The Hour of the Demagogue
Mini Teaser: As fate has it, Russia is given to the power of extremes,.
As fate has it, Russia is given to the power of extremes,...and what we need here is not pale, unemotional theories, but fiery, new ideas.
--Nikolai Berdyaev,
The Russian Gironde" (1906)
The attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev obliges us to take a new and closer look at the dynamics of the anticommunist revolution. From the moment that the old Soviet Empire began to shake in 1989, participants and observers alike saw the principal threat to democracy in political extremism. These countries had, after all, only the thinnest constitutional traditions, and the tough policies needed to get postcommunist economies working right were bound to be an excruciating test. Amid political confusion and social tension, the enemies of democracy--whether unprincipled rabble-rousers or generals in tanks--were expected to find their opening. By contrast, politicians guided by a spirit of conciliation and compromise were sure to lose out.
Is this what has happened in the Soviet Union? The coup against Gorbachev certainly confirmed the threat of neo-authoritarianism, but what of the threat to democracy we once detected in radical populism? Yesterday's threat became today's salvation. The statements of Western officials and commentators suggested that the future of freedom in the Soviet Union depended on the ability of one angry man to raise the masses in a rage against their oppressors.
This ironic result should not have been so unexpected. The post-revolutionary experience of Eastern Europe, and the Soviet revolution still underway, refute our fear of "extremists," who in almost all these dramas have strengthened--not subverted--democracy. An indispensable role has been played by a character many considered a simple contradiction in terms: the liberal demagogue. This unlikely political figure taps popular hatreds, resentments, and grievances in the mundane work of creating and fortifying a pluralist constitutional order.
Support for the firebrands of the anticommunist revolution, in short, should not have been treated simply as an affair of the heart (although it is that, too). Liberal demagogy has helped the revolution to succeed and endure, and unless we recognize how much it has achieved we will neither understand the requirements of future success nor be able to contribute to it.
1917: A Cautionary Tale
Demagogues can, of course, be the gravediggers of popular government even if they are not overtly hostile to it. Without dictatorial ambitions of their own, they may make it impossible to protect democratic institutions against committed enemies. The locus classicus of this kind of demagogy is the sad case of Alexander Kerensky: his failure to preserve Russia's brief democratic experiment in 1917 is the cautionary tale in whose light which we should judge the work of today's reformers and revolutionaries.
Too little is remembered of Kerensky now, beyond the fact that he lost his showdown with Leninism. His historical image is that of the hapless reformer, unsuited to a turbulent time. In fact, as he emerges in Richard Pipes' extraordinary new history, The Russian Revolution, Kerensky was "all impulse and emotion." He was the great firebrand of the Russian political scene, whom others had to respect because he could move a crowd. In a word, a demagogue.
If rhetoric is sometimes an instrument of power, Kerensky clearly overestimated what it could do for him. Confident of his ability to sense and manipulate the public mood, he was carried along by the passion of his own attacks on the old order. He neglected and even antagonized institutions and individuals that might have supported him when he needed it most. In March 1917, for example, the Provisional Government hastily dissolved the old provincial bureaucracy. This mistake was, in Pipes' view, "a unique instance of a government born of a revolution dissolving the machinery of administration before it had a chance to replace it with one of its own creation."
Most dangerous of all, Kerensky's disdain for existing political institutions led him in late August 1917 to take on the army, in the person of General Lavr Kornilov, the minister of war, whom he accused of plotting to overthrow the government. Pipes makes a completely convincing case that this famous charge was a fiction: not only was there no such plot, but the generals--including Kornilov--were in fact prepared to work with Kerensky to strengthen him. He was hardly to their taste, but they hoped he could hold the country together. (They too, it seems, overrated the power of rhetoric!) Because it divided Lenin's opponents, the Kornilov affair paved the way for the Bolshevik takeover two and a half months later.
Why did Kerensky turn on those who were ready to support him, and whose support could mean so much? Kornilov was becoming a hero of conservatives, and Pipes concludes that by confronting him in this way Kerensky hoped to "pose as champion of the Revolution." It was a demagogue's mistake: pick a fight with a representative of the old order so as to win popular acclaim at the expense of one's rivals.
Kerensky saw politics as a popularity contest. His preoccupation with winning it kept him from seeing that the country's desire for firm leadership could not be satisfied by talk alone. To consolidate his position in the middle of a revolution, he had to offer--but couldn't--relief from uncertainty and disorder. Only the institutions that he tried to discredit and weaken could have helped him meet this need.
This indictment of Kerensky parallels a common critique of today's democratic revolutionaries: too thrilled by talk and big ideas, not prepared to run the country. Yet precisely because the same view of contemporary demagogues is so widespread, it is worth weighing a wholly different assessment of Kerensky--that he was not demagogic enough. Far from being undone by his own demagogy, he made too timid use of the new form of power that he had created.
