Gorbachev's Gamble: Political, Economic, and Ethnic Challenges to Soviet Reform

GORBACHEVS GAMBLE:_____ POLITICAL, ECONOMIC, AND ETHNIC CHALLENGES TO SOVIET REFORM Bruce Parrott Today the Soviet Union is undergoing a monumental sociopolitical upheaval which will determine the country's fate for decades if not centuries to come. Only once before, in the years immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution, has the USSR wrestled with such fundamental choices about its political and economic structure. It is now locked in an all-encompassing struggle over whether to reverse those earlier decisions. If the contemporary proponents of liberal reform achieve enduring success, historians in the next century will look back on seventy-odd years of communist rule as a lengthy deviation from late nineteenth-century Russian liberal trends rather than as a logical continuation of the Tsarist autocratic tradition. However, it is also possible that future historians will look back on a chain of events leading to a very different outcome—to a new autocracy or even, perhaps, to the disintegration of the Soviet state. Gorbachev's Agenda and the Forces of Change For several years Mikhail Gorbachev has been claiming that he intends to carry out a "revolution" in the Soviet Union, and it is now Bruce Parrott is Professor and Director of Soviet Studies at SAIS. His works include: Politics and Technology in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), The Soviet Union and Ballistic Missile Defense (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987); and The Dynamics ofSoviet Defense Policy (Washington, D.C.: Wilson Center Press, 1990). 57 58 SAISREVIEW evident that he has not been engaging in hyperbole. Although Gorbachev took power in 1985 hoping to revitalize the established Soviet system through tighter discipline and accelerated economic growth, he and his supporters quickly moved to transform the system politically as well as economically. While professing their fidelity to "authentic" Leninism, they have now virtuallyjettisoned Marxism-Leninism as a guide to action and have adopted many philosophical tenets ofWestern liberalism. They have abandoned previous assertions that the Communist Party possesses absolute political truth and instead advocate open political discussion and dialogue. Discarding the Party's traditional domination of society in the name of a mythical general will, the reformers have acknowledged the legitimacy of a wide range of real societal interests. The Party, they now proclaim, must continuously win the public's acceptance of its right to rule. Rather than pursuing Lenin's vision of a society increasingly homogenized by historical and political processes, the reformers affirm that sociopolitical pluralism is both unavoidable and desirable. In economic affairs, they have moved a long way toward accepting the concepts of decentralized markets, economic competition, and private ownership of the means of production. On the whole, these changes in the reformers' general pronouncements mesh with their deeds. Gorbachev, of course, is an exceedingly adroit politician who has frequently made public commitments which he has later broken. To date, however, most ofthe political promises he has broken have been to conservative rather than to liberal goals. For example, his recent disavowal of the Communist Party's legal monopoly on power, while matching the spirit of an historic speech he made to the Central Committee in January 1987, contradicts public reassurances he gave to party conservatives as recently as this past December. Despite the misgivings of conservatives such as Yegor Ligachev, Gorbachev has encouraged the emergence ofinformal groups and popular fronts that have gradually begun to act as political parties and to play a major role in local and regional elections. At his prompting, the regime has created a real, though not yet fully, democratic legislature and has set up a presidency that is scheduled to be filled through direct competitive elections in the mid-1990s. He and his backers have also introduced draft legislation designed to establish legal guarantees for the new political liberties that citizens now enjoy. Together with the changes in the philosophy ofgovernment espoused by Gorbachev and such close allies as Aleksandr Yakovlev, these steps indicate that the reformers are seeking to create a new political order that bears only the most tenuous relationship to the Soviet system we have known since 1917. GORBACHEVS GAMBLE 59 It is far from certain, however, that Gorbachev and his associates have the political leverage and social...