Soviet Crackdown Watch (Part 5): The Tightening of the Screws

As part of its continuing monitoring of the emerging Soviet crackdown, the Center for Security Policy adds the following developments to its list of worrisome indicators:

• In a chilling speech to the Congress of People’s Deputies on 22 December, KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov provided the latest rationale for a crackdown: to prevent Western businesses and governments from penetrating, subverting and imposing capitalism on the Soviet Union. His sweeping attack on Western nations and institutions — including accusations of disseminating anti-Soviet propaganda, conducting "economic sabotage," stimulating an emigration "brain drain," and exploiting the USSR’s current difficulties to obtain secret information — cannot be dismissed as mere "old thinking," a throw-back to the bad old Cold War days. Notwithstanding subsequent Soviet (and American) statements attempting to minimize the Kryuchkov speech, it should be interpreted as a strong warning to the West’s investors and creditors (both governmental and private) of the prospective climate for business in the USSR.

 

• The icing on the cake came when Kryuchkov invoked Secretary of State James Baker, citing the latter’s recent statement in Brussels which exemplified Mr. Baker’s tolerant attitude toward the Gorbachev regime’s new, repressive policies. Kryuchkov noted that the Secretary had said at NATO, "In the short term the question for the Soviet leadership now is not whether reforms will succeed, but how to prevent anarchy and chaos."

 

• Also on 22 December, President Gorbachev issued a presidential decree threatening to take unspecified "necessary measures" in Moldavia unless steps were taken to end inter-ethnic conflicts in the republic. On 29 December, Gorbachev’s military adviser Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev said in an interview with TASS that rumors that Gorbachev would declare martial law in Moldavia were "just as unfounded as rumors about a military dictatorship seeking power [in Moscow]." Reading between the lines, on 30 December, Moldavia’s Supreme Soviet chose to blink, adopting a resolution agreeing to Gorbachev’s terms.

 

• On 24 December, TASS reported that a new position had been created of Deputy Minister of Defense and that Col. Gen. Vladislav Achlov, former commander of the Airborne Assault Forces (known by the acronym VDV), had been appointed to fill it. In this month’s edition, Armed Forces Journal International reported that the forces were involved in a number of incidents in the Moscow suburbs last September — incidents that may have been part of a "joint KGB-Army attempt to practice an anti-coup operation." The ostensible perpetrators of such a coup were evidently the "’informals,’ Army slang for the reformist politicians and activists in Moscow [who were] planning to forcibly remove the Soviet government."

 

• Elena Bonner, the widow of Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov and heroic champion of personal freedoms in the Soviet Union in her own right, has recently issued repeated warnings to the West of what is in the offing in the USSR. These include stark statements made in a 28 December 1990 interview with Wall Street Journal deputy editor Amity Shlaes such as: "In the Soviet Union, the coup has already happened." Ms. Bonner underscored in the same interview a point long stressed by the Center for Security Policy — that the West’s willingness to overlook Mr. Gorbachev’s powermongering is reinforcing "Gorbachev’s transition to dictatorship."

 

• Moscow’s Red Square "tent city" was razed by bulldozers in the early morning hours of 30 December as a further step in Gorbachev’s "law and order" campaign. Soviet dissidents had occupied the "tent city" in Red Square over the last six months to protest deteriorating economic and other conditions in the Soviet Union. Twenty-seven persons were reportedly taken into custody. This action was chillingly reminiscent of the forcible clearing of tents occupied by Chinese students for months in Tiananmen Square prior to the massacre there.

 

• On 2 January, armed Soviet troops from the Interior Ministry surrounded the headquarters of the Communist Party in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, in order to "guard the property of the CPSU in Lithuania" pursuant to a presidential decree issued by Gorbachev.

 

• On the same day, Soviet Interior Ministry troops brandishing weapons and the Soviet flag took over the main publishing house in Riga, Latvia. Print workers have undertaken a protest strike to last as long as the troops continue to occupy the building. Latvian government officials attempting to intervene in the action were turned away at gunpoint by the troops.

 

• According to one report, when Mr. Dainis Ivans — the Deputy President of the Latvian Supreme Council — identified himself and sought to enter the building, an armed guard "removed the safety catch [on his machine gun] and turned the gun toward him." According to the Washington Post, he was told by the guard: "One more step forward and we shoot." While Boris Pugo, the new hard-line Latvian communist recently appointed Minister of the Interior, denied authorizing the building take-over, Ivans said "such a move would need the Kremlin’s go-ahead — at least tacitly."

   

 

• Ivans also said "This looks to me like the first step of a major armed action against us." This view was seconded by Estonian Prime Minister Savisaar who decried the action as more evidence of Soviet attempts to provide a pretext for the Soviet army to establish "order" in the Baltics.

   

• In the first interview (published on 3 January) since his spectacular resignation, former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze told Moscow News:

 

"These days, we often hear repeated that discipline and order are indispensable. They are absolutely indispensable. But unfortunately, in the minds of many, discipline and order are associated with the use of force….Everybody agrees that the country is in a crisis — chaos and anarchy are coming. At the same time, many people deny the possibility of a dictatorship. But I think if the country isn’t able to break out of the crisis, then dictatorship is unavoidable." (Emphasis added.)

 

• Interestingly, this interview was printed after the popular Soviet TV program "Vzglyad" was blocked from airing a feature on the Shevardnadze resignation on 28 December by Soviet Radio and Television Chairman Kravchenko. According to Kravchenko, the reason for such censorship was that "[Gorbachev] had asked people not to get drawn into …such a debate." In all likelihood, however, it was imposed so as to provide time for the government to determine the official line on Shevardnadze’s resignation.

Incredibly, President Bush has still not spoken out against the emerging Soviet crackdown and its symptoms. To the contrary, he has seemed determined not to say anything unpleasant — or that might otherwise give offense to Gorbachev. For example, at a joint press conference on 22 December with British Prime Minister John Major, President Bush — when asked to comment on KGB chief Kryuchkov’s statement that "bloodshed may be necessary to restore order in the Soviet Union" — President Bush simply deferred the question to Major, admitting that doing so was the British equivalent of throwing the new PM a curve-ball ("That’s what they call bowling us a googly.") Subsequently, when asked by reporters on 27 December whether he was concerned that "the pendulum seems to be swinging back the other way [in the Soviet Union]" and that "Mr. Gorbachev wants more control," President Bush responded that "they can sort all that out."

Now that the Congress has returned, the Center urges it to follow the lead of Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell (D-ME), who has courageously raised his voice against the Soviet crackdown and pledged that it will entail real costs for Moscow center. An op.ed. article by Center director Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. in today’s Washington Times (a copy of which is attached) calls on the Bush Administration to do no less.