Center Calls For Bush Apology For Calling Potemkin Coup Theory ‘Ridiculous’

(Washington, D.C.): On 21 August 1991, President Bush contemptuously dismissed as “ridiculous” the statement by Zviad Gamsckhurdia, President of the Georgian Republic, that Mikhail Gorbachev was not only likely to prove the principal beneficiary of the coup — but one of its instigators. In so doing, Mr. Bush did more than reject out of hand an hypothesis that warrants careful analysis — given its significant implications for the Administration’s policy of overinvesting in Gorbachev. He also impugned the Georgian President’s competence in judging “what is happening around the world.”

At the time, the Center for Security Policy took strong exception to this latest example of the sort of cavalier treatment the Bush Administration has tended to accord democratic reformers in the Soviet republics — reformers who choose to cross, or to challenge otherwise, the West’s enthrallment with Gorbachev. In a Decision Brief entitled George Orwell Bush on Gorbachev-the-Democrat: Saying It Don’t Make It So (No. 91-D 85), the Center noted:

“The Center for Security Policy respectfully suggests that a man like President Gamsckhurdia — a man freely elected by people who have experienced first-hand the quality of Mikhail Gorbachev’s commitment to democracy among other ways at the point of sharpened shovels in Tbilisi — almost certainly has a better understanding of “what is happening” (at least in the Soviet Union) than does George Bush.

 

 

“The President does a profound disservice to an informed debate about the wisdom of his policy of investing in Mikhail Gorbachev — and the folly of not opting for the ever-more obvious alternative of supporting those genuine reformist elements at the republic and local levels — by blurring the distinctions between them. At the very least, it is incumbent upon him to explore the possibility that Gorbachev was a party to a ‘Potemkin coup,’ if only as a means of calibrating the wisdom of lending further support to a man viewed with real and understandable suspicion by so many bona fide democrats in the USSR.

 

 

“If Mr. Bush’s cognitive dissonance on this score prevents him from commissioning such a thorough review — as it appears to have blinded him to the possibility of a coup in the first place — Congress should conduct its own investigation as part of a top-down reappraisal of the President’s Soviet policy.”

 

The Center’s view was reinforced when, in a stunning moment during Gorbachev’s appearance in the Russian parliament today, a member of that institution observed:

“Those who defended the Russian “White House” all have the opinion that you knew ahead of time what was going to happen, and [leader of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and an alleged ringleader of the coup] Lukyanov’s interview on the 19th confirms this. He said he agreed with you and agreed on the personnel in this group of plotters. The only thing you couldn’t agree on was whether this should be agreed by the Supreme Soviet or not….If [the putschists]…had prevailed [they] would have left you as president. If they lost, you can now…become a national hero, martyr, so to speak.”

 

The fact that Gorbachev is widely believed to have been involved in the coup does not, of course, necessarily mean that is true any more than widespread speculation about an “October surprise” implicating George Bush has any basis in fact. Still, the Center believes that it would be an appropriate first step in the direction of mending fences with the real democratic forces in the USSR — and towards the necessary realignment of U.S. policy vis a vis that country — if the President were to admit that the “Potemkin coup” theory evidently espoused by many of them is not “ridiculous” after all. A wise second step would be to commission his own intelligence review of this possibility and its implications for American policy.