1999 (6 page)

As he looks to the south, the threat is already at hand: The Soviet Union is mired in a war in Afghanistan with no prospect for
a quick victory. Eight years after the invasion, the Kremlin still cannot pull out its 120,000 troops without precipitating a collapse of the communist government in Kabul. More than 25,000 Soviet troops have been killed in action. Over $40 billion has been spent on the war, and expenses are running at over $10 billion annually. Its forces have ravaged the countryside, yet Moscow controls little more than the country's major cities and the main roads. What's worse, the war carries the risk for ominous political repercussions among the Soviet Union's Muslim peoples.

No one should doubt that Moscow has the potential power to prevail. But at the current rate victory will not come for at least twenty years, and it may never come. For the Kremlin leaders, there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

When Gorbachev looks beyond the regions on his immediate frontiers, he finds all his communist clients in the Third World queuing up for handouts. They are not allies but dependencies. Not one of Moscow's friends in the Third World could survive without massive economic subsidies or military assistance. Lenin wrote that capitalist countries turned to imperialism as a profit-making venture. If that was true, the communist revolution in Russia certainly did usher in a new era, since Moscow's empire impoverishes rather than enriches the Kremlin. Vietnam costs the Soviet Union over $3.5 billion a year, Cuba over $4.9 billion, Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia a total of over $3 billion, and Nicaragua over $1 billion. Moscow's imperial domain costs the Kremlin over $35 million a day.

When Gorbachev looks at the battle of ideas, he sees that the communist ideology has lost its appeal. After a visit to the Soviet Union seventy years ago, a liberal newspaper reporter, Lincoln Steffens, wrote: “I have seen the future and it works.” Now we have all seen that future and it does not work. This is true not only in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself, where the people have lived under communism in practice, but also in the rest of the world. In the 1950s, many noncommunists in the Third World admired the Soviet model of economic development. Today, no Third World government aspires to become a bureaucratic nightmare like the Soviet Union, with its jungles of red tape and its stagnant swamp of an economy. In the 1930s, Americans who
spied for Moscow acted out of ideological conviction. Today, Americans who have been convicted of spying for the Soviets did it for cold, hard cash.

Moscow's military power is its only asset. Great as that may be, military power cannot be sustained over the long term without matching economic power. Moscow's dilemma is that its assets are ill-suited to solving its problems, and its problems are undermining its assets.

Gorbachev does not underestimate the Soviet quandary. Nor do his communist neighbors to the east. A Chinese leader, after explaining why China's current economic reforms were essential if it intended to step into the front rank of nations, once commented to me that if the Soviet Union did not adopt similar changes Moscow would “disappear” as a great power in the next century. That is true, and Gorbachev knows it.

Economically, it has abysmally failed to capitalize on its great human and material resources. It has not surpassed any other major country in GNP since the end of World War II; meanwhile it has been surpassed by Japan and Italy. Moscow's economy is a basket case. The growth rate is virtually zero. Productivity is dropping. Absenteeism, corruption, malingering, and drunkenness are rife. The standard of living is sinking, so much so that the life expectancy of Russian men is actually going down. A Soviet worker must spend more than seven times as many hours as a West European to earn enough money to buy a car. The Soviet Union has fifteen times fewer industrial computers than advanced West European countries and forty-five times fewer than the United States. What few positive blips have been detected in the vital signs of the Soviet economy in recent years have resulted from the Kremlin's manipulation of its own economic statistics.

Western economists used to undertake esoteric extrapolations to gauge the depths of Moscow's economic crisis. Today, they only have to read Mikhail Gorbachev's speeches. Khrushchev claimed the Soviet Union would catch up and surpass the United States economically in a decade. Brezhnev swept economic problems under the rug. Andropov thought more discipline among the workers was the solution. In Gorbachev the Soviet Union finally has a leader who grasps that without a growing economy its international
position will steadily erode and its military power will gradually atrophy. He has formally repealed the Communist Party's goal of Khrushchev's era which called for the Soviet Union to surpass the United States in gross national product in the 1980s. He has labeled Khrushchev's boastful predictions of Soviet economic growth as “groundless fantasies.” Gorbachev knows that more than wishful thinking and pep rallies is needed to get the Soviet system back on its feet.

He also understands that his major priority must be to revitalize the Soviet economy. Without economic growth, he cannot afford the current level of Soviet military spending, provide even a marginal improvement in the standard of living of the Soviet peoples, or hold the Soviet system out as a paragon for developing nations.

Gorbachev faces the classic dilemma of communist totalitarian systems. In order to have progress he must allow more freedom. But allowing more freedom threatens his power. Excessive centralization is the principal problem of the Soviet economy. But decentralizing economic decision-making carries the risk of prompting demands for political decentralization. And political decentralization would mean the dissolution of the communist system.

When Gorbachev totals up the balance sheet of Soviet strengths and weaknesses, the bottom line is not encouraging. Moscow has put itself into a unique historical position: It does not have a single ally among the major powers of the world. The Kremlin faces potential adversaries in Western Europe, China, Japan, Canada, and the United States, whose combined gross national products account for over 60 percent of the world economy. Moreover, never in history has an aggressive power been more successful in extending its domination over other nations and less successful in winning the approval of the people of those nations. In not one of the nineteen nations of the world in which they rule did the communists gain power by winning a free democratic election, and none of them dares to have one. If the Soviet Union's strength wanes, its satellites will certainly try to break out of the Kremlin's orbit.

Gorbachev feels the pressure of these problems and has responded with a far-reaching reform campaign. As he tackles the difficult tasks before him, we need to analyze the consequences of his reforms for the world. We need to answer these questions: What kinds of reforms has he proposed? What do these reforms tell us about Gorbachev's intentions? What is the likelihood that these reforms will succeed? What does Gorbachev's reform drive portend for Soviet behavior in the world? How should the West respond?

