MOSCOW’S POTEMKIN ‘REFORMS,’ NEW ‘OPPOSITION’ GROUP: MORE FROM THE FOLKS WHO BROUGHT YOU PERESTROIKA

(Washington, D.C.): As the Soviet
campaign to win new economic concessions
from the West enters the home stretch in
the run-up to the London Economic Summit,
Moscow center is pulling out all the
stops. Scarcely a day goes by without an
announcement of some Kremlin policy
shift, some legislative action by the
Gorbachev-dominated Supreme Soviet or
some nominally unauthorized
initiative being taken by close Gorbachev
associates.

What these steps have in
common is a cynical attempt to mollify
Western concerns about the Soviet central
authorities’ commitment to fundamental
reform — without altering
meaningfully their actual control over
the levers of power. A
partial listing of recent examples of
such initiatives includes the following:

• Erstwhile Gorbachev economic
  advisor Gregori Yavlinski has
  been the prime Soviet mover
  behind the so-called “Grand
  Bargain” proposal developed
  with Harvard academics over the
  past two months. Gorbachev has
  coyly indicated his personal
  interest in this deal featuring
  at least $120 billion in Western
  aid flows over the next few years
  in exchange for the promise
  of reform in the USSR. Even as he
  has done so, the Soviet president
  has allowed his prime minister,
  Valentin Pavlov, and other
  cohorts to go unchallenged in
  denouncing it and ridiculing its
  terms. Fortunately for Western
  taxpayers and genuine reformers
  in the USSR, this deal seems to
  have died aborning as a result of
  premature exposure to critical
  examination in the West.
• The Supreme Soviet passed what
  Sen. Bill Bradley (D-NJ)
  described as the equivalent of a “sense
  of the Senate resolution”
  concerning the right of Soviet
  citizens to emigrate from the
  USSR. The act established that
  such a right would be protected
  by law starting in 1993
  and subject to certain
  conditions. Remarkably, such a
  flim-flam was viewed by the Bush
  Administration as sufficient
  grounds to waive the
  Jackson-Vanik Amendment — even
  though it fell far short of that
  Amendment’s requirements for
  genuinely free emigration, to say
  nothing of meeting President
  Bush’s own, previously stated
  requirements for a full
  codification of this right and
  a period during which its
  faithful implementation could be
  observed.
• Ironically, just yesterday,
  published reports in the New
  York Times and elsewhere
  indicated the pernicious effect
  that the new emigration
  “law” is having on the
  flow of people leaving the USSR.
  In an article entitled “Rush
  of Soviet Immigrants to
  Israel,” the Times
  revealed that:

“A sudden rush of
new immigrants, eager to
leave the Soviet Union before
its new passport law
took effect today, pushed
Soviet immigration for
June to its highest total
since October….But
Israeli officials said the
same forces that caused
the sudden rush would
probably reduce
immigration to a mere
tricklein July.
Starting July 1, every
Soviet citizen who leaves
the country must have a
passport…there is
apparently some doubt
about the Soviet
bureaucracy’s ability to
[ensure that every
would-be Soviet Jewish
emigrant will get a
passport quickly].”
(Emphasis added.)

• The Supreme Soviet also acted
  recently to make it possible, in
  principle, for Soviet citizens to
  own land privately. The terms and
  conditions applied to that
  ownership, however, are such as
  to make it exceedingly difficult
  for the average Soviet to acquire
  title — even if, despite bitter
  historical experience to the
  contrary (notably, Stalin’s
  violent repression of kulaks who
  took advantage of an earlier
  liberalization to own their own
  farms), they actually believe the
  government will faithfully honor
  such transactions in the future.
• On 1 July 1991, the Supreme
  Soviet also adopted a new statute
  authorizing the private ownership
  of as much as 70% of state-owned
  properties. As with most other
  reform legislation, this
  authorization is substantially
  emasculated by conditions,
  caveats and exceptions that will
  greatly reduce its effect in
  opening up the Soviet economy to
  free market forces.
• In a marvelous indictment of this
  legislation and its sister
  “reforms” enacted in
  recent weeks by the Supreme
  Soviet, yesterday’s New York
  Times quoted an obviously
  jaded, but quite realistic,
  Western businessman who has
  worked in Moscow for five years
  as saying:

“In the past year or
so, the Supreme Soviet
keeps passing laws in
which the title sounds
right but the details
don’t add up to what you
would think was promised.
They pass a law on free
emigration and travel and
you can’t leave freely.
They authorize private
land ownership, but you
can’t buy and sell land.
And now, we have this
spanking new law on
privatization where it
would seem you can’t buy
an enterprise.”

• Also on 1 July, nine present or
  former close associates of
  Mikhail Gorbachev — led by
  former Soviet Foreign Minister
  Eduard Shevardnadze — agreed to
  organize a political opposition
  group. The exact intentions of
  this group are unclear; it might
  or might not form an actual
  opposition party in September to
  campaign against the Communist
  Party. All of the organizers,
  however, have been intimately
  associated with the Communist
  Party. Some, like Shevardnadze
  continue to be Party members.
  Several, notably Shevardnadze,
  have moreover rather unsavory
  records as apparatchiks; href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=91-P_59at”>the
  attached article by Michael
  Ledeen which appeared in the Wall
  Street Journal on 13 May
  1991 documents some aspects of
  the former Foreign Minister’s
  career administering the KGB in
  his native Georgia.
• What is rather more clear is that
  this initiative may
  constitute the life boat for the
  Communist Party — the
  vehicle whereby communists can
  affect a more “human
  face” calling themselves
  Social Democrats or by some other
  moniker, much as they have done
  elsewhere in the former Soviet
  bloc. The involvement of
  Gorbachev’s intimates, if not
  Gorbachev himself, in such an
  undertaking suggests furthermore
  that this movement is yet
  another in a series of steps that
  appear to challenge the
  old order he continues to lead
  but that actually help him to
  channel and control such
  challenges —
  rendering them ineffectual in
  every respect except in
  impressing the West with Kremlin
  tolerance for “change.”

• Equally indicative of the true
  character of this
  “opposition” group is the
  absence of bona fide reformers
  like Boris Yeltsin and Gary
  Kasparov whose loyalties lie
  unmistakeably with the
  anti-communist reformers
  — something that cannot be
  said of the mayors of Leningrad
  and Moscow (Anatoly Sobchak and
  Gavril Popov, respectively).

The Center for Security Policy believes
that the Bush Administration and
its counterparts in Western capitals must
exercise great care in distinguishing real
systemic change from Moscow center’s
potemkin reform machinations. It
would be an egregious mistake to reward
the Soviet central authorities for
undertaking the former — through
liberalized access to
taxpayer-underwritten assistance,
technology transfers, arms control
concessions or other devices — when, in
fact, they have (at most) engaged in the
latter.