution," he has been consistent in his efforts to neutralize democratically elected governments in republics that threaten to slip away from the Kremlin's control. While he has put up with considerable disorder, which dismays his generals, he has demonstrated before that he is ready to use armed force to hold the union together. Now Gorbachev has adopted stale Stalinist lies by claiming he is responding to pleas from nameless patriots to protect the socialist revolution from fascists. To bolster those lies he is also moving to reintroduce censorship. It was no accident that 15 unarmed protesters died defending Lithuania's television center. Glasnost, which has succeeded, is as endangered as perestroika, which has not.

The old-fashioned iron fist remained poised last week over all three Baltic republics, which have asserted their independence from the U.S.S.R. Army paratroops in Vilnius openly threatened the Lithuanian government. Predicted President Vytautas Landsbergis, who was holed up in the barricaded parliament building awaiting the next move: "The legitimate powers in Lithuania and Latvia will be overthrown."

In Riga, capital of Latvia, ethnic Russians staged pro-Moscow demonstrations and Soviet troops raided the police academy, carrying away its weapons. As in Lithuania the week before, party loyalists put together a shadowy, no-names- please committee of "national salvation" to call for presidential rule from Moscow. Communist Party organizers brought thousands into the streets of Tallinn, the Estonian capital, to demand the resignation of the elected government.

WHO IS TO BLAME?

Fabrication of the Big Lie reached ludicrous levels in Vilnius three days after the massacre at the television center. A Soviet camera crew interviewed the major who led the attack. Identifying himself only as Vitali Ilyich -- omitting his last name -- he claimed that no one had been killed. "We shot people?" he said. "You must be fooling yourself." When asked by Western journalists about the 10 scarred bodies that had been displayed in public, he shrugged and replied, "It is hard to say."

That obfuscation was matched in Moscow, where no one wanted to take responsibility. Responding to questions from Supreme Soviet Deputies, Gorbachev implied that the killings in Vilnius were the Lithuanians' own fault. He accused them of violating the Soviet constitution, trampling the human rights of the republic's Russian and Polish minorities and splitting the society. Negotiations with Lithuania were hardly possible, he said, "when the republic is led by such people" as Landsbergis.

A day later, Gorbachev told the parliament that "thousands of telegrams" had arrived at the Kremlin, along with appeals from the Committee of National Salvation, demanding presidential rule be imposed in Lithuania to halt the restoration of "a bourgeois state." He even waved a document, allegedly found by the KGB in a Lithuanian government building, which he said was a list of Communists and anti-independence leaders marked for detention.

In spite of all this self-justification, Gorbachev denied that he gave the order to shoot. "I learned about what happened when they woke me up the next morning," he said. Interior Minister Boris Pugo and Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov shirked responsibility as well. The decision was made, said Yazov, by the army commander in Vilnius, whose assignment was to protect "all members of society."

Other voices were raised in outrage, but the most challenging belonged to Gorbachev's nemesis, Boris Yeltsin, leader of the huge Russian republic. He called events in the Baltics "the beginning of a mighty offensive against democracy." To prevent such steps in his republic, said Yeltsin, "it is becoming clear that we will not be able to protect our sovereignty without a Russian army of our own."

In parliament a day later, an angry, flushed Gorbachev denounced Yeltsin's suggestion as "a gross violation of the constitution of the U.S.S.R." and "a deliberate act of provocation." He demanded that Yeltsin withdraw his comments. But Yeltsin was unrepentant and proved he could play the old Leninist party games as well. He claimed he was receiving "thousands of telegrams" from across Russia asking him to cancel his recent agreement to contribute almost 30% of the national budget.

Whether Gorbachev actually gave the order to use force in Lithuania, or can plausibly deny a direct role, is irrelevant. He was responsible. It is his policy to refuse demands for sovereignty and independence that have arisen in non-Russian regions and Russia itself. It has been his practice, when he feels it necessary, to use military force to crush them. Besides, if Gorbachev was not responsible, does that mean he has lost control to the conservatives in the army and the KGB and is being forced to front for their demands for order? U.S. analysts doubt that. "Gorbachev is a hostage to his own policy," says Robert Legvold, director of Columbia University's Harriman Institute. "Things may be going further than he wants, but he charted the course."

