John Paul noted, in this same period, that “the time is ripe to reassemble the stones of the battered walls” and “construct together our common house,” based upon the “spiritual roots which have made Europe”—but that all efforts would fail if nations did not end “the presence and spread of countervalues such as selfishness, hedonism, racism and practical secularism.” His geopolitical agenda remained the same because his reading of all these events had not changed: On an exclusively materialistic basis, not even all the nations involved in the CSCE (NATO and Warsaw Pact nations, plus twelve European neutrals) could achieve even a limited success. But they were going to try anyway.
For there was no gainsaying the effect now evoked in the Internationalist minds of the West. Even the schedule of free elections now promised for 1990 was startling for minds that, over forty-five years, had never associated such a democratic process as a free election with the Soviet Gulag Archipelago: February 24, Lithuania; February 25, Moldavia; March 4, the Ukraine; March 18, East Germany, Latvia and Estonia; March 25, Georgia and Hungary; May 20, Romania and Bulgaria; June 8, Czechoslovakia; and, to round all this off, the December elections in Germany to pick a Reichskanzler for all of Germany.
The changes promised by Gorbachev started to appear slowly but surely. At Brussels, Eduard Shevardnadze joined the United States in condemning Nicolae Ceauşescu’s repression of dissidents in Romania. “I can only express my very profound regret,” he said. “We are categorically against the use of force.” An extraordinary public relations effort was launched by the hated KGB to recast its image as “just an intelligence service like the ones possessed by all the other Western powers.” But it was in Lithuania that Gorbachev began to reveal his biggest surprise.
As far back as February 1986, he had told the landmark Congress of the Soviet Communist Party that “no party has a monopoly over what is right. We need,” he went on significantly, “to restructure the Party’s internal apparatus, greater democracy within the Party, and national election reform.” In June 1988, he told his Soviets: “The Party’s leading role will depend entirely on its actual prestige, which, at every point, will have to be reaffirmed by concrete deeds.” Now, in late December, Lithuania’s Communist Party broke its ties with the Communist Party of Moscow and declared itself the Independent Communist Party of Lithuania. It was a direct rejection of Article Six of the Soviet Constitution, which guaranteed the CP of the Soviet Union the “leading role” in world Communism.
In mid-January 1990, Gorbachev flew to Lithuania for three days of cajoling, threatening and argumentation. He was well briefed on the situation. The local Communist Party had already declared its independence from Moscow’s control. “We have passed the threshold,” said Algirdas Brazanskas, Communist Party first secretary and Politburo boss, “and there is no turning back.” Anyway, as another member of the Lithuanian Politburo remarked, “Gorbachev will be overthrown within a year.”
Nothing daunted, Gorbachev took on all comers in Party meetings and on the streets of Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital. His efforts were backed up by very efficient KGB teams, who worked assiduously to undermine the anti-Soviet sentiment that animated Lithuanian workers, management and intellectuals. On his last day there, at the end of a marathon four-hour public debate with Lithuanians, one Lithuanian stood up and asked the Soviet president bluntly: “Are you in favor of a multiparty system?” Gorbachev’s answer was totally unexpected. “I do not see anything tragic about a multiparty system,” Gorbachev said, shrugging his shoulders, “if it emerges and meets the realistic needs of society. One should not dread a multiparty system.” That was on January 13.
Less than a month later, on Sunday, February 4, the day before the opening of the Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, there was a very strange gathering in Moscow’s Red Square. It was strange for Moscow because it was the first assemblage of so many people—over 250,000—in that square in seventy years. It was strange for the Party-State because, as an absolute rule, Soviet law and practice prohibits any gathering of even 100 people in the street without official permission, and because it came together precisely to urge the Communist Party to resign its political monopoly in that vast territory. “Resign! Resign!” were the cries shouted under the walls of the Kremlin. “Long live the peaceful revolution of February 1990 that is now under way!” shouted Yuri N. Afanasyev, member of the Congress of Deputies.