It is, for example, astonishing that while relying on the support of the Socialists-Revolutionaries (the [cm;1]sr[cm;0]s), essentially a peasant party, Kerensky had no land reform program. There were perhaps plenty of good moderate reasons not to push the issue. A radical program would have added yet another front to the war that he was waging; it would have won him new enemies, and added to social instability. Yet it would have proved--something that Kerensky otherwise failed to do--that he aimed to reward those who supported him. The farm boys who filled the ranks of disgruntled soldiers in Petrograd might have stayed on his side.
Similarly, although the obvious way to tap the sr[cm;1[cm;0]] s' popular support outside cities was to speed up nationwide elections, Kerensky delayed. The Constituent Assembly would have enabled him to escape the dual power structure--the division between the Cabinet and the Soviet--that made it hard for him to govern. Yet, by the time the Assembly met, the Bolsheviks had already seized power.
Finally, to succeed, Kerensky would have had to be more ruthless in dealing with his nominal allies on the Left. Pipes argues persuasively that, after the Bolsheviks' first (bungled) attempt to seize power, Kerensky should have made a determined effort to destroy Lenin with a full-blown trial for treason, laying out all the evidence of his reliance on German money. For such a strategy to work, however, more than mere cooperation with the criminal justice system was needed. Decapitating the Bolsheviks would, despite their small following, have brought on a deep political crisis. It could easily have provoked an all-out battle for control of the streets, and even with the support of the army and police, victory would have depended on an effective campaign for the people's loyalty. It would have tested not only Kerensky's ability to use existing instruments of power, but all the resources of his demagogy as well.
Mazowiecki vs. Walesa
Kerensky has become our textbook case of a democratic revolution being derailed--"devouring its children"--but it yields no simple moral about the virtue of moderation. Nor does the post-1989 record of Polish politics, although many have tried to read a similar lesson into the struggle that a year ago split the leadership of the Solidarity trade union movement. When Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki became the victim of an electoral insurgency led by Lech Walesa, now president, it seemed that a good democrat had been laid low by a bad demagogue. The demagogue's subsequent conduct in office has, of course, made the forecasts that he would soon become a dictator look a little ridiculous. Yet this is all the more reason to take another look at what happened for the light it sheds on the dynamics of anticommunist revolutions.
Despite Walesa's heroic past, there were reasons to worry about the way he made his bid for power. After taking office in the summer of 1989, good-democrat Mazowiecki had clearly done all the right things, prescribing the harsh medicine necessary to cure Poland's economic disease. It had even begun to work, but with dreadful social side-effects: unemployment, the wiping-out of people's savings, steep price increases for necessities like food and fuel. As popular anxiety rose, the bad demagogue sought to take personal advantage of it, demanding early presidential elections and using irresponsible rhetoric to whip up popular anger. Walesa alleged that Mazowiecki had allowed too much of the old Communist partocracy to stay in place and was letting its members grow rich in the process of privatization. He even made some unsavory insinuations about Jews in the ranks of the good democrats (who are mostly middle-class intellectuals, journalists, and professionals). Feeding on popular unhappiness and promising that he alone could set things right--"with an ax," as he put it--he was swept into office.
Now everyone is familiar with the tut-tutting Western commentaries and editorials that this episode produced. Walesa's victory allegedly demonstrated that the Eastern European revolutions had a very dark side. They allowed the resurgence of nasty pre-democratic folkways--the preference for one-man rule, the paranoid search for the enemy within, and so forth. Equally important, the rejection of Mazowiecki showed that economic collapse was too much for representative institutions to handle. Even analysts with some sympathy for Walesa joined the indictment. Timothy Garten Ash suggested in the New York Review of Books that Walesa's themes reflected a considered judgment about how to make the transition to democracy: a Polish leader who cannot deliver a higher standard of living any time soon has to pander to popular blood lusts instead. He does this by offering Communist heads on a platter (figuratively, of course; there were no executions). In a clever phrase, Ash called this approach "Salome tactics."
Clever as it is, the description misstates what is at stake. The real issue is not how to distract people from hardship, but rather how to make sense of it for them. Hardship can be adequately rationalized only if it is part of a program that realizes the goals of the revolution. Leaders who seek to sustain popular support during the transition to democracy have to prove that a real revolution, not a halfway one, is taking place; that the country won't wake up at the end of the process to discover that the same people are still in charge. This is why anticommunist rhetoric has been a crucial source of legitimacy. Middle-class intellectuals who disdain it are unlikely to convince people that the revolution will be carried through to the end. They may even produce disenchantment with popular government itself. If this is what their vaunted "moderation" leads to, then who are the real gravediggers of democracy?