GOODBYE, GLASNOST?

He is also accountable for the sudden illness of glasnost. Leonid Kravchenko, whom he appointed in November as chief of the State Committee for Television and Radio, has been systematically chipping away at the policy of openness. He suspended the popular music and information show Vzglyad (View) when it planned to broadcast a discussion of the resignation of Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, who had charged that dictatorship was returning. Kravchenko also forced Interfax, an independent alternative to the official Soviet news agency TASS, out of his headquarters.

When the latest protests flared in the Baltics, central television's newscasters aired little but Communist Party disinformation, reading statements from the so-called national salvation committees accusing the local governments of fascism. The controlled press, TV and TASS all recited the propaganda line on Vilnius last week, reporting that the paratroops acted only to restore order after they had been attacked by Lithuanian snipers. One report from commentator Alexander Nevzorov presented the soldiers as heroes besieged by "ethnic hysteria." The 15 dead, he claimed, had turned out to be victims of road accidents and heart attacks.

Some balance nevertheless crept in from more liberal radio stations and newspapers. Komsomolskaya Pravda carried a front-page picture of a body under a tank and the question "Tbilisi, Baku, Vilnius, what next?" Under the headline BLOODY SUNDAY, Moscow News published a statement from 30 well-known intellectuals, including two of Gorbachev's most important former economic advisers, labeling events in Lithuania "a crime."

Condemnation from the reformers stung the President into counterattack. Marching onto the rostrum of the Supreme Soviet, he proposed suspending the country's five-month-old law that guarantees freedom of the press. "We are going through a period of the most serious decisions," he said. "People need objectivity."

His proposal produced an uproar among liberal Deputies. Ukrainian journalist Alla Yaroshinskaya jumped up and shouted, "What is happening to our glasnost?" After heated debate, the Supreme Soviet eventually voted for a compromise, calling on the government and a parliamentary committee to work out "measures to ensure objectivity."

WHY MOVE RIGHT?

As Yeltsin reflected later upon the week's events, he told correspondents he had asked Gorbachev directly why he was moving to the right. The Soviet - President replied, according to Yeltsin, "Because society is moving to the right."

For a world that has largely welcomed and supported Gorbachev's original course toward reform and democratizatsiya, it is not easy to find the proper response to his right turn. The West has, in effect, purchased stock in Gorbachev's enterprise and desperately wants it to succeed. Gorbachev is the man who ended the cold war. Who or what might follow him is a question fraught with worry.

To begin with, dismantling of the old superpower confrontation is not complete. The treaty cutting conventional forces in Europe is still to be ratified, and that is not a sure thing now that the Soviets have admitted circumventing some of its key provisions. The START agreement reducing strategic nuclear weapons is not yet signed, and several technical issues have not been solved.

No one wants to do harm to improved superpower relations, least of all George Bush. So far, Washington has only expressed its "outrage" about the Baltics and asked the Soviets to "refrain from further violence" or face possible curtailment of economic programs. While there are other reasons to postpone it, the White House said last week that the summit scheduled for Moscow next month is "clearly up in the air" after Vilnius. Says Michael Mandelbaum, director of the Project on East-West Relations at the Council on Foreign Relations: "My guess is that the Bush Administration will do as little as it decently can, for geopolitical reasons."

But pressure is building on Bush to speak more sharply in hopes of making Gorbachev reconsider. For conservatives, recent events only confirm their long-standing doubts about lending support to a leader they consider an attractively tailored Lenin. Says an analyst in Washington: "In effect, we need to stop payment on his Nobel Peace Prize."

In Congress opinion is hardening. Senator Bill Bradley, a Democrat not noted for hawkish views, suggested last week that the Senate consider a resolution returning economic links with the Soviet Union to their cold-war sterility. A Foreign Relations Committee staff member believes that "a lot of members aren't going to want to do business with the Soviets while any kind of crackdown is proceeding."

