"IT IS ONLY NOW THAT THE REAL PERESTROIKA BEGINS."
-- Mikhail Gorbachev
Feb. 5, 1990
"WE SHOULD GET RID OF IDEOLOGICAL DOGMATISM."
-- Mikhail Gorbachev
Feb. 5, 1990
The Gorbachev revolution came home last week. Many of the words and images were familiar from last year's upheavals in Eastern Europe, but the setting was new: at the geographical and political center of the Communist world. This time it was not in Prague, Budapest or Leipzig but in Moscow that citizens thronged the streets with banners that could be loosely translated THROW THE BUMS OUT! This time it was in the Kremlin that the bums themselves seemed to take heed and the custodians of absolute power began the process of giving it up. And this time Mikhail Sergeyevich, the Commissar Liberator, was not somewhere over the horizon, letting it all happen. He was on the podium, making it happen.
In the revolutionary year of 1989, the world grew accustomed to the spectacle of ruling Communists stepping onto the slippery slope of power sharing, with no more enthusiasm than a condemned man mounting a scaffold, but with no more resistance either. However, that was in Eastern Europe, not the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was different: it couldn't happen there.
The conventional wisdom was promulgated by Kremlin and Kremlinologists alike. Yes, Gorbachev had created the conditions for the end of one-party rule in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria by putting the regimes there on notice that they were on their own. But no, he could not, would not and probably should not give up the Communist monopoly in his own country.
The reasoning went like this. Despite his disillusion with "Soviet reality" and his aspirations for "humanitarian socialism," Gorbachev was neither Thomas Jefferson nor Vaclav Havel. He was Yuri Andropov's protege, the Stavropol chieftain who came to the big city and made good. He was still thought to be a devout Communist, a true believer in a creed that is, in its essence, monopolistic: there is one truth about how society should be ordered, and therefore one source of authority.
Then there was the imperial imperative for preserving the party's unchallenged position. While Gorbachev might have been willing to cut loose the U.S.S.R.'s colonies beyond its borders, he was also a Soviet patriot -- and besides, he valued his own skin. Therefore, he was emphatically not willing to let his sprawling, fractious country come apart at the seams and thus give his enemies the excuse they were looking for to cast him onto the dustheap of history.
The party, it was often said (including by one of Gorbachev's closest advisers as recently as November), was the one "all-union" institution that could exert the gravitational pull necessary to counteract the many centrifugal forces. Superimpose a multiparty system on a multinational empire, and soon Moscow would be the capital of a rump state called Russia.