In Poland, misplaced moderation gave way only to a tougher brand of anticommunism; democracy itself did not give way. In 1917, by contrast, Kerensky's mistakes did promote the victory of illiberalism. Yet the basic pattern--the collapse of centrist reformism--was the same. Fifty years ago, it provided the basic theme of Crane Brinton's study, The Anatomy of Revolution, which remains one of the best explanations of the weakness of men like Mazowiecki and Kerensky in a revolutionary environment. In analyzing the English, American, French and Russian revolutions, Brinton found that in every case a first wave of moderate reformers was given a chance to remake the old order, and that their response to this opportunity was almost always the same:
to set about quite naturally cultivating the sober virtues that go with power. Such virtues, however, make them inadequate leaders of militant revolutionary societies.
The moderates also displayed a deeper weakness: a lack of conviction that the people were able to detect. In the French and English revolutions, Brinton wrote, the moderates
used grand words and phrases grandly, as a consolation and a joy to their listeners and to themselves. But they did not believe in them as the radicals believed in them; they did not intend to try to pursue them to their logical conclusions in action.
This is still a remarkably fresh account of what we would today call the credibility problem of moderate reformers throughout the old Soviet Empire. It pervaded Mazowiecki's half-hearted campaign, which he waged in nineteenth-century style, rarely leaving his office except for weekend speeches.
In retrospect, Mazowiecki's weak defense of himself and his policies is itself defensible only if one concludes that the future of Polish democracy was not in fact hanging in the balance. Had Walesa been a true tyrant in the making, Mazowiecki's readiness to send the good democrats down to defeat for the sake of a lot of Communist holdovers would seem absurd. After a lifetime in opposition, he could hardly have believed that he owed the nomenklatura a graceful retirement.
Mazowiecki's handling of anti-Semitism was an almost equally incomprehensible case of self-restraint. He refused to dignify with any response the insinuation that he might be part Jewish. Scorning the obvious ripostes (how dare Walesa degrade Poland's elections! or, this shows Lech's no democrat! or, look at what he'll do to avoid spelling out a real economic program!), he simply said nothing. To many, this silence under attack seemed wonderfully decent, even saintly. But, again, such admiration rests to a large extent on not taking the threat of Walesa's anti-Semitism too seriously. Had his rival been a truly ominous figure, Mazowiecki's aloofness would seem more a mark of impotence than honor.
To defend himself fully, of course, Walesa has to establish more than that his campaign of self-aggrandizement did no real harm. He has to argue that Polish democracy needed a more capable defender--to secure it not against the likes of Lech Walesa but against other challengers who might not be democrats at all. The election returns seemed to bear him out. Mazowiecki so jeopardized support for the democratic transition that he actually received fewer votes than the mysterious Stanislaw Tyminski, an almost unknown Peruvian-Canadian spiritualist-businessman who was widely thought to be working for the secret police. As the Communists themselves always say, a revolution must be able to defend itself. Mazowiecki's was not.
Postcommunist Eastern Europe
The choice between Mazowiecki and Walesa has, in a variety of forms, been posed in almost every country of Eastern Europe since 1989: it is the choice between relying on old institutions as a bridge to the new, and pushing forward hard to overturn the communist order as quickly as possible. Should the old guard be treated as potential coalition partners or as criminals? And, the crucial question, which approach does more to strengthen new democratic institutions?
The answer to at least the first of these questions is quite clear. Throughout Eastern Europe, governments that tried to follow strategies of institutional continuity and national consensus lost ground; they were either obliged to pursue more radical policies or were replaced. This was even true in Czechoslovakia, where the Communists had been thrown out in what was called the "Velvet Revolution," a slogan meant to suggest that the convulsion underway would be barely perceptible and certainly not painful. The usual revolutionary excesses would be prevented by persuading people, as President Vaclav Havel tried to do in his 1990 New Year's Day address, that everyone was to some degree implicated in the old order. By the same token, the new order would rest on the unifying principle of "culture" and have room in it for everyone.
Havel's own prestige was so great that this formula seemed to have a chance of working. And yet it soon became clear that not all Czechs subscribed to the universal-guilt thesis. They wanted visible confirmation that the revolution, Velvet or otherwise, was really happening. Within months, the Havel government had to announce that it was launching investigations and trials of the Communist old guard. This retreat was important not because it showed that the revolution in Czechoslovakia had some of the attributes of revolutions everywhere but because the legitimacy of the revolution would otherwise have been undermined.
If Czechoslovakia seemed the most promising place in Eastern Europe for a painless democratic revolution, Bulgaria seemed one of the least promising for self-government of any kind. While Communist regimes were falling elsewhere, Bulgaria continued to be seen in the West as having so little awareness of the outside world and such weak democratic traditions that the Communist Party might rule indefinitely on a constitutional basis. At first these expectations were borne out: the Communists came out ahead in the elections of spring 1990 and formed their own government after the alliance of liberal parties rejected a national unity coalition. A coalition, the liberals believed, could only legitimize the idea of continuing Communist leadership. Waiting for an opportunity to take on the government, the opposition organized the only successful general strike in the history of the communist or postcommunist world. In November the government fell, and a new cabinet with a non-Communist prime minister was formed a month later. By refusing to compromise and by conducting a strategy of confrontation, the liberals had made the Communists their junior, and fading, partners.
