One of the major confrontations at the plenum was over the Lithuanian Communist Party's declaration of independence (with the obvious aim of regaining political credibility, after it was swept from the boards by Sajudis in last year's election for the Congress of People's Deputies). The Soviet CP leadership clearly was not prepared to give the Lithuanian CP so wide a margin for maneuver. It sponsored a split in the party, giving support to a Moscow loyalist group calling itself the Lithuanian Communist Party (on the Plat-
Finally, on the eve of the plenum, the authorities gave tacit support to a mass demonstration in Moscow against the conservatives. It drew over 100,000 participants, and set a new watermark in mass mobilization in the Soviet capital. Despite the fact that the march was encouraged by the authorities, many of those who participated expressed at the very least a lack of confidence in the Soviet chief: "Gorbachev stop fooling the people," "Gorbachev, whose side are you on."
Moscow News stressed the breadth of the demonstration, mentioning many independent groups: "For the first time, we saw marching side by side representa6 cratic Union, the anarcho-syndicalists and. tives of the Memorial Group, the Demothe Union of Democratic Youth, the soldiers union Shchit ("Shield"), the Sakha(Constitutional Democrats) and the Democratic Communists, RUKH [the Ukrainian People's Front], the Democratic Platform of the CPSU, the Social Protest Movement and the People's Front of Georgia." RUKH supporters carrying the flag of the independent Ukrainian republic were reportedly quite prominent in the
At the plenum itself, the demonstration was referred to both positively and negatively. In the debate on February 7, V.I. Mironenko, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol, said: "We have to understand finally that the hundreds of thousands of people on Manezhnaya Square were not a motley crowd, as someone said on the first day of our work, but the people. It was the people, who give power and take it away. It was the people who are demanding decisive measures to improve their situation."
### Leading conservatives forced to resign
The conservatives were apparently still on the defensive in the apparatus. In the days before the plenum, a series of unreconstructed local party bosses resigned (in Tiumen, Volgograd and Chernigov); the discredited Leningrad boss Soloviev was expelled, and Moscow News ventured to present a critical profile of the conservative leader Yegor Ligachev. Pravda published an denounced former Azerbaijani Ghaidar Aliev in the most violent terms.
The conservatives did not speak out against abandoning the constitutional guarantee of the "leading role" of the Communist Party, which was presented as a major advance for the reformers. But this had become something of an artificial issue. This provision was added to the new Soviet constitution adopted in 1977. It changed nothing in reality. The single-party system was established and maintained without it.
provision had removed in the Baltic republics, as a result of the shattering of the single-party system in fact by the rise of the People's Fronts. However since then commentators in the Estonian and Latvian literary weeklies Reede and Literatura un Maksia, close to the People's Fronts, have argued that the local parties dropping this clause has gone hand hand in with an an antidemocratic offensive by other means and maneuvers, such as trying to prevent opposition groups from expressing themselves by cutting supplies of paper to "unreliable publications."
While the conservatives did not raise their voices against Gorbachev's reforms as such, they took the opportunity to raise the alarm about a slide into disaster. "The main danger to perestroika, a mortal danger I would say for perestroika, for the Soviet union, are the powerful forces of a anti-Communist sort," Ligachev said. He also raised an alarm about the danger represented by German reunification.
The conservative chief said that the talk about a division between conservatives and liberals in the CP was intended to divert attention from this dangers. In particular, he denied a report in the liberal magazine Ogonyok that conservatives had been behind the massacre in Tbilisi on April 9, 1989: "I want to stress that...on April 7, the entire Politburo, with the participation Gorbachev, and...Shevardnadze and Yakovlev, unanimously approved the political recommendations having to do with the evolution of events in Tbilisi."
The primrose path of concessions to nationalism
Yakovlev, apparently a bête noir of the conservatives, found himself accused several times of being responsible for leading the Lithuanian CP leadership onto the primrose path of "concessions" to separatism, nationalism and so on.
