GEORGE ORWELL BUSH ON GORBACHEV-THE-DEMOCRAT: SAYING IT DON’T MAKE IT SO

(Washington, D.C.): In a particularly
unsettling statement, President Bush
today gave the back of his hand to one of
the Soviet Union’s leading democratic
reformers — even as he was singing the
praises of those whose courage and
commitment to freedom ensured that the
recent coup came to naught.

Zviad Gamsckhurdia, President of the
Georgian Republic, became the latest of a
number prominent Soviet figures to
speculate that Mikhail Gorbachev
was not only likely to prove the
principal beneficiary of the coup — but
one of its instigators. In an
interview on CNN, he said:

“I think…this coup [could
have been] planned by Gorbachev
himself and he has made [it]
together with these persons
because it gives political
dividends to Gorbachev….”

Q: “Let me understand what
you are saying. You are saying
that you have a theory that
President Gorbachev planned the
whole coup himself to boost his
popularity?”

A: “Yes, I think for the
future presidential
election.”

Q: “Now, would this not have
required some collusion with the
very people that did do the coup
and would force them out at the
end of the coup? In other words,
would the people that have done
the coup had to have cooperated
closely with Mr. Gorbachev?”

A: “Yes, it may be.
Everything is possible.”

In thinking along these lines, President
Gamsckhurdia echoed similar comments made
in recent days by: a former KGB officer, Victor
Shemyov; one of the most
important individuals in the Soviet
democracy movement, World Chess Champion Garry
Kasparov; and even one of
Gorbachev’s own intimates, former Foreign
Minister Eduard Shevardnadze.

It is, therefore, particularly
striking that President Bush would react
as vehemently — even contemptuously —
as he did in dismissing President
Gamsckhurdia’s speculation when asked
about it by reporters today:

“I think [President
Gamsckhurdia] needs to get a
little work done on the kind of
statements he’s making. I mean
that’s ridiculous. Here
is a man who has been also
swimming against the tide, it
seems to me a little bit, and I
don’t want to go overboard on
this but he ought to get with it
and understand what is happening
around the world.”

“To suggest that this —
President Gorbachev would plot to
put the people of the Soviet
Union through this kind of trauma
and the rest of the world through
it makes absolutely no sense
at all….I would discount [such
a statement] 100%.”

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.