Finally, it was strange because neither when the jam-packed thousands crowded into Marx Prospekt after a four-mile march nor when speaker after speaker denounced the Communist status of the USSR, and clamored for a multiparty political system, did the police take any action. Radio Moscow, in fact, broadcast the rally in advance. Unofficially, this rally had official sanction! “Keep your hands off our President!” warned one hand-lettered sign.
Up at the windows giving on to Marx Prospekt, Gorbachev could point down at those thousands; they were going to be his best allies when he faced the 250-member Central Committee on the morrow. Nobody had to stress the obvious: Only one man could have sent out the word that summoned the crowds, that muted the police, that instructed the media. “These are democratic forces,” the television reporter commented at the news hour, as the screen showed the placard held high by the marchers: “Gorbachev! We’re with you!” Lest anyone miss the change-or-die message, evening television followed the news with reports from the former satellites.
Western observers had a choice. They could regard Gorbachev’s very recent railing against a multiparty system and his visit to Lithuania as last-ditch attempts to stave off a dreaded result. Or, they could regard all that as skillful use of psychological pressure in order to place him in the position of the French revolutionary who excused his sudden change of allegiance, saying: “I did my best. But the people are leading. I must follow them!”
On Monday, February 5, Gorbachev opened the Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party. He dropped his bombshell right at the beginning: The Communist Party must renounce the absolute power guaranteed it by Article Six of the Soviet Constitution. “The crux of the Party’s renewal is the need to rid it of everything that tied it to the authoritarian-bureaucratic system…. The Soviet Communist Party intends to struggle for the status of the ruling party. But it will do so strictly within the framework of the democratic process, by giving up any legal and political advantages.”
There could be no doubt now. The CP’s monopoly was over. Pluralism was in. The multiparty system would be legal and constitutional. As if to prove further how far along the de-Marxizing of the USSR could go, the Central Committee’s platform published on February 7 contained an endorsement of private property. This was a surrender not only of the Party’s economic dictatorship; it was a repudiation of one of Karl Marx’s basic principles and an apparent adoption of the principle on which all true capitalism is built. The CC did not proclaim the principle, however. It just permitted private property. The CC also faced the conundrum posed by private ownership of property in a closed and planned Marxist economy: “how to find an organic combination of plan and market methods to regulate economic activity.” And the drafters of the platform spoke of “a need for a procedure in which planned, centralized economic management will be exercised through prices, taxes, interest rates, credits, payments, etc.”
All of this sounded like capitalism in the making. Gorbachev airily dismissed the wonderment-filled questions of reporters on Friday, February 9: “These changes have been under way in this country since 1985.” All of this was a normal evolution, he was saying, in the Soviet democratic process. Why the surprise?
It was score 1 for the “new thinking.” There was still more to come as added reassurance.
On February 12, leaders of the Soviet parliament voted in favor of holding “an extraordinary session … in the nearest future” in order to vote on new powers for the Soviet presidency—Gorbachev’s post. “A democratic presidential po
wer would be his: to maintain the country’s stable development, to speed up perestroika, to guarantee its irreversibility, to ensure the normal and effective functioning of all state and public institutions in the process of democratization, to ensure law and citizens’ security, to protect the Soviet Union’s interests, and to represent our state in the international arena.”
These were the absolute czarlike powers he needed. What Lenin and Stalin had accumulated by bloodletting, torture, the massacre of millions, lies and propaganda, this Master Craftsman of Statism had obtained unbloodily and by overwhelming vote. It was score 2 for the “new thinking” of the West.
Finally, as score 3, there was the big surprise of February 13. At Ottawa, the Soviet Union agreed with the leaders of the West that talks should start immediately, on a rapid schedule, with a view to reunification of the two Germanys into one. The significance of this mutual decision was mighty. It meant that the USSR was directly involved in shaping the future of all Europe; for, in that Europe made whole, the economic hegemony and the dynamic leadership would reside in a reunified Germany under conditions guaranteed by the USSR. It meant, even in the short run, the diminishment of U.S. hegemony—and that, also, in a military sense, for no one was fool enough not to realize that Germany would rearm, perhaps within a European force, perhaps not. It also laid the groundwork for the emergence of an ancient dream: the Northern Alliance Tier, or Russo-German Alliance. On all those developments, Gorbachev as czarlike leader would have immense influence.
In the “new thinking” now foremost in Western capitals, all major government policies and activities would be geared to the thirty-five-nation meeting in June and the U.S.-USSR summit at about the same time. The United States and its allies were determined to “help” the Soviet president and to avoid giving his enemies any handle with which to beat him down.
Gorbachev was given carte blanche to fix the date of the next U.S.-USSR summit when it best suited him politically. Nor did Secretary of State Baker emphasize in any way the U.S. objection to the USSR’s sending a supply of new Mig-29s to Cuba and India. He would not publicly reiterate U.S. insistence on the independence of the three Baltic states. Nor would a word be breathed about the thirty million land mines the Soviets had sowed in Afghanistan. For the “new thinking” bids the West to make Mr. Gorbachev’s avowed aim—to terminate the Communist Party’s totalitarian rule—as easy as possible. This is why many would rather speak of conspiracy between the U.S. and Gorbachev than “new thinking” by the U.S. about the USSR. Many more go further and insist that basic Leninism is Gorbachev’s motivation, and that behind all the smiles and concessions to “democratization” there abides a cold, calculating eye.
“The Western image that Gorbachev is democratic,” admonished Lithuania’s Bronius Genzelis, a member of the Congress of People’s Deputies (the new superparliament Gorbachev has created in Moscow), “is not correct…. Gorbachev is playing with the West the way a cat plays with a mouse…. He is a realist who saw the precipice of decay and destruction, and hurried to the West to avoid an explosion in his own country.”
Nevertheless, it remained that at the end of this skillful bout of geopolitical statecraft by Mikhail Gorbachev, the excited mentalities of the nations had predictably accepted the reactive posture on which he had counted. “The West does not fully realize that the Soviets have not won the Third World War, the unarmed war [for economic victory],” said Vytautus Lansbergis, leader of the Lithuanian Sajudis independence movement. “They, on the contrary, have collapsed. But they are talking terms of peace as if they had won. The West talks to Gorbachev as to an equal.”
That summed up pithily Gorbachev’s achievement. Instead of being relegated to stew in his own Soviet-made, homegrown juice, he and his USSR were now welcomed into the millennium endgame.
Soviet satisfaction was almost oleaginous. Foreign Minister Shevardnadze cast an eye back over the Cold War days when Stalin predicted an “inevitable victory” for Marxism and Nikita Khrushchev told the West, “We will bury you.” To be frank, Shevardnadze told his Western colleagues at the Ottawa meeting in mid-February, “our country took too much time grappling with the dilemma of truth versus happiness.” The Soviets, he said, had thought they should “prefer the anxiety of someone who knows the truth”—that the proletarian revolution would succeed—“and not choose the tranquillity of those [the West] who ignore it.” But, he went on magnanimously, “Today our country is sick…. We shall become not only a big and strong country but a genuinely comfortable and civilized home for men and women. Such a state has to survive.” As a mea culpa, this dripped with delusory self-righteousness, which, under normal circumstances, would have been greeted in the West with hoots of laughter and catcalls of “Hypocrite!” But in the “new thinking,” this was music in Western ears.
More was to come from the Soviet parliament, that February. The parliamentary working group, on February 21, came up with a draft law giving President Gorbachev new and extensive powers over the legislative and executive branches of government: power to bypass parliament, power to bypass the Politburo, power over the Ministry of the Interior, the KGB and the Red Army. Absolute power, in other words.
One final and effective blow in favor of “helping Mr. Gorbachev” and, therefore, in favor of total U.S. dedication to the millennium endgame was provided by the new president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel. In his childlike, almost holy-man manner, the former playwright addressed the U.S. Congress on February 21. It is doubtful if, when he had finished, he left any dissenters in the tiers.
