Gorbachev's perilous experiment

Franklin Roosevelt called 7 December 1941, the day on which the Japanese naval and air forces attacked Pearl Harbor, 'a date which will live in infamy'.

I wonder what we shall come to call 7 December 1988? Let's not get carried away at the start by the competing voices of the pundits who have already jumped to one thundering conclusion or another and made more moderate sounds in between.

Go back to the scene, to the packed auditorium of the general assembly at the United Nations building in New York on Wednesday morning. Mr Gorbachev had not been talking for more than five minutes before I noticed one delegate's chin slump on his chest and his number two man nudged him to stay put but not to snore. The Chinese sat frozen as in a freeze. Inscrutable, I believe, is the word, but not more inscrutable than Mr George Shultz, who held a classic poker face throughout.

At one point, the United Nations camera panned over, almost on cue, at the dropping of the word 'ethnic', panned over to the Romanians and I thought not of Romania proper, but of Moldavia and its people who speak Romanian. From there, my mind wandered from what was being said and I wondered how were things in Tajikistan, where the people are mostly Moslems and speak Iranian. How's the huge cotton crop doing in Uzbekistan? And do the peoples of Kirghiz and Kazakh feel comfortable about glasnost and perestroika, or apprehensive?

I have called off less than half of the Soviet socialist republics and they are not the only ones we hear practically nothing about, or think about, when we let our minds try to take in the huge, the brave, the perilous experiment that Mr Gorbachev is trying to impose across eleven time zones and every climate on earth, except the truly tropical, on 15 republics of the union, at least 25 languages and Lord knows how many self-sufficient dialects and religions.

You'll notice that I haven't yet used the one word we all use sometimes exclusively to describe, to take in this vast conglomerate of nations – the word Russia. I must say the Americans stick to a usage in public and in print which does remind us that the Russians are only 52 per cent of the republics. The word is the Soviets and it's worth using now whenever we're inclined to think of the Soviet Union as a spreading, huge, unified country, a bigger France or Britain or the United States.

For some of us, the first sign that the rousing words glasnost and perestroika meant a good deal more than freeing refuseniks and letting intellectuals speak their minds came with the uprisings in Azerbaijan and Armenia. We, in the West, have instantly translated those words to mean something vague and inspiring, like openness or freedom and the democracies, especially, tend to see the Gorbachev experiment as a stimulating break with dictatorship and an itch to bring what we call democracy to the Russians – and all done on the initiative of this forceful, attractive man named Gorbachev, certainly the most engaging and dynamic of the Soviet leaders any of us can remember.

I'm not suggesting, by the way, that if we'd known Lenin, we'd have found him engaging, and, by now, even the most leftist Democrat is quite safe in believing something he would have hotly disputed ten years ago, a belief that is now the official Soviet view, namely, that Stalin was a human monster.

Azerbaijan and Armenia gave us the first shock of recognition that openness could seem to offer to some of these different nations, different cultures, permission out of Moscow to be open about ancient grievances and deep divisions that have been kept shut by iron Communist security forces that reached from the Baltic to the Pacific. I don't think many of us had thought of Moslems and Lutherans rising up in the Soviet Union to demand national sovereignty, or the transfer of populations or the establishment of their religion and no other.

And, no doubt, openness will come to provoke many other awkward and surprising things we hadn't thought about. I'm thinking of movements not initiated as protest movements, but intended to assert an old identity of race, tribe, religion, region, which has been hidden under the cloak of a Soviet socialist republic. And if this goes on, certainly it will strengthen the growing faction in the Communist elite which fears that these movements will crack the monolith to the point where it might not be able to be repaired by Moscow.

This is the outcome that a whole group of Western Soviet experts has feared – men and women who wish Mr Gorbachev well and, of course, if the cracks presaged a break-up and widespread revolt throughout the huge country, or even of the satellite nations around its rim, then it would be a Herculean labour on Mr Gorbachev's part to prevent his opposition taking over, to reassert by the old ruthless means the unity of the republics.