Soviet ambassador to Poland, V. I. Brovikov, delivered a prolonged peroration about the slide to ruin: "We keep trying to show that the people are for perestroika, but let me ask, what kind? Is it for the kind that in less than five years has plunged the country into an abyss of crisis, sent it to the devil, alongside whom we have come face to face with rampaging anarchy, with the degradation of the economy, with the grimace of general ruin and a collapse of morals." A number of speakers talked about the party's loss of authority and members.
V. K. Mesyats, the first secretary of the Moscow district committee, said:"Today, Communists are asking us: Why is the Central Committee of the CPSU taking a defensive position, why isn't it opposing the demagogues and falsifiers, why is it temporizing with those who carry party cards in their pocket and oppose the line of the party? In our opinion, the time has come to take a position and to say who is who! Who is really a supporter of perestroika and who is using glasnost to further their own group and political ambitions, for seizing power outright."
Further on, he said that his district committee of course supported perestroika, "but a lot of what is going on today, comrades, looks very much like a rampage of unhealthy passions, anarchy, skillfully
February 26, 1990 • #179 International Vlewpoint whipped up by the leaders of all sorts of groups and unions of an anti-Communist orientation. All this is putting strong psychological pressure on people, arousing just anger and worry. I don't know, I might be mistaken, but this is not the democracy, the glasnost for which the April 1985 plenum voted. Our indecisiveness being weakness...Things have gone too far. Isn't this one of the main reasons we have not gotten the economic results expected?"
The second secretary of the Kazakhstan party, V. G. Anufriev, made a sharp attack on the the CPSU leadership: "The party
VISU
PADOM
USSR congress has to be moved up, On January 23, in "sovereign Latvia" there was no paper for non-Communist party publications.
(Banner reads "All power to the Soviets") — from Literatura un Maksia because the present Central Committee and Politburo no longer have the authority to make crucial decisions. Some of their members should think of leaving. Who, comrades, is to answer for the breakdown of the unity of the party, for its ideological collapses, who is going to answer for the events in Eastern Europe that no one wants to discuss here? They have destroyed our buffer zone... But today already they are raising territorial and material claims, wrecking our consulates, defiling the graves of our soldiers and our shrines, humiliating a great country. And once again we are throwing away millions there, robbing our own people.
Leading official opposes foreign ald
"We offer hospitality to these Mazowieckis and other fellows. We don't need to feed foreign countries so that they will have a better life. We have to assure that things are better here than in their countries and then they will come here themselves and offer us their friendship. Who will tell us comrades, how much Angola, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Vietnam and Cuba cost us? Everything should be given to Soviet people, and that should be written in the program."
However, some top government figures talked as aggressively about the need for "order" as the conservatives. For example, the premier, N. I. Ryzhkov, said: "Hundreds of thousands of refugees have been deprived of their homes and accuse the government of being unable to defend their personal security and property. There are laws against stirring up interethnic conflict, but they are not being applied. There are laws for fighting crime, but their effectiveness has been reduced because the law enforcement agencies have literally been overwhelmed by a wave of unbridled criticism....
"It has to be said forthrightly that any attempts by the law-enforcement agencies to assure order, even in the framework of the existing laws is immediately described as an attack on democracy, an attack on glasnost. At the same time, the people are rightly worried that the organs of power are not taking decisive action to stop growing manifestations of lawlessness." appointed by Gorbachev, said.
"In practice, we have gone into a period of political struggle, in which our many opponents do not shrink from any means. State and national education, work collectives, the youth and mass media are becoming an arena of struggle. We were not ready for this struggle.
Wide variety of forces accused of destructive
"Recently, the ideological face of various forces has become uncovered - from ultraleftists, to social democrats to open nationalistic anti-Communists and even monarchists. Many of them are generating destructive antisocialist activity. If tormerly, they adopted pro-perestroika slogans, today as a rule they reject the policy of the CPSU and aim openly to seize power. Moral terror, threats, physical attacks are being unleashed against soviet and party workers, against those who do not agree with them.
"They seek to discredit the party, the organs of power, the armed forces, the peace-keeping forces. As a means of accomplishing their aims they have chosen to whip up nationalist passions, provocative mass actions, destabilizing the and the means for implementing it, is by no means an opening for disorder, irresponsibility and anarchy. It is not an opening for the expression of extremism, including political extremism. Otherwise, perestroika could turn into a tragedy for our country, whose consequences would be hard to foresee. Years would be necessary to repair the damage.
