Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 8, 1990 TAG: 9007100425
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICH BIDLACK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The Congress, the first to meet in four years, is an assembly of 4,700 party delegates who purportedly represent the nation's 20 million party members. However, the Congress is dominated by the party's most conservative elements, the mid-level activists. They are desperately trying to hold on to the party's "leading role" in the U.S.S.R., and therefore largely reject Mikhail Gorbachev's efforts at decentralizing political power and introducing limited market mechanisms in the economy.
The stinging attacks on Gorbachev's "reckless radicalism" from the conservative right should not be interpreted as a serious threat to his power base. What the Congress's conservative coloring really shows is that if the party's Central Committee and politburo follow the Congress's lead to the right, the party will become increasingly ineffective and even irrelevant.
The right is intellectually bankrupt, without a coherent program. Since the death of Stalin in 1953, the conservatives' quandary has been how to provide incentive to work, without resorting to massive use of coercion, in a system where the party-state has monopoly ownership and control of the economic and political systems.
During the late 1970s and 1980s, Soviet growth rates leveled off and a popular mentality emerged of profound disillusionment with part goals and policies. Conservatives could not reverse the trend without a return to Stalinist teror tactics, a path that practically no one wants to travel. Thus, the right is reduced to criticizing Gorbachev's failures, which are many, without offering a dynamic program of its own.
Gorbachev probably is not too worried about the attacks from the right. In fact, he might even welcome them. They permit him to portray his nebulous semi-reforms as the "golden mean" between conservative and the radical leftist notions of Boris Yeltsin & Co., who advocate a market economy and full transfer of political power from the Communists to multiparty representative councils ("soviets").
The problem with the "middle ground" approach is that it is infirm to begin with, and disappearing as Soviet politics is quickly polarizing. More force is accruing to the left, as was shown in free elections this year to local and republic councils, than to the discredited right.
To survive, Gorbachev needs to clarify key aspects of his reforms:
What does the official end of the party's monopoly on political power mean in practice? Will alternative parties be allowed to organize at the national level and publicize their views? Will party committees that control factories, farms, schools and the military be abolished? Will the democratic councils supersede the party in real decision-making?
What of private property? Gorbachev's half-measures of limited cooperatives and rigged arrangements for leasing property have functioned poorly. Will he expand and introduce guarantees for private ownership?
WIll his regime permit U.S.S.R. republics to secede from the Soviet empire if the overwhelming majority of a republic's people so desires?
Russia has a long, sad history of periodic and bloody social upheaval. For five frustrating years, Gorbachev has been trying vainly to forge a compromise to "make socialism work."
The Communist Party, which at this writing he still heads, appears over the past few days to be making important strides in its march into the dustbin of history. If Gorbachev does not clarify his vision of reform, and seek political legitimacy for his position via a nationwide vote, he runs the same risk.
by CNB