Seize the Moment (5 page)

—The Russian imperial tradition, the fundamental but unspoken pillar of support for the previous Communist regime, has retreated but not disappeared. The danger exists that at some point a demagogue will revive Russian imperialism by depicting the defeat of the Communist center as a defeat for the Russian nation. In such hands, the Kremlin might then use the ethnic Russian minorities in the former Soviet republics to try to reestablish Russian domination.

—Communism has been totally discredited, but socialism appeals to a broad spectrum of Soviet society. As a true
believer in communism, Gorbachev consistently resisted genuine free-market reforms on ideological grounds. As democratic politicians, reformers may succumb to the allure of democratic socialism and may balk at the needed wrenching economic changes out of fear of the voters, who expect the security of fixed prices and guaranteed jobs and housing and fear the uncertainty of the market.

A wide range of views exists on what tack the West should take in responding to the Soviet crisis. Some urge that we pour in massive economic assistance immediately to the new noncommunist governments to consolidate the victory of the reformers. Others contend that we must use aid to reverse the disintegration of the Soviet Union and prevent potential international “instability.” Others say that we need a step-by-step aid program that will reward each increment of economic reforms with Western assistance. Still others hold that we should set our policy on cruise control, waiting for events to sort themselves out before we accelerate or hit the brakes on Western help to Moscow.

All of these arguments address only part of the issue. The key strategic question is not what kind of help we should give but what kind of successor to the Soviet Union we wish to see emerge from the current crisis. In this respect, we should seek to advance one key principle: democratic self-determination. We must not use aid to prop up the center—whether ruled by Gorbachev or Yeltsin—at the expense of the republics. With the death of communism, a stable order can be built only by recognizing the legitimate rights of nations to determine their own political destinies through democratic means. If the new noncommunist leaders in Moscow try to cobble together a new centralized union or federation, it will be an unstable one. If they allow each former Soviet republic to determine its relationship with the center—including the option of outright independence—the result will
be a sturdy new commonwealth based on the natural economic ties mandated by proximity, interdependence, and market forces.

The Soviet revolution has opened up new vistas for constructive relations with the West. In the past, our conflicting values led us to look for the few areas where common interests permitted limited cooperation. Today, our growing common values have created almost limitless possibilities for developing cooperative projects that serve our mutual interests. The first item on our new agenda must be to resolve old business, the outstanding issues of the cold war, such as arms control and Moscow's aid to third world totalitarians. The second item must be to assist those former Soviet republics that take the needed and painful steps to transform their state-dominated economies into market-based ones. A policy of selective assistance that differentiates among republics on the basis of their commitment to economic and political reform will create powerful incentives for needed change.

While internal developments, not external aid, will determine what kind of system will replace the Soviet Union, its desperate economic crisis has given the United States unprecedented leverage over the course of events. The last of the world's great empires has now disintegrated. We should not assist those who seek to piece it back together. At the same time, we should recognize that the great victories of freedom will survive only if freedom succeeds. As the world's only superpower, we must not smugly enjoy the defeat of communism but rather roll up our sleeves to help ensure the victory of freedom.

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I have traveled to the Soviet Union seven times since 1959, when I parried verbal jabs from Nikita Khrushchev in the Kitchen Debate. During my most recent trip in March 1991,
I met not only as I had in my previous visits with the top man—Khrushchev in 1959, Brezhnev in 1972 and 1974, and Gorbachev in 1986—but also with a wide range of government officials and political leaders. I had discussions with the head of the KGB, the interior minister, the defense minister, and other key players in the August coup. I met with Boris Yeltsin, who three months later would resoundingly win election as president of Russia and five months later would stand in heroic defiance against the coup plotters. I also discussed the course of events with former key members of Gorbachev's inner circle such as Eduard Shevardnadze, Alexander Yakovlev, and Leonid Abalkin, as well as with top officials and opposition leaders in Lithuania and in the republics of Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia.

