The piecemeal meting out of freedom to us has killed people’s hopes for better times. The Soviet leaders’ attempt to keep us in a state of semiliberation and semistarvation could not help but lead to an explosion. Fearing this explosion, party and government officials staged a coup and held the whole world in suspense for 60 hours. They have not been able to do that since the Cuban missile crisis, and not since then has tragedy turned so quickly into farce.
The putsch has been crushed. Translating political theater into the conventional version, it was probably Ionesco rather than Shakespeare. Theater of the absurd.
For several years all of us in the U.S.S.R. considered the possibility of a putsch, listened to the emotional recitations of the generals and did not believe it would happen. Meanwhile, Soviet liberals, including me, vowed that they would soon transform the country’s life in a democratic direction, set up a market economy and feed the hungry with steaks and pastries. We have not been able to do any of this. The liberal power structures have worked poorly. In the din of rallies, we can barely hear one another.
The conservatives, aware of this, gathered their forces and decided to take power into their own hands. All the more so because they clearly saw what happened to their colleagues in Eastern Europe, who one by one came under investigation and went on trial, losing their privileges and medals. But they carried out the coup just as ineptly as they governed the country all these years. When the real test came, the lessons of glasnost that the people had received proved more powerful than the lessons of fear.
At this point it is very important that I emphasize the Soviet Communist Party’s historic collapse-or, more precisely, its suicide.
I think the present situation, to a large extent, clarifies the events that occurred in Vilnius on Jan. 13. On that day people at the TV center were shot down by Soviet special forces. The Communist organization at our magazine announced that it was disbanding because it did not want to have anything to do with a party that gave its blessing to murders. Many people at the time were astonished, believing that the leaders of the party organizations in the special forces were a particular type-what could you expect of them, people said.
Today everybody has filed it firmly into their memories that the putsch was organized and led by the top leaders of the Communist Party; that it was not Communists but nonparty-member Boris Yeltsin who called for resistance to the putsch, and that non-Communists headed the struggle against the putsch.
If anyone has any lingering doubts on this score, the Communists have proven once again that they are not a democratic party. In 1917 they seized power in Russia as a result of a coup. Today they tried to restore their power, again by means of a coup. Neither attempt brought the people anything worthwhile. It is fundamentally important that the attempt of last week failed with such a crash. It is important that virtually everybody has understood the reasons and depth of the disaster. Now Mikhail Gorbachev’s fate will depend in large part on what he has understood and what decisions he makes.
The people who headed the putsch were Gorbachev’s closest associates; he was the one who brought them into the upper echelons of power and he should be responsible for this. He almost made the same mistakes, trying again to rely on old cadres in whom the Soviet people had lost their trust. It seems to me that Gorbachev, in repeating his mistakes over and over, is having trouble picking up the new tempo of change.
But now we must bring new people to power, we must renew the political map of the country with all possible resolve. Even in my own magazine I may change my own status and become something like a father-commander or mentor, rather than the person responsible for day-today decisions. We must usher in new politicians and new policies. I am firmly convinced that Gorbachev can no longer remain the head of the Communist Party, which just tried to overthrow him. He has to make a choice. His continual attempts to sit in every chair at the same time was, to a large measure, what provoked the tragedy. The absurdity of the communist idea, which the putschists were trying to save, made the coup into a political show. There was not even a hint of high tragedy.
I am quite annoyed with the euphoria that has swept over many people in my country and in the United States. The situation in Moscow is not at all conducive to celebrating. The reforms have yet to begin and the economic situation continues to deteriorate. We have already proven repeatedly that we can win short battles. But now it is time for strategic decisions. Glasnost is permitted again and the streets in Moscow have been cleaned up. But there is still no one to collect the harvest, and privatization is proceeding very slowly. A skirmish has been won, but the main engagement is yet to come.
