1999

by Richard Nixon

  Moscow’s military power is its only asset. Great as that may be, military power cannot be sustained over the long term without matching economic power. Moscow’s dilemma is that its assets are ill-suited to solving its problems, and its problems are undermining its assets.

  Gorbachev does not underestimate the Soviet quandary. Nor do his communist neighbors to the east. A Chinese leader, after explaining why China’s current economic reforms were essential if it intended to step into the front rank of nations, once commented to me that if the Soviet Union did not adopt similar changes Moscow would “disappear” as a great power in the next century. That is true, and Gorbachev knows it.

  Economically, it has abysmally failed to capitalize on its great human and material resources. It has not surpassed any other major country in GNP since the end of World War II; meanwhile it has been surpassed by Japan and Italy. Moscow’s economy is a basket case. The growth rate is virtually zero. Productivity is dropping. Absenteeism, corruption, malingering, and drunkenness are rife. The standard of living is sinking, so much so that the life expectancy of Russian men is actually going down. A Soviet worker must spend more than seven times as many hours as a West European to earn enough money to buy a car. The Soviet Union has fifteen times fewer industrial computers than advanced West European countries and forty-five times fewer than the United States. What few positive blips have been detected in the vital signs of the Soviet economy in recent years have resulted from the Kremlin’s manipulation of its own economic statistics.

  Western economists used to undertake esoteric extrapolations to gauge the depths of Moscow’s economic crisis. Today, they only have to read Mikhail Gorbachev’s speeches. Khrushchev claimed the Soviet Union would catch up and surpass the United States economically in a decade. Brezhnev swept economic problems under the rug. Andropov thought more discipline among the workers was the solution. In Gorbachev the Soviet Union finally has a leader who grasps that without a growing economy its international position will steadily erode and its military power will gradually atrophy. He has formally repealed the Communist Party’s goal of Khrushchev’s era which called for the Soviet Union to surpass the United States in gross national product in the 1980s. He has labeled Khrushchev’s boastful predictions of Soviet economic growth as “groundless fantasies.” Gorbachev knows that more than wishful thinking and pep rallies is needed to get the Soviet system back on its feet.

  He also understands that his major priority must be to revitalize the Soviet economy. Without economic growth, he cannot afford the current level of Soviet military spending, provide even a marginal improvement in the standard of living of the Soviet peoples, or hold the Soviet system out as a paragon for developing nations.

  Gorbachev faces the classic dilemma of communist totalitarian systems. In order to have progress he must allow more freedom. But allowing more freedom threatens his power. Excessive centralization is the principal problem of the Soviet economy. But decentralizing economic decision-making carries the risk of prompting demands for political decentralization. And political decentralization would mean the dissolution of the communist system.

  When Gorbachev totals up the balance sheet of Soviet strengths and weaknesses, the bottom line is not encouraging. Moscow has put itself into a unique historical position: It does not have a single ally among the major powers of the world. The Kremlin faces potential adversaries in Western Europe, China, Japan, Canada, and the United States, whose combined gross national products account for over 60 percent of the world economy. Moreover, never in history has an aggressive power been more successful in extending its domination over other nations and less successful in winning the approval of the people of those nations. In not one of the nineteen nations of the world in which they rule did the communists gain power by winning a free democratic election, and none of them dares to have one. If the Soviet Union’s strength wanes, its satellites will certainly try to break out of the Kremlin’s orbit.

  Gorbachev feels the pressure of these problems and has responded with a far-reaching reform campaign. As he tackles the difficult tasks before him, we need to analyze the consequences of his reforms for the world. We need to answer these questions: What kinds of reforms has he proposed? What do these reforms tell us about Gorbachev’s intentions? What is the likelihood that these reforms will succeed? What does Gorbachev’s reform drive portend for Soviet behavior in the world? How should the West respond?

  Gorbachev has pressed forward with a three-pronged reform program. But while he has departed from the policies of his immediate predecessors, we must view the scope of these changes with historical perspective.

