Seize the Moment (6 page)

Yeltsin was a better politician—in the Soviet setting—than
Gorbachev. Yeltsin is a combination of John Wayne and Lyndon Johnson. He is a two-pistol kind of man who radiates animal magnetism. He takes a no-nonsense approach and adopts categorical views. He expresses his opinions in earthy terms and can connect with the average person. Gorbachev was a Soviet version of Adlai Stevenson: intellectually brilliant, articulate on television, but unable to relate to the man in the street. He spoke tirelessly about abstract “processes in society” and “steadily unfolding phases of change”—rhetoric that thrilled academics but that left people cold. Unlike Yeltsin, Gorbachev was profoundly uncomfortable in dealing with average Soviet people. Yeltsin likes retail politics, while Gorbachev liked boardroom politics.

Those Soviet experts who characterized Yeltsin to me as a demagogue who “believes in nothing but the desire for power” revealed shocking political superficiality. Yeltsin's views had grown, evolving to cope with the deepening Soviet crisis while Gorbachev's remained in the quagmire of Marxism-Leninism. Before the failed coup, Yeltsin had totally repudiated communism, while Gorbachev had not. Yeltsin supported private ownership of enterprises and land, while Gorbachev did not. Yeltsin supported immediate independence for the Baltic states, while Gorbachev did not. Yeltsin called for cutting off all aid to Cuba, Afghanistan, and other Soviet clients in the underdeveloped world, while Gorbachev did not. Yeltsin wanted to make major cuts in spending on the Soviet military, while Gorbachev did not. Yeltsin won office in a fully free election, while Gorbachev did not. Immediately after the coup, Yeltsin spoke of a bold democratic revolution, while Gorbachev spoke timidly of reforming the Communist party.

Yeltsin certainly aspires to power—as all politicians do—but that does not make him a demagogue. He wants power not for its own sake but for what he can achieve with it.
When I asked him whether he sought Gorbachev's job, he responded flatly that he did not, that ruling from the center would mean compromising principle. Shrewd calculation, as well as genuine conviction, clearly stood behind that decision. He knew that he could never win the support of the reactionaries who kept Gorbachev in power. To court their support, Yeltsin would have had to turn his back on democratic and market reform, a price that he refused to pay. Instead, he sought to defeat the center through an end run—winning power in the Russian republic, developing close political ties with other major republics that shared his values, such as Byelorussia and Ukraine, and confronting Gorbachev with a reformist united front. It was the knowledge that Yeltsin's strategy was on the eve of success that prompted the Communist hard-liners to launch their coup.

Yeltsin's resolute leadership of the democratic revolution after the coup made him a world figure and exposed his critics in Western diplomatic and media circles as political amateurs. Because he proved them wrong, he has been pelted by a barrage of barbs and snipes in the press. One policymaker warned that he had “very serious questions about Yeltsin” and that the Russian leader displayed “undemocratic instincts.” Another dismissed him as a politician with “an enormous ego” and “an instinct for what plays.” Many criticized his decrees outlawing Communist party activities in Russia and his forceful exchanges with Gorbachev before a public session of the Russian parliament immediately after the coup. A major Western newspaper termed his behavior “worrisome” and condemned the way “he bulldozed a shaken Mr. Gorbachev in the autocratic style of the old apparatchiks.” And a widely read columnist condescendingly sniffed at how he licked caviar and butter off his fingers at a state dinner in Washington.

Yeltsin is a victim of a blatant double standard. When
Gorbachev made 180-degree swings in his policies, Western pundits and policymakers called it statesmanship. When Yeltsin made modest shifts in his positions, they called it opportunism. Those who call Yeltsin's democratic credentials into question never scrutinized Gorbachev's. Their faith in Gorbachev led them to overlook his often reiterated fidelity to the communist ideology and to excuse his precoup alliance with the unrepentant reactionaries. When I was in the Soviet Union in March 1991, he called out more than fifty thousand troops to enforce his ban on demonstrations in central Moscow. But few of his Western supporters denounced him. Even though KGB thugs and Interior Ministry troops pummeled many of the five hundred thousand protestors who turned out despite his decree, the State Department spokesperson refused to reproach him. She argued that this situation was “no different than our own country,” adding that if groups wanted to hold “a demonstration in Washington, D.C., they have to apply for a permit.”

