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Time to Look Beyond Gorbachev
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18949 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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2 / 1991 |
2,885 Words |
| Author
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Christopher Smart
Christopher Smart is a research analyst specializing in Soviet
and Eastern European politics at the Hudson Institute. |
Mikhail Gorbachev has amassed an impressive record at home and abroad: easing international tensions, pulling his troops back home, liberalizing emigration laws, releasing press control, and holding contested elections. On top of it all, Gorbachev has been a model partner in Washington's current crisis in the Persian Gulf.
None of this should cloud U.S. policymakers' thinking, however, as they look to the future of the Soviet Union and contemplate the consequences of its transformation for the West. The time has come for Washington to look beyond Gorbachev.
Scenarios of the Soviet future usually include imaginative combinations of riots, mass unemployment, ethnic strife, hyperinflation, famine, rampant crime, waves of refugees, epidemics, and much, much more. Soviet officials eager to frighten the West into providing aid are fond of mentioning the prospect of the USSR's dissolution into 15 or more independent and enemy republics, each armed with nuclear weapons. The only calamity yet to enter the Soviet political forecasts is a swarm of locusts.
Gorbachev remains the most important player at the center of this maelstrom, but he has long since been dwarfed by the forces swirling around him. If the United States is to defend both its principles and its interests in its relationship with the Soviet Union, the time has come to cultivate a broad range of contacts within this raging storm.
The United States, might, for sentimental reasons, like to see Gorbachev enshrined as a latter-day Peter the Great (the modernizer) or a Soviet Abraham Lincoln who set his people free. The reality, however, is that as a masterful compromiser and improviser, the Soviet leader has held on to his office but essentially lost control of his revolution. While he still has a chance to reclaim his power by a return to authoritarian rule, there is an equal chance that he will eventually be tossed aside entirely.
As he concludes his sixth year in power, Gorbachev theoretically faces a choice between three broad directions for his country: (1) to press for democratic reform and hope his people are ready, (2) to hold his habitual course along some stagnant middle ground and risk sinking deeper into irrelevance, or (3) to fall back on authoritarian measures to restore order to the streets and food to the stores.
Increasingly, however, it seems that only the last choice
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