THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  The Gorbachev of 1986 was hailed in many Western quarters as a conciliatory international leader; with the events of 1989 (including the acquiescence of the Soviet Union in German unification and Eastern European autonomy) and 1990 (especially the signing of the Charter of Paris) this view became the general opinion. Nevertheless, a less anachronistic description is probably closer to the truth.

  For the confident Gorbachev of 1986 was by no means the supplicant of 1989. Two moves on the international scene won for him a wide following in liberal circles in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere: the surprise proposal made at Reykjavik in October 1986 to scrap nuclear weapons and the INF agreement signed in Washington in December 1987. I am inclined to believe that neither of these events justifies the conclusion that Gorbachev had abandoned, with these proposals, the Soviet aim to win decisive strategic advantages over the United States. On the contrary, both measures struck at the vitality of U.S. extended deterrence.

  It is easy to lose sight of what was at stake in these dramatic negotiations, yet only if these stakes are kept firmly in mind can we make sense of the course of the talks. Very briefly, it can be said that the United States wished to treat Western Europe as part of its homeland (NATO having arisen in the period when there was only central deterrence), despite the reality of the end of deterrence identity between the United States and Europe (owing to U.S. homeland vulnerability to Soviet nuclear systems and the resulting birth of extended deterrence). At the same time, however, the USSR wished to treat Western Europe as a mere launching platform for the United States, not as a superpower in itself nor as a part of a superpower's homeland (because a threat against it was manifestly not as forceful as a threat against the U.S. homeland), despite French and British independent nuclear deterrents and the presence of American troops defended by nuclear weapons. Unwilling to concede the identity of security interests between the United States and Europe, the USSR could not, however, insist on wholly separate treatment either because to do so would have jeopardized the Russian insistence that its position as a superpower entitled it to parity with “the other half,” the rest of the developed world, then largely arrayed against it. This explained the constant Russian pressure on Western Europe to identify itself as distinct from U.S. interests, coupled with the contradictory refusal to treat Western European security concerns as on a par with those of the United States and the USSR.

  One might draw the comparison in this way. For the Soviet Union, a superpower was entitled to pose threats (deployments) equal to the threats it faced from all sources; a balance existed when each superpower faced equivalent threats. For the United States, a superpower was entitled to pose threats equal to the threats posed by the other superpower; a balance existed when each superpower faced threats equal to those it posed. These paradigms are derived directly from the respective superpower relationships to Western Europe, one threatening, as it had to if its empire in Eastern Europe was ever to be truly secure, the other protecting, as it had to if its political and philosophical positions were not to be isolated in the world.*

  There are two reasons why Gorbachev's strategic proposals have been regarded as evidence of his transcendence of previous Soviet thinking. First, many Western observers were themselves supporters of the abandonment of U.S. extended deterrence, that is, the abandonment of the protection of Europe by American nuclear weapons. Just as Soviet market-oriented reforms were applauded because they were associated in the West with economic efficiency and seemed likely to bring political liberalization, so dramatic cuts in nuclear weapons were also hailed as evidence of a reasonableness that heralded progressive political evolution. Second, later events did in fact lead Gorbachev to make significant concessions, and these—like the later economic collapse—imperceptibly color the way we see his earlier actions. Principal among these was his decision not to intervene to shore up the Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. This was, I think it can be shown, a decision, as Gorbachev's admirers assert, dictated by his vision and not, at least at first, by necessity. That vision, however, was not one of a pluralistic Central Europe, independent of Soviet control. Rather it was a strategic vision, animated by a rather daring innovation: he would make the Warsaw Pact over in the image of NATO in order to protect it from the buffeting of developments in the domestic politics of its members, remove the stain of the Prague intervention when the Pact had been turned against one of its members, and use the alliance as a lever to pry away older leaders with whom he had little sympathy and replace them with younger ones who shared his dynamism and zest for innovation.

  Throughout the 1980s various political and human rights movements in Eastern Europe had exploited the Helsinki Final Act declarations in order to develop civil institutions within socialist constraints. In Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia there arose movements that anticipated the market state by bypassing state institutions and creating a sphere of private, associational action within which democratic methods and ideals prevailed. This was a daring intellectual leap, because it reversed the Marxist notion that materiality determines human consciousness. By simply creating a space where persons could speak the truth, recount their memories without self-conscious editing, and cooperate to perform nonpolitical tasks, these movements struck at the passivity that underlay the grip of Communism on Eastern Europe since its crushing of the popular revolts of the 1950s and 1960s.20 The military strength of Soviet forces was no less in 1989, however, than it had been in 1968 when Warsaw Pact troops invaded and quickly overwhelmed Czechoslovakia. What had changed was not Soviet military dominance in Eastern Europe but the growth of an organized civil society there—as well as a different mood in the Soviet Union itself as a result of perestroika and glasnost. This new consciousness was reflected in literary works21 and philosophical essays, 22 but it found its most powerful institutional instrument in the Polish labor coalition Solidarnosc (Solidarity). Eventually this group embraced 90 percent of Polish workers; it assumed responsibility for managing production, settling trade disputes, and wage bargaining, thus bypassing communist institutions and rendering them obsolete by informally assuming their functions. When General Jaruzelski felt compelled to seize control of the country in 1981—in order to pre-empt Russian troops poised to cross the Soviet-Polish border—it was a tacit admission that the communist state had failed to legitimate itself with its principal constituency, the mass of industrial workers.

