Cover Stories: Starting at Year Zero

By LANCE MORROW

An entire empire careered through darkness with a load of nuclear weapons on board. On the winding road, it could see no farther than the beams of its headlights. And as it raced around the corners, the vehicle was disintegrating.

The world watched the spectacle with complicated feelings: astonishment, relief for the people of the republics in their deliverance from the old life, a certain fascination and some fear about what lay ahead. The event was unprecedented. Never before had a fully matured empire, one superpower of the world's only two, torn loose from its foundations and sped off, at such velocity, on such a journey.

There came a burst of euphoria when the reactionaries' coup failed. Then the headlong dismantling. Here was the famous domino effect in reverse, whole peoples going uncommunist by chain reaction: Lithuania, Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, Belorussia, Moldavia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kirghizia. The future, sunny a moment earlier, suddenly looked problematic and dangerous. What of the 27,000 nuclear warheads deployed on missiles, bombers, submarines and at ammunition dumps across the old Union? Would the world see a medieval fragmentation, reversion to the old city-states of Kievan Rus and Muscovy, and feudal warlords with nukes? What of the 25 million ethnic Russians now intermixed with the newly nationalistic peoples of Ukraine or Kazakhstan? What would happen if the grain harvest proved as poor as predicted, the distribution system remained as feckless as ever, and winter not far off?

When the unknown is operating on a historic scale, it conjures up apocalyptic projections. Dick Elkus, an advisory-board member of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, predicted, "What has happened so far is a 6.0 earthquake on its way to becoming an 8.3 -- 900 times greater." The Harriman Institute's Richard Ericson said, "We are facing what is perhaps the largest man-made disaster the world has ever seen."

Well, "perhaps" sometimes becomes "perhaps not." What is true is that the Russians and the peoples of the other republics are now standing at Year Zero of some new order that they must invent for themselves. How will they do that? According to what models?

No one knows. Are the Russians going to emerge eventually in a political landscape that looks like Switzerland -- different languages and nationalities coexisting under a government organized to make decisions at the most democratic level possible? Or like Lebanon at its savage worst? Or like someplace that no one has ever seen before?

Analysts have proposed various paradigms. Some think the republics that were the Soviet Union may rearrange themselves into a kind of British Commonwealth, or into something like the European Community. Some think of the Organization of African Unity, a roster of African states each of which has declared adherence to principles of sovereign equality and noninterference in the internal affairs of member states. Might they become a federation, in which the republics yield some coordinating economic authority to a central government, or a confederation, an alliance, some sort of cooperative? Will they adopt a cooler, well-machined nationalism in the style of Western Europe? Or revert to the atavistic warring tribalism that threatens Yugoslavia?

In the past, the concept of Year Zero has often meant that utopians have taken over and invited the executioner to step forward and do some housecleaning. It happened in the French Revolution. In Cambodia the Year Zero of the Khmer Rouge's new order witnessed a genocidal scouring away of the old, down to anyone who wore glasses or spoke French. But Year Zero for the people of the Soviet Union is pointed, they hope, in the opposite direction -- away from the totalitarianism of utopia. They have tried that, and know it is a nightmare.

Speed unfortunately favors the worst-case possibility: a version of Lebanese disintegration as the Soviet center gets replaced, too quickly, by radical nationalisms. Empires -- the Roman, the British, the Ottoman -- are good for one thing: they impose law and order so that business and trade may flourish undisrupted. When the empire dissolves, the deeper ethnic and nationalistic impulses, suppressed by autocracy, may be violently set loose. For a long time, Soviet rule restrained a thousand primitive tribal feuds waiting to be settled in the old-fashioned way. In the familiar argument between dictatorship and anarchy, neither alternative has much charm.

In a speech to the Supreme Soviet last week, Mikhail Gorbachev suggested that the Union should be preserved in part because it is a superpower. He may be guilty of a fallacy: a ruler's assumption that the ordinary people really care whether they are citizens of a superpower or not. The old Soviet Union was clearly an untenable superpower. It was the last empire, trying to preserve itself on a ruinous ideological and economic system. The costs of < being a superpower (25% of the Union's GNP went for military expenses) have been eating the Soviet people alive. The best-case scenario for them lies in a different life in a reconfigured world.

To a great extent they may find it in the style that communism always called "bourgeois" and that the First World considers ordinary. Says S. Frederick Starr, a Soviet expert who is president of Oberlin College: "Never in history has the phrase 'normal life' had such revolutionary overtones as in the U.S.S.R. today."

America and the Soviet Union can be intriguing negative images of each other. The U.S. is triumphant materialism. Russia has a spiritual depth and resonance. V.S. Pritchett has written of "the Romantic belief in the supreme value of suffering which is often said to be fundamental among Slavs. Prison has the monastic lure." Americans are virtually addicted to not suffering, to the un-Russian idea of the pursuit of happiness.

Tocqueville said that America, when it started out, was une feuille blanche, a blank page of history waiting to be written upon. The American founders -- white, male, educated, property owning -- had certain advantages, including a continent mostly free of those ethnic passions that crowd the Soviet republics now and make it difficult to fashion a new order. The new page in the old Soviet Union is smudged, messy. The American founders were creatures of the Enlightenment and drew upon a tradition of thought that never made its way to Russia.

America's genius has always been its gift for self-transcendence -- its natural resources and its dumb luck, its almost inadvertent way of evolving out of its problems within the original constitutional framework. The Russians have displayed a fatal talent for reversion to autocracy. When Ivan the Terrible was young, he was regarded as a reformer. Later he became a brutal, accomplished executioner, who once had an elephant cut to pieces because it refused to bow to him. That has been the unhappy Russian paradigm.

Yet Russian political tradition contains another strain -- of reform, decency and individual rights. The tendency has often been suppressed. The best hope is that now it will at last give the people of Russia and the other republics something they have never had before: a state built from below, a civil society in which real citizens, not subjects, break through to govern themselves.

The global electronic monoculture may allow the Russians to override their autocratic traditions. If the best of Russia's usable past has often been buried, the examples of other societies and their expertise are elaborately available today. The republics, having satisfied their suppressed chauvinistic sides with independent gestures, may return to some form of economic union. Together they may peacefully lift their gray economies into the black, into the open -- which most would find nearly impossible alone. Many horizontal trade arrangements have flourished for some time and may be easily converted into legal market systems working in social democracies.

As Starr says, "The Soviet Union has been a one-hub country, with everything going through Moscow. What they are talking about now is a multihub organization of everything. What they are groping toward is making contact with the truths of modern organizations -- for example, the truth that the horizontally organized links are more important than the vertical links, the truth that things must be built from the bottom up, not from the top down."

Russia and the other republics may eventually evolve into something unique, unexpected, even brilliant. That could take a long time. The incoherence may persist for years, and with it the dangers. Rebuilding must go much slower than collapse, however miraculous the collapse may have been.