"We consider extremism unacceptable.
In any form it implies violence. Isn't it time to declare with all clarity and decisiveness what our attitude is to violence and the means of achieving political aims
"In the recent period, we have been confronted with violence in various regions of our country and in various spheres of public life. It is clear that you can't quell extremists with sermons. That only fires them up. All of us are for political methods of solving problems, even socially acute ones. But if these methods prove insufficient, then force has to be met with
Gorbachev's proposals for a strong presidential government fitted in with the view expressed in the various round tables of experts published in the Soviet press that a firm hand is needed to carry through the reform process. They are also in line with the general strategy of trying to create a parliamentary, constitutional bureaucratic domination. Moreover, they correspond to the fact that the party as a machine of rule has been weakened by the reforms, and the contradictory pressures they generate. For example, the leaderships at various levels are being pushed to try win political support, and at the same time they risk the thunders and worse of the top if they make concessions to mass pressure. The sad fate of the majority of the Lithuanian CP is the latest
Strong presidential regime rejected
However, conservative Central Committee members who decried the lack of strong authority in the country opposed the proposals for a strong presidential regime. They do not in fact appear in the new party program published in the February 13 issue of Pravda. This issue could have much more concrete importance than the question of the constitutionally guaranteed "leading role" of the party
A strong presidency in the hands of Gor-
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7
International Viewpoint #179 • February 26, 1990
USSR bachev would not only be a bonapartist dictatorship over the country; it would be a dictatorship over the party itself. That would not only be to the detriment of the factional interests of the conservatives, but would in fact undermine the party as
Furthermore, simply from the standpoint of political realism, the party bosses have good reason to doubt that Gorbachev now has the political authority to make such an institution work. One speaker, Yu. A. Gan'kovski, secretary of the party committee at the Nizhnevartovsk oil and gas combine, raised the question openly if Gorbachev did not already have too many responsibilities.
The leading radical reformer, Boris Yeltsin, took the opportunity of the plenum to put forward a whole program for reforming the party, the first point of which was abolishing democratic centralism, at least as it has been understood, and to replace it "with general principles assuring genuine pluralism in the party, guarantees of rights for minorities, freedom of opinion for party members and citizens of the country and their right to defend their positions, political rights and individual freedom."
Yeltsin presents ten-point program
He presented ten points. The second was "rejecting the apparatus as an instrument of power". The sixth was moving away from a vertical structure in the toward horizontal groupings based on functional and territorial units. He also called for permitting tendencies and factions, as well as for putting the partycontrolled media directly authority of congresses... for the decision about whether an editor or TV director stays or goes to depend on the whim of party secretaries." The final point called for "moving from the unitary principle of building the state and the CP toward a voluntary union of peoples and a voluntary union of the Communist parties of the various republics."
Yeltsin cast the only vote against the new party program, reportedly because it did not go far enough in the direction of
In fact, a number of speakers criticized it for vagueness; one even called it "weepy." The text published in the February 13 Pravda was largely a collection of glittering generalities.
The new program's promises of democracy were belied by the brutal treatment meted out to the Lithuanian CP. Following a harsh denunciation of the local party leadership by Gorbachev, the plenum voted to condemn the decisions of the Lithuanian CP's recent Twentieth Congress and to give support, in particular material support, to a breakaway group, the Lithuanian
8 Lithuanian CP leader, Brausaskas, was CP (on the Platform of the CPSU). The
either reduced to incoherence by the brutality of the attack, or his remarks were denatured in the official version, which quotes him time after time as stammering, "there is nothing I can say."
Y. V. Palackis, the secretary of the Central Committee, however, was quoted as arguing that the breakaway group were neo-Stalinists:
"When Vadim Andreevich Medvedev [Gorbachev's high priest for ideological questions] came to us before our Twentieth Congress, in a closed session...a squall of attacks were launched at our guest. And these attacks were not against Comrade Brausaskas and Berezov but on perestroika and the present leaders of our
"Among our opponents, I think there are many who have no taste for the perestroika CPSU. The CPSU of Brezhnev, and further back than that, is more to their
It does seem likely that only the most Stalinist elements of the Lithuanian party would have opted for a breakaway group totally isolated from the local population and completely dependent on Moscow. (One speaker felt a need to say, for instance, that the new party "has a social base"). Although Gorbachev backed this group, it is hardly likely that he is its favorite person.
