Why Gorbachev lost.

WITH FAILURE of the coup attempt, a page has been turned in the history of the Soviet Union. The country could descend into chaos; it could make progress toward democracy; it could even fall victim to another coup. But whatever happens it will not return to "Gorbachevism," the attempt to free consciousness while preserving the society's totalitarian institutions intact. History has moved on. The moment for Gorbachev's foredoomed attempt to combine the uncombinable has passed.

The events of the last few months illustrate well the irreconcilability of the interests of the Soviet people and the military-industrial complex.

Last October, Gorbachev agreed to the Shatalin plan for shifting the Soviet Union to a market economy in five hundred days. The plan provided for eventually putting 70 per cent of industrial enterprise in private hands. At the last minute, however, Gorbachev came under pressure from the military and industrial interests and the plan was dropped.

The scuttling of the Shatalin plan was followed by an attempt to reinforce central planning. This May, however, under pressure from the devastating coal miners' strike and the victory of Boris Yeltsin in the Russian elections, Gorbachev agreed to the "Nine plus One" plan, under which control over natural resources was to pass to the Republics. It was the prospect of a new Union treaty based on this agreement that pushed the leaders of the military-industrial complex to attempt to seize power.

From the very beginning, there was an oversimplified quality to Gorbachev's reputation in the West as a liberal reformer. Gorbachev was ready to reduce repression and diminish the role of the Party, but the purpose was to modernize the Soviet Union's state bureaucracy, whose leaders remained members of the Party.

This, in turn, was a matter of military necessity. In August 1982, Israeli pilots flying American F-15 and F-16 airplanes destroyed 81 Syrian MiG-21 and MiG-23 fighters over the Bekaa Valley without losing a single plane. This disaster was followed by President Reagan's announcement on March 23, 1983, that American technology had reached the point that it would be possible to intercept Soviet missiles before they hit the United States. These developments convinced the Soviet leaders that they had to take the risks of reform.

Reform projects had circulated in the higher levels of the Party for years before Gorbachev's accession to power. Abel Aganbegyan, an early Gorbachev economic advisor, outlined the crisis of the Soviet economy as early as 1962. Once in power, Gorbachev took it upon himself to push through a reform program; however, he met total opposition from the all-powerful Party apparatus. Obliged to operate through some other means, Gorbachev decided to recruit the Soviet people themselves, inspiring them with glasnost, the controlled release of truthful information, a decision which was to determine the course of events for the next six years.

Much has been written about Gorbachev's attempts to balance between Left and Right; in fact, the policy of playing off one force against another was inherent in Gorbachev's decision to use democratic passions to defang the Party apparatus in the interests of the state machine.

At first, there were attempts to confine glasnost to a "Leninist" framework, but this proved difficult. In the first place, any fixed limits had to be enforced; this entailed a gift of power to the enforcers, who were the anti-reform forces that Gorbachev had to fight. At the same time, Gorbachev was rapidly pushed by Party recalcitrance and the ever-present threat of a palace coup to develop a second, "presidential" structure of power, which involved semi-free elections to the previously purely formal soviets. This had the effect of creating further possibilities for freedom. The result was that free speech proved impossible to stop and glasnost expanded steadily to demolish the entire fictional world of the ideology.

Breaking the Spell

THE PROBLEM was that in seeking to change the Soviet Union, Gorbachev approached the Soviet people purely instrumentally. He and other Communist "progressives" could cynically denounce everything that they had previously taught, but for millions of Soviet citizens, the breaking of the magic spell of the ideology created a spiritual crisis. Soviet citizens awoke to the realization of an enormous breach of trust.

The first result was an explosion of nationalism. When it became clear that repression had eased, mass demonstrations took place in Armenia and the Baltics and then spread to virtually every national Republic. In 1989, the first massive strikes broke out in the Novokuznetsk coal mines; strikes spread to other coal-mining areas with the speed of a chain reaction, as if Soviet workers were determined to express their anger all at once.

The sense of betrayal became all the deeper when Soviet citizens began to realize the truly limited nature of the reforms that Gorbachev had in mind.

The first reforms he introduced provided for a degree of autonomy for enterprises. The enterprises were still required to fill state orders, which often accounted for 90 per cent or more of production, but there was now the possibility of selling some of the remaining production at negotiated prices. It also became possible for citizens to form cooperatives and for collective farmers to rent land.

These changes, however, all took place within the context of central planning; although they did introduce elements of economic freedom, they in no way changed the status of the state's bureaucratic machine. What they did do was disorganize the planned economy. Factory directors raised salaries to attract workers and concentrated on expensive items, while cooperatives, forced to pay bribes for scarce supplies, in turn engaged in superexploitation, helping to fuel an explosion of inflation.

By last year, it had become obvious that the way out of a fast-deteriorating economic situation was privatization, and particularly the creation of private property in land; but here the interests of the country came squarely into conflict with those of the military-industrial machine.

There had been considerable talk of "collective property" and cooperative property, of joint stock companies run by the workers. But all of these forms of ownership allowed for control and manipulation by the state. In fact, in the case of joint stock companies in the absence of private ownership, there was a need for more bureaucratic interference rather than less.

The institution of private property, on the other hand, would make it possible actually to dissolve the state bureaucracy and to direct resources in some direction other than the military-industrial complex. In the Soviet Union, the share of the national product that goes to wages is 35 per cent, compared to 70 percent in the West. The difference goes to pay for the Soviet military machine.

On the matter of private property, however, Gorbachev refused to yield. At first, he justified his refusal ideologically, describing private property as the "basis of the exploitation of man by man"; with time, he no longer bothered, resisting instead on behalf of the interests he had always served and even trying to stall the implementation of the Shatalin plan (before dropping it altogether) by calling for a referendum on the question of private ownership of land.

The result was that a serious gap opened up between the consciousness of Soviet citizens, which had been freed of socialist illusions, and the nature of their institutions, which continued to be organized on socialist lines. This was a formula for disaster. If, before, the Soviet Union owed its stability to the fact that its pyramidal social and economic structure was reinforced by the imaginary universe of Marxist-Leninist ideology, now consciousness and institutions came into open conflict.

The combined pressure of national separatism and the demands for economic autonomy of groups like the coal miners posed a dire threat to the unified economic complex that is critical to military procurement. This intensified the conflict between the bureaucracy and the people and put Gorbachev in the position, even before the coup, of changing positions like a weather cock in a frantic effort to hold on to power.

The Soviet Union is now entering the twilight of the Gorbachev period. At this point, Gorbachev is no longer necessary to anyone. The powerful interests which staged the August coup could regroup for a bloodthirsty encore. Or the forces of democratic change could triumph. In neither case would there be a need for a man who, in his constant maneuvering, has succeeded in alienating both.

Mikhail Gorbachev cut the Soviet Union loose from its previous moorings, and it is now adrift. The best hope for the future is that it will find leaders capable of doing what Gorbachev could not do: put aside tactical considerations and the lust for power and guide it to safe harbor on the basis of fairness and respect for the dignity of man.