Gorby Invites the Deluge

By WILLIAM SAFIRE
The New York Times, December 12, 1991

Revealing the true colors of a tyrant, Mikhail Gorbachev now seeks to thwart the democratic
will of the independent republics of his former empire by bidding for the support of the veteran
Red Army generals.

He is responding to the declaration of independence and formation of a commonwealth by
Russia, Ukraine and Byelorussia by encouraging what amounts to a military coup.

That puts the truth nakedly, but even his remaining apologists in the West cannot escape this
fact: He seeks to enlist the power of arms to overrule the decision of elected representatives of
the freed peoples.

The new line of our discredited stay-in-the-union set is that Mr. Gorbachev is seeking only to
control the nuclear weaponry in four of the newly independent states, and that it is in the interest
of world safety that the West discreetly support his struggle to maintain central Kremlin control.

The opposite is true. The danger to order in the former internal empire comes from entrenched
apparatchiks seducing the troubled military. The resistance of the unelectable old guard to
ineluctable change is the main source of instability.

What is causing the U.S. Ambassador, Robert Strauss, to bewail the “wild card” of the Red
Army, and inducing our new Director of Central Intelligence to send solons to dictionaries with
his predictions of “xenophobic atavism”?

Not the responsible and orderly transfer of power undertaken by Boris Yeltsin, until recently the
object of scorn as a “buffoon” by Brent Scowcroft, Mr. Bush’s much-touted strategic aide. Not
the historic referendum for freedom by Ukraine, instructed not to indulge in “suicidal nationalism”
by President Bush in his infamous “Chicken Kiev” speech.

On the contrary; the fears of upheaval and chaos being fanned by so many union-minded
Gorbachevites are caused by the clique trying to exaggerate those fears to cling to power. In the
French proverb quoted by Madame de Pompadour to Louis XV: Apres nous le deluge.

Consider what Mr. Gorbachev, reformer without a cause, has done in response to this week’s
swift but peaceable replacement of the Soviet Union with a commonwealth of the core republics.

He marched to the old Defense Ministry, reminded the generals that he still held the title of
Commander in Chief and admonished Marshal Shaposhnikov for having prematurely welcomed
the commonwealth’s proposal of a sharing of “strategic military space.”

If the Defense Minister had been Gen. Mikhail Moiseyev, Mr. Gorbachev’s first choice to
replace the faithless Marshal Yazov after the August coup, few doubt that the Red Army chief
would have saluted and obeyed Gorbachev orders to assert the Kremlin center’s military control
over the republics.

But Marshal Shaposhnikov was a Yeltsin choice, and is torn between protecting his sponsor and
saving his officer corps from the hardships of demobilization. He temporized.

In the face of this threat from the old union’s Defense Ministry, Mr. Yeltsin did what he did
during the August coup: went publicly to the Russian regional commanders (and privately to the
arm of the K.G.B. in Moscow now under his control). He promised “to make the life of
servicemen better” to counter the Gorbachev bribes.

Thus has Mr. Gorbachev’s appeal to military leaders increased the potential for civil war, even
as he hints at its dire consequences. More likely, however, the Gorbachev military move has
started a different kind of war — a bidding war between politicians for the support of the military.

The first thing the new republic’s economies need is a drastic reduction in military spending; the
last thing needed is pressure to maintain expensive forces. But if you were a general, with your
lifelong colleagues facing unemployment, wouldn’t you play one politician off against the other?

Postponing demobilization takes food off civilian tables and prevents recovery. That is the
terrible consequence of Mr. Gorbachev’s latest grab for power.

Our diplomatists should stop wistfully dreaming of him as a source of stability and see him for
what he has become in his final throes: a tinhorn despot reaching for military mastery; a source
not of nuclear control but of civil upheaval; and a man trying to arrange a deluge to follow his
certain downfall.