  The Jaruzelski crackdown and the subsequent imposition of martial law were closely studied by the new Soviet leadership that came to power four years later. Shevardnadze concluded that imposing martial law had stimulated rather than silenced the noncommunist opposition. “So there is no reason,” he asserted, “to hiss at perestroika and cheer for military force. It would not be a bad idea for us to learn the lesson of martial law in Poland for ourselves.” Instead of opting for force—and here Shevardnadze and Gorbachev may have made an error by not distinguishing between Polish and Soviet force—the new Soviet leadership chose a strategy of counter-reformation, disclaiming the Brezhnev Doctrine and attempting to distance itself from the traditional communist leaderships in the other Warsaw Pact states, while striking the pose (which Gorbachev believed would be alluring) of a new, more humane socialism. This was certainly no mere miscalculation. Gorbachev was well aware that popular revolts had broken out in the Central European states whenever a Soviet leader had signaled the advent of a program of liberalization. This had occurred in Germany in 1953 after Stalin's death when Georgy Malenkov had briefly appeared to be contemplating a less restrictive relationship between the USSR and her allies; and again in Hungary and Poland in 1956 following the distribution of Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin.

  Moreover, Gorbachev was also aware that the regimes which these revolts had briefly brought to power in Hungary and Poland had announced their intention to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. Gorbachev was eager, however, to discredit the prevailing communist leaders in Eastern Europe in order to ra
lly support for his own policies in the Soviet Union. If he were ever forced to order troops to fire on workers, the delegitimation crisis would grow even worse for communism in both places. He had to avoid being lumped with the leadership of a past generation, for whom (with the exception of Andropov) he had no great regard, and also thwart popular movements that might defect from the Warsaw Pact military alliance if these movements took power. A misstep in either direction would risk destroying the Warsaw Pact, as the inevitable domestic turmoil accompanying Gorbachev's liberalizations erupted in the member states.

  If, instead, he could decouple domestic politics from membership in the Pact—as NATO had successfully managed to do—he might also be able to use the prestige and power of his role in the Warsaw alliance to improve his position at home without being dragged into embarrassing positions vis-á-vis the Soviet client states of Europe. If the communist governments could no longer maintain, let alone improve, the welfare of the populations they ruled in exchange for passive political and social compliance, it might nevertheless be possible to give responsibility for the economic problems with which these leaders had to deal to persons less tightly linked to the Soviet apparatus. Gerbachev thought he had found a way to detach the Warsaw Pact from the vulnerability of the Party, and even to strengthen his own control when like-minded leaders came to power in the associated states. The opportunity to test these ideas first presented itself in Poland.

  A new round of strikes in 1988 forced the Polish regime to negotiate with Solidarity. Two outcomes of these negotiations were the acceptance of free associations—the cornerstone of the civil society developed in Poland and indeed the basic idea of Solidarity itself—and an agreement to hold partially free elections in June of 1989. Solidarity candidates proceeded to win virtually every seat for which they were allowed to compete, preventing Jaruzelski from forming a communist government. He then asked Solidarity to come into the government as a coalition partner. When Polish Communist Party leader Mieczyslaw Rakowski balked at this, Gorbachev telephoned him on August 22, 1989, and directed him to go along. In exchange, Solidarity promised to remain within the Warsaw Pact and to preserve communist control over the state organs of security. Jaruzelski would become president and chief of the armed forces; the Ministry of Defense would remain in communist hands. Now, Gorbachev calculated, the economic crisis triggered by the accumulation of debt from the previous communist regime would have to be dealt with by Solidarity. The Warsaw Pact was, if anything, stronger than before and promised to survive the domestic upheavals that seemed to be spreading throughout its membership.

  This perception was flawed in two respects. First, to the Poles and to others in Central Europe, Gorbachev's policies reflected Soviet doubt about the effectiveness of coercion. This tended to embolden the nonCommunist opposition. Second, events in the Central European states inevitably reverberated in the Soviet Union itself. To Soviet citizens what was happening in Central Europe was unsettling, and made the communist alternative appear to be shunned by peoples thought to be fraternal allies.