  Glasnost. This is the catchword for the new openness about problems in the Soviet Union and the greater tolerance of dissent. Gorbachev has allowed the Soviet press to publish exposés about the failures of and corruption in the Soviet system. He has brought Andrei Sakharov back from internal exile and has released a few other prominent dissidents. He has increased the number of Jews allowed to emigrate and has given exit visas to Soviet citizens divided from their spouses in the West. All these steps have been widely hailed in the West.

  These developments are significant and represent a welcome change from the past. But we should always remember that the literal translation of the word glasnost is “transparency.” Repression remains the keystone of the Soviet system. While fewer than 100 political dissidents have been released, another 40,000 still languish in prison camps. While 8,000 Jews were allowed to emigrate in 1987, another 400,000 are still waiting to do so. While more criticism of the system is permitted, it is still all officially sanctioned criticism. It is no accident that those who are criticized under Glasnost never argue back.

  Gorbachev’s purpose is threefold. He wants to create a more favorable attitude toward the Soviet Union in the West in order to facilitate his pursuit of more important goals, agreements on trade and arms control. He wants to use Glasnost to weed out his political opponents. He wants to create a new spirit among intellectuals and particularly young people in the Soviet Union. Glasnost is a small price to pay.

  Democratization. Gorbachev’s speeches overflow with paeans to democracy. But what he means by democracy is very different from what we mean by it. He wants to open up the system; he wants to encourage people to step forth with new ideas; but he has no intention of relinquishing any of the power and prerogatives of the Communist Party. His democratization stays strictly within the party. There is no real democratization outside the party. He wants to shake up the system to get it moving again. But it will not lead to anything remotely resembling a Western democracy.

  Perestroika. This slogan for economic reform literally means restructuring. Gorbachev has spoken in sweeping terms about this program. He has called for the dismantling of much of the central planning apparatus. He has endorsed the idea of joint ventures with private Western firms. He has proposed giving greater decision-making power to factory managers. He has pushed for allowing some opportunities for very small enterprises to make private profit. But he has so far achieved little. Few of Gorbachev’s proposals have been enacted, and they in no way compare to the revolutionary initiatives that Deng Xiaoping has undertaken in China. The day-to-day workings in the Soviet Union still run by the dictates of the old regime.

  That Gorbachev seeks to take a new approach to Soviet problems does not mean that he rejects the basic premises of his system. He believes that the system is fundamentally sound but needs to be made more effective. We must always remind ourselves that the reforms themselves tell us nothing about Gorbachev’s intentions. Their purpose is not to move the Soviet Union toward more freedom at home or a less aggressive policy abroad, but rather to make the communist system work better. He wants the system to be more efficient, not less communist.

  Gorbachev’s success is far from guaranteed. He faces monumental political and cultural obstacles. Some people have even argued that he has only a fifty-fifty chance of lasting five years in power. They point out th
at in every speech he makes he refers to the opposition against his reforms. They recall that when the last great Soviet reformer, Nikita Khrushchev, tried to revitalize the system his colleagues in the Politburo promptly gave him the boot. They conclude that the same could happen to Gorbachev.

  Those who hold this view rightly point out that there is opposition to Gorbachev’s reforms but underestimate his ability to handle it. A shake-up of the Soviet system will always be opposed by those who have been shaking it down through perks and corruption. He is trying to impose new changes on those who benefit from the old ways. They do not want to lose their dachas, their limousines, their ballet tickets, their Black Sea vacations, and their rights to expert medical care and preferential education for their children. But the analogy to Khrushchev does not fit. Like Khrushchev, Gorbachev is bold and unpredictable; but unlike Khrushchev, he will not be rash.