Anxiety is widespread in the countries of the old Warsaw Pact. Governments there do not seriously expect Moscow to attempt to reduce them to satellites once again, but they are nervously aware that the Soviet army has not yet gone home. There are 360,000 Soviet troops in Germany, 50,000 in Poland, 15,000 in Czechoslovakia and 20,000 in Hungary. "They might decide to 'reinforce' them," frets a senior Hungarian diplomat. Last week Warsaw anxiously asked Moscow to pull its forces out by the end of this year, but the Kremlin balked, saying the forces must remain until its troops in Germany have returned home. The Czechoslovak government ordered 20,000 troops to its border with the Soviet Union.

The European Community warned Moscow that if violence continues it might have to cut off its promised $1 billion in food and economic aid and $500 million in technical assistance. But however dismayed Germany might feel, it is in no position to take similar action. Most of its bilateral aid was pledged in formal agreements that opened the way to unification last year and is tied to the withdrawal of Soviet troops by 1994. "We will remain faithful to these treaties," said Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, "because we want the Soviet Union to be faithful to them."

NO TURNING BACK?

Gorbachev, who is more dependent on Western aid than ever now that perestroika has broken down, must feel the need to reassure the West. In one offering, he appointed Alexander Bessmertnykh, a smooth professional diplomat serving as ambassador to the U.S. since last May, to succeed Shevardnadze as Foreign Minister. Bessmertnykh is considered a liberal but not one with great political influence in the Kremlin. "He'll be a soothing hand to hold," said a U.S. official, "but he probably won't have much authority." The new minister quickly stressed the continuity of Moscow's policy: "It will be preserved," he said.

Perhaps, but actions still speak louder than Bessmertnykh's words. The Soviet Union vetoed discussion of the Baltic crisis at a meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe last week. The recently signed treaty provides for discussion of "questions of urgent concern," but Moscow blocked that, claiming it would be interference in Soviet domestic affairs. That episode only demonstrated how a hard line at home is imitated in dealings with the rest of the world. "If the Soviet Union becomes a nasty, brutish place," says a U.S. official, "its foreign policy will reflect that."

Gorbachev's turn to the right has been accelerating for several months. Some analysts date it from last October, when he lost the support of the country's liberals by backing away from the radical 500-day economic-reform plan put forward by his former adviser Stanislav Shatalin. It became obvious that he was relying on the security apparatus to enforce Moscow's will and was handing over the future of perestroika to the party and its military-industrial complex. While those power centers are still strong, they are also the most interested in preserving the status quo and the least receptive to reform.

Ironically, it was the success of his efforts to democratize the political order that ultimately pushed Gorbachev hardest. Six years, ago Paul Goble, a leading expert on Soviet nationalities and now a State Department adviser, wrote that Gorbachev would eventually discover he could make liberalism work in Russia, but that a significantly liberalized union of 15 republics was a contradiction in terms. "Like Lincoln before him," says a senior U.S. analyst in Washington, "Gorbachev has decided that he doesn't want to preside over the dissolution of his own country." By opting to hold on to the union, Gorbachev chose the course that requires armed repression from Moscow. "He is trying to send a signal to the other republics," says a State Department official. "He picked what he thought would be the easiest target."

The Soviet President has immense powers on paper but little ability to rule in the separatist regions. Legvold predicts that "Gorbachev will try to sit on these people through ((Defense Minister)) Yazov. He wants it to be with as little recrimination from abroad and as little mayhem in the area as possible." After Lithuania, any republic that does not knuckle under to Moscow could feel the fist next.

Though Gorbachev has proved wondrously skilled at skipping between right and left in the past, it is no longer certain that the architect of perestroika could turn back now if he wanted to. Each step on the road to coercion and dictatorship takes him farther from former allies who might offer him a way back to reform. He might still harbor a vision of a peaceful, democratized Soviet Union. But he has not been able to find either the determination or the right time to bestow true freedom of choice on his country and all its people.

With reporting by James Carney/Vilnius, John Kohan/Moscow and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington