To the Editor:

There is another precedent, aside from those so ably discussed in Martin Malia’s article, “Yeltsin and Us” [April], that the United States should keep in mind in formulating assistance policies toward Russia. . . .

Communism, . . . along with its low ceiling on aspirations and possibilities, also provided a kind of safety net. Both are now gone. The people of the former Communist states have been given an opportunity to develop themselves and their lives to a degree unimaginable before, but this is an opportunity, not a guarantee. It comes with the very real danger that things could get worse, especially in the short-term transition before the institutions of freedom and the free market begin to function fully.

The problems, and the dangers, for the West arise, not from the degree to which people in the former Communist world are different from us, but from the degree to which they are the same. Many of the self-liberated countries have a trusted . . . leadership that the West seems to lack. But the question is how much time these leaders have before their people . . . run out of patience and can no longer wait for an improvement in their daily lives. Historical analogies are never exact, but there is a precedent which should help to convince us that it is in our interest to extend this time period.

In 1919 the Weimar Republic marked a new start for Germany, . . . but economic crisis hit almost immediately, drastically lowering German living standards. Political turmoil began simultaneously, as the weak new democracy came under attack from both the Right and the Left. Economic problems were so severe that even the revenge-minded French, along with the British and the increasingly isolationist Americans, agreed to a more lenient rescheduling of reparations in the 1923 Dawes Plan.

The recovery and the political peace which followed were temporary. The worldwide depression of 1929 hit Germany particularly hard, and more and more Germans lost patience with democracy and the damage it seemed to be doing to their lives. They supported a leader who made promises and delivered on them, though at a cost the Germans and the world could not have imagined. . . . The leader, of course, was Adolf Hitler.

It is not only in keeping with strong American traditions to help the former Communist states of Eastern Europe, as well as the former Soviet Union, to become prosperous, fully functioning democracies. It is also in our own self-interest.

Bruce L. Brager
Arlington, Virginia

_____________

To the Editor:

If Martin Malia is correct in saying that Boris Yeltsin is a democrat rather than an autocrat or a Leninist, why did Yeltsin decree the merger of the USSR KGB with the USSR Ministry of the Interior, and the Russian KGB with the Russian Interior Ministry at the end of 1991? . . . And why did he reconfirm the appointment of Gorbachev’s Gulf War liaison to Iraq, Yevgeny Primakov, as director of the Central Intelligence Service?

Before proceeding to help Yeltsin, the U.S. ought to consider the significance of the above, especially in the light of: (1) the reaffirmation by Yeltsin of bilateral treaties initiated by Gorbachev of “friendship and cooperation” with NATO members France, Germany, Italy, Greece, and Spain; and (2) the possibility of Russia and a host of former Soviet republics and East European countries joining an expanded European Community whose recent treaty of union declared that a qualified majority could overrule a member-state’s veto. . . .

In this context, Yeltsin’s assertion of February 13, 1992 that “A democratic zone of trust, cooperation, and security is being formed across the northern hemisphere” sounds neither democratic nor too Russian. It is, instead, too close for comfort to Stalin’s Federated State of Europe and Gorbachev’s Common European Home.

Lawrence Kohn
Madison, Wisconsin

_____________

Martin Malia writes:

Both Bruce L. Brager and Lawrence Kohn raise doubts about the likelihood of Russia’s successful transition to democracy under President Boris Yeltsin, but they do so from different perspectives. Mr. Brager sees the danger in structural factors that may be summed up as “Weimar Russia,” whereas Mr. Kohn sees the danger to democracy in certain of Yeltsin’s specific acts. Certainly prudence is in order in assessing Russia’s prospects for democracy, but blanket skepticism just as certainly is not.

Most of Mr. Kohn’s points are either trivial or hopelessly wide of the mark of reality—such as the specter of the former Soviet republics joining the European Community and overriding the vetoes of Western governments, or his comparison of Yeltsin’s vague “democratic zone of trust” with Stalin’s hegemonic ambitions.