Instructive fate of Brazauskas leadership
The fate of the Brausaskas leadership is a good example of the dilemma of the reform line. He was put in as general secretary when the previous Lithuanian CP leadership failed to stop the rise of the national-democratic movement by repressive means. He succeeded in gaining enough political credibility to keep the local Supreme Soviet from adopting a sovereignty resolution modelled on the
But then the national democratic movement became disillusioned with him, and the CP was buried in the elections for the Congress of People's Deputies. Now, after being forced to make new concessions to regain credibility, his patrons in Moscow have cut off his branch, just before the decisive elections for the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet.
This case does not do much to lend credibility to Gorbachev's recent verbal concessions to the right of self-determination.
In fact, at the plenum also, Latvian party secretary Vagris complained about economic maneuvers designed to sabotage Latvian economic autonomy, which was supposed to go into effect from the first of
In general, neither the plenum or the new program adopted offered any "political" solution to the problems raised, and overall it seems that despite the retreat of the conservatives, Gorbachev came out of
Explosion in Tadzhikistan HARDLY was the Soviet CP plenum over before Gorbachev faced a new explosion of national resentment in a Central Asian republic. This time it was in Dushanbe, the capital of Tadzhikistan. The spark was a rumor that Moscow was giving apartments to Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan, when the shortage of housing is acute. The anti-Armenian aspect became clearly anti-European. However, it should be remembered that large scale pogroms developed in Uzbekistan against the Meskhetian Turks, who were forcibily settled there by Stalin, despite the fact that they are a people of Muslim tradition, like the Uzbeks themselves
While the blowup in Tadzhikistan, by all accounts, had a pogromist aspect at the start, it seems to have quickly taken on a general political character directed against the government. The demonstrators called for the resignation of the local CP leadership, a demand which they won; and raised something like a political platform - the closing of a aluminum factory, street signs in Tadzhik, dissolution of the local repressive forces, as well as the opening of butcher shops conforming to Muslim religious laws. Anti-European feelings have been fueled by the fact that the standard of living is far lower than in the European republics, just as it is lower for the original population than for at least a very large part of the Russians living in the republic. Clearly oppression has now become well established in the non-European republics, and it seems that it may spread like a prairie fire. *
Lithuania: perestroika faces test of free
USSR Western newspapers, praising Gorbachev's statesmanship in confronting the Lithuanian issue head on. The Washington Post acclaimed his virtuoso performance in - Lithuania and • urges the Lithuanians to consider Gorbachev's arguments seriously (Guardian Weekly January 21). As US President George Bush commented on January 24, against a background of falling stock markets "it is in our interest that perestroika succeed and go forward."
"THE PARTY and state leadership will not allow the Union to disintegrate" thundered Mikhail Gorbachev responding to the decision of the Lithuanian Communist Party at its 20th
Congress on December 17, 1989 to become an "independent party with its own programme and statutes". Gorbachev also told the all-union CP Central Committee meeting over
Christmas that this decision was illegal and that the independence movement was the work of "separatists and nationalists" as well as an "attack on my reform policies."
He proposed that the Supreme Soviet examine the
"legitimacy of the existence in the country of organizations and political movements carrying out separatist activities and sowing nationalist terror." Signalling the gravity of these developments, Gorbachev cancelled all meetings with foreign visitors; the Tokyo stock market shuddered.
COLIN MEADE
HESE THREATS were followed
T by a visit by Gorbachev and a high-level team to Lithuania in mid-January. The visit resulted in the Soviet leader offering an olivebranch: everything, even independence might be possible as long as it took place in the framework of the new legitimacy -
Gorbachev as president over an elected
Supreme Soviet - that the Soviet leader is trying to establish as the backbone of a new political order in the Soviet Union.