I discovered that before the coup three fundamental errors about the situation in the Soviet Union dominated the debate about Western policy. The first error was the idea that Gorbachev's government should be provided with massive economic assistance in order to support the course of reform. Some Western pundits and policymakers peddled the “grand bargain” under which foreign aid to the tune of $100 billion or more would underwrite the Soviet Union's transition to a market economy. But aid to Gorbachev's regime—which was dominated by the hard-liners who later tried to depose him—would have undercut, not advanced, the prospects for political and economic reform.

One newspaper editorialized that spurning aid to the Soviet president could deal “a mortal political blow to Gorbachev, in whose leadership the U.S. has invested so much hope for a continued improvement in East—West relations.” Another argued, “Gorbachev and his country need help. It is fitting, and in America's interests, to join in supplying that help.” Gorbachev played to this gallery. In his Nobel Peace
Prize speech in June 1990, he asserted that “the world needs
perestroika
no less than the Soviet Union,” that “the Soviet Union is entitled to expect large-scale support to assure its success,” and that if it fails “the prospects of entering a new peaceful period in history will vanish.”

Moments after the hard-liners announced their seizure of power, the debate began over “who lost Gorbachev.” Many in the West, including leaders such as German chancellor Helmut Kohl, claimed that the failure to shower Gorbachev with gifts of economic aid at the London summit had contributed to the Soviet president's ouster. That is fatuous nonsense. A helping hand to Gorbachev would have hurt the cause of democracy. Historically, the Russian and Soviet leaders have reformed only when under severe pressure domestically or internationally. Aid at that time would have been exploited by hard-liners to preserve the Communist system. As Andrei Sakharov said shortly before his death in 1989, “In the absence of radical reforms in the Soviet system, credits and technological aid will only prop up an ailing system and delay the advent of democracy.”

Those who today claim that aid to Gorbachev would have prevented the coup ignore the fact that our aid would have gone to a cabinet dominated by the Soviet-style “gang of four”:

—Valentin Pavlov, the prime minister, was steeped in the Stalinist practice of blaming external forces for domestic woes. In February 1991, he made groundless accusations that Western banks had conspired to try to undermine the ruble and thereby destabilize the Soviet economy. He then authorized the police and KGB to raid the offices of Western joint ventures without search warrants. When Gorbachev apparently bridged his differences with Yeltsin in April 1991, Pavlov fired a shot across the bow, independently asking the
Supreme Soviet to transfer powers from the president to the prime minister on the lame pretext that the head of state simply lacked the time to exercise these responsibilities.

—Dimitri Yazov, the defense minister, was an unapologetic advocate of reactionary defense and foreign policies. When I pointed out to him in our meeting that arms control could not go forward unless the Kremlin abandoned its attempt to evade CFE limits through the resubordination of three divisions to the naval infantry and other services, he replied that since the Soviet Union did not have a Marine Corps, it was entitled to such transfers to balance U.S. capabilities, breezily disregarding the fact that this still violated the letter of the treaty. In discussing the need to reduce the massive Soviet military budget, I observed that the Kremlin was spending at least 20 percent of its GNP on defense, while the U.S. allocated only 5 percent. He responded that the real Soviet figure was 12 percent of GNP, a patent falsehood based on vastly understated official figures. He then added that because the U.S. economy was “at least five or six times larger” than that of the Soviet Union, Washington was spending almost twice as much as Moscow on the military. As I listened, I was reminded of Khrushchev's earthy comment to me in 1959 that “statisticians are the kind of people who can melt shit into bullets.”

—Boris Pugo, the interior minister and tough-minded former KGB chief in Latvia, was a throwback to the Brezhnev era. When I met with him, he engaged in a lengthy hard-line monologue. He blamed the “politicians” and “troublemakers” for generating the political and economic crisis. He insisted that the regime had to cut back on reforms in order to restore order and stability. He justified the use of force in the Baltic states—for which he fully accepted responsibility—as necessary to defend the ethnic Russian minorities living
there, ignoring the fact that even the Russians voted overwhelmingly for independence a few days before we met. Until his suicide in the aftermath of the failed coup, Pugo continued to orchestrate bloody attacks by Soviet military and internal security forces against pro-independence republic governments and innocent civilians from the Baltics to Transcaucasia.

