Revolutions Farewell

By Bruce W. Nelan

Mikhail Gorbachev need feel no resentment when he hears himself described as a transitional leader. As Winston Churchill might have observed: some leader, some transition. Gorbachev presided over the dissolution of a truly evil empire, brought freedom to hundreds of millions of oppressed people and lifted the threat of a cataclysmic nuclear war. The wonder was not that the President of the Soviet Union, a fervent socialist to the end, managed his revolution well but that he launched it at all.

In his resignation speech last week, Gorbachev conceded that he had not been a complete success. He was convinced that the reforms he began in 1985 were "historically correct." But, he added, "there were mistakes made that could have been avoided, and many of the things that we did could have been done better." His severe gaze and impenetrable self-assurance hardly wavered as he refused to admit that he and his office had become irrelevant. He could not even bring himself to say he was resigning; he had decided, he said, to "discontinue my activities" out of "considerations of principle."

To a large extent, though not in the sense he implied, his firmly held principles did lead to his departure from the Kremlin. As a reformer, Gorbachev was a phenomenon, an almost inexplicable product of the communist establishment who rose to its pinnacle. But he was never able to rise above himself, his socialist faith and his dedication to the Union -- always the Union -- of Soviet Socialist Republics. His ability to go only so far, and no further, made it inevitable that he would be the initiator, not the final arbiter, of democratic change in the former Soviet empire. Said the daily Izvestia: "He did all he could."

Despite Gorbachev's best efforts, the Soviet Union no longer exists. It was swept away by the forces he set in motion and then could not control. Like his own office, the remnants of Soviet government were shunted aside or taken over by Russia, the successor state to the U.S.S.R.

Of all Gorbachev's admirers in the West, George Bush supported him longest and most warmly. Only after the Soviet leader's resignation on Christmas Day did Bush acknowledge that 12 new countries (not counting the three Baltic states) and an 11-member Commonwealth of Independent States had been created on the soil of the former Soviet Union. He granted recognition to all 12 and announced that diplomatic relations would be opened immediately between the U.S. and Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia and Armenia. The other six -- Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldavia, Tadzhikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan -- could expect diplomatic ties once they committed themselves to "responsible security policies and democratic principles."

By that Bush meant that the new states must promise to control nuclear weapons tightly, adhere to the arms-control and troop-limitation treaties signed by the Soviet Union and advance human rights and market economies. Governments around the world quickly began announcing their recognition of the 12 new states, even as they wondered what kind of future their Commonwealth, established on only the barest sketch of a treaty signed last month in Alma- Ata, capital of Kazakhstan, will be able to build for itself. The Commonwealth members, with Russia and Ukraine in the lead, are already wrangling over how to divide up the massive Soviet armies, navies and air forces and the central government property. There is increasing resentment of Russia's decision to move quickly to decontrol prices and of Ukraine's determination to introduce its own currency.

International concern was heightened last week by heavy fighting in the center of Tbilisi, capital of Georgia, where political rivals of the high- handed President Zviad Gamsakhurdia were trying to blast him out of government headquarters. More than 50 people were killed and 200 wounded. Surprisingly, the fire fight did not spread from the downtown area of the city, and most of Tbilisi went about its normal business, apparently out of exhaustion or indifference.

Possibly because it was preoccupied with its internal power struggle, Georgia moved only last week to join the new Commonwealth. Yeltsin told Gamsakhurdia that his country will not be admitted until it restores peace and respect for human rights. Though the West was concerned that such violence could become the norm in other former Soviet republics, recent flare-ups have been limited to ethnically divided Moldavia and the Caucasian states of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Most of the population, says Russian sociologist Yuri Levada, has proved -- for now, at least -- to be "more democratic, more restrained and more peaceful than many expected."

Fears that nuclear weapons might be misused are also widespread. Though Yeltsin is trying to be reassuring, ambiguities remain over the control and dismantling of these weapons in the treaty signed by the four republics where the strategic missile forces are based: Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia and Kazakhstan.

After Gorbachev handed over custody of the nuclear arsenal and the codes that permit strategic missiles to be launched, Yeltsin declared himself sole inheritor of "the button," as he called the code box. "There will be only one button," he said. "The other republics are not going to have any other buttons." Even so, he said, he had agreed with the Presidents of the other three republics where the missiles are still located that any decision to use them would have to be made unanimously by the four.

Apprehension about the uncertainty that fogs the former U.S.S.R. is not misplaced. At the same time, the world should remind itself that coexistence with a unitary Soviet state for seven decades was not anxiety-free, and that its deconstruction is not necessarily a bad thing. Though Gorbachev insisted that he intended to retain the union and advance freedom, there was no way he could do both. In the face of the republics' passionate rejection of the central government, the Communist Party and Russian domination, Moscow could have held the union together only with armed force.

But use of military force would have doomed Gorbachev's reforms and any hope for democracy. To be democratic, the republics had to gain their freedom. And now that they are independent, they are also free to re-create the institutions they believe they need to coordinate defense and economic policies. In that experiment, they have no room for a union, a central government -- or a Gorbachev.

The overwhelming rejection of Gorbachev in the new Commonwealth -- still surprising to many Westerners -- is due mostly to his unfulfilled promises. He spoke constantly of democracy but clung to the power and bureaucracy of the Communist Party, which he headed long after it had been revealed as the main obstacle to perestroika, his plan for restructuring. Even when the party resorted to violence against him in the aborted coup last August, Gorbachev publicly pledged his loyalty to it. That was the moment at which Yeltsin succeeded to Gorbachev's authority and pushed him to close down the party.

Gorbachev also talked repeatedly about granting "sovereignty" to the union's republics, yet he never devised a form of qualified freedom that had any appeal for the nationalist forces rising in all of the republics. When the three Baltic states insisted on regaining their separate status, he was even willing to look the other way last January as security forces used tanks and guns to suppress the independence movements.

Most dismaying of all to the majority of Soviet people, Gorbachev did not deliver on his promise that perestroika would bring efficiency to the socialist system and prosperity to the country. Instead, as he admitted last week, "the old system fell apart even before the new system began to work." In fact, there was no new system. In September 1990 he announced he favored the so-called 500-Day Plan for a sudden switch to a free-market system. But then he lost his nerve and reneged, opting for a "compromise" between dramatic change and another round of tentative tinkering with the gargantuan central-planning apparatus.

On the day of his resignation, Gorbachev was still talking about finding some blend of central planning and market economics that he called a "multi- tier economy" with "an equality of all forms of ownership." No such halfway house exists, and his protracted attempt to find one left the irrational centralized system in chaos, with no replacement in sight. Ordinary citizens paid the price for his procrastination.

Russians are now waiting for their new government to deliver Yeltsin's version of reform. As a first step, most prices are to be freed from government control this week, although the cost of basics like bread, milk, salt, medicine and vodka will still be regulated. The results may be no more satisfactory than those of perestroika because many state-run monopolies, including wholesale and retail suppliers, retain their paralyzing grip on the distribution system. With hyperinflation a real threat, much of the population feels menaced by poverty as well as hunger this winter.

Though deprivation is part of the inheritance Gorbachev leaves his people, Bush rightly observed that "his legacy guarantees him an honored place in history." Two years ago, TIME named Gorbachev its Man of the Decade. That decade was the 1980s, and the new world he initiated has now overtaken him. But the title is his to keep. He is living proof that it is people who make history, not the other way around.

With reporting by Christopher Ogden/Washington and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow