Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 8, 1991 TAG: 9102080773
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-3 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: MICHAEL PUTZEL ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
On Wednesday, Bush's secretary of State criticized the Kremlin's crackdown on dissent but expressed hope the Soviets will get back on course toward reform.
And on Thursday, Bush's Defense secretary told Congress, "The Soviet economy is collapsing," and he raised the specter of civil war in an empire turned against itself.
As Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev appealed to his own people to hold their union together, the Bush administration that has supported him offered progressively bleaker assessments of Gorbachev's prospects for success.
Bush himself acknowledged at a news conference that Gorbachev "has enormous problems at home." But when asked if the era of glasnost and perestroika is over, he replied "No. I think it will never go back, no matter what happens, to the totalitarian closed-society days of the Cold War."
Secretary of State James Baker, appearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was less positive but nonetheless hopeful.
He sharply criticized recent moves by the Kremlin to crack down on dissent and reverse economic reforms, but he remained hopeful that the Soviets "can relearn quickly . . . that the old ways are not the right ways."
"Perestroika cannot succeed at gunpoint," the administration's top diplomat said. "For the sake of history and for the sake of the world, I hope they resume the march that has given the entire world hope of a better future."
But Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, who outlined the administration's military posture for the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday, painted the government's grimmest portrait yet of the Soviet slide toward the abyss.
Cheney touched off a storm of criticism two years ago when he predicted Gorbachev's reforms would fail and that Gorbachev was likely to be replaced by someone more hostile to the West.
He reiterated his prediction of failure on Thursday but said the death of the Warsaw Pact military alliance in the last year and the deteriorating Soviet economy have lessened the threat to the United States, permitting some force reductions.
He said the Soviet Union remains "the one nation in the world that has the capability to destroy the United States," but said the changes in the Soviet Union and in Europe mean the United States would have time to prepare a response if the Soviet threat were to re-emerge.
"Today, our focus when we think about the Soviet Union is much more upon having to deal with the problem of a collapsing Soviet empire," he said. "I think that the economic situation in the Soviet Union today is as bleak as it has been perhaps in the last 50 years, since the end of World War II, and there is now no doubt but what the Soviet economy is collapsing."
Gorbachev's much-touted efforts to move from a centralized communist economic system to a market system apparently came to an end last fall, Cheney said.
It was then the Soviet president rejected what was known as a 500-day plan for transition to a market economy and opted instead for a vague blueprint that has never been implemented.
Since then, Cheney said, the circumstances "have grown increasingly bleak." Shortages of food and consumer goods have spread to major cities, and there is increasing despair.
Cheney pointed to Gorbachev's resort to a bloody crackdown in the Baltics, increased use of police and military to maintain order and "a reversal" of trends toward more human rights and press freedom.
by CNB