Keys of This Blood (79 page)

But the more his institutional organization descends into the shameful shambles of disintegration; and the fewer become the number of those who are Catholic in belief and practice; and the greater the number and power of those within his Church who are no longer genuine Roman Catholics, the more that monkey on his back screams in alarm at the approaching deadline, the point of no return, beyond which it will not be truthful or accurate to speak of a visible Roman Catholic Church.

Whether it was a tacit perception that the Wojtyla-Gorbachev summit at the Vatican outclassed the Bush-Gorbachev summit in Maltese waters, or whether the guesses and estimates about that Maltese summit had already and accurately forecast the results of Gorbachev's short meeting with President Bush, the fact is that no noticeable excitement surrounded the American and Soviet flotillas for those few days at the beginning of December 1989. The ugly winter waters, the annoyance of the Soviet president at being kept waiting, the critiques of Gennadi Gerasimov, these and suchlike details were what created news. It was taken for granted by all observers that the two presidents were going to put their final stamp on the “new thinking.”

So it came as no great surprise when Mr. Bush, in the immediate aftermath of the Malta summit, summed up the results by saying: “We stand at the threshold of a brand-new era in U.S.-Soviet relations.” The President was thus announcing the official American entry into the millennium endgame. Its basis? The “new thinking” was carried to its logical
conclusion: “I, the President of the United States, will kick our bureaucracy and push it as fast as I can,” on trade and credits, on two arms control agreements—both treaties to be finished and ready for signing at the next summit meeting, in June 1990. Mr. Bush did not explicate in so many words, but it was part and parcel of the “Malta understanding” that the United States would exert great circumspection in its words and actions so as not to make Mr. Gorbachev vulnerable at home to the attacks of the new Russian “Patriots” and of those who were already screaming out loud about Gorbachev's “caving in” to the Yankees.

Doubtless, the Soviet president acquainted Mr. Bush with his December-February program as well as with his planned schedule for the remainder of 1990, thus getting himself confirmed as “our man in Moscow.” The “we must help Mr. Gorbachev” rule went into full vigor. It would be some weeks yet before Vaclav Havel, new president of Czechoslovakia, would gently but pointedly criticize this Western attitude. “In the West, there is a tendency to personalize history,” Havel told journalist Lally Weymouth. “It seems to me that no matter how big Gorbachev's share in this [the changes in the USSR], this is something that doesn't exist and fall with his person.” But Western leadership proceeded on that principle. “You have a love affair going with Gorbachev,” one Lithuanian activist told an American visitor, “but we do not love him as you do.”

Loved or unloved, Gorbachev went ahead with the propaganda value of a promised papal visit to the Soviet Union and John Paul's help in calming Catholics in the Baltics and in the Ukraine as the palpable results of the Vatican-Moscow meeting on December 1; and, following Mr. Bush's post-Malta resolutions, the “new thinking” was definitely “in.” The Soviet leader had been assured of Western cooperation in his domestic struggle for those czarlike powers he needed for complete control of his situation. Gorbachev had now become the key element in the millennium endgame as Western leaders planned it.

But the contrast in aims between Western leaders and John Paul was clear to the Pontiff. The West's cooperation was granted in view of the “Wise Men's” ultimate aim of the “new world order.” John Paul was carrying on Christianity's perennial tradition of accepting forced cohabitation with evil, knowing that, in general, no new world order could successfully emerge that was not based on the rule and kingship of Christ; and that in this particular historical situation, the final solution of the world's difficulties would be effected through the intervention of the Queen of Heaven.

In the meantime, he could once more have written the veritable scenario
of Gorbachev's achievements between December 1989 and February 1990. The achievements were phenomenal, the “new thinking” they generated so exhilarating for the West that an almost Alice-in-Wonderland atmosphere pervaded the international atmosphere for a while.

“Moscow feels immeasurably more comfortable in the international arena than ever before,” Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze crowed on December 5. Well he and all his colleagues might crow. President Bush had undertaken: to have the two treaties—strategic nuclear arms, conventional forces—ready for the June summit meeting; to facilitate the economic reforms in the Soviet Union; and—most important—not to embarrass the Soviet Union's adventurism in Afghanistan, Syria, Cuba, Nicaragua, Ethiopia and El Salvador.

The events following up these beginnings took on the air of the inevitable.

By the end of December's second week, U.S. Secretary of State Baker had sketched out a “new architecture” built on the “old foundations” of NATO, the European Security Conference (CSCE) of 1975–76, and the European Community (EC). The U.S., the EC and the USSR would meet in June at a CSCE thirty-five-nation assembly to map out the place and function of a unified Germany in that “new architecture.” For a Germany reunited will be the capstone of the inmost circle in that “architecture”—the Western community of nations. The second circle will include the Soviet Union and its former satellites. The third and outermost circle will embrace all in a wide sweep from Helsinki to Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean. Mr. Baker was planning as an Internationalist, of course. True to that mentality, he had now presented his so-called two-plus-four framework: Within this arrangement, the two Germanys would agree on a path to be followed, leading them to unification; then the four powers—the U.S., Britain, France and the USSR—would sit down with the all-Germany delegates and negotiate the delicate issues of new and old borders and of international security.

Rightly, Mr. Gorbachev spoke rambunctiously about it all. “No one has the right to ignore the negative potential formed in Germany's past.” He added that “the Soviet Union has an inalienable right to expect, and the capability to exert efforts to ensure, that our country should not sustain either moral or political or economic damage from German unification.” The fine combination of saber rattling and righteousness showed that Gorbachev saw in this “new architecture” the fresh outlines of his geopolitical plan. “Our Leninism,” he told Moscow cadres, “is now purified and capable of reaching its destined goals.”

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.”