Gorbachev and the Demagogues
The most prolonged clash between moderate reformism and radical demagogy was the one carried on until last month between Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. In the space of just a year and a half, they were by turns adversaries (in the spring and early summer of 1990), and then collaborators (in the late summer and early fall of that year), then adversaries once more (from the end of 1990 through April of 1991), and finally collaborators again (until Gorbachev's fall in August). Yet throughout this period, even when working together, they stood for deeply different approaches to changing the Soviet system, a disagreement that has not been made any less basic (or any less bitter) by the hardliners' coup. To the moderate reformer, Yeltsin may always be guilty of having pushed too hard, of overplaying his hand. To the radical demagogue, Gorbachev brought on the counter-revolution by failing to break the power of the old guard when he had the chance; he underplayed his hand.
At crucial junctures, of course, the very survival of moderate reform has depended on the support of demagogy. Last winter Yeltsin successfully halted Gorbachev's turn to the right, and the decisive factor in his victory was the recognition that the only way to break the new conservative line was through popular mobilization. This was new: until the end of 1990, the challenge that Soviet liberals had mounted against Gorbachev had been decorously minuet-like, and there was widespread uneasiness within the opposition at the idea of trying to rally the people against him. It was, after all, not fully clear how the people would answer. (This hesitation was understandable: there had not been a single large political demonstration against Gorbachev in Moscow until 1991. For all the ferment of perestroika, the big urban crowds that made the Eastern European revolutions were not part of the Soviet scene. The student rallies that forced the resignation of the Ukrainian prime minister in the fall of 1990 were only a partial exception, and were not immediately imitated elsewhere.)
In the face of this hesitation, Yeltsin argued the case for political confrontation. As he told the Russian Parliament last December, "We have not been elected by the people to patch up peeling facades." The further Gorbachev turned to the right, the more radical Yeltsin's positions became. On the economy, he favored private land ownership; on secession, he stood with the Baltic republics against Moscow; on the role of the army, he suggested that Russian soldiers disobey orders to fire on civilians and raised the possibility of separate forces for the Russian Republic. As for Gorbachev himself, Yeltsin went on Soviet television in February to call for the president's resignation. A month later, he ran up a huge majority in the Russian Republic in favor of instituting an elective presidency--a post he clearly intended for himself.
To many of his colleagues, not to speak of his critics, Yeltsin seemed on a populist rampage.(1) His then deputy in the Russian legislature, Ruslan Khasbulatov, said recently that he especially doubted the call for Gorbachev's resignation but now recognizes that it was necessary. Provoking the army seemed riskier still. For a comparable challenge to the military, by a politician who was in no real position to see it through, one has to go back to the Kornilov affair (and Soviets know how that turned out).
Yet in April Gorbachev blinked. He sought a truce with Yeltsin in the form of a pact signed by the leaders of the nine republics that had not declared secession, and this formula--the so-called "nine-plus-one" agreement--became the basis for a new round of cooperation between the two. We may never know how Gorbachev felt about this retreat: had he grown dissatisfied with the crackdown because it was failing or because it contradicted his long-term reformist goals? The answer matters for history's ultimate verdict on Gorbachev, but it is almost irrelevant to an analysis of what caused the crackdown to fail. Whether Gorbachev was a firm believer in the turn to the right, or a merely a reluctant one, he abandoned the policy of repression for the same reason: Boris Yeltsin's successful demagogy.
A campaign of political confrontation had saved the good Gorbachev from the bad one. The good one's response was now to argue that the time for liberal demagogy had passed; lack of unity would only make the path of reform more difficult. Gorbachev's favorite themes were the need for what he called "civic accord" and the danger of dividing the country into "reds and whites"--communists and anticommunists. On July 25, when he addressed the Central Committee for the last time before the coup, he went so far as to warn liberals against actions that would provoke the party into further repressive measures. (He referred to these politely as "another line of behavior.") "This is by no means what society needs just now"; what is needed is "moderation of emotions."
The national unity approach clearly had its advocates in the Yeltsin camp. One of the Russian president's advisers described his boss's outlook in these terms: "Anticommunist hysteria is out, replaced by an emphasis on competence and reliability regardless of party affiliation."(2) The prospect of cooperation between moderates and radicals was further enhanced by the defection of Gorbachev's former chief lieutenants, Eduard Shevardnadze and Alexander Yakovlev, who on July 1 announced the formation of a semi-oppositionist group called the Movement of Democratic Reforms. They argued that only unity among democrats offered a "realistic prospect" of success, and while the precise terms of the unity they proposed were unclear, the basic idea was not. It was to build the broadest possible reform coalition, ignoring internal disagreements that were not directly related to the task at hand. That Gorbachev himself hoped to work with this new organization was suggested by the description he gave the Communist Party in its new program: the "party of democratic reforms."
All the same, the differences between moderates and radicals remained fundamental to the very end of Gorbachev's rule, and they are worth sketching out to understand what each strategy contributed to the democratization of the Soviet system.