  The next opportunity to test Gorbachev's plans came in East Germany. When thousands of East Germans began packing the embassies of sympathetic Warsaw Pact states in an effort to expatriate to the West, Gorbachev gave approval to the Hungarian regime's proposal to open its border with Austria, permitting East Germans to flee. This triggered a mass exodus from East Germany and began the political crisis there that toppled the Honecker regime. As Michael Beschloss and Strobe Talbott wrote:

  The Hungarian government had obtained the Kremlin's tacit consent in advance…. [Gorbachev] privately told his aides that Honecker would have to go, as soon as possible. “The East German leadership can't stay in control.” He ordered his General Staff to make sure that Soviet troops stationed in East Germany did not get involved in the strife that was sure to envelop the country.23

  After letting some nine hundred Germans escape in August, Hungary opened its borders in September. In October, Gorbachev met with Honecker in East Berlin and urged him to adopt “reforms”; twelve days later Honecker was removed from power and replaced by Egon Krenz. On November 9 the East German government opened up the Berlin Wall. Krenz announced that he was planning free, democratic, and secret elections. These elections removed him from power.

  As Fyodor Burlatsky has put it, Gorbachev's original hope was to have “mini-Gorbachevs” come to power. As is now clear, he overestimated the degree of legitimacy of communist reformers in Eastern Europe. While his counterreformation might have worked in 1968, communist revisionism was long dead by 1989. A civil society had developed and with it, legitimate leaders had emerged [who] could demand greater concessions from the revisionist communists who were espousing the perestroika line.24

  Because these concessions were constitutional in nature they ultimately worked to defeat Gorbachev's strategic plan by destroying the Warsaw Pact.

  On November 17, enormous spontaneous demonstrations erupted in Prague. Within one week the communist party leaders had resigned and a new government was formed. Now the process of constitutional mimicry began to operate against Gorbachev. Czechoslovakia and Hungary eliminated the leading role of the Communist Party from their constitutions in the fall of 1989, something hardly contemplated by perestroika. This quickly led to Czechoslovakia's decision to assert an independent foreign policy and to demand the removal of Soviet troops from Czech soil. On December 14, Poland announced that the agreement by which the Soviet Union had stationed troops in Poland was no longer valid. As Koslowski and Kratochwill concluded,

  by allowing the eclipse of the leading role of the Communist Party within the bloc and at home, Gorbachev, probably unwittingly… defeated the rationale for the very existence of the bloc and its domestic institutions. When socialism was not automatically accorded a privileged position in the constitutions of any bloc state, the Warsaw Pact had lost one of its fundamental reasons for existence, making its continuation as an effective alliance less likely.25

  In February 1990 Gorbachev took two fateful decisions: He agreed to a plan for German unification and he essentially jettisoned the Communist Party as the vehicle for guiding the Soviet state. In that month he engineered the decision by the Central Committee to give up the Party's monopoly on power and allow a multiparty system. This move was completed when in March, Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution was abolished, thus legitimating opposition parties, and at the Twenty-eighth Party Congress in July, when the Party voted to give up its supervision of government by removing all government officials (except Gorbachev) from the Politburo.

  But the Czech, German, and Polish revolutions in which Gorbachev had collaborated had encouraged rebellions in the Soviet republics. Widespread noncompliance with Soviet draft calls swept the country in 1990. The republics attempted to enhance their own legitimacy by declaring their separateness from Moscow, and assuring their publics that troops would not be used to suppress national movements. Boris Yeltsin, then the president of the Russian Republic, instructed Russian soldiers not to use force during the Lithuanian revolt, which occurred when the Baltic states asserted their independence from the USSR.

  Gorbachev was no longer attempting to forge a more powerful and competitive Soviet Union; it was now a matter of simply preserving the Soviet state. This he decided could only be accomplished by joining the West. The vehicle for this partnership was collaboration in German unification. Such a partnership would offer him two advantages: it would enhance his personal political prestige as he would now be allied with the desirable West rather than the crumbling Party, and it would offer him access to financial support with which he might halt the Soviet state's quickening slide into bankruptcy.

  This collaboration ended the Cold War. First fascism and then communism had been discredited, strategically and then constitutionally in the case of fascism, in the reverse order in the case of communism. Gorbachev's attempts to create a more strategically dynamic Soviet Union through constitutional innovation had in fact en
gineered a strategic collapse. In the wake of that collapse, legitimacy deserted the Soviet state.

  A CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT: THE PEACE OF PARIS

  The focus now shifted to Washington, where an exceedingly complex set of problems presented themselves. While for many persons the chief American figure in the collapse of the Soviet Union was Ronald Reagan, a better case can be made for the team of George Bush and James Baker, who in 1990 faced a delicate and dangerous set of issues they managed to resolve with consummate skill. The fact that the Soviet Union collapsed on their watch did not, of itself, assure them a secure status in the pantheon of Western statesmen; to the contrary, had they pressed too hard in an effort to exploit the vulnerabilities of the Soviet position they might very easily have cast away the winnings earned by several generations of Allied leaders. Nothing could be more misleading than the cliché that the Bush administration “presided” over the demise of the Soviet Union.