ond Gorbachev's Baltic clampdown
Like the imperialist assault on Iraq, with which it was so cynically timed to coincide, the Stalinist assault on the Baltic republics came as no surprise, reports DAVID SHEPHERD. The build-up had been apparent for months - most dramatically brought to the world's attention by the resignation of the Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze before Christmas ('My protest against the offensive of dictatorship").
What are the implications of the military action in the Baltic for the future of President Gorbachev and his attempts at reform, for Soviet foreign policy and for the the Soviet Union itself? Are we witnessing the beginnings of a process of reaction which will retum the USSR to a form of pre-glasnost Stalinist rule? Will an authoritarian-stalinist halt be called to developments towards a market economy? Have the obituaries of the cold war been written prematurely? Mikhail Sergeevich Bonaparte
President Gorbachev's direct and personal responsibility for the moves towards an authoritarian-military response to the rebellion of the oppressed nations of the USSR should not be doubted for a moment. Consider the evidence.
From at least the latter half of last year Gorbachev has been putting a passionate -and increasingly desperate - defence of a 'unified national state" clearly to the fore as his number one domestic priority. Increasingly, in policy decisions as well as in speeches, his furious battle to preserve the union at all costs has put all other questions in the shade.
In mid-December he denounced arrant, extremist nationalism' as the most serious danger facing the country. And his New Year television address repeated the message: 'For us ... there is no more sacred task than to preserve and renew the union.*
This overriding priority has dictated an extremely significant political recomposition at the top of the Soviet regime. Gorbachev tumed decisively towards those elements in SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 30. February 1991
FEATURES the ruling burcaucracy still committed to a unitary state: the Communist Party, the military establishment Russian troops in Vilnius and the KGB. A haemorrhaging of the more reformist elements from positions of influence began last year and has accelerated since.
In the past Gorbachev has balanced between the different interest groups and fac tions within the ruling bureaucracy, reassuring the conservatives at one point, only to come back with bold reform proposals at another. But what has happened over the past months has been something much more profound.
In turing in particular to the military establishment in order to defend the union, Gorbachev has turned to a section of the bureaucracy which is least interested in reform, which is interested above all in defence of its own sectional interests.
In late November the minister of defence Marshal Yazov, 'on a commission from the president of the USSR', appeared on TV to denounce moves by some republics to set up armed units and to circumscribe conscription to the Soviet army. In mid-December the head of the KGB, Vladimir Kryuchkov, appeared on TV at Gorbachev's request to serve notice that his organisation would use all the powers at its disposal to preserve the union.
The removal of the reform-minded liberal Vadim Bakatin from the post of minister of the interior was a further clear signal of the direction of the recomposition in the Soviet leadership. In January his successor was announced: ex-KGB official and former Latvian party hardliner Boris Pugo. The position of second-in-command at the interior ministry (which has at its disposal 700,000 police, 340,000 special troops and 30,000 elite riot cops) was given to the conservative soldier Boris Gromov, former commander of Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
Running in parallel to these, and other, political and personnel changes were the con-
tinuing efforts at increasing the already vast constitutional powers of the president himself, efforts which were successful at the fourth Congress of People's Deputies in December.
The resignation of Shevardnadze at the fourth Congress pointed up another aspect of the political recomposition: the extent of the divisions between sections of the ruling establishment which had hitherto been loyal to Gorbachev's reforms, on the one hand, and the military establishment on the other.
Shevardnadze's warnings about military dictatorship were widely publicised in the west, but his worries that the military establishment had actively (and without his knowledge) undermined and put at risk the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) agreement revealed something equally significant: the turn by the military towards increasingly open involvement in the political scene in defence of its own interests.
This tum has been not only tolerated (or appeased) but actually encouraged by Gorbachev in his efforts to preserve the union.
As early as November, preparatory measures for a crackdown were being made by Gorbachev in relation to the mass media. He appointed the conservative Leonid Kravchenko as head of state TV and radio. The president's calls for "objectivity" (read censorship) in the media in the aftermath of the action in the Baltic were merely a continuation of this process.
In a spectacle reminiscent of the darkest days of Stalinism, the official media built up to a crescendo of hysterical lies during the military action. (Interestingly, western journalists reported an enthusiasm on the part of the foreign ministry to get them into the Baltie region to report what was really going on -a further sign of the deep divisions within the ruling establishment.)