The Moderates' Reproach
The moderates' case was a practical one: continuing progress toward democracy depended on flexibility and realism. The radicals' electoral victories were said to give them a stake in the effectiveness of government, and in tempering public expectations of any immediate improvement. Because the radicals would eventually be held accountable for their promises, they needed to overcome the rigid idealism and refusal to compromise that Alexander Yakovlev last year derided in Moscow News as the "complex of the female student," or, in yet another abusive phrase, as "a normative approach worked up into psychosis."(3) If the radicals remained moral and political absolutists, they would only spur expectations that could not be met and that would constrain future policy. The people had to understand that the switch to a market economy brings unavoidable hardships, or they would not accept the pain when it came.
This critique had its logic, but it distorted Soviet political realities. The crucial obstacle to economic reform was not, as their votes showed, what the public would accept, it was what Gorbachev would accept. As long as he insisted on splitting the difference between the reform proposals of market economists and those of his conservative bureaucrats, liberals could only benefit from their unwillingness to compromise with him. When asked in late summer 1990 to choose between the Shatalin-Yavlinsky "500 Days" plan and the program of then Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, Gorbachev's verdict was: combine them. When asked, in the early summer of 1991, to choose between the reformulated Yavlinsky plan and Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov's so-called "anti-crisis" program, he had the same advice again: combine them.
Because Gorbachev's prime minister always had a veto over proposals for rapid marketization, liberals correctly sought to highlight their differences with the government. They would have gained nothing from supporting heavily negotiated programs that they did not think would be either successful or irreversible. Had Yeltsin, for example, pieced together a compromise "500 Days" plan last year, he would have been held at least in part accountable for this year's economic collapse. The damage done would have been more than personal. The public would have had reason to believe that the painful transition to a market economy is, in fact, all pain and no transition. Likewise, conservatives would have found it far easier to argue that all marketization plans are unworkable. It was precisely because no successfully fudged compromise plan emerged last year that moderates like Yakovlev and Shevardnadze began to radicalize their economic programs this year.
Scolding their radical colleagues for short-sightedness, Soviet moderates offered a further critique of the long-term effects of the demagogic style: playing on popular anger might bring good returns for a while, but the picture was likely to change as other, less principled players join the game. A super-charged political atmosphere does give illiberal demagogues opportunities they would not otherwise have. This is why moderate reformers began to worry openly about the rise of political "speculators" who would be able to outbid the more responsible competition. The moderates said, in brief: live by the crowd, die by the crowd. Shevardnadze recently warned (and his phrase was a very common one) that in a deepening social crisis "someone completely unknown" could come to the fore of Soviet politics--unless reformers unite.
Like much of their case, this theme reflected the growing political isolation of moderate reformers, but it fit the facts only loosely. The elections of the past two years did not confirm the fear that an angry people would support the angriest candidates. Extreme Russian nationalists, to take just one example, did very poorly in parliamentary elections of 1990. In the Russian presidential election in June 1991 the vote for Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an admitted demagogue who tried to combine nationalist themes with economic grievances, was less than 8 percent. And even if one is disturbed by Zhirinovsky's showing (and some people claim to be), it was the moderates rather than the radicals who needed to think hardest about its implications. They were the ones who suffered most from his presence in the field. The only candidate who could fairly be called a moderate reformer--former Interior Minister Vadim Bakatin--was also the one who fell furthest short of expectations. He was the contender most closely identified with Gorbachev's reforms, and was regarded as Gorbachev's favorite in the race. Bakatin got just 3 percent of the vote; Yeltsin, by contrast, drew 57 percent.
It was moderates, then, who had made themselves most vulnerable to outbidding by illiberal demagogues. Yeltsin was comparatively immune: he was not going to be derailed by jingoistic candidates promising lower vodka prices as long as he kept control of the most potent demagogic issue of Soviet politics--anticommunism. The Polish presidential elections had, of course, conveyed the very same message: Tyminski's victim was not Walesa but Mazowiecki. In both cases, the politician who died by the crowd was the one who had never lived by it.(4)
Continuity and Coups
Perhaps the most important difference between moderates and radicals concerned the future of the party and state bureaucracy. On this issue, their timid positions of the past put the moderates on unusually weak ground. Yakovlev, for example, was the most consistently liberal voice to which Gorbachev listened over the past six years, and yet his public statements give an inkling of how gradualist his private advice must have been. Just last year he reproached the radicals for their obsession with breaking up the bureaucracy. For him, it made no sense to treat the entire "stratum of management and administration as despotic because it used to be such." After all, he said, "democracy is nothing without professional and highly qualified management." Here Yakovlev echoed Mazowiecki (as well as Pipes on Kerensky): if things are to improve, hothead amateur politicians should stand aside; "Professionals must take over." As a purely practical matter--and here the defeatism of the moderates shone through--reformers should see that "it is impossible to crush the apparat."
