MAYDAY, MAYDAY
Stephen Handelman on
Mr Gorbachev's efforts to arrest the spread of freedom
Moscow TIME is short,' wrote Lenin in the spring of 1918, 'after painful May will come still more painful June and July and perhaps part of August.' At the time, the young revolutionary state was hemmed in by enemies on all sides, some of its own making. Food shortages were increasing, the peasants were in open revolt, and even In the distant Urals, where Tsar Nicholas II and his family were under house arrest, Bolshevik power was crumbling. History has come full circle. As the state that Lenin built prepares to celebrate its most painful May Day in decades, Presi- dent Mikhail Gorbachev, Lenin's direct successor as an agent of cataclysmic change, is facing collapse on several fronts, largely at the hands of forces unleashed by his own revolution.
The crumbling of Soviet power in Lithuania is nearly complete. Although the tightening economic blockade provides physical evidence of Moscow's muscle, the moral authority of Mr Gorbachev's revolu- tion has been tarnished in one of the few regions of the country where it took root and flourished. The Baltic crisis, as Lenin might have said, illustrates the dilemma of making half a revolution. After holding out the promise of self-determination to the peoples of the old (and new) Soviet empire, Mr Gorbachev now makes clear that keeping the country together at all costs is the chief task of his new presiden- cy.
Similarly, the revolutionary goals of reforming the economy and democratising the system — goals which transformed public opinion at home as well as abroad have got fogged up by compromise and tactical retreat. Perhaps only a starry-eyed idealist might have expected anything less. But having to perceive Mr Gorbachev as a national leader like any other, dealing in the grimy market-place of politics, will be something of a shock to those who re- garded him as a visionary crusader put on earth to wash away the 20th century's sins.
Retrenchment is the key word this diffi- cult May in Moscow. Less than a month after reformers swept to power in the city council, Party bosses have been working behind the scenes to make sure their power is contained. The most important reform newspapers in the capital have been placed under the control of the party ideologists. A presidential decree last week took the right to authorise demonstrations away from Moscow and placed it in the hands of the Soviet Council of Ministers. A whisper- ing campaign has already begun against Gavril Popov, the mild-mannered radical economist chosen as Moscow's mayor.
In Leningrad, Russia's moral capital, an unsubtle rearguard action has been laun- ched against the reformers. When Nikolai Ivanov, one of the city's controversial MPs, was scheduled to appear on a local television programme to explain his charges of high-level corruption, the prog- ramme was yanked off the air. Leningrad council's efforts to assert its right to control local media programming were promptly eclipsed by the state broadcasting author- ities in Moscow. Meanwhile, conservative and loyalist Party members who formed a special `Russian Communist Party' last weekend physically barred representatives of the more liberal city media.
Half-hearted measures on the economy are also the order of the day. After two divisive meetings, the new 16-member presidential council decided to postpone the austerity measures which even the country's chief economist, Leonid Abal- kin, had been arguing publicly were neces- sary for the country's long-term prosperity. The reason: too many people would be hurt. Mrs Thatcher's long and much publi- cised seminars with Mr Gorbachev have apparently come a cropper. 'Mass unem- ployment is unacceptable to socialism,' insisted presidential spokesman Arkady Maslennikov, who spent time as a Pravda correspondent in London. 'Socialists can- not develop the economy at the cost of the people. We cannot copy the methods used by Madame Thatcher.'
A noble sentiment perhaps, but it has only postponed the day of reckoning that everyone knows must come. A large rise in prices, the introduction of private property rights, and the reduction of the state's monopoly control over the economy are almost universally acknowledged as the only way of ensuring the success of what is largely called the 'planned market'. 'Peo- ple don't have much of a choice today,' argued the Moscow political commentator Igor Klyamkin recently. 'They can either have a society of high organisation and economic efficiency which is known as capitalism or a society of poverty and confusion which until recently was known as socialism.'
In the circumstances, his candour was shocking. But the muddying of the great Gorbachev vision has still not altered the one achievement Soviet people can lay claim to this 'painful May'. By whatever means, and against overwhelming odds, a civil, political culture is in fact taking shape behind the monolith of Soviet communist society. From the monarchists and anarch- ists in Moscow to the separatists in Ukraine and the Baltics, the rule and influence of the centre is being eroded. Freedom has one property,' noted Galina Starovoitova, another leading reformer. 'The more you have of it, the more you want.'
The struggle with Lithuania is visible proof of the process. And it offers as much reason for optimism as pessimism about the outcome of Mr Gorbachev's revolu- tion. The mounting sacrifices Lithuanian people are being called upon to make as their factories close and their shops run out of food are a forerunner of the trials facing all of the Soviet Union in its hobbled march towards a new society. No one can predict how the argument between Mos- cow and Vilnius will end, but in his decision to force Lithuania to pay a harsh price for its freedom, Mr Gorbachev has sent a salutary May Day message to his depressed and restless compatriots who thought changing their lives would be as easy as saying perestroika.
Stephen Handelman is Moscow bureau chief of the Toronto Star.
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