“We enter an era in which all of us, large and small, former slaves and former masters, will be able to create what your great President Lincoln called the family of man…. After World War II, the Soviet Union … was a country that rightly gave people nightmares because no one knew what would occur to its rulers next and what country they would decide to conquer…. Europe turned into a single enormous arsenal divided into two parts.” But now “the totalitarian system in the Soviet Union, as well as in most of its satellites, is breaking down. And our nations are looking for a way to democracy and independence…. These revolutionary changes will enable us all to enter into an era of multipolarity … and to create the family of man.
“How can the United States help us today? My reply is as paradoxical as my whole life has been: You can help us most of all if you help the Soviet Union on its irreversible but immensely complicated road to democracy.”
By that time, Havel had said all his audience wished to hear: a clear, unambiguous endorsement of the “new thinking” and of U.S. engagement in the millennium endgame. But there was, in his estimation, one other fact they needed to recall. No one could have better expressed Pope John Paul’s deep reservation about the situation—and in secular language as effective as the Pontiffs. “Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being,” Havel said quietly. Then he put his finger on the central lack. “We still don’t know how to put morality ahead of politics, science and economics.” Then this retiring and shy man underlined the remedy. “We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of all our actions, if they are to be moral, is responsibility, responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my company, my success.”
It only remained, for complete frankness, for Havel to invite all the members of Congress listening to him to kneel down, to worship God and to ask God’s blessing and help and divine light. Under the circumstances, Havel knew this was not the thing to do. But he must have regretted—at least momentarily—that the dominant secularism of the age and of the United States precluded such an ending to his remarks.
No doubt, his speech clinched the “new thinking” in many a mind and helped orient it to the millennium endgame. He himself would be skeptical as to the number of those who would in reality place all this within the framework of godliness. For them, the family of man was the result of genetics,
evolution and politics. For Havel, for Abraham Lincoln, for Papa Wojtyla, the family of man was a supernatural bonding of all the creatures of God, Creator and Redeemer.
There remained, at the end of this exercise of brilliant geopolitical statecraft by Mikhail Gorbachev, the excited mentalities of the nations now involved in the consequences of his skill, in contrast to the almost detached tranquillity of John Paul. For, once again, the leaders of the West (and with them their peoples) had dutifully and predictably accepted the reactive posture on which Mikhail Gorbachev had successfully counted. And the source of that difference between the Holder of the Keys and his contemporary competitors in the fateful millennium endgame was to be sought in the radical difference between the visions drawing each side on unresistingly.
Thus, as of winter’s last days, in February 1990, the geopolitical vision of the “Wise Men of the West” had been squared and tailored and trimmed to Gorbachev’s “common home” of some 800 million “Europeans” occupying the landmasses and plying the ocean waters between the Urals in Russia and the Pacific coast of California. More peace, more prosperity, more manufactured goods, more trade, more stable currency of exchange, more freedom from threat of sudden destruction, more healthy and happy populations—all within a geopolitical structure beneath whose roof the chauvinist bickering of ideologies and the jingoism of nationalisms would no longer have any voice. None of this was being planned in obedience to the divine precept “Love each other, as I have loved you.” Nor did the moral law as Christ has revealed it stand as the measure of what was good and what was evil. The visionaries, in this case, will not acknowledge success as dependent on God’s providence. He will not be adored and praised officially beneath the roof of the house abuilding.
Mikhail Gorbachev, within a relatively short time, will find how far the “new thinking” will permit him to venture—again as chief agent of action—in conducting the already reactive posture of the West. The Gramscian penetration of Western culture will be, he hopes, thorough and deep and pervasive. In the light that guides him, he will at any given moment see the opportunity that all genuine Marxists believe will surely arise under the irresistible dialectic of material forces. The geopolitical house now abuilding will need very little adaptation—perhaps a thorough housecleaning, followed by some interior decoration and design—in order to fit the frame of universal dictatorship of the Party as the host of the soon-to-come and stateless “Paradise of the Workers.” Mikhail Gorbachev has tranquillity, yes, but with ebullient outbreaks of legitimate rejoicing. He has had his way with the society of nations so far.
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