Yeltsin made clear what he thought of this argument by issuing his decree of July 20, 1991, which provided for the disbanding of Communist Party organizations in all state institutions located on the territory of the Russian Republic, including industrial enterprises. The stated goal: "to prevent interference...in the activities of state bodies." In fixing his name to such a document at the very moment that his negotiations with Gorbachev on the Union Treaty were bearing fruit, Yeltsin showed that he did not intend to let cooperation in one area dilute his authority as the Soviet Union's most single-minded and effective basher of bureaucrats and party hacks. The rhetoric with which he defended his action suggested a real relish for the fight--and an awareness that it gave him political credibility that he could not afford to sacrifice. "It's time you stopped hampering our reforms!" he told a group of hardline conservatives. "Those in the way should go."(5)
The July 20 decree showed that Yeltsin intended to increase rather than ease his pressure on Gorbachev to implement a radical program. By zeroing in on the party apparatus, he selected an issue on which popular sentiment was well known and Gorbachev's dithering is of long standing. Yeltsin also showed that he could force other putative reformers to choose sides. Gorbachev obliged by putting himself once more at the head of the reactionaries, promising them that he would veto Yeltsin's measure with his own decree. Shevardnadze and Yakovlev, by contrast, issued a statement supporting Yeltsin: they had been maneuvered into a more radical position than they probably expected. Yakovlev had earlier said of their new movement that it would "not be confrontational in character." Yeltsin was making him think again.
For anticommunist demagogues, the party apparatus has been at one and the same time all-vulnerable and all-powerful--an irresistible target. Their new foothold in government did not mean that the radicals had to work with the bureaucracy, but exactly the opposite: they had to confront it. They believed that otherwise they would become mere figurehead rulers--enjoying "popularity without power," in the words of one Soviet commentator. The residual influence of the apparat loomed as large as any other problem in the thinking of elected liberal leaders. Leningrad Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, hardly a radical by temperament, compared the precariousness of the democrats' position to that of Nicholas II: the last czar was unable to keep his officials from acting in a way that made czarism unbearable to his subjects. And because he could not control the bureaucracy he was responsible for reducing the country to Bolshevism. This, says Sobchak,
is a lesson for a democrat who, upon finding himself at the head of a city, a republic, or even the country as a whole, acts in a shilly-shally manner. The System may adroitly prod him towards adopting decisions which can lead to catastrophe. The System can take a decision behind the back of a spineless or credulous leader. For what it thinks about is not the people's benefit....It thinks solely about preserving its own wealth. It is really a machine and, like any thinking machine, it is inhuman. God, man, blood, conscience, shame--it refuses to accept all of these. The System may provoke a bloodbath behind the back of a democrat-reformer. He will not have the slightest chance to wash away the blood that was spilt and to prove his non-participation.6
For Soviet liberals, the certainty of being sabotaged by the old apparat made the theoretical advantages of institutional continuity irrelevant. For them, the fact that Gorbachev did not acknowledge this simply attested to the futility of his kind of moderation.
Nowhere was this futility more evident than in his attitude toward the very institutions of the old order that posed the greatest potential threat to reform: the military and the police. Long before August, the men who ran these institutions had made their opposition to Gorbachev's policies known: in private meetings, in strident public declarations, and in a bizarre effort in June to stage a parliamentary vote stripping him of his powers. Yet he took no visible action of any kind against the participants in this conspiracy. He jocularly referred to what had happened as a "coup," and even offered public excuses for its instigators.(7)
Gorbachev had, in effect, over-learned the lesson of Kerensky's mistake: keep the existing institutions of the state on your side, for what really counts is force, not popularity. This strategy was doomed: when the chieftains of the old order turned against him at last, he had to rely on the popularity of someone else.
For his part, Yeltsin had also been wary of pushing the military too far and sought to show that he was prepared for some sort of working relationship with them: he accepted a deputy chief of the general staff as his "defense minister," named a decorated veteran of the Afghan war as his vice-presidential running mate, worked out an arrangement with the KGB for information-sharing between it and the Russian government. To avoid yet another confrontation, Yeltsin chose not to apply his July 20 ban on party cells to the military, acknowledging that this issue would have to be addressed by the all-Union Parliament.
For Gorbachev, propitiating the generals was a strategy; for Yeltsin, at most a tactic. Doing so might help to defuse tensions between the Russian president and the military, it offered far less effective protection against a coup than his broader strategy of cultivating mass support. The decision of the August coup leaders not to arrest Yeltsin at the same time that they arrested Gorbachev was perhaps the ultimate tribute to what he had achieved: he had made himself too powerful to touch. This was, of course, only the coup leaders' first mistake: they also miscalculated their ability to hold together the institutions that were nominally under their control. When demagogic power took on institutional power in the streets of Moscow, the Soviet state disintegrated.