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On the final decision to send the army into Vilnius, there can again be little doubt about who was responsible: the general command and the political leadership in Moscow. The army went in on 7 January to 'enforce conscription". The next day they had gone into action, placing the press building 'under protection" amid talk about how Lithuania's elected govemment was attempting to restore a bourgeois state' - the very least one could say is that this was a rather strange way to en- force conscription'. The "bloody massacre on Sunday" 13 January was, regardless of who gave the final orders to open fire, a logical conse- quence of the entire trajectory of the Soviet leadership under Gor- bachev over the past year. Glasnost hangs in the balance The future of glasnost hangs in the balance. The principal architect of the policy has begun to dig its grave. But it would be wrong to conclude that a neandertha! to relum Stalinism at home and the cold war abroad will be the automatic outcome of the process now under way. In relation to foreign policy the overriding concem continues to be the maintenance of an interational environ- ment conducive to the solving of domestic problems. This is even more the case given the recent escalation of the domestic crisis. In this sense it would not be particularly brave to predict business as usual on the international front, with one qualification. The qualification relates to the increasing influence of the military establishment over policy, which may well have some effects. Already senior military voices have ques- tioned the arrangements for the withdrawal of Soviet forces from easter Germany, for ex- ample, and Shevardnadze's departure was in part the result of battles between the military and the foreign ministry. But a retum to the approach of the Brezhnev era on foreign policy looks extremely unlikely. On the Gulf, in spite of criticisms from some military figures, Soviet complicity in the imperialist assault has already been bought and paid for in hard currency - $4bn of hard currency to be precise, paid in loans and aid by the oil-rich Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia in retum for the USSR's back- ing of the key UN Security Council resolution on the use of force (Both sides expressed satisfaction at business concluded' - Finan- cial Times). Page 24
FEATURES
The appointment of the liberal career diplomat Alexander Bessmertnykh Shevardnadze's replacement at the foreign ministry on 15 January (two days after bloody Sunday in Vilnius) was clearly a move designed to demonstrate to the west the continuity of foreign policy. He has spent 11 years in Washington and is regarded by the US administration as a loyal follower of Shevardnadze. Further moves to reassure the KGB HANDS OFF VILNIUS DISTRICT! US and imperialist world opinion generally that the USSR can be a reliable ally (at the right price, of course) can be expected.
In relation to the possible course of developments within the USSR, it is necessary to look beyond immediate appearances to the basic processes and fundamental forces at work. It is undoubtedly the case that sections of pro-market reformers have abandoned Gorbachev in the wake of his tum to the authoritarian right - but that is not the whole story.
It would be a mistake to assume that the political divisions are only, or even fundamentally, between democratic promarketeers on the one hand and authoritarian pro-central planners on the other, and that Gorbachev has lined up behind the latter group-
The forces demanding order have not only been the military and backward-looking ap paratchiks: some pro-market reformers, such as Anatoly Sobchak, have long been calling for 'poryadok" (order imposed by a strong state) in order to enforce reforms against the resistance of apparatchiks and workers.
The depth of the economic crisis is such that no simple return to the old command methods is either possible or credible in the medium to long term. There is an increasing
recognition of this among all sections of the bureaucracy. In this context it is, at the very least, pos sible that an attempt could be made made to drive ahead forcibly with moves towards marketisation, and even full-scale capitalist restoration, in the context of political "poryadok", whatever the short-term retreats Gorbachev has been forced to make while concentrating on reimposing order on the rebellious republics. In an editorial last December, the Economist commented It might ... be the Soviet Union's tur for what could be [former called the Chilean dictator] Pinochet approach to liberal economics'. That journal, at least, appears to be under no illusions that the introduction of capitalism must automati- cally be associated with political liberalism or democracy. Such a con- nection exists only in the heads of woolly-minded liberals. In fact it would be more accurate to say that in the Soviet Union today the maintenance and ex- tension of democratic freedoms and decisive moves towards a market economy are mutually ex- clusive options. But to carry through perestroika at the ex- pense of glasnost, Gorbachev would face two major problems. First, the forces with which he is in alliance in the process of restoring 'order" are not in general those who are keenest for market-oriented reforms and, by the same token, some of those most en- thusiastic about the market have democratic scruples about the turn to authoritarianism. This could, however, change. It is interest- ing for example that Valentin Pavolv, con- firmed as prime minister on 14 January and widely held to be a conservative, said that he saw his main task as 'smoothing the transition to market relations. The second, and much more intractable problem he would face is that the order"-res toring process itself is far from over. The at- tempt has only just begun: and it appears to have faltered at the first step. The extent and depth of opposition to the attempted crackdown in the Baltic, both in the republics themselves and, crucially, in the Soviet Union as a whole, clearly took Gor- bachev by surprise. After over five years of glasnost, the Soviet people are not going to give up their new-found political freedoms without a tremendous struggle. SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 30. February 1991
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