
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, March 9, 1990                   TAG: 9003122950
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

GORBY'S POWERS

THE PELL-MELL rush toward democracy in Eastern Europe is spreading within the Soviet Union as well. Most remarkable is the apparent willingness of the establishment to relax its own grip on the country.

The Central Committee of the Communist Party has acceded to President Gorbachev's wish that it yield its monopoly on power. Moscow is giving up central control of the U.S.S.R., and the state is surrendering ownership of the means of production. In local elections this month, pro-democracy candidates and other progressives made gains against Communists.

Mute your cheers. What the world sees in the Soviet Union nowadays is not the flowering of the long-promised dictatorship of the proletariat. It is the effort of one man, Mikhail Gorbachev, to loosen the old guard's ossifying hold on power so that he can gather it into his own hands.

This does not necessarily imply a sinister design toward the outside world. Gorbachev does want to revive the economy and strengthen his country, and he knows that this requires a top-to-bottom shakeup of government and politics. Someday hence, a rejuvenated Soviet Union may pose a danger to peace; that will not likely be under Gorbachev, maybe not in his lifetime. Even CIA Director William Webster thinks it very improbable that the Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces will regroup and again threaten Western Europe militarily.

At bottom, Gorbachev is not a Jeffersonian democrat but a pragmatist: The ends justify the means. He is willing to tolerate greater freedom so as to enlist the people in his effort to purge hard-liners who would frustrate his radical reforms.

At the same time, he is warning that there can be too much freedom, such as in the fractious Baltic and Central Asian republics. He has loosed powerful forces in the Soviet Union, and his task is to contain and channel their strength without losing control.

To this end, he is asking that an emergency session of the 2,250-member legislature, to meet within a few days, ratify constitutional amendments vesting broad powers in the presidency he now holds. Like an American president, he could veto legislation, but without its being passed over his veto. If he wanted a law that a recalcitrant legislature would not pass, he could submit it to a popular vote. He could nominate the prime minister; issue decrees on any topic; impose martial law or declare war.

The late Andrei Sakharov was among those who rightly feared such concentration of authority. Gorbachev justifies it as "necessary for the country - to continue the process of perestroika, to advance and accelerate reforms . . . defend democracy, to work effectively on the renewal of our federation and for everything else." Anyone bred in genuine democracy can recognize the dangers. But Russians - still the dominant people within the U.S.S.R. - are accustomed by history to strongman rule.

Gorbachev does not, it seems, aspire to be another Stalin. He is also proposing that a president with these new powers be electable for not more than two five-year terms. By that time, he hopes his reforms will be both irreversible and succeeding. Then what? Andrei Sakharov did not fear Gorbachev. He did fear who might inherit the iron hand.

by CNB