  Gorbachev has also shown great skill in consolidating his power. Unlike Stalin, he does not have his rivals killed. Unlike Khrushchev, he does not leave them in positions where they can threaten his power. (Brezhnev, for example, was standing next to Khrushchev during our Kitchen Debate in 1959.) Instead, Gorbachev ferrets them out of their key positions and replaces them with supporters. In just two years, he has replaced all but one of the members of the party Secretariat, the key body which runs the party apparatus. Of the thirteen members of the all-powerful Politburo, the body which runs the country’s day-to-day affairs, only three are holdovers from the Brezhnev era. He has also replaced two thirds of the provincial party secretaries and more than 60 percent of the government ministers. His ruthless sacking of Boris Yeltsin, who was one of the strongest supporters of reform, was a shot across the bow to anyone—friend or foe—who is tempted to challenge his authority. Gorbachev is firmly in charge, and he will remain so as long as he keeps playing his cards with such masterful skill.

  But even if Gorbachev stays in power his economic reforms face three profound difficulties. The first is his communist ideology. He is a deeply believing communist. Communism is his faith. His occasional references to God in private conversations do not make him a closet Christian. A communist cannot become a Christian without ceasing to be a communist. Communism and Christianity have irreconcilable differences. He has been hailed as a pragmatist and has spoken of the need to create incentives to guide the decisions of workers and managers. But that runs contrary to one of the fundamental premises of the Stalinist command economy. Our economic system works because the market guides virtually all economic actions. If Gorbachev’s reforms are enacted, there will be a basic tension built into the system. How will Gorbachev determine which decisions should be made by the market and which by the state? It will be difficult for him to move away from the beliefs of a lifetime about the superiority of state control over what he believes to be the heartless exploitation of the masses by selfish capitalists. As problems arise, there will be a powerful motivation for the Soviet state to step in and hand out orders to solve them.

  The second obstacle is the hidebound Soviet bureaucracy. Gorbachev must implement his reforms through millions of lower-level Soviet functionaries and managers. It is not easy to teach old bureaucrats new tricks. They simply do not know how to act like entrepreneurs. They are used to taking orders, not initiating ideas. Like bureaucrats everywhere, they know that the best way to win promotions is to play it safe and not take chances. They do not have the slightest idea of how to judge which economic risks are worth taking. It will take nothing less than a cultural revolution, one in which individual initiative is promoted over party discipline, to overcome the habits of seventy years of centralized Stalinist planning.

  The third problem involves the Russian people. Unlike the peoples of Eastern Europe and unlike many in China, the Russians have never known anything but government-controlled enterprise, whether under the old czars of the nineteenth century or the new czars of the twentieth century. The Chinese generally, as demonstrated by their success in any country to which they emigrate, are born entrepreneurs. Most Russians are not. We tend to believe that people will always respond to the challenge of opportunity. That is not true. Many even in this country who have become used to the security of the welfare state value it above all else.

  Ironically, while Marx attacked religion as the opiate of the people, the secular religion of Marxism-Leninism has proved to be an even more insidious addictive. When people become accustomed to a system that provides total security and that makes playing it safe rather than taking a chance the best way to get ahead, it is difficult to change them. For them, change means instability and represents a threat. Even those who benefit little from the system fear they will lose what little they get.

  Gorbachev is aware of these problems. He has a deep faith in his ideology, but he knows that his economy is not working. He wants to reform the system, but he cannot do so without the participation of the people who make up the system. He can act only through his bureaucracy. But his bureaucrats and managers are unaccustomed to making their decisions without guidance from above. He must also enlist the cooperation of people who must change the habits of a lifetime, who must respond to the challenge of opportunity, with all its risks, rather than huddle in the comfort and security of a totally planned society. His task is almost as difficult as making drones into productive bees.

