GORBACHEV MUST MAKE A CLEAN BREAK WITH HIS ERSTWHILE ALLIES BEFORE HE WARRANTS WESTERN SUPPORT, AID

(Washington, D.C.): Lest the end of
the coup in the USSR — and the imminent
restoration of Mikhail Gorbachev to power
— precipitate a binge of further Western
political, economic and technological
overinvestment in the Soviet President, the
United States and its allies must adopt a
new stance. If Gorbachev is to deserve
the mantle of democratic leadership the
West is determined to accord him and if
he is to be the recipient of further aid,
he must immediately take the following
steps:

• The institutions
  that perpetrated the coup (the
  KGB, the military and the
  Communist Party) — not
  just their leaders who formed the
  “Committee on the State of
  Emergency” — must
  bear the full consequences of
  their actions.
  Specifically:
• The KGB must be dismantled
  as a “state within a
  state;” it must be
  stripped of its vast
  military and paramilitary
  forces; its network of
  millions of informers
  within the Soviet Union
  must be disbanded; and
  its subversive operations
  overseas must be
  terminated.
• The military
  — including the troops
  of the MVD or Interior
  Ministry — must
  be massively reduced.
  This should be done with
  a view to bringing them
  into line with the
  legitimate defense needs
  of the Soviet Union,
  ending the
  military-industrial
  complex’s
  disproportionate
  consumption of Soviet
  resources and halting the
  unwarranted but
  continuing build-up
  of Moscow’s strategic and
  other weaponry. For
  starters, defense should
  be accorded no more than
  four-to-five percent of
  GNP (vice the 20-30% it
  has obtained under
  Gorbachev).
• In addition, the
  KGB, the armed forces and
  the Interior Ministry
  should be placed under
  tight civilian control
  and subjected to the
  effective oversight and
  budgetary discipline of
  freely elected
  parliamentary committees
  as they are in genuine
  constitutional
  democracies.

• The Communist
  Party throughout the
  Soviet Union must no
  longer enjoy its
  privileged political
  position in
  either the Kremlin, the
  military, the workforce
  or the society as large.
  It must compete for power
  in free, fair and
  pluralistic elections on
  an equal footing with
  other parties.
• Such elections should be
  held at once for
  both the office of
  President of the USSR and
  for the Congress of
  Peoples Deputies and the
  Supreme Soviet.

• Those who participated in
  the coup and their senior
  subordinates should be replaced
  immediately by individuals with
  unblemished records of commitment
  to urgent, wholesale democratic
  and free market reform.
• A new Soviet Constitution
  should be swiftly drafted and put
  to a popular vote — one
  that provides sure guarantees of
  individual rights, political
  liberty and economic opportunity.
  In particular, this constitution
  should provide for an independent
  judiciary, capable of serving as
  a needed check-and-balance on the
  executive and a guarantor of the
  rule of law.

The first task of such an
judiciary would be to
conduct — perhaps in
parallel with a
parliamentary inquiry —
an independent
investigation of the
possibility that
Gorbachev himself was a
participant in, as well
as the principal
beneficiary of, the
abortive coup.

• The Baltic States,
  Georgia, Moldavia and any other
  republic that wishes to secede
  from the USSR should be permitted
  to do so at once — and
  not in accordance with the
  torturous five-year process
  contemplated by the present,
  illegitimate Soviet constitution.
• The All-Union Treaty
  should be opened for
  renegotiation — not
  rushed to signature as Secretary
  Baker has suggested. This should
  be done in order not only to
  clarify the full extent to which
  power would actually
  devolve from the center to those
  republics that wish to remain
  within the Soviet empire, but to
  expand the scope of such
  devolution.
• The law that is supposed
  to codify the right of free
  emigration and movement within
  the USSR should be modified to go
  into effect immediately,
  not on 1 January 1993.
• Measures needed to
  legitimize private property, free
  enterprise, repatriation of
  profits, etc. must be swiftly
  enacted and the sort of
  half-steps and bureaucratic
  impediments to dismantling the
  command economy favored
  heretofore by Gorbachev dispensed
  with.

The Center for Security Policy finds
itself in surprising company as it agrees
with Vladimir Posner and Dmitri Simes —
two prominent Soviets with uneven records
when it comes to their support for
radical democratic and free market reform
of the USSR — that Gorbachev’s
day has passed. His association
with the individuals and institutions
that ostensibly removed him, his past
service on their behalf and his
unwillingness to submit himself to a
popular election have discredited him. As
a result, his value to a nation in urgent
need of genuinely reformist leadership
has been undermined irreparably.

The Center believes that the
West should do nothing to help promote
Gorbachev over those whose popular
mandates and personal convictions prompt
them to pursue aggressively systemic
political and economic reform.
At the very least, he must
embrace that objective in deed
as well as word no less
wholeheartedly than have Boris Yeltsin
and his colleagues. This transformation
of Gorbachev has to occur before any
thought is given to further Western
investment in him and his continued
rule.