The New Russian Revolution

The Soviet press has been noticeably reserved and even evasive as it has tried to deal with the magnitude of the humiliating defeat suffered by high Communist Party officials in last Sunday’s national elections. While providing raw results, the government-controlled media have had little to say about specific victories and losses. Analysis of the sometimes stunning repudiation of local party bigwigs, between 20% and 25% of whom appear to have been angrily and even contemptuously rejected at the polls, has been nonexistent. One of the more remarkable aspects of the election was that the anti-party vote occurred spontaneously, without any national and with little local organization. No doubt that’s another reason for the press’ silence about the meaning of what happened. Soviet leaders recognize the danger of letting Soviet voters know just how powerful an instrument their wrath proved to be.

What flows now from that demonstration of power will be the real test of President Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of political and economic reform. Gorbachev himself, it’s fair to assume, has reason to be content. Among the election’s more prominent losers were many conservatives whose enthusiasm for his reform plans has been less than unconstrained. Having lost in the election for the Congress of People’s Deputies, these opponents of change now face possible loss of their party sinecures. “Party leaders,” said foreign ministry spokesman Gennadi I. Gerasimov, “must have not only the confidence of the party but the confidence of the people.” Gorbachev is now in a position where he can claim that the election handed him a broom and a mandate to give the party’s ideological house a good spring cleaning.

Getting rid of some enemies of reform, though, won’t by itself bring down the barriers to reform. Gorbachev has indicated from the start of his tenure four years ago an appreciation that public opinion must begin to count for something in the Soviet Union if modernization is to have any chance to succeed. While there is no reason to think he intends to let it become the ultimate political force that it is in the liberal democracies, he apparently does see it as a valuable supporting instrument for his hopes to make the Soviet Union a more efficient, productive and maybe even humane society. Reforms will work only if people believe they have a stake in making them work. For most people that stake is the prospect of a better material life; for some it also means the chance for much greater intellectual freedom. The Soviet people for generations have been bombarded with empty and unrealizable promises. If they now genuinely come to think that things can really be made better, Gorbachev will have cleared a major hurdle.

One of the things that will shape what Soviet citizens think is how their demands for change are recognized in the composition of the Supreme Soviet, the power-wielding body whose members will be chosen from among the delegates of the new congress. If the independent and reform-minded elements that drew such wide support are given not just seats in the Supreme Soviet but an attentive hearing for their views, than Gorbachev can probably count on at least extended public patience and maybe even enthusiastic support as he maneuvers to rescue the Soviet economy from mismanagement and corruption. But if the popularly chosen voices of change are ignored or effectively silenced, then almost certainly the public cynicism that contributes so significantly to the country’s stagnation will deepen. Last Sunday’s election was important to Gorbachev’s ambitions for reform. What happens next could be not just important but crucial.