Go Faster! No! Go Slower! Pushing Forward

By John Kohan/Tartu

Let's Think a Bit More, Estonian television's live talk show, has a reputation for being a glasnost groundbreaker, but few who tuned in one Wednesday evening nearly a year ago were quite prepared for what happened. During a debate about making the political system more democratic, a novel notion came up. Why not unite people who support perestroika into something resembling the popular-front movements that lobbied for social reforms in Europe during the 1930s? For a moment, the question hung in the air. Nothing like it had ever been tried in the Soviet Union. Telephone lines soon jangled with enthusiastic offers of support. When the broadcast ended at midnight, excited participants remained in the Tallinn studio to draft a manifesto.

Estonia -- or the Soviet Union, for that matter -- has not been the same since that night of April 13, 1988. Certainly, life changed dramatically for Marju Lauristin, 48, a journalism professor who had watched the show at home in the university city of Tartu. Inviting other activists to her apartment, she helped write the founding declaration of the Estonian Popular Front. Less than three weeks later, local party officials gave the group guarded approval to organize.

When Mikhail Gorbachev first sowed the seeds of democracy, no one could have foreseen that they would mature so quickly into grass-roots revolutions like the Estonian Popular Front. There may be times, in fact, when the Soviet leader must wonder if he has planted a brier patch. The Estonian initiative has given rise to other popular fronts in the Baltic states, but its indirect impact has been far greater. It has become a model for an amorphous mass of unofficial political groupings and single-issue movements across the country, championing causes long ignored by the party and government bureaucracy: cleaning up the Volga River, stopping the building of nuclear power plants, preserving historical monuments, fostering the study of regional languages.

A petite woman with gray hair, Lauristin may seem an unlikely revolutionary, but she is as much a rebel in her own way as was her father Johannes, a prominent Estonian Bolshevik. Her Popular Front has taken the organizational model of the party and turned it upside down. The movement promotes no rigid political platform, except a general commitment to democracy and pluralism, and welcomes everyone into its ranks. Its central steering committee is an umbrella organization for dozens of local chapters that open their doors to any citizens' groups with a worthy cause. In Tartu the Popular Front joined with the environmentalist Greens and the local branch of a monument- preservation society to stage an evening of "public accounting," during which municipal leaders ran a gauntlet of tough questioning. Says Lauristin: "We are seeking a way to make the transition from totalitarianism to democracy and begin a normal exchange between the authorities and the people."

The movement's success in channeling public opinion has been impressive. When party First Secretary Karl Vaino tried to pick delegates to the All-Union Party conference last summer, the Popular Front announced a mass meeting. One day before the rally, the imperious party boss was replaced by Gorbachev protege Vaino Valjas. In November the Estonian supreme soviet, with strong Popular Front backing, turned down new election-reform laws that it considered an infringement on the republic's sovereignty, triggering a showdown with the Kremlin. Says Lauristin: "It was the first conflict between perestroika from above and perestroika from below, but it helped both sides to make contact."

Though the confrontation with Moscow has eased, tensions still linger, particularly within the republic's Russian-speaking minority. The Russians are concerned that the Estonian-dominated Popular Front is bent on carrying out a nationalist agenda that will turn them into second-class citizens and ultimately lead to a break with the Soviet Union. Such fears have been fanned by the rival Russian-led Intermovement, which has attacked popular-front activists as "counterrevolutionaries." Lauristin worries about the Stalinist clang of such rhetoric and cites it as an example of a continuing "colonial mentality." Says she: "This is not an ethnic problem. It is a problem of | differences in political culture and language."

The Estonian community is a unique social laboratory for grass-roots democracy. It is a highly literate, culturally homogeneous group, shaped by a brief interlude as an independent republic between the two World Wars. What has been so astonishing is how the ideas of the Popular Front have spread elsewhere. Officials in other republics have accused the movement of sending "emissaries," but as Lauristin points out, Estonians traveling outside the republic these days get besieged with questions. "The movement has become like an exploding supernova," says Lauristin, elected last week to the Congress of People's Deputies. "The power given off by this new star of democracy has been so great that it has radiated across the Soviet Union." Now, even the Kremlin will have to brush up on its astronomy.