Cover Stories Fighting The Founders

By Strobe Talbott

Of all the conceits of Communism, none is more pervasive, and none more dubious, than its claim to serve the interests and fulfill the aspirations of the people. Marxist states are given to calling themselves "people's republics." The largest represents 1.1 billion men, women and children, nearly a fifth of humanity. The Chinese are supposed to read the People's Daily, entrust their security to the People's Liberation Army and obey laws passed by the National People's Congress, which convenes in the Great Hall of the People, situated, as it happens, on Tiananmen Square.

But something quite extraordinary is happening. The people who live under Communism are rising up and asserting themselves against the party. In China they have done so in defiance of their rulers. In the Soviet Union they are doing so with the help of their leader. While his Chinese counterparts were intriguing against one another last week, Mikhail Gorbachev officiated at the opening of a new government body called the Congress of People's Deputies. For once the name was not entirely a mockery of the political reality.

For these two events to be occurring at the same time was remarkable but not coincidental. The interaction between what has been happening in Beijing and Moscow may lead future historians to look back on May 1989 as the most momentous month in the second half of the 20th century. Forces of epochal transformation are bubbling up from below in China, while they are being marshaled from above in the Soviet Union. But in both cases these changes are driven by a recognition that Communism has failed its subjects, the people, and that the only solution is far-reaching reform of the entire system. In China it is the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square who personify that realization. In the Soviet Union it is Gorbachev himself.

No less an authority than Karl Marx asserted that the political order of a country derives from the economic relations among its citizens (although Adam Smith had figured out the same thing in the previous century). The leaders of the Russian and Chinese revolutions imposed on the people a totalitarian form of the social compact: You give up your freedom, and we'll make sure you live decently. Bread was one of the most common words on the banners that the workers carried through the streets of Petrograd in 1917, and the promise of food was an important theme in the propaganda of the Communists as they swept to victory in China in 1949. The police state would also be a welfare state. For 71 years in the Soviet Union and for 40 years in China, the state has failed to deliver on its end of the bargain. It has provided plenty of police but not much welfare.

At first, the leader of the Great Counterrevolution was Deng Xiaoping. He dismantled the vastly inefficient system of communes. Farms were turned over to families. The results were almost immediate -- and impressive. Grain output increased 44% over eight years. Soviet economists looked to China with envy and emulation. Kulaks -- rich peasants -- came back into fashion.

Deng clinched his reputation as a reformer with a witty aphorism dismissing the value of ideology: "It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice." Catching mice meant putting food on the table -- meeting the material needs of the people. The color of the cat meant the degree to which the economy relies on private incentive and market forces rather than subsidies and quotas -- Adam Smith's recommended mechanisms rather than Karl Marx's.

Revolutionary true believers used to call Deng a "capitalist roader." They were right in their accusation, but he was right in his perception that the Communist road was a dead end.

But while Deng subordinated ideology to the goal of "modernization," he did not downgrade the role or diffuse the power of the Communist Party. Quite the contrary; he has remained an absolutist in defense of the institution that Marx and Engels aptly called the "dictatorship of the proletariat." Farmers could work their own plots and profit from the sale of their produce at market, but under Deng, the People's Daily remained very much an organ of instruction rather than information, to say nothing of debate. The doors of the Great Hall of the People were shut, figuratively and often literally as well, to the people themselves. Deng thought that China could have a closed Communist Party that would preside over an open economy.

He was wrong. In all Communist societies, the principal purpose of the party -- and the only thing it does well -- has always been the preservation and enforcement of its own power. But that naked truth has traditionally been disguised with Marxist economics and ideology. To the extent that he de- Communized the economy and discredited ideology, Deng diminished the party's claim to legitimacy. He left the party all the more vulnerable to the flood of discontent that has so stunned the world in recent days. An improvement in living standards is not enough to meet the needs of the people. As a student banner in Tiananmen Square put it, WE LOVE RICE, BUT WE LOVE DEMOCRACY MORE.

