Soviet Union Riding a Dangerous Wave

By Bruce W. Nelan

The image is gripping: Mikhail Gorbachev as the daring surfer, nimbly sliding across a wave, vanishing into the spume, only to reappear, confidently using the giant comber looming over him to increase his speed. That is the Soviet President's way with crises. He seems to react to them faster than any of his rivals, skillfully turning them into vehicles to help accelerate his perestroika program and bolster his crusade against the immobile bureaucracy. Gorbachev's adroitness at converting danger into momentum is a high-risk performance that can make onlookers hold their breath as they wonder how long the daring rider can survive.

Last week the Soviet leader managed to keep his balance atop a couple of spectacularly unpredictable waves. The last of some 300,000 striking coal miners, whose walkout at one point threatened to spread to rail workers and paralyze the vast Soviet Union, returned to their pits, mollified by a package of raises, consumer goods and political reform carrying no official price tag but estimated at $8 billion. In a dramatic bow to the intense nationalism of the Baltic republics, which were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, the Supreme Soviet, led by Gorbachev, approved a resolution endorsing plans to allow Lithuania and Estonia to manage their own economies freely, outside the control of central planners in Moscow. Baltic economists say they intend to develop Western-style market economies similar to those in Scandinavia, based on light industry and agriculture and free to sell or barter with other Soviet republics or foreign countries.

This unprecedented loosening of central authority is a bold but risky attempt by Gorbachev to deal with the surging tide of nationalism; he has had trouble riding that particular wave in recent months. While Baltic representatives acknowledged that their economies could not yet survive under full independence, some of the more extreme Baltic nationalists hope last week's action will ultimately lead to actual secession from the Soviet Union. The Supreme Soviet seems powerfully aware of the danger. Although the enabling laws granting autonomy to the republics will not be submitted to the Parliament until October, other aggrieved national groups are already eyeing the same reward. Delegates from the Ukraine have expressed interest in the proposal, and Moscow Deputy Fyodor Burlatsky suggested that the "historic" experiment on the Baltic might provide a model for all 15 Soviet republics.

As he so often does in tense times, Gorbachev last week portrayed himself as both head of the government and leader of the opposition. When he saw the striking miners "taking matters completely into their own hands," he said on national television, he concluded that there was a lesson for Moscow in the situation: "We have to carry out perestroika more decisively." He amended a decision to delay local government elections and said the country's republics could hold them whenever they wish.

"Perestroika is a revolution," Gorbachev insists, and only two weeks ago he warned a meeting of top Communist Party leaders that any official at any level who was not prepared to man the barricades would be purged. He had already proved his seriousness by ousting Leningrad party chief Yuri Solovyov and attacking the party organization there for "chewing the same stale gum" and resisting reform.

Of all the threats to Gorbachev and his program, one of the most immediate comes from the conservative faction inside the party. Gorbachev has been chipping away at the conservatives since he took power 4 1/2 years ago, and now sometimes gives the impression that he is willing to destroy the party in order to save it. By creating a new legislature and making himself head of state, he has built a fallback power center from which he can bombard the party's hard-liners and, if necessary, defend against their counterattacks.

Nor are the hard-liners the only threats to his position. If workers from other large industries take inspiration from the coal miners' success, as Gorbachev said he has, they could swamp the economy with a tidal wave of strikes. And with estimates that the budget deficit is already running about $160 billion and production growing by only 2.5% instead of the hoped-for 6%, Moscow would be hard-pressed to make more payouts like the one it gave the miners. Perestroika might make strikes more likely, since reform will eventually entail decontrolling prices and closing inefficient factories, measures that workers are likely to fight.

Also worrisome to Gorbachev may be the workers' determination to become a force in upcoming union and local elections. Gorbachev says he wants to keep them inside officially sponsored organizations, urging their leaders to "think over what happened and what to do to make sure unions carry out their role." In spite of his efforts, though, he could find himself nursing the birth of an independent union movement like Solidarity, which has remade Poland's government and politics.

Democracy is an innovation in the Soviet Union. The leaders and the led are inventing it as they go along. But at the top it is essentially a one-man show: Gorbachev handles everything from party conclaves and press conferences to Supreme Soviet sessions to meetings with a stream of foreign visitors. He has looked red-eyed and weary on recent trips to London and Paris, and last week it was reported that he went for three nights without sleep because of the endless meetings. Gorbachev is under terrific pressure to produce the goods, literally, before his time runs out. Many Soviet experts in Europe and Washington predict that he has less than two years to complete his reforms and get the store shelves filled with the things his workers want to buy. If Gorbachev fails, his audacious political rendition of Surfin' U.S.S.R. could suffer the fate that wave riders most dread: a wipeout.

With reporting by John Kohan/Moscow and William Mader/London