Rather than relying on direct repression,
Gorbachev hoped, and continues to hope,
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that economic pressures, combined with the full conservative weight of the dominant forces on the world scene, most of whom who fear "chaos" in the Soviet bloc and elsewhere as the postwar order crumble, will create a climate in which
"emotional" nationalist hotheads will see
"reason".
The economic line of attack - Lithuania is economically integrated into the
USSR; independence would be disastrous — was constantly used by Gorbachev and his team during the visit. While uniting, Lithuania
Western Europe was was planning to secede from the
USSR the against
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TH they argued.
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BACK THERE als, Argumenty i Fakty, (No
3,1990) emphasized the Lithuanians' international isolation by its devoting front page to a series of excerpts from editorials from authoritative
A third manoeuvre against the Lithuanian independence movement is attempts to play on the fears of non-Lithuanians (see IV 173). At the meeting between Gorbachev and LP activists on January 13 a delegate V. Pavlovich, describing himself as a "worker" insisted that there had been no workers at the LCP conference that had taken the decision to split from Moscow. People, he claimed, were being subjected to nationalist pressures and persecution, and there was an atmosphere similar to that in Germany in 1936-37. Furthermore, the LCP had been collaborating with anti-socialist groups.
Pavlovich was going to support a new breakaway party, whose creation flowed from the fact that 160 delegates (against 855) at the 20th LCP congress had voted against a wholly independent party and for "an independent party inside a renewed CPSU."
Stalin's role in introducing
"socialism"
A representative of this new provisional anti-independence LCP, M. Burokyavicus, speaking at the February plenum of the CPSU Central Comittee reiterated Pavlovich's arguments, stressing in particular his positive assessment of the role of Stalin's Soviet Union in establishing the "socialist system" in Lithuania.
It is unlikely, however, that any of this will stem the nationalist tide in Lithuania. The decision of the LCP to declare its independence from the CPSU was a result of its crushing defeat by the nationalist Sajudis movement in elections for the Congress of People's Deputies in March 1989 (TV 161). As LCP leader Algirdas Brazauskas explained to Gorbachev at the January 13 meeting, only an independent party could regain the confidence of the people and avoid disaster in the elections to the Republic's Supreme Soviet elections on February 24.
He also insisted that independence was án unavoidable aspect of democratization in a situation where national self-determination had been violated by the forcible incorporation of the Baltic States into the Soviet Union as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939.
At the same meeting, the head of the Lithuanian government's nationalities programme, a Karaite Jew, countered sugsenseasoning nationalist hysteria by rip of 9 unreasoning nationalist hysteria by citing
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elections
Gorbachev redefines
A LONG ARTICLE by Mikhall Gorbachev was published in the
November 26 issue of Pravda, entitled "The socialist idea and perestroika." It represented a considerable effort by the Soviet leader to give some theoretical coherence to his reform projects. This article is quite likely more important than his book, which appeared in 1987. And in fact, the article introduces significant corrections and innovations with respect to the book. This is understandable - Gorbachev wrote his article after the extraordinary events of the past
International Viewpoint #179 • February 26, 1990
USSR the achievements in the government since 1987 in providing cultural facilities for minorities. An effort was being made to assist in the reconstruction of the rich Jewish cultural institutions that had existed in the capital Vilnius before the Second World War. Further support to the Lithuanian cause came from a Russian delegate, Z. Valtsevich who appealed to the Republic's non-Lithuanians not to let themselves be manipulated and opposed attempts to split the LCP.
At the Feburary CPSU plenum, Brazauskas tried once more to explain to the delegates that, by identifying with the nationalist demands, the LCP had reestablished itself and "overcome its crisis". But even this appeal to the basic interests of the assembled nomenklatura fell on deaf ears: the CC gave its formal support to the anti-independence LCP which, the CC resolution states, upholds the principles of internationalism.
It seems that confrontation cannot be avoided despite Brazauskas' evident desire for compromise and whatever the result of the elections.
As Brazauskas explained, for a majority of his republic's inhabitants, sovereignty "means, above all, a politically independent government for the Republic," a concept fundamentally at variance with any proposal that reserves power over Lithuania's fate in the hands of central Soviet institutions.