America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

MOSCOW: I've been coming here for 23 years. That turns out to have been about a third of the U.S.S.R.'s life-span. In none of my previous 30-plus visits did I ever think I would outlive the Soviet state. Yet now that it is upon us, the demise of the Soviet Union makes both moral and historical sense.

A country is, among other things, an idea, often dressed up as an ism. The U.S.S.R., a hodgepodge of would-be nation states, was based on an outmoded idea, imperialism, and a modern one, totalitarianism. There was in the minds of those old men in the Kremlin the conceit, personified and perfected by Stalin, that fear makes the world go round; fear can make the worker work, the % farmer farm, the writer write and, of course, the Latvian, the Armenian, the Uzbek and the Ukrainian all take orders from Moscow.

To his lasting credit, Mikhail Gorbachev knew that was a lousy idea. He realized that the chemical reaction between intimidation and sycophancy could not fuel a modern society or allow even a so-called superpower to enter the 21st century as anything other than a basket case. Gorbachev has allowed the beginnings of real politics to take the place of terror, and the concept of real economics to replace the institutionalized inefficiency of central planning and massive subsidization.

With the end of the Soviet idea comes the end of the Soviet Union. There is no reason to mourn the death of a country that killed millions of its own citizens in the collectivization campaign, the purges and the famines that were used as an instrument of government policy.

Still, there is apprehension in the cold, sooty air here. I feel it in the pessimism and snarliness of my Russian friends. Only two other events in this century, World War I and World War II, have had an impact comparable to that of the Second Russian Revolution. In each of those earlier cases, our side's victory left a vacuum soon filled by new villains with big, bad ideas that made another global showdown inevitable.

World War I put the Prussian military machine out of business and created new nations from the wreckage of the Habsburg Empire. But by humiliating and pauperizing Germany, the victors contributed to the conditions out of which Nazism arose. World War I also so weakened Czarist Russia that a band of conspirators who called themselves Bolsheviks and who had a blueprint to take over the world were able, for starters, to take over the largest country on earth.

The consequences of World War II were also ambiguous. It destroyed the Third Reich and the Empire of the Rising Sun, but it made possible Stalin's conquest of Eastern Europe and Mao's triumph in China.

Now the cold war is over, and the good guys have won again. But can the winners this time break the pattern of the past? More to the point, will the U.S. take the lead in ensuring that the West does everything in its power to bring about a transition to democracies and free markets in Eurasia?

Karl Marx was wrong about a lot, but he was right about one thing: politics is born of economics. The political stability of the new Commonwealth of Independent States will require steady, substantial infusions of cash, credits and know-how from outside.

The U.S. and its allies in the cold war spent trillions of dollars keeping the Soviet Union from blowing up the world. For a fraction of that amount, the West can help prevent the former Soviet Union from blowing itself up, with all the political -- and perhaps literal -- fallout that would mean for the rest of the world.

Having slain the dragon of international communism, the U.S. is now flirting with the distinctively American bad idea of isolationism, just as it did after the First World War. This turning inward is now, as it was then, dangerously shortsighted. If worse comes to worst here, Boris Yeltsin may give way to a Russia-Firster like Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who has fascistic tendencies, territorial ambitions and an ominously large popular following. The U.S. might then find itself dragged back into another open-ended international crisis that would make the meagerness of its current aid program seem penny-wise and pound-foolish. After all, the Marshall Plan and other programs to reconstruct Germany and Japan after World War II were arguably as important to avoiding World War III as was the containment of communism.

It's also worth remembering that those first two world-transforming events, the conflagrations of 1914-18 and 1939-45, resulted in the loss of approximately 60 million lives. The political miracle of 1989-91 has also had its victims: scores were killed in the crackdowns in Tbilisi, Baku, Vilnius and Riga, and three young men were martyred in the August coup. But large- scale outbreaks of violence have been fairly isolated everywhere except in the ethnic conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan. By and large, the Soviet Union has given up the ghost of the totalitarian idea with remarkably little bloodshed.

Usually when countries and empires die, they take vast numbers of their own people with them. So far, at least, the U.S.S.R. is an exception. Keeping it so is a challenge not only for its new leaders but for the rest of the world as well.