There's another group which says that it wouldn't take only regional revolts to defeat openness and all Mr Gorbachev's reforms. They ask how, so far, have glasnost and perestroika affected the living conditions of the ordinary Soviet citizen, of, especially, the majority, the Russians? We hear that the household goods, food supplies and so on, available to the mass of the people have been declining.

But the fact remains, and it is never out of the minds of the American and NATO leaders, that the Soviets spend more than twice as much of their national budget on the military as the Americans do and four times as much of their industrial production, that this has been so for a very long time and that, no matter how close we come to what Mr Gorbachev calls symmetry in nuclear arms, the Soviets preserve a vast superiority over Western Europe, over the NATO countries, in manpower and all the effective arms of conventional warfare.

It was this superiority and its potential threat to Western Europe that started the United States on its nuclear arsenal. And now, after over 30 years of nuclear competition, of catching up with each other's nuclear power, or the rumours of it, we have with Mr Gorbachev signed a treaty which requires both sides to reduce and withdraw their intermediate-range missiles. It is the official position of both nations that this is a good thing and reduces the threat of nuclear war. There are, in both countries, people, experts, so-called, who think it was not a good thing. Whichever side these people were on, there is a general agreement among the present governments of the United States, Britain, West Germany, to go no farther, that the main anxiety about Soviet intentions and Soviet power remains with their immense potential in conventional forces.

So was it not a moment to rejoice when Mr Gorbachev came to announce what was expected to be a drastic reduction in those conventional forces? Before the speech, with Mr Gorbachev barely off his plane, we were being tipped off by knowing commentators that he would reduce his conscripted manpower and tank capability by 30 per cent. It turned out not to be.

What matters in any anticipated conventional war, what the Pentagon and the NATO general staffs have come to believe matters, is tanks and artillery. And what Mr Gorbachev proposes is a reduction of his tank advantage over NATO from 3.1 to 2.5 and the artillery advantage from 3.3 to 2.4. It brings the odds down but still leaves a force capable of overwhelming the NATO forces if they no longer have short-range missiles to counter a conventional attack. And that remains the chief concern, if not the preoccupation, of the present leaders of the NATO countries and of the incoming Bush administration.

Why should they be so suspicious, so steadily concerned? Did not Mr Gorbachev say, 'The use or threat of force no longer can or must be an instrument of foreign policy?' Yes, indeed, he did. But the use or threat of force has been a prime instrument of the foreign policy of every nation since nation states were invented and, so far, our great and good intentions, our solemn treaties – if only through the past 70 years – our solemn treaties to renounce force, or the threat of it, and to abolish war itself, have come to nothing.

To go back for a minute to the thought we had at the beginning – the reminder that Mr Gorbachev is not the all-powerful leader of a large unified country, but the present leader of the most powerful faction in a huge conglomerate of nations, can Mr Gorbachev swing his enormous experiment? There are unsleeping misgivings about it which was dramatically shown on Wednesday night when the word that Mr Gorbachev was on his way home was taken, at first, by some responsible people to mean he was on his way out.

At the moment, we have a choice of two extreme positions, as well as many in between, about Mr Gorbachev's speech. Conveniently, they can be found in one newspaper. The New York Times on Thursday cried editorially, 'Perhaps not since Woodrow Wilson presented his 14 points in 1918 has a world figure demonstrated the vision Mikhail Gorbachev displayed yesterday at the United Nations. Breathtaking, risky, bold, naive, diversionary, heroic – all fit.'

On the opposite page, one of the Times's chief political columnists wrote, 'The United Nations and the watching world heard what it wanted to hear – an uplifting, peaceful speech from an all-powerful Soviet leader, but let's not be snookered into trusting a man who has double-crossed and ousted just about every colleague who put him in place. His immediate goal is to bide time for recovery without profound change in his system by downplaying direct superpower competition and undermining the unfavourable line-up of NATO versus the Warsaw Pact.'

Touch wood. Keep your fingers crossed. And, ladies and gentlemen, place your bets.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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