The idea is that a strengthened central government should focus first on economic reform, putting democratization on hold and stifling labor unrest and the secessionist impulses of ethnic minorities. Countries like Chile and South Korea are cited for developing robust freemarket economies under nondemocratic rule. There are both critics and supporters of Mikhail Gorbachev who maintain that the same formula could work in the Soviet Union. “The analogies aren’t accurate. Chile and South Korea already had capitalism,” says Princeton Sovietologist Stephen Cohen. “Yet in every power elite in the Soviet Union–high party officials, technocrats in the defense industry, segments of the military–there are people who are enchanted by the authoritarian path.”
How could that path be chosen? Economic collapse and civil disorder could force a crackdown. “The inevitable outcome is either authoritarianism or dictatorship,” says Soviet political scientist Andranik Migranian, now a visiting professor at San Diego State University. “This kind of chaos cannot last long. If it does, it can be used by the extreme right to oust Gorbachev and impose military rule,” says Migranian, who proposed a transitional authoritarian regime in a 1988 article. He argues that democracy must be deferred because “if people have the opportunity to vote, they will vote against making the painful changes that are necessary for development.”
An authoritarian system, by Migranian’s definition, is one that firmly maintains law and order but puts economic power into private hands. More conservative proponents of authoritarianism would go even further, giving the central government strong control over the economy. A team of six economists and academics with ties to Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov suggests a “postperestroika” arrangement in which several dozen large state conglomerates would pull the country out of its economic mire. As in South Korea, the government would provide financing, tax breaks and export assistance. But the “criminal bourgeoisie” (i.e., private entrepreneurs) would have no place in the proposed system. Communists would still run the economy.
Even some of the more liberal politicians think it is necessary to strengthen the country’s central administration. At a recent seminar conducted by the Cato Institute, a U.S.-based libertarian group, Gavriil Popov, the progressive chairman of the Moscow city council, shocked his hosts by praising the Japanese model. Substantial government interference would be needed, he said, to convert the Soviet military-industrial complex to consumer production and to provide social welfare during the transition to a market economy. “It’s a real paradox that the radicals are demanding … stronger administrative power,” said Popov, who is likely to be elected mayor of Moscow this week. Some of Gorbachev’s aides also want to strengthen the central government. “Perestroika and reforms are unthinkable in conditions of chaos,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Vitaly Churkin said earlier this year. “We need law and order. Sometimes you have to make the difficult choice between the bad and the worse.”
But the progressives want to avoid dictatorship. They defend the new separation of the executive and legislative branches of government and argue against concentrating power in a few hands. “I am categorically against an authoritarian regime,” Aleksandr Yakovlev, one of Gorbachev’s closest advisers and a principal architect of perestroika, told NEWSWEEK recently. “It will bring us rapidly back to our past. We know all too well what to do under an authoritarian regime.”
It may already be too late to turn the Soviet clock back–even if the objective is not to go backward all the way to Stalinism. Political reform is already entrenched. And if Boris Yeltsin is elected president of Russia this week, he will be another obstacle to hard-line rule. China has tried for years to achieve economic reform without permitting political liberalization. The result was the democracy movement and the Tiananmen massacre two years ago, followed by a continuing dictatorship. In the Soviet Union, the centrifugal forces of nationalism and the ongoing collapse of the economy mitigate against centralized rule. And without a widespread conversion to private property, none of the authoritarian models can be fully applied to the Soviet Union. Economist Vasily Mikheyev says hard-liners “don’t realize that the South Korean model would be a replacement for socialism, not a reform of it.” However they achieve it, Soviet leaders will have to find a way to restore order without stifling democratization or reimposing unworkable central controls.