Gorbachev has pressed forward with a three-pronged reform program. But while he has departed from the policies of his immediate predecessors, we must view the scope of these changes with historical perspective.

Glasnost.
This is the catchword for the new openness about problems in the Soviet Union and the greater tolerance of dissent. Gorbachev has allowed the Soviet press to publish exposés about the failures of and corruption in the Soviet system. He has brought Andrei Sakharov back from internal exile and has released a few other prominent dissidents. He has increased the number of Jews allowed to emigrate and has given exit visas to Soviet citizens divided from their spouses in the West. All these steps have been widely hailed in the West.

These developments are significant and represent a welcome change from the past. But we should always remember that the literal translation of the word
glasnost
is “transparency.” Repression remains the keystone of the Soviet system. While fewer than 100 political dissidents have been released, another 40,000 still languish in prison camps. While 8,000 Jews were allowed to emigrate in 1987, another 400,000 are still waiting to do so. While more criticism of the system is permitted, it is still all officially sanctioned criticism. It is no accident that those who are criticized under Glasnost never argue back.

Gorbachev's purpose is threefold. He wants to create a more favorable attitude toward the Soviet Union in the West in order to facilitate his pursuit of more important goals, agreements on trade and arms control. He wants to use Glasnost to weed out his political opponents. He wants to create a new spirit among intellectuals
and particularly young people in the Soviet Union. Glasnost is a small price to pay.

Democratization.
Gorbachev's speeches overflow with paeans to democracy. But what he means by democracy is very different from what we mean by it. He wants to open up the system; he wants to encourage people to step forth with new ideas; but he has no intention of relinquishing any of the power and prerogatives of the Communist Party. His democratization stays strictly
within
the party. There is no real democratization
outside
the party. He wants to shake up the system to get it moving again. But it will not lead to anything remotely resembling a Western democracy.

Perestroika.
This slogan for economic reform literally means restructuring. Gorbachev has spoken in sweeping terms about this program. He has called for the dismantling of much of the central planning apparatus. He has endorsed the idea of joint ventures with private Western firms. He has proposed giving greater decision-making power to factory managers. He has pushed for allowing some opportunities for very small enterprises to make private profit. But he has so far achieved little. Few of Gorbachev's proposals have been enacted, and they in no way compare to the revolutionary initiatives that Deng Xiaoping has undertaken in China. The day-to-day workings in the Soviet Union still run by the dictates of the old regime.

That Gorbachev seeks to take a new approach to Soviet problems does not mean that he rejects the basic premises of his system. He believes that the system is fundamentally sound but needs to be made more effective. We must always remind ourselves that the reforms themselves tell us nothing about Gorbachev's intentions. Their purpose is not to move the Soviet Union toward more freedom at home or a less aggressive policy abroad, but rather to make the communist system work better. He wants the system to be more efficient, not less communist.

Gorbachev's success is far from guaranteed. He faces monumental political and cultural obstacles. Some people have even argued that he has only a fifty-fifty chance of lasting five years in power. They point out that in every speech he makes he refers to the opposition against his reforms. They recall that when the last great Soviet reformer, Nikita Khrushchev, tried to revitalize the
system his colleagues in the Politburo promptly gave him the boot. They conclude that the same could happen to Gorbachev.

Those who hold this view rightly point out that there is opposition to Gorbachev's reforms but underestimate his ability to handle it. A shake-up of the Soviet system will always be opposed by those who have been shaking it down through perks and corruption. He is trying to impose new changes on those who benefit from the old ways. They do not want to lose their dachas, their limousines, their ballet tickets, their Black Sea vacations, and their rights to expert medical care and preferential education for their children. But the analogy to Khrushchev does not fit. Like Khrushchev, Gorbachev is bold and unpredictable; but unlike Khrushchev, he will not be rash.

Gorbachev has also shown great skill in consolidating his power. Unlike Stalin, he does not have his rivals killed. Unlike Khrushchev, he does not leave them in positions where they can threaten his power. (Brezhnev, for example, was standing next to Khrushchev during our Kitchen Debate in 1959.) Instead, Gorbachev ferrets them out of their key positions and replaces them with supporters. In just two years, he has replaced all but one of the members of the party Secretariat, the key body which runs the party apparatus. Of the thirteen members of the all-powerful Politburo, the body which runs the country's day-to-day affairs, only three are holdovers from the Brezhnev era. He has also replaced two thirds of the provincial party secretaries and more than 60 percent of the government ministers. His ruthless sacking of Boris Yeltsin, who was one of the strongest supporters of reform, was a shot across the bow to anyone—friend or foe—who is tempted to challenge his authority. Gorbachev is firmly in charge, and he will remain so as long as he keeps playing his cards with such masterful skill.

But even if Gorbachev stays in power his economic reforms face three profound difficulties. The first is his communist ideology. He is a deeply believing communist. Communism is his faith. His occasional references to God in private conversations do not make him a closet Christian. A communist cannot become a Christian without ceasing to be a communist. Communism and Christianity have irreconcilable differences. He has been hailed as a pragmatist
and has spoken of the need to create incentives to guide the decisions of workers and managers. But that runs contrary to one of the fundamental premises of the Stalinist command economy. Our economic system works because the market guides virtually all economic actions. If Gorbachev's reforms are enacted, there will be a basic tension built into the system. How will Gorbachev determine which decisions should be made by the market and which by the state? It will be difficult for him to move away from the beliefs of a lifetime about the superiority of state control over what he believes to be the heartless exploitation of the masses by selfish capitalists. As problems arise, there will be a powerful motivation for the Soviet state to step in and hand out orders to solve them.