(3 of 4)
Such a free-for-all may now be only a gleam in the eyes of the Yeltsinite radicals. Serious competition for the Communists is still probably a long way off. (Of course, the way events move these days, that could mean several months.) But the principle of real democracy has been established; Gorbachev has dragged his comrades, many of them kicking and screaming, across a Rubicon.
In a sense he is merely broadening his experimentation with free markets. The party is to politics what Gosplan, the state central planning agency, is to the economy. For some time enterprising Georgians have been allowed to fly to Moscow in the dead of winter to sell their flowers at whatever prices they can get in the underground stations of the Metro. Latter-day kulaks sell in private stalls the vegetables they raise on private plots. Taxi drivers, restaurateurs and publishers are making money in microenclaves of capitalism called cooperatives. Even the state has got in on the act, auctioning off foreign currencies for rubles to the highest bidders. But in all these cases the invisible hand of laissez-faire has been at work only at the margins of economic life.
That is just the point -- reform has been marginal -- and it explains Gorbachev's latest, boldest move. Next month will be the fifth anniversary of his ascension. By Soviet reckoning it is the end of Gorbachev's personal first five-year plan. It is therefore a time of judgment. The judgment is harsh. The lot of the Soviet consumer is not just stagnating but deteriorating. Efficiency, incentive, initiative, competitiveness, productivity, quality, pride, "self-accountability" -- these new buzz words are beginning to sound as hollow as the old slogans about the glory of socialist labor.
What might be called Perestroika I has failed. The main reason: despite the ministrations and exhortations of its reformist rulers, the Soviet Union still has a command economy and a totalitarian political system. Managers instinctively wait for orders from above; regional leaders still look to Moscow; and everyone looks to the party, to that body that met and argued and finally bent to Gorbachev's will in Moscow last week: the Central Committee. The very word center has connotations in Russian with which Gorbachev is doing battle as he prepares for his next five years, for Perestroika II.
Decentralization may be the order of the day, but centralization has been a fact of life for decades. Old habits and old fears die hard, especially when the Communist Party is there to keep them alive. That is why Gorbachev and his principal advisers have concluded that further reform and the continued existence of an all-powerful party are incompatible. Modernization requires the devolution of central power; the party, by its irredeemable nature, resists that devolution. Gorbachev has decided that the party is an obstacle to Perestroika II. Something had to give, and it gave last week.