Pour It On

By WILLIAM SAFIRE
The New York Times, September 2, 1991

Some of us remember the imperious way Mikhail Gorbachev cut off the microphone of Andrei
Sakharov when that saintly dissenter tried to protest against impending dictatorship just days
before he died; for that reason, we find it hard to join editorialists who tut-tut at the “bullying”
way Boris Yeltsin told the chastened Mr. Gorbachev to read out the truth from a similar rostrum.

The crowd that used to say the peoples of the Soviet empire really were born to
authoritarianism, and that we should not encourage the pushy Landsbergis of Lithuania because
disunion would surely lead to anarchy followed by dictatorship, now pushes this line: Let’s not be
beastly to the former despots in the Communist Party, the Red Army or the K.G.B.

“No witch hunt” is their phrase of choice; it also comes from such overnight civil libertarians as
Gus Hall here and the hard-liners in Havana, Beijing and North Korea. Translated from the
hypocritical, that means: Shoot if you must the 13 arrested coup-plotters, but do not harass the
millions of petty tyrants, informers and social parasites who profited from the predations of
Communism at the expense of their neighbors.

Unfortunately, real civil libertarians are picking up that line, arguing that the Yeltsin suspension
of Pravda, seizure of party assets and reign by decree defeat the democratic purposes of the
second revolution. A principled stand, that — but only if the Communists were a political party,
and not a conspiracy to control the society and stamp out freedom.

I’m pro-witch hunt; that is, I would release most of the totalitarian 13 (and let them lead police
to the assets hastily transferred abroad). But I would fire from the public payroll every
non-elected official who was a member of the party at the time of the coup. Let them go free, and
go into private enterprise or sponge off the families they corruptly enriched.

What standing do well-wishing outsiders have? They also serve who only stand and root; we
should let our newly freed friends know what longtime anti-Communists abroad hope to see.

We are rooting for the thorough removal of Communists (now former Communists pretending
they were good republicans all along) from appointed positions of power. They are still
entrenched. They are changing their spots to meet the fashion and claiming to be bureaucratically
indispensable, but they are a burden to recovery and a danger to democracy.

We are rooting for the demobilization of the armed services, the cost of which is an economic
millstone. “Forty acres and a mule” was a great 19th-century idea; millions of soldiers should be
mustered out and given — as their private property — land and a piece of machinery to farm it.

We are rooting for the total dissolution of the K.G.B. The former Communist politician (he ran
sixth in a field of six for president of Russia) appointed by Mr. Gorbachev to “purge” it is Vadim
Bakatin, who is showing a skill for media manipulation.

He ostentatiously fires his son, showing purity from nepotism — but retains tens of thousands of
secret police who should be learning what life is like on a bread line.

He terminates the K.G.B. board of directors — but keeps most of its members in their mid-level
jobs, awaiting the moment of restoration. He transfers troops to the army — from which they can
be swiftly recalled — rather than disbanding them.

He is bamboozling the reformers and the Western press by using all the ringing words we like to
hear, safely denouncing his predecessor — while quietly continuing to maintain the center’s
coercive weapon against the republics, aggressively to suborn foreign officials, steal U.S. secrets
and protect its web of well-paid traitors around the world.

Like Mr. Gorbachev, the handsome new K.G.B. chief wants to fix the old central system, make
it less political and more efficient — rather than do away with an imperial structure inimical to
freedom.

In Kaliningrad, reports The New York Times’s Henry Kamm, a construction worker collecting
signatures for an anti-Communist petition had a fist shaken in his face by a naval officer, who
barked, “We’ll get Yeltsin and you.” To which Aleksandras Kovetskas replied: “We feed and
clothe the military, so shut your mouth.” The stunned officer fled.

Mr. Kovetskas, the world is rooting for you.