WHEN THE KREMLIN TRIED A LITTLE OPENNESS
By Philip Taubman
St. Petersburg Times
May 20 2008
Russia
A dash of openness can be a dangerous thing in an autocratic
state. Mikhail Gorbachev discovered this two decades ago when his
campaign to inject some daylight into Soviet society doubled back on
him like a heat-seeking missile.
Now China’s leaders are playing with the same volatile political
chemistry as they give their own citizens and the world an unexpectedly
vivid look at the earthquake devastation in the nation’s southwest
regions. The rulers of cyclone-battered Myanmar, by contrast, are
sticking with the authoritarian playbook, limiting access and even
aid to the stricken delta region where tens of thousands of people
were killed by the storm.
While China’s response to its natural catastrophe is certainly more
humane, and is only a small step toward openness, it could set in
motion political forces that might, over time, be unsettling. That’s
especially true in an age of instant communications, even in a nation
like China, which tries to control Internet access.
"When you start opening up and loosen controls, it becomes a slippery
slope," Jack Matlock, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow during much of
the Gorbachev period, said last week as he watched the events in
China. "You quickly become a target for everyone with a grievance,
and before long people go after the whole system."
Chinese leaders are well aware of the Soviet experience. The bloody
crackdown against the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989
seemed motivated in part by fears that a relaxation of repression would
lead to a replay of Soviet turbulence in China. It was no accident
that China was the first country to translate and reprint Matlock’s
1995 account of the demise of the Soviet Union, "Autopsy on an Empire."
And China has taken a different reform path, in effect offering its
people robust economic growth, with a degree of responsiveness when
problems can be blamed on local officials, in exchange for continued
one-party rule. Playing up the response to the earthquake, even as
China restricts coverage of repression in Tibet, could prove a shrewd
move, rather than one that cascades into instability.
Still, it is worth recalling a time when a little openness flew out
of control.
As a correspondent and bureau chief for The New York Times in
Moscow in the late 1980s, I had a ringside seat to observe the slow
disintegration of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev. The collapse of
the Soviet empire and dissolution of the Communist Party were not
exactly what he had in mind when he took power in 1985 and launched
his twin policies of glasnost and perestroika.
As events unfolded, it was like watching a scientist start a nuclear
chain reaction that races out of control, eventually consuming him
and all those around him.
Gorbachev realized that his country was rotting from within, paralyzed
by repression and ideological rigidity, a backward economy and a
deep cynicism among Russians about their government. "We can’t go
on living like this," he told his wife, Raisa, hours before he was
named Soviet leader, he recalled in his 1995 memoirs.
But he clearly had no inkling of where his initiatives were headed
when, shortly after taking office, he broke new ground for a Kremlin
leader by mingling with citizens in Leningrad and giving unscripted
interviews.
As glasnost gathered force in the years that followed, it ripped away
the layers of deceit that were the foundation of the Soviet state. Each
step undermined the authority of the party and the government.
The explosion of a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in April 1986
shattered the Kremlin’s credibility — and gave a powerful impetus to
glasnost. The Kremlin, like the Burmese leaders after the cyclone,
seemed paralyzed by the accident. The first government announcement
— an innocuous 44 words — came more than a day after the reactor
meltdown, and hours after Sweden detected alarming levels of radiation
in its air.
The glacial flow of information imperiled thousands of people living
in the accident area. Gorbachev, embarrassed by the debacle, redoubled
his efforts to make the government and party more transparent.
The truth about Stalin’s brutality, and even Lenin’s, was exposed
as a bright floodlight illuminated the hidden recesses of Soviet
history. Newspapers and journals wrote honestly for the first time
about government corruption and mismanagement. Artists, playwrights,
filmmakers and writers looked unsparingly at the abuses of the
Soviet system.
Last week, Svetlana Savranskaya recalled the electrifying days in 1987
and 1988 when the truth about Soviet history trumped the distortions
that had long been taught at Moscow State University, where she was
a student.
But resistance to the accelerating change grew as the rivets that held
together Soviet society started to snap. Savranskaya, now an analyst
at the National Security Archive, a research institution at George
Washington University, challenged the traditional history textbooks
used at the Moscow high school where she taught history. She was soon
forced to teach English instead.
"Gorbachev thought he could control glasnost, and use it, but in the
end, even he turned against it," she said.
The scale of opposition became clear in March 1988, when an obscure
chemistry teacher named Nina Andreyeva attacked Gorbachev’s reform
agenda in Sovietskaya Rossia, a prominent newspaper. The attack,
which filled a full page, and its timing — while Gorbachev was
traveling in Yugoslavia — had the hallmarks of a Kremlin mugging.
That was all but confirmed when several members of the ruling Politburo
defended the article at a meeting convened when Gorbachev returned
to Moscow.
"A split was inevitable," Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs about the
Politburo gathering. "The question was, when?"
A striking moment of glasnost came with the killer earthquake in
Armenia in December 1988. Faced with the deaths of tens of thousands
of Soviet citizens, and desperate for outside aid, the Kremlin lifted
restrictions on travel to Armenia. Western reporters in Moscow were
stunned to discover that they could just go to the airport and catch a
flight to Yerevan, the Armenian capital, no advance government approval
required. Foreign relief flights, including U.S. military planes
carrying food, water and medical supplies, were welcomed in Yerevan.
Sounds a lot like China today.
As the old regime frayed, Gorbachev wasn’t prepared for the assault
of long-repressed political forces let loose by his reforms. The most
potent was nationalism, the fierce pride in nationhood that Stalin
and his successors had tried to suffocate in places like Lithuania,
Latvia and Estonia; Armenia and Georgia; and throughout Eastern Europe.
Once uncorked, nationalism essentially overwhelmed Gorbachev, who,
to his credit, choose not to try to hold together the Soviet empire
by force.
Russia today, despite the restoration of authoritarian rule by Vladimir
Putin, enjoys a degree of freedom that was inconceivable at the height
of Communist rule. Glasnost helped make it that way.
China’s leaders may not take comfort in that thought.
As Matlock said last week, "If you remove the power of repressive
state organs while stirring up a nation with many problems, you will
get a process you can’t control."
Philip Taubman is deputy opinion page editor at The New York Times,
where this comment first appeared.