America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

Mikhail Gorbachev specializes in the politics of the impossible. Even his job description -- to preside over a country that is falling apart -- is a contradiction in terms: . He may be the most widely disliked figure in the Soviet Union, yet he is convinced that he alone can avert outright warfare among tribes and factions that hate one another even more than they hate him.

Traditionally, politicians build coalitions of supporters. Gorbachev has done the opposite. He has managed to make a peculiar virtue out of having detractors on all sides.

Reactionaries will never forgive him for his earlier policies, while democrats feel betrayed and threatened by his current ones. Nationalists see him as thwarting their drive for independence, while imperialists blame him for tolerating the very idea of secession.

So far he has been able to play these complaints off each other and position himself in the middle as the conductor of a discordant choir. What he has done that infuriates the left also makes him tolerable to the right, albeit just barely. And vice versa. Remove him from the equation, and the result could be a cataclysmic struggle between forces that are intolerable to each other.

Boris Yeltsin has supplanted Gorbachev as the Soviet politician who seems most committed to following through on reform. Unlike Gorbachev, Yeltsin has openly broken with the Communist Party, and he wants to legalize private property and introduce a real free market. His vision for the future -- independence for some republics, a loose confederation for the rest -- is, in the long run, probably more realistic than Gorbachev's. But in the near term it tempts disaster in the form of a much more serious backlash than what has already occurred. While Yeltsin's boldness resonates with the impatience of much of the populace, it also terrifies, antagonizes and provokes the reactionaries. Yeltsin has people power, but his enemies have the power that comes from the barrel of a gun.

No doubt largely because Yeltsin is so popular, Gorbachev detests him, and Yeltsin heartily reciprocates the sentiment. They are trying to vanquish each other with public denunciations, parliamentary maneuvers, resolutions on ballots and demonstrations in the streets. But vicious as their rivalry is, it is nothing compared with the way politics used to be in the Soviet Union -- and might be again if the advocates of a return to repression were to prevail.

Bloody Sunday, Jan. 13, when Soviet soldiers killed unarmed civilians in Lithuania, is often cited as proof that Gorbachev has already thrown in with the ultraconservatives. Actually, in the aftermath of the massacre, he showed his determination to preserve an equilibrium between right and left, between centrifugal and centripetal forces. If the hard-liners had really had their way in Vilnius, the night of horror would have stretched into a week, a month, perhaps a new era. Vytautas Landsbergis would now be dead, in jail or, if he were extremely lucky, back to teaching music. Instead he remains President of Lithuania.

The Baltic affair is a reminder that the outside world has an unusual claim on the man in the Kremlin and hence some limited influence on the policies that emanate from there. Especially now that Gorbachev has alienated or disillusioned his constituencies at home, he is desperate to preserve the ones he has built abroad. He was aghast when his pals George Bush, Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand warned that the violence in Vilnius jeopardized not only Western economic assistance to perestroika but also Gorbachev's personal standing in the club of world leaders.

In the midst of that uproar, Gorbachev had to replace Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, who anticipated the use of force against nationalists and resigned in pre-emptive protest. The resurgent Old Guard's choice for the post was the Politburo ideologist, Alexander Dzasokhov; on the eve of Bloody Sunday he had the inside track. But at the last minute, to reassure the international community, Gorbachev picked instead a Shevardnadze protege, the smooth, English-speaking ambassador to Washington, Alexander Bessmertnykh.

Of course, if Gorbachev had heeded Shevardnadze in the first place, there might never have been a massacre in Vilnius or a vacancy at the Foreign Ministry. Still, Gorbachev did call off the tanks, leaving Landsbergis' government in the Lithuanian parliament and Soviet troops around the republic's main TV station several blocks away -- a standoff that captures in microcosm the state of the U.S.S.R. as a whole. And in Bessmertnykh, the Soviet Union has ended up with a Foreign Minister who is a comedown from Shevardnadze but a considerable improvement on Dzasokhov.

Thus the outcome of the latest crisis has been worse than anyone would have liked but better than many had feared. That seems to be the appropriate judgment about the U.S.S.R. these days. The blame and credit due Gorbachev are, like so many contradictory elements over which he presides, in a rough, precarious balance.