A Burial Certificate for Bolshevism? : A united opposition--long the dream of Soviet reformers

Sixteen months ago the Soviet Communist Party lost its constitutionally guaranteed monopoly on power, for more than seven decades the arbitrary source of its legitimacy. Now the party--weakened by mass defections and internally divided, with its most conservative elements fighting desperate rear-guard actions to delay reforms--faces its most formidable challenge so far.

Many of the Soviet Union’s most prominent opposition figures have joined to launch a new Democratic Reform Movement, dedicated to the “spiritual, economic and political freedom of a person” and to converting citizens “into owners of property and of the products of their labor.” More than just an emerging party’s manifesto, this sounds very much like the intended burial certificate for Bolshevism.

The founders of the movement are a who’s who of the reform effort that has emerged since Mikhail S. Gorbachev first made criticism of communism’s failures possible, if not always officially welcome. Among them: former Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze; former Politburo member--and senior adviser to Gorbachev--Alexander N. Yakovlev; Moscow Mayor Gavriil Popov; Leningrad Mayor Anatoly A. Sobchak; Stanislav S. Shatalin, the free-market economist; Ivan S. Silayev, prime minister of Russia, and Alexander Rutskoi, war hero and vice president of the Russian Republic. And what of the republic’s president, Boris N. Yeltsin? He had said earlier that while president he would join no party. But certainly he’s watching the movement carefully, both because it could provide a strong organizational base for opposition--as distinct from his own largely personal base--and because it could well produce a rival to his own national ambitions.

A united opposition movement has long been a dream among reformers. The dream, though, is only now beginning to emerge. The declaration of the new group appeals for support, specifically, “from the reformist wing of the Communist Party.” But it still has to show it can attract mass backing on a national basis. That may not prove easy, despite the Communist Party’s obvious and disastrous failures. More than 70 years of communist rule has left a Soviet population that is lacking in any experience with political pluralism, a population raised from infancy to fear any degree of private control of the economy. Such an electorate may stop short of rushing to the banner of a party committed to broad private ownership and personal freedoms.

The founding conference of the movement is scheduled for September. By then it’s apparently hoped that grass-roots support will have emerged across the country. Shevardnadze spoke the other day of the need for a “constructive democratic-oriented opposition” that could help build a “well-balanced two-party state.” One of those parties seems sure to be the Communists, discredited and de-legitimized though they may be. Now it has to be shown whether that party’s leading opponents are capable of creating an organization able to supplant it.