After the August coup, Western leaders who staked their political capital on a personal relationship with Gorbachev went bankrupt overnight. Those who belittled Yeltsin and who glorified Gorbachev made the critical error of confusing personal relations between leaders with political relations between great powers. Western policies toward Moscow should never have hinged so much on the fate of one man, even as remarkable a figure as Gorbachev. Fortunately for the Soviet people, the policy of backing Gorbachev “to the end,” as one policymaker urged, turned out to be as futile as it was foolish.

Yeltsin has disproved Pushkin's observation in the nineteenth century that rebellions in Russia tend to be senseless and violent. While the Russian president unquestionably has
the eloquence and charisma to incite a crowd to violence, he took power through ballots, not bullets. In the aftermath of the coup, he has sought to advance democracy through parliament, not through purges. In speaking of the violence of revolution, Lenin often remarked that you cannot make an omelette without breaking some eggs. If a few bruises to Gorbachev's ego were the cost of the peaceful triumph over the Soviet Communist system, it was a fair price to pay.

The third fundamental error prevalent in the Western policy debate before the August revolution was that nationalism in the Soviet republics was an unmitigated evil threatening to unleash instability and violence. In fact, the new nationalists not only gave the democratic movement in the Soviet Union its initial momentum but also provided indispensable strategic depth to the forces resisting the coup. The only fully free elections in Soviet history have been conducted not by Gorbachev and the center but by democratic nationalists in Russia and other republics. Moreover, if Yeltsin and the reformers in Moscow had been the only obstacle to the attempted Stalinist restoration, the coup leaders could have found enough card-carrying killers within the Soviet security apparatus to prevail. It was the fact that the democratic resistance commanded the loyalty of tens of millions across all fifteen republics that caused the Communist system to suffer a fatal breakdown of its political will.

In an age of nationalism, it was inevitable that loosening the Soviet Union's totalitarian order would produce an outburst of nationalist feelings. Communism was premised on the idea of a worldwide workers' revolution, in which the ideology transcended borders and nationalities. The failure of communism thus left the Soviet empire without a unifying ideology and gave the Soviet peoples an opportunity to reassert
their national identities. Promoting democratic and market-oriented reforms while simultaneously fighting a rearguard battle to save the empire was impossible. The Soviet empire was put together and held together by force. The glue of the communist idea, which once enhanced unity, long ago lost its potency. Today, the new Soviet political order can remain intact only through the voluntary consent of the Soviet nations.

Before the coup, some Soviet spokesmen tried to sell the line that the West should help Gorbachev hold his country together. Just as Lincoln waged the Civil War to preserve the United States, they argued, Gorbachev needed to take whatever steps were necessary, including the use of force, to preserve the Soviet Union. Their analogy—which, tragically, even some leading Western statesmen parroted—was fundamentally flawed. While the United States is a multinational society composed of free individuals, the Soviet Union was a multinational state composed of captive nations annexed against their will. Legislatures in each of the thirteen colonies ratified the U.S. Constitution before it came into force, while Lenin and Stalin ratified the incorporation of fourteen republics into the Soviet Union through the use of force. In addition, while the union in the American Civil War fought for the higher moral cause of abolishing slavery, the secessionists in the Soviet crisis struggled for the higher principle of abolishing communism, another form of slavery.

The new sick man of Europe was doomed to die. The centrifugal nationalist forces within the Soviet Union did not stem from trivial origins. The Soviet nations opposed the center not out of a desire to fly their own flags or sing their own folk songs. They did so as a result of their profound traditions as sovereign nations—six of which had been either independent countries or part of another free country—and
of the deep and abiding historical grievances of each against the brutality of the center's Communist rule:

—In Ukraine, Stalin killed 5 million peasants during the collectivization of agriculture, 10 million through forced famines, and 3 million in suppressing the postwar guerrilla resistance, while more recently the Chernobyl disaster doomed an estimated 2 million people to premature deaths from cancer and other ailments.

