America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

The Baltic republics, it is often said, are the "laboratory" of Mikhail Gorbachev's experiment in liberalization. The metaphor captures the exhilaration and ominousness of what is happening, both there in the Baltics and throughout the U.S.S.R. Glasnost, elections and free-market economics will help save the Soviet system from itself, or the mixture will explode.

The citizens of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania love to watch grainy black- and-white documentary films of what it was like 50 years ago, before their lands were seized by Stalin, invaded by Hitler, then colonized by the Kremlin. They remember themselves as having been self-reliant yet outward looking. These are among the virtues that Gorbachev is now preaching for the Soviet Union as a whole. He is a Westernizer, in the tradition of an enlightened but ultimately frustrated school of 19th century Russian reformers. The Baltics are already the most Westernized of the 15 Soviet republics, and they are eager to become more so.

The Soviet economy, all but bankrupt when Gorbachev came into office nearly five years ago, has actually deteriorated. He is beginning to get the blame. He desperately needs to show that perestroika is working somewhere, and the Baltics may be the best chance he has.

Yet the three republics are also the cause of Gorbachev's greatest anxiety. Thanks to his policies of decentralization and democratization, the powers that be in the Baltics are looking less nervously toward Moscow, but they are also listening far more attentively to their own people.

Increasingly, Baltic leaders are hearing demands for "national rights." For some proponents the phrase means full sovereignty, now. For others it means autonomy within a radically more lenient U.S.S.R. Estonian officials are busily planning to introduce their own currency, airline and diplomatic missions abroad. The so-called popular fronts, with their platforms calling for regional self-determination, are well on their way to taking over the power structure. The secessionists and the federalists disagree about tactics and timetable, but not about the dream of independence.

No wonder there is fear and anger in Moscow, particularly among Gorbachevites. They believe no Kremlin leader can afford to give up Soviet power, not to mention Soviet territory. Many American officials share this concern, although they must be careful about saying so. In a conceit of diplomatic formalism that until recently seemed quaint and futile, the U.S. Government has never recognized the legality of the Baltic annexation. Support for human and civil rights is, or is certainly supposed to be, a constant of American foreign policy.

But now there is a new factor: George Bush is a Gorbachevite himself. He doesn't put it that way, nor does he like others to do so. But the fact remains that for the first time in 72 years, the U.S. has a stake in the survival and success of a particular Soviet leader. Bush does not want to see the Baltic laboratory blow up any more than do the people who live there. Therefore, the American President is plugging not just for the citizens of those tragic republics trapped by history within the Soviet Union, but also for the extraordinary scientist mixing his dangerous chemicals in the Kremlin.