What If the Soviet Union Collapses?

By DAVID AIKMAN

The year is 1992. Gorbachev has been overthrown, and the Soviet empire has fallen apart. The Russian heartland is ruled by an ultra-nationalist military dictatorship, the Baltic republics by Catholic radicals, and Central Asia by fundamentalist emirates. Tanks patrol the streets of Moscow, and throughout the country a fearful, starving populace wreaks revenge on former Communist Party members, Jews and intellectuals.

A sneak preview of the latest Tom Clancy effulgence? Hardly. This frightening scenario of Soviet collapse, titled Nevozraschenets (The Non- Returnee), was published last June in Iskusstvo Kino, the official journal of the Soviet movie industry. Its appearance reflects a mood of unprecedented pessimism and self-doubt, in which intellectuals and political figures have been speculating somberly about the catastrophes that could befall the Soviet Union if perestroika falls apart. Last September, for example, political oppositionist Boris Yeltsin, a former Moscow party boss, repeatedly warned of an impending disaster. "We are on the edge of an abyss," Yeltsin told a rapt audience at New York's Council on Foreign Relations. Yeltsin gave Gorbachev until next fall to produce results. Others have warned of an actual civil war by then.

The ramifications of this possibility are so serious that they ought to worry the West more than they do. Would a complete Soviet collapse, after all, be a good or a bad thing?

Evidence hinting at such an eventuality is widespread. Economically, the country is barely functional. At least 43 million Soviets live below the official poverty level of 75 rubles a month ($1,500 annually) and some regions of the country have resorted to widespread rationing of even the most essential goods.

Riding atop the economic woes is the horseman of ethnic anarchy amid the 15 national republics that constitute the Soviet Union. Armenia and Azerbaijan are nearly at war with each other, Moldavia has been crippled by ethnically inspired strikes, Georgians are demanding an end to the "Soviet empire," and in Lithuania the Communist Party has abolished its own monopoly of power, the most striking sign of Baltic nationalism to date.

Such radicalism would not be possible without Gorbachev's glasnost. But the new openness in the Soviet media has also exposed irrational superstitions reminiscent of the last days of Czar Nicholas II. The TASS news agency reports with a straight face that aliens stepped out of UFOs in Voronezh. On TV, psychic healers appear frequently with supposed cures for everything from obesity to detached retinas. As in all periods of great stress, the Christian churches in Russia have seldom been fuller.

The Soviet Union has formidable reserves of resiliency, as it showed during the crisis of Hitler's invasion. But what if the dark forebodings of a Soviet screenwriter came true?

A Soviet national catastrophe might take either of two forms: a "revolution from below" or a coup from the right. A hint of the first surfaced last summer, when half a million Soviet miners went on strike. The miners not only won all of their basic demands, but set up strike committees that became for a while the headquarters of local political power. Yeltsin himself has called those committees "the embryos of real people's power." If a new wave of strikes rolled across the Soviet Union, the nationwide momentum from below for political change might prove unstoppable.

Last week's narrow defeat of a Supreme Soviet motion to debate an end to one-party rule showed just how tenuous the authority of the Soviet Communist Party now is. Striking workers might bring about not only a collapse of power in Moscow but the snapping of links to the outlying republics. A wave of secessionism might then follow, with the probability of murderous ethnic strife in its wake.

The second scenario of Soviet catastrophe is a coup from the Soviet "right" engineered by the army, perhaps in conjunction with the KGB. Though many top Soviets -- including Yeltsin -- dismiss this scenario, Central Committee members voiced fears of a coup to Marshall Goldman, a leading American Sovietologist, last summer. The coup menace is exacerbated by the growing strength of Russian ultra-nationalist organizations. Extremist groups like Pamyat have targeted Jews (a paranoid Jewish-Masonic conspiracy theory), "intellectuals" and "Russophobes" as scapegoats for national decline. The nationalists are at heart anti-Communist, but their appeal overlaps with a growing blue-collar nostalgia for the despotic simplicities of the Stalinist era.

A total collapse of the Soviet Union might create almost as many global problems as it solved. Regional despotisms like Fidel Castro's Cuba or Najibullah's Afghanistan would probably wither quickly, as might many Third World Communist insurgencies. The U.S. economy would benefit handsomely from vastly reduced defense expenditures. But the blessings of a Soviet collapse would certainly be mixed. Just as the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I led to Hitler's brutal exploitation of the resulting power vacuum, so the end of the Pax Sovietica in Eurasia might touch off an ethnic bloodbath among the squabbling successor regimes. For University of Alabama historian Hugh Ragsdale, a Soviet collapse would lead to a disastrous "Balkanization" of Eurasia and the emergence of "dozens of Khomeinis . . . skulking incognito among the Sufis and dervishes of the region." The disappearance of Soviet influence would probably also hasten the emergence of a united German superstate intimidating to both its Eastern and Western neighbors.

Gorbachev's own vision remains that of a Soviet Union that is sufficiently open to be honest about its problems but sufficiently centralized to remain a powerful Leninist state. The trouble is, how many other Soviet citizens share it? The glasnost he unleashed has turned into a dangerous tiger for 280 million people to ride. If Gorbachev offers no realistic alternative to continued Leninism, he may be forced to try caging it once more -- which he probably will -- or to face the dissolution of the "socialist sixth of the earth."