The result will almost certainly be a more complete rout of the old order than would have occurred if the conservatives had not acted at all. Curiously enough, this was the precise advice they received just weeks before the coup by Gorbachev's closest supporters. At the July session of the Central Committee, Anatoly Lukyanov, the speaker of the Supreme Soviet and a longtime leader, appealed to the body not even to think of trying to oust Gorbachev as party leader. Were the president of the USSR to cease being the general secretary of the CPSU, Communists would be left defenseless at the hands of elected democrats across the country. The result would be awful: a "pogrom against party organizations."(8)
Before the coup, then, the prospect of having to face down wild-eyed, Communist-hating radicals gave Gorbachev and his supporters additional arguments against hardliners who were spoiling for a fight. When the coup came, the hardliners were defeated because Soviet democracy had acquired a popular base that Gorbachev himself had never been able--or willing--to give it. In the end, both Gorbachev's crackdown of last winter and the hardliners' revolt of August had the same result: moderate reform could not survive without the support of radical demagogy.
The events of this year may at last put an end to one of the more illusory ideas that has crept into analysis of Soviet politics: the so-called "Pinochet model." This was the voguish comparison between the Soviet Union and other states--Chile and South Korea among others--that had made their breakthrough to democracy by way of military rule, under which a capitalist middle class took shape and the unappeasable conflicts of the past were forgotten. Exponents of this neo-authoritarian scenario insisted that in the Soviet Union only a military regime would be strong enough to deal with the social tensions created by rapid marketization.(9)
Both Gorbachev's own hard line and, still more so, the August coup exposed a huge problem with the "Pinochet" scheme: the only institutions able to enforce it had no interest in promoting the liberal result that its authors desired. At the same time, the mobilization of radical forces suggested that liberalism was not so feeble as the neo-authoritarians had insisted. By rallying the people, Yeltsin and his allies showed that a Soviet liberal regime might--like its Eastern European counterparts--be strong enough to enforce its policies. It was a reminder that, in a revolution, force is not the only form of power.
Illiberal Demagogues
Anyone who sets out to praise liberal demagogues takes the risk of seeming to praise demagogues of all kinds--a serious mistake in writing about the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In the unfolding disintegration of Yugoslavia, for example, the most important single role has been played by the president of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, who for our purposes can only be categorized as an illiberal demagogue. After taking control of the Serbian Communist Party in 1987, he succeeded in giving it a thoroughly nationalist coloration and in December 1990 was able to win a crushing victory in the republic's presidential election. Insisting that Yugoslav federalism was created by Tito largely at Serbia's expense, Milosevic quickly brought two previously autonomous provinces--Vojvodina and Kosovo--under firm Serbian control. More recently, in the bloody guerrilla war waged by Serbian military and paramilitary units inside Croatia, he has again played an inciting role.
What sets Yugoslavia's break with communism apart from the other Eastern European revolutions is that it was achieved without any real role for anticommunism. The country went straight from a decentralizing reformism to divisive nationalism. Grievances against the Communist Party were unimportant enough that its leaders were able to become nationalist heroes not only in Serbia but even in Slovenia, the most Western of Yugoslavia's six republics. Moderate reformers--above all, the federal Prime Minister, Ante Markovic--eventually became irrelevant bystanders to ethnic conflicts whose spread they could do nothing to stop.
The absence of anticommunism in Yugoslav politics may seem a mere curiosity, but it is more than that. It has meant that the country has no politicians able to rally popular support for holding the country together on a democratic basis. Yugoslavia has, in other words, no liberal demagogues. They were pre-empted for many years by the seeming success of moderate reform and, subsequently, by ethnic particularism. The first factor made anticommunism seem unnecessary; the second made it seem inadequate. As a result, the only serious electoral rival to Milosevic last year turned out to be another Serb nationalist. When armed force was used to break up peaceful demonstrations in Belgrade last spring, a burst of anticommunist protests gave hope that liberalism had a constituency after all. But no existing politicians were in a position to exploit (or perhaps even to understand) the opportunity. Milosevic had so successfully defined Serbian politics in ethnic terms that he quickly refocused public attention on the conflict with Slovenia and Croatia.
The horrors of the Yugoslav case have seemed a mere foretaste of what might be in store in the Soviet Union, and developments in some of the non-Russian republics do bear striking similarities to the Yugoslav pattern--in particular, the use of ethnic minorities as pawns in increasingly violent paramilitary struggles. The outstanding example is Georgia, whose president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, has accused Moscow of arming the Ossetian minority so as to foment a Georgian civil war and cripple the drive for independence. He has referred to the Ossetians as "guests" in Georgia and threatened to deport them and other minority groups. Elsewhere in the Soviet Union, ethnic minorities have provided similar material for outside manipulation. In the Baltic republics, for example, Soviet military bases have provided organizational support for demonstrations and strikes by ethnic Russian groups; alleged violations of the rights of Russians were also among the pretexts for the military crackdown in Lithuania and Latvia in January 1991.
