Gorbachev and the right - Mikhail Gorbachev - editorial

THE BLURT BY Secretary of Defense Cheney reminds us once again of the tensions between diplomacy and analysis. He was asked whether he thought the reforms of Mr. Gorbachev would take, to which he answered, No, I do not think they will. He was then asked whether that would mean an end to Mr. Gorbachev's reign, and he answered, Yes, I think it will. To which stretch of cool analysis the White House responded with feverish dissociations. If Lyndon Johnson had been President, Cheney would have been fired or otherwise humiliated. Mr. Bush is a calmer and more philosophical man, but the incident calls to mind a theme running through the mills of journalistic criticism.

It is that longtime anti-Communists do not wish Gorbachev to succeed. Martin Schram, a commentator for CNN, has it all figured out. The longtime anti-Communists-he mentioned specifically Jeane Kirkpatrick and Patrick Buchanan-can't wait for Gorbachev to fail so that they can get back to the only kind of foreign policy they truly enjoy: hating the Soviet Union.

Now Jeane Kirkpatrick is my sister, and Pat Buchanan my brother, and if I have ever differed from their foreign-policy analyses it can only have been in a moment of aberration. Accordingly I relay my thinking on the point of Gorbachev, confident that it is no different ftom their own. It is this: The objective chances of Gorbachev's accomplishing what he ostensibly wishes to accomplish (peace and prosperity) are slight.

Why should this surprise anyone? For seventy years the Soviet productive plant has been emasculated by the superordination of political decisions over economic decisions. When Comrade Ulanov is placed in charge of a shoe factory because he is a ranking member of the local Communist Party, not because he has carned his way up the commercial hierarchy, Soviet shoe production is off to a bad start. When Comrade Ulanov is then told how many people he must employ, irrespective of whether he needs that many people, or can do with that few people, Soviet shoe production gets hit again. And then the order goes out, issuing from some alien ministry in Moscow, that the shoes are to sell for 17 rubles. Comrade Ulanov is in despair trying to square all those circles.

Now Mr. Gorbachev hasn't repeated these accretions of state socialism. To do so would pit him against every Comrade Ulanov who clings to his position of authority. Besides which, the market needs a little time to extrude three generations of compacted sclerosis, and even if Adam Smith were in charge of the Soviet Union beginning tomorrow, we could not expect a trebling in tbe shoe production of the country for, well, a while. It is true that agricultural production in China was trebled, but that was a relatively easy operation: taking an acre of land, turning to the farmer, and saying: Anything you grow on it you can sell for whatever price you can fetch for it. Industrial production doesn't work on tiny little individually owned acres.

And then there is the matter of the soul of the Soviet Union (absolutely distinct from the soul of Russia). It is one thing to criticize, as Gorbachev has done, the excesses of his predecessors. But the line of criticism stops abruptly at Lenin's tomb. Without Lenin, there is simply no justification for seventy years of Soviet life. Imagine a reformist Pope who questions the authenticity of the Bible, and you have some idea of the philosophical and indeed spiritual problems that Gorbachev faces. He cannot deny the credenda of the Soviet state without denying at the same time his own legitimacy.

Now all of the above is generous to Gorbachev, as we cold-warriors tend to be, to a point perhaps a little unguarded. It assumes, for instance, that Gorbachev wants the free market notwithstanding his reiterated professions of faith in socialism. It assumes that he has no further interest in expansionism notwithstanding his continuing subsidies to, well, Fidel Castro. We are currently engaged in selling our wheat to the Soviet Union at a discount, which will make it possible for the Soviet Union to continue to send dollar-value supplies to Cuba, which can continue to subsidize revolution in Central America. In other words, it is entirely possible that Gorbachev, while acting in response to hard realistic pressures, is doing so against his own will. It is entirely possible that he wishes to reenergize the Soviet Union the better to pursue his cold war against humanity.

There now, isn't that a reasonable reading of history, as of the mind of the realists? I belong to only one political committee, into which ] was inducted in Hawaii many years ago. It is called tbe Pearl Harbor Committee to Keep One's Eyes on the Russian Fleet. That's all we're doing.

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