No Role Models for Soviet Transition : Reform: Those who disparage Gorbachev and celebrate Yeltsin neglect history. What the Soviets need is a triple transformation.

As Mikhail Gorbachev’s domestic popularity continues to shrink, his authority in the West has also diminished from the peak it reached in 1989. Yet experienced politicians in Washington--from the President and secretary of state downward--and in the major capitals of Western Europe have been slower to embrace Boris Yeltsin and the Soviet opposition than have many Western correspondents in Moscow.

That is partly because they are less affected by the mood of the moment than those in closer touch with Soviet intellectuals and the disgruntled ordinary people standing in Moscow lines. It is also because politicians have to deal with the powers that be, rather than with those whom they might wish to see in office. But it is surely based, too, on their fellow-feeling for any politician faced by the range of horrendous problems and dilemmas confronting Gorbachev.

Their sympathy is the stronger because they recall not only that Gorbachev has pursued the most constructive foreign policy of any Soviet leader since 1917, but that he has done more than anyone to undermine the foundations of the old political system in the Soviet Union. It is still worth remembering--although highly unfashionable to do so in Moscow--that without Gorbachev’s attempt to radically reconstruct the Soviet system, Yeltsin would almost certainly still be a little-known Communist Party apparatchik in Sverdlovsk.

Gorbachev, not Yeltsin, was the initiator of radical political and economic reform. Yeltsin’s originality lies in his having been the first Soviet politician to make a comeback, thanks to popular support after he had been ousted from the Communist Party hierarchy. In terms of his current hold on public opinion, he may be considered the most successful populist in post-revolutionary Russian history, but he has been able to achieve this by making use of the political space opened up by Gorbachev’s reforms.

Yeltsin has also benefited from Gorbachev’s mistakes. That is not, however, to say that Yeltsin or anyone else could have done better. With the Soviet Union in crisis today as the Georgians become the latest nationality to vote for independent statehood, as the patience of the people as a whole is being tested by drastic price rises and as miners and other workers turn to strikes and street demonstrations as a means of changing the leadership and transforming the system, it is time to ask what this “direct democracy” is likely to achieve.

No populist politician can admit that he does not have solutions to the people’s problems. But a serious analysis of what is happening in the Soviet Union should begin with recognition that of all the attempted transitions from authoritarianism to democracy launched over the past two decades (whether in southern Europe or Latin America) or even in the last two years (in Eastern and Central Europe) the Soviet case is the most dauntingly difficult--different in kind as well as in scale from the others.

The most basic point is that the Soviet system needs a triple transformation . The first required transformation is one which the Soviet Union shares with other communist and post-communist systems--namely the move from a command economy with almost 100% public or state ownership to a market economy with a substantial private sector. Even in this instance, several other communist countries--including Yugoslavia, Hungary, China and Poland (with its private agriculture)--were well ahead of the Soviet Union in modifying that system before the great transformations of most recent years got under way.

A second required transformation is that of the political system--from the institutions and norms of an authoritarian state to those supportive of democracy, such as competitive elections, freedom of group organization, the establishment of representative assemblies in which critical voices can be raised and pluralism in the mass media.

Although the kinds of authoritarian regimes have varied, even among communist states (not to speak of the difference between them and non-communist authoritarian regimes), the need for this transformation has been common to all the attempted systemic transitions, whether in Eastern or Southern Europe or Latin America. In the Soviet Union it has made far greater progress than the transformation of the economic system, although for the time being this is a mixed political system in which the old and the new--authoritarianism and pluralism--still struggle.

It is a combination of the first two requirements with the need for a third transformation that, however, distinguishes the Soviet from every other political transition. I have in mind the transformation of relations between the Soviet republics and between ethnic groups, in a country with more than 100 different nationalities. In this area solutions are even less clear-cut than in the other two. It is not enough to support independence for the republics or national self-determination in every case, for the one can conflict with the other. One nation’s independent statehood can become a minority nationality’s perceived oppression, as the current example of Georgia and its Abkhazian and Ossetian minorities illustrates clearly.

There are no panaceas for a democratic transition in the Soviet Union or, for that matter, for its peaceful dissolution along the oft-quoted lines (not that it is a very apt analogy) of the change from British Empire to commonwealth. It may be too much to expect the long-suffering Soviet people to look at the developments of recent years in a broader historical perspective, but it is not unreasonable to expect Western commentators--reflecting on the long, painful and, as yet, incomplete struggle to extend full citizenship rights to all their people--to exercise a little humility when they ponder Gorbachev’s six years as Soviet leader.