—In Byelorussia, Stalin not only killed 100,000 people in purges and repression in the 1930s but also doomed 1.5 million people and 75 percent of the republic's cities and towns to death and destruction through his half-witted military strategies in World War II.

—In the Baltic republics, more than 150,000 Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian guerrilla fighters died resisting Soviet rule after World War II, while another 540,000 were killed in purges or exiled to Siberia.

—In Moldavia, a young Leonid Brezhnev orchestrated the postwar subjugation of the newly annexed Romanian territory, ordering thousands of executions and shipping off 30,000 people to Siberian labor camps.

—In the Caucasian republics, 100,000 Azerbaijanis, 30,000 Georgians, and tens of thousands of Armenians were imprisoned, tortured, or killed under Stalin, with Armenia's prisons so full at some points that basements of government buildings were converted into makeshift jails.

—In the Central Asian republics, Stalin crushed the anti-communist guerrilla forces that fought Moscow into the 1930s, while Khrushchev's “virgin lands” campaign triggered a massive influx of Russian colonists and Brezhnev's harebrained agricultural and development schemes wreaked ecological disaster throughout the region.

In light of the scope of these human tragedies—which have
no parallels in American history—it was totally unreasonable to expect these nations to use their growing political freedom under Gorbachev to seek a new union with Moscow as its dominant political center.

Reform leaders in the non-Russian Soviet republics have more in common with Walesa and Havel, who opposed communism from the outside, than with Yeltsin and Shevardnadze, who at first tried to reform the system from within. Lithuania's Vytautus Landsbergis, Latvia's Anatolijs Gorbunovs, Estonia's Arnold Ruutel, the leaders of the Ukrainian Rukh movement, and other democratic leaders at the republic level sought not only freedom but also independence for their nations. In the republics, strategies based on working within the system were discredited because to be part of the system was to betray the nation. As a result, the new republic leaders were not reform-minded Communists like Gorbachev but nationalists who led democratic popular fronts and who sought to free their nations through elections.

I must admit to a measure of skepticism when I was introduced to Lithuanian president Landsbergis, who had been a professor of musicology before entering the political arena. I tend to agree with the observation of an eighteenth-century European king who said, “The cruelest way to punish a province is to have it governed by professors.” With notable exceptions, such as Woodrow Wilson, great professors are seldom good executives. I have found that they tend to become mired in irrelevant trivia, to flit from one intellectual fad to another, and to lack the decisiveness needed in politics. But I soon discovered in the course of our exchanges that this musician was a very strong leader who talked pianissimo but acted forte.

In our conversation, Landsbergis mentioned that his favorite literary quotation was a line from Ibsen's
Enemy of the
People:
“The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.” The Lithuanian president personifies the concept better than almost any leader I have met. Like Charles de Gaulle in World War II, Landsbergis knew that his only source of power was his absolute inflexibility on matters of principle. His insight and personal will enabled him not just to navigate the perilous course that ultimately led to the restoration of his country's independence after fifty-one years of Soviet occupation. In concert with Yeltsin's Russia, he and the other democratic nationalists in the non-Russian republics served as the indispensable backstop in the victory of the August 1991 revolution.

It was ironic that many Americans, particularly within the foreign policy elite, viewed the new nationalists in the Soviet Union with disdain or contempt. That has not been our traditional—and historically vindicated—approach to nationalism. Few other forces inspire loyalties as strong as patriotism. International stability requires the great powers to accommodate legitimate nationalist aspirations while reproaching the excesses of extremists. With the death of communism as an ideology, the force of nationalism inevitably—and rightly—has become the decisive element in defining the future of the Soviet Union.

Since Woodrow Wilson, American presidents have recognized the legitimacy of nationalist movements around the world. At Versailles, Wilson helped oversee the birth of the new nations of Eastern Europe. Roosevelt and his immediate successors pressed Britain and France to grant their colonies independence. During the French war in Indochina, Truman and Eisenhower kept their distance in order to avoid tainting America with European imperialism. During the Suez crisis, Eisenhower forced the British, French, and Israelis to abandon their attempt to retake the canal by force. It makes no
sense for the United States to have pressed for the dismantling of the British and French empires, which were based on the values of European civilization, and yet to have attempted to prop up the Soviet empire, which was based on the ideology of communism.