In such confrontations, separatist leaders have won strong popular support by proposing to wage the battle with Moscow on the all-out terms that Moscow itself employs. Gamsakhurdia (whose rhetorical style is typified by his demand that Communists "be chopped up....burned out with a red-hot iron of the Georgian nation") was the choice of 86 percent of voters in last spring's elections, and his critics charge that a personality cult and press censorship are taking hold.
For many, these cases are reason enough to treat nationalism as inherently illiberal, a view that President Bush himself came close to expressing when he lectured the Ukrainian Parliament on August 1 about the threat to freedom posed by "suicidal nationalism based on ethnic hatred." There could have been no worse spot than Kiev to deliver this message, for--whether intentionally or not--it implied a grossly unfair criticism of the Ukrainian opposition movement Rukh. Rukh, as it happens, provides strong support for the proposition that anticommunism tends to liberalize nationalism. The movement is passionately hostile toward Moscow; toward minorities, its policy is a model of tolerance (and in a culture whose tolerance is by no means ingrained). It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Bush ignored Rukh's moderate nationalism primarily because he considers its principal goal, Ukrainian independence, to be inherently extremist. But, paradoxical as it may seem, the two halves of Rukh's program--inclusiveness and separatism--are mutually reinforcing. Tolerance helps to neutralize the attempts of the "empire" to use non-Ukrainian minorities as levers of political control. And anticommunism helps to build a national identity that is not simply ethnic. If the Ukraine evolves successfully toward democracy, liberal demagogues--liberal nationalist demagogues, at that--are likely to deserve much of the credit.
The Defense of Liberty
Almost thirty years ago, a candidate for the presidency of the United States horrified a national political audience by suggesting that extremism in the defense of liberty was no vice. There was as much sham as shock in the reaction to this remark, but the basic objection to it was reasonable enough. Extremism weakens the underlying consensus that a working democracy needs. Losers find it too hard to accept defeat, winners find it too easy to press their advantage.
This objection can hardly have the same force in societies that are trying to break down totalitarian institutions and make democracy work for the first time. In carrying out such a revolution, liberal anticommunist demagogy helps to solve three separate problems with which moderate reformism has usually been unable to cope. It gives the people, who are asked to endure many hardships, reason to believe that the changes underway will not be so heavily compromised that they cannot succeed. It intimidates the guardians of the old order, who are otherwise inclined to think that the revolution can be undone by some combination of bureaucratic sabotage, strong-arm methods, and stalling. And it gives new democratic leaders the enduring legitimacy that enables them to thwart rival demagogues who seek power for illiberal ends.
The peoples of the old Soviet Empire have been blessed with the opportunity to make one of history's great revolutions, by unexpectedly peaceful means. They have discovered, however, that there is sometimes only one way to protect a peaceful revolution, and to keep it moving forward. With an ax.
Stephen Sestanovich is director of Soviet and East European studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.
1) Foreign critics spoke up too. On March 28, the very day that the Russian Congress met to consider Yeltsin's impeachment, Stephen Cohen of Princeton expressed doubt abut the propriety of the protest rally held on Yeltsin's behalf: "Is it the right thing to do to bring hundreds of thousands of people into the street at a moment when a parliament, which is a new phenomenon in the Soviet Union, is meeting to resolve weighty issues?" It was one thing, apparently, for conservatives to attack, quite another for liberals to respond.
2) Oleg Rumyantsev, "Who is Boris Yeltsin?", Washington Post, June 16, 1991. Whether this is in fact Yeltsin's view is, as we shall see, unclear.
3) Yakovlev is known in the West as one of the most sophisticated and worldly of Soviet politicians, but the sneering epithet "female student" confirms that these terms are relative.
4) Zhirinovsky has something else in common with Tyminski: he was widely seen as a creature of the secret police. The KGB, it seems, was using the Russian election for a little market research: could a candidate openly appealing to lower class resentments cut into Yeltsin's vote? This time the answer was no, but the research continues: Zhirinovsky says he will run next for president of the USSR. (Tyminski has also formed his own party, to be known simply as "X.")
5) Yeltsin first made a national reputation as a critic of party privilege, while Gorbachev has always been curiously obtuse about it. In February 1990, immediately after the CPSU's historic decision to surrender its constitutional monopoly of power, Gorbachev dismissed the whole subject: "What privilege does a party organization secretary's post afford him? The privilege of rushing around day and night?" (Pravda, February 12, 1990).
6) Moscow News, No. 48, 1990, p. 15.
7) See Jeremy Azrael and Sergei Zamascikov in the New York Times, August 4, 1991.
8) This would not be the first time Yeltsin's radicalism has helped Gorbachev. One of the most insightful journalists covering Soviet politics Guilietto Chiesa, argues that at the 1990 Communist Party Congress conservatives were frightened by Yeltsin's warnings about possible future trials of Communists and turned to Gorbachev for protection. (Problems of Communism, July-August 1990, p. 33.)
9) See Jerry Hough's testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, July 9, 1991.
Essay Types: Essay