EMPTY-SHELF SOCIALISM
Stephen Handelman on the
pressures that shortages are putting on Mr Gorbachev
Ottawa IN previous journeys abroad, Mr Mikhail Gorbachev looked — there is no other word for it — smug. With the West hanging on his every word, the new celebrity of the East seemed at times to be on an extended inspection tour, like some latter-day Peter the Great instructing audi- ences on the spiritual advantages of Mother Russia while busily filling his shop- ping list. The gleaming wonders of capital- ism never challenged his faith in the correctness of his own vision. As for most tourists, his travels tended to confirm his
prejudices: under perestroika, Russia could have both supermarkets and social- ism.
There are few signs of smugness on Mr Gorbachev's third, and potentially most interesting, journey to North America since 1987. The past few months have not only changed the political stakes at home, but have altered the face Mr Gorbachev presents to his admirers overseas. He is no longer the world's favourite communist reformer — that role might soon be played by Boris Yeltsin, the newly elected Presi- dent of the Russian Federation. Mr Gor- bachev no longer enjoys the unqualified confidence of his people. The economic crisis, events in Lithuania and the Baltics and now, once again, Armenia, have tar- nished the glow of Gorbymania. The coun- try is plunged into a period of instability the outcome of which no one would venture to predict. Add to that the uncer- tainty in the West about Mr Gorbachev's bargaining flexibility on arms control and German unification, and it becomes easy to understand the speculation in Moscow that his trip would be very different from the hero's passage once imagined.
Some of Mr Gorbachev's closest aides report that he is fully prepared to encoun- ter scepticism if not outright hostility among his former North American admir- ers. According to those aides, this would be something of a relief. Hero worship and adulation, they argue, tend to distract attention from the serious business of the post-cold-war world. All the same, the Soviet President's trip to Canada and the United States is already carrying an un- comfortable amount of baggage.
Travelling West in advance of the Soviet presidential party, one can feel the differ- ence in small but significant ways. We Westerners who live in Moscow used to regard our trips 'out' with Gorbachev as something of a holiday, a bit of mindless technological uplift, and a chance to bask in the glow of the author of perestroika not to mention a temporaty relaxation from the angst and intensity of front-line perestroika. Now, the contrast with the conditions and the mood we leave behind is merely depressing. The neat houses and trimmed green lawns of Ottawa, the coun- ters bulging with goods, even the quiet efficiency of the hotel clerk excite nostal- gia. Economic change in the Soviet Union once seemed as easy as installing a McDo- nald's restaurant. Now the mental gap between Moscow and the 'real world' is widening. Soviet people say they have been through this before. So they have. The sense of insulation and isolation from the world, like looking at a train pulling away from a station, occurred in the years of famine and civil war after the Revolu- tion and in the early years of the second world war. It is one thing to talk of sacrifice, of temporary unemployment and hardship as the 'first stage' of national restructuring and economic reform. Quite another to apply it to the reality already experienced by many Soviet friends.
The local state 'product' store near our block of flats in south Moscow has had no bread for nearly a week. The shelves are filled instead with sweets left over from the New Year's holiday, as the assistant told my wife the other day, 'to make it look like there was something to buy'. The new shortages of course are caused as much by panic buying in advance of price increases as by the inefficiencies of the economy. Only a week earlier I was in south-western Siberia, enjoying a fully laden table of fresh milk, sausages and vegetables proud- ly offered by my hosts. Yet the lack of confidence in the government and a corres- ponding bitterness has shaken everybody. Intellectuals repeat their predictions last summer of an apocalypse, and the spectre of strikes and social chaos has returned, but the prevailing mood is as much fear as anger.
Although there is an obvious difference between higher-priced bread and lack of bread, Russians are looking at the approaching 'reforms' with dread. Public opinion polls have made clear for some time that while most people support the principle of a market, few have any idea what it means. Having accepted the assur- ances of Mr Gorbachev and his reformers that supermarket socialism was around the corner, they find it difficult to understand why they — the ordinary workers — are being asked to bear the burden of solving the system's ills. 'If we had started real economic reform a few years ago, it wouldn't have been so costly,' one eco- nomist wistfully told me. This is now a popular refrain among economists and government ministers alike. But the reason they didn't begin then was the same cautious fear of popular reaction which is haunting them now. This issue of delay has provided the opening sought by the dozens of new political groups and factions now plaguing Mr Gorbachev on all sides. It may in fact be the only benefit. Voices calling for the resignation of the government and the formation of a new 'government of nation- al trust' are getting louder. The institutions set up to speed Mr Gorbachev's vision of managed change — the new parliament, free city councils, increasingly autonomous republics — are now pushing the country towards more open, if more chaotic, poli- tics. Everyone is now looking ahead to the July Communist Party Congress, where a split in Party ranks appears inevitable, to end finally the illusion that the Kremlin and Mr Gorbachev are in sole control of the national agenda. To answer that eternal Russian question, everyone is to blame for the current state of affairs, leaders and led alike. In retro- spect, this is no surprise. In December 1988, at what looked like the peak of his prestige, Mr Gorbachev was forced to cut short his trip to New York because of the Armenian earthquake. The ground under his feet has not stopped shaking since.
Stephen Handelman is Moscow bureau chief of the Toronto Star.
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