His only substantive point is Yeltsin’s fusion of the KGB with the Ministry of the Interior last December. While the full motivation behind this move is not clear, it seems that Yeltsin, after an initial drive to dismantle the KGB, by December came to the conclusion that with Gorbachev trying to woo the army in order to save his union, and with the possibility of civil disturbances after the price liberation set for January 1, he might need an effective police force after all. Yet, to counterbalance this force under the career policeman Viktor Baranikov, Yeltsin appointed the reformist Nikolai Fedorov as Minister of Justice. Similar considerations of expedient compromise explain Yeltsin’s retention of Primakov as head of the Foreign Services of the old KGB: Primakov, after all, was the only important member of Gorbachev’s entourage publicly to oppose the August putsch.

Yet over a year and a half after this police merger, it is clear that Russia is by no means becoming a police state again, that the country is as free as any other in Europe, and that the population is deeply attached to this freedom. What the Baranikov episode reveals is not incipient autocracy, but a fundamental dilemma of reform in Russia and throughout the ex-Communist world. This dilemma is that almost every adult, from the age of Yeltsin on down to that of the youthful economist Yegor Gaidar, is in some measure compromised by service to the old order, or at least molded by its values; yet it is with this human material that the new order, the hoped-for post-Soviet “normal” society, must be built. Clearly, not everyone can be purged, even in the KGB; most Communist material will have to be recycled if society is to function at all; and this process of phased transition will probably take a generation.

As for the “Weimar Russia” thesis, it was first launched by Gorbachev aides to frighten the West into supporting perestroika, and the danger now is that it could be used to frighten the West away from supporting a genuine Russian reform government at the moment that real transformation has at last become possible. This does not mean that there is no danger in Russia or other ex-Communist countries that the population might lose patience under present stressful circumstances and turn to a strong man. But this is not fascism. Fascism means militant and total national mobilization for foreign war. Russia is now, and will remain for the foreseeable future, too exhausted and decomposed for any such exertions. The authoritarian danger in Russia, rather, is that, if the democratic and free-market government of Yeltsin should fail, it will be succeeded by a free-market developmental dictatorship on the model of Chile’s Pinochet.

Thus the Yeltsin experiment—and all involved are quite aware that it is a risky endeavor—offers the best chance of acclimating to a market democracy in Russia. Yet two dangers threaten its success. In the three years since the collapse of Communism began with the Polish elections of June 1989, it has become increasingly clear that the transition to the market is a far more intractable process than anyone had imagined. Developing a third-world country, it now seems, is a simpler task than redeveloping a mis-modernized second-world country. Russia, moreover, started out on this process some two years later than its neighbors, and the scale of all its problems is continental in comparison with theirs. It will clearly be years before the Yeltsin-Gaidar gamble pays off in a more modern economic life for the population.

A second major danger is that Russia, like all the other ex-Communist democracies, does not yet have a constitution. The existing political framework was created by a series of amendments to the Soviet Constitution of 1977, the fundamental document of a state that no longer exists. The present Russian Congress of People’s Deputies, together with its Supreme Soviet, was elected by a semi-rigged suffrage in March 1990 and has a Communist plurality. Yeltsin was elected by universal suffrage in June 1991 on an explicitly anti-Communist, anti-Soviet platform. The cohabitation of these two political forces has been tense and turbulent, and, after this spring’s conflict between them over the Gaidar reforms, it is clear that a major constitutional crisis is not far off.

Yeltsin wants strong executive authority in order to continue the present economic course, and a new constitution to institutionalize such powers. The Congress wants a parliamentary regime and a more gradualist economic policy. Executive dissolution of the Congress is a distinct possibility, together with a referendum on a new presidential constitution, for which both the U.S. and France furnish precedents. In this event, the most likely outcome would be a Gaullist-type republic in Russia; and indeed, de Gaulle is often cited in Yeltsin’s entourage as an appropriate model, just as he is around Walesa in Poland.

Such a solution might well not be Jeffersonian in its temper, but it is clearly within the range of democratic alternatives, quite far removed from Pinochet and still more from Weimar’s twilight. And Yeltsin has shown himself to be as scrupulously respectful of universal suffrage as was de Gaulle. Moreover, whatever constitution does emerge next in Russia will no doubt turn out to be provisional.

It will take as many years for stable democratic polities to develop in the ex-Soviet countries as it will for functioning market economies to emerge. The West cannot help being involved in both endeavors, if only out of Western self-interest. But we should do so without illusions, and brace for a very long haul.