—Vladimir Kryuchkov, the steely head of the KGB, showed no sympathy for broader political reform. In the past, he had publicly accused reformers of taking their cues from the CIA and other Western intelligence services. In my meeting with him, he pulled no punches. While most hardliners carefully cultivated the pretense of supporting reform, Kryuchkov did not bother. He blamed Gorbachev's reforms for a steep rise in crime and corruption. He called the revolutions in Eastern Europe “disastrous,” not surprising coming from the man who had served as third secretary in the Soviet embassy in Budapest during the bloody suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. When I raised the issue of Baltic independence, he dismissed it outright on the grounds that the United States would never entertain such an option for Puerto Rico! He also said that he had had “tough arguments” over reform with Gorbachev and did not know how long the Soviet president would keep him around because “he may get bored with me.” Kryuchkov's vision for the Soviet future most resembled post-Tiananmen Square China: a mixed economy coupled with a totalitarian state. When I asked about the future of political reform, he bluntly replied, “We have had as much democratization as we can stomach.”

If Western aid had started flowing before the August revolution, Pavlov, Yazov, and Kryuchkov would be sitting in power instead of sitting in jail. Those who touted the “grand
bargain” failed to understand that without political reform, aid to Moscow would have been the “grand con job.” Without genuine democracy, the choke hold of the Communist party apparatus on society would not have been broken, the people would have refused to accept the sacrifices inherent in the transition to the market, and the political process would have lacked the accountability needed to keep the reforms on track. Without democratic self-determination for the Soviet republics, political instability and the lack of an accepted framework of laws would have undermined even the best economic reform program.

While Gorbachev carries an American Express card, the idea that we should have given the precoup Soviet government a personal automatic-teller card to the U.S. Treasury has been thoroughly discredited by subsequent events. Such aid would have helped the very individuals who sought to return the Soviet Union to its Stalinist past and demoralized the reformers who ultimately prevailed in the August 1991 democratic revolution.

The second fundamental error in the conventional wisdom of Western analysts before the coup was that there was no better alternative to Gorbachev. That view might have been true in the first years of Gorbachev's rule. But it was outdated by 1991 and was totally refuted by the resistance to the coup. Although many Western diplomats and leaders were obsessed with supporting Gorbachev, reformers—led by Yeltsin but reinforced by key figures who had resigned from Gorbachev's inner circle and by new democratic nationalists in the republics—had already become a broad-based movement capable of governing the country.

When I received briefings on Yeltsin before my trip to the Soviet Union in 1991, I was reminded of the official assessments of Khrushchev in 1959. State Department and CIA
briefers characterized Khrushchev as “oafish,” dwelling on his habit of drinking too much in public, his poor Russian grammar, and the sartorial ineptitude of his floppy hats, short-sleeve shirts, and ill-fitting suits. But of all the leaders whom I have met in forty-six years of public life, Khrushchev had the quickest mental reaction time. He proved to be a strong leader, at times almost more than the West could handle. One of the briefers on Yeltsin in 1991 sounded like a recording of my 1959 briefing on Khrushchev. He was dismissed as an opportunistic lightweight who drank excessively, behaved erratically, spoke colloquial Russian, and was not in Gorbachev's league intellectually or socially.

After meeting for over an hour with Yeltsin, I found that some of my briefers had fallen victim to the tendency among many foreign policy analysts to mistake style for substance. Politics is not learned from the pages of a textbook or a fashion magazine. It depends on ideas, organization, and charisma. Yeltsin was clearly a political heavyweight who could discuss complex subjects without aides or notes and who had an instinctive understanding of the people. He had proved his ability to marshal a nation-wide campaign, winning 60 percent of the vote in a multicandidate field. Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin possessed genuine personal charisma—the intangible quality of leadership that no one can define but everyone can recognize—but each drew his support from a different audience. Gorbachev appealed to Wall Street, Yeltsin to Main Street. Gorbachev captured the elite in Georgetown drawing rooms, Yeltsin the workers at the Sverdlovsk factory gates. Gorbachev appealed to the head, Yeltsin to the heart. Gorbachev dazzled a crowd, Yeltsin moved a crowd. Gorbachev was a man of the world, Yeltsin a man of the people.