  So far there is no reason to believe that Gorbachev’s reforms will make the world a better or a safer place. First of all, he has not broken with the horrors of the Soviet past. In his secret speech in 1956, Khrushchev said that “Stalin was a man of capricious and despotic character whose persecution mania reached unbelievable dimensions” and that Stalin had personally ordered the mass executions of his opponents and the mass deportations of whole nations away from their native lands in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev, on the other hand, endorsed the brutal policy of collectivizing agriculture, praised “the tremendous political will, purposefulness and persistence, ability to organize and discipline the people displayed in the war years by Joseph Stalin,” and criticized only the “excesses” of the Stalin years. To a man who killed tens of millions of Soviet citizens Gorbachev gave a pat on the back and a slap on the wrist.

  Moreover, for the Soviet Union, reform at home does not automatically lead to restraint abroad. We should not bet the ranch on the expectation that these reforms will bring about a softer Soviet foreign policy. In czarist Russia as well as in communist Russia, reformers traditionally couple new domestic policies with a strong foreign policy. Peter the Great was a prime example. So was Nikita Khrushchev. He sought to reform the economy, but he also put missiles in Cuba, built the Berlin Wall, and ordered Soviet tanks to shoot down Hungarian freedom fighters in the streets of Budapest just nine months after he delivered the famous secret speech condemning the crimes of Stalin.

  Gorbachev cannot afford to appear weak. He must convey the impression of a strong, successful, formidable leader. If he retreats abroad, he will quickly lose support within the Soviet power elite, and his enemies within the Communist Party will tear him apart. He will be cautious in taking on new initiatives around the world, but he will be tough in fighting to preserve what he inherited from his predecessors. He wants to consolidate the gains of the 1970s before seeking new gains in the 1990s.

  It is a mistake to buy the idea that Gorbachev is a foreign-policy “moderate” beset by conservative rivals. While he may have his internal foes, the entire leadership forms a united front to confront the external world. Creating the impression of a battle between “hawks” and “doves” within the Kremlin is a common Soviet ploy. Some of Roosevelt’s advisers were conned into believing that Stalin was fending off hard-liners. In meetings with Henry Kissinger and me, Brezhnev made a great show of stepping out to consult with his “hawks,” in the hope that we would later make more concessions to help him out with his domestic opposition. We must not be fooled by this shopworn tactic. Gorbachev’s rivals oppose him not because he is a moderate, but because they want his p
ower.

  Finally, there is no evidence that under Gorbachev the Soviet Union has pulled back from its aggressive policies. Nowhere in the world is Gorbachev doing less than his predecessors to further Soviet global ambitions. While Soviet sources have spread rumors that Soviet strategic doctrine has shifted to a purely defensive posture and that Gorbachev has announced a new military approach based on “strategic sufficiency” rather than a quest for superiority, he has not reduced the Soviet defense budget or scaled back Soviet deployments. He has endorsed the Brezhnev Doctrine, which justifies Soviet intervention to suppress popular uprisings in the communist countries in Eastern Europe and the Third World. He has increased Soviet military aid to and the Soviet military presence in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Angola, and the Persian Gulf.

  Under Gorbachev, Soviet rhetoric against the United States has taken a dark turn. It makes President Reagan’s talk about the “evil empire” sound like a Sunday-school lesson. Gorbachev’s government-controlled Soviet press has charged the United States with conspiring in the assassination of Indira Gandhi and Olof Palme. It claims that while the Soviet Union has been giving aid to Africans, the United States has been giving them AIDS. As Dimitri Simes has observed, “The Soviet leopard has changed its spots but it is still a leopard.”

  We must not heed the counsel of the so-called experts on the Soviet Union who are forever reading signs of a softening in Soviet foreign policy in the Kremlin tea leaves. When Gorbachev recalls that in the Khrushchev era “a wind of change swept over the country,” they jump to the conclusion that Gorbachev intends to bring about a Moscow spring. We must always remind ourselves that the purpose of the Gorbachev reforms is not to move toward more freedom at home or toward a less threatening foreign policy abroad, but rather to make the communist system work better. If his reforms succeed and his foreign policy remains the same, Gorbachev will have more resources with which to strengthen and expand the Soviet empire.