Deng also made himself vulnerable to the supreme, and probably final, irony of his roller-coaster career. He carefully, patiently, skillfully set the scene for Gorbachev to visit China two weeks ago. The Soviet leader was coming on Deng's terms to end the 30-year schism between the Communist giants. Yet not only was this diplomatic triumph overshadowed by the more spectacular events in Tiananmen Square, but the demonstrators there carried banners in Russian demanding glasnost and saying IN THE SOVIET UNION THEY HAVE GORBACHEV. IN CHINA, WE HAVE WHOM?

Gorbachev has not always been a champion of the kind of people power on display in Tiananmen Square. Early in his tenure as General Secretary, his understanding of democracy was closer to Deng's concept of limited managerial and entrepreneurial liberalization. However, the Soviet leader grew to realize that as long as the Communist Party maintains its grip on all aspects of society, significant reform is nearly impossible. The party is too conservative, too resistant to change. At the time of the 1917 Revolution, the party was the agent of cataclysmic change -- but on behalf of a conspiratorial elite, not, as it claimed, on behalf of the people. Over the decades, the self-professed vanguard of the proletariat became adept at fighting rearguard actions against innovation.

In a word used by a number of his own advisers, Gorbachev was "radicalized" by the experience of trying to improve the system. The result, two months ago, was a genuine choice for voters in the election to the new Congress of People's Deputies. Numerous standard-bearers of the old order were defeated, including some who ran unopposed (they gathered too few votes to qualify for election). A prominent Soviet historian, Leonid Batkin, asserts that "the Communist Party lost as an institution. Communists won not because they were Communists but despite being Communists." The insurgents suffered a setback in last week's election of a new parliament, or Supreme Soviet, but Gorbachev still intends that body, over time, to serve as a counterweight to the party. He is pulling off an amazing, perhaps unprecedented, feat in the history of statesmanship: he is simultaneously the leader of the entrenched power structure and the leader of the opposition.

Gorbachev also has the satisfaction of knowing that he has re-established the pre-eminence of the top man in the Kremlin as the leader of world Communism -- but with a twist. He is now the leader of the Communist reformation. It is as though Martin Luther had returned in triumph to Rome to be installed as Pope.

Deng Xiaoping's predecessor Mao Zedong split with Gorbachev's predecessor Nikita Khrushchev partly on the grounds that Khrushchev was a "revisionist." Gorbachev has gone a long way toward healing the rift, but not by returning to orthodoxy. He has carried revisionism to a level unimagined by either Mao or Khrushchev, and as a result his picture and slogans are on the posters of Chinese demonstrators.

The tumult in China can be used by both sides in the debate taking place in the Soviet Union. Reformers can draw the lesson that perestroika must be accompanied by glasnost and demokratizatsiya or sooner or later the people will take to the streets. The conservatives can argue that glasnost and demokratizatsiya unleash anarchy and are a threat to the powers that be, notably including the General Secretary of the party.

Despite its current troubles, China has an immense advantage over the Soviet Union, and it gives Chinese reformers an immense advantage over their Soviet counterparts. There really is a Chinese people; 94% belong to one ethnic group, Han Chinese. By contrast, Russians make up only 51% of the population of the U.S.S.R.; they are one of more than 100 ethnic groups. Those non- Russian nationalities -- in the Caucasus, in Central Asia, along the Baltic, in the Ukraine -- are already straining at the ties that bind them to Moscow.

There has been a patriotic fervor to the demonstrations in Beijing. The protesters sang the national anthem and saluted the country's flag. It is all but impossible to imagine something similar happening if Latvians took over the main square in Riga or Ukrainians mobbed downtown Kiev. They would be singing songs and waving flags that would symbolize their dreams of independence and their resentment of Russian domination. Gorbachev's picture might be on their posters too. However, that would be because the demonstrators would see him as not just a reformer but a liberator. That is one role that Mikhail Gorbachev does not want, since it could make him the protagonist in a tragedy. If glasnost and democratizatsiya seem to be tearing the Soviet Union apart, Gorbachev may be in the position of having either to order a crackdown himself or to yield to a successor who would do so. He, like Deng, may yet discover that starting a counterrevolution is far easier than determining where it leads.