FACES AND PLACES: Poor George, poor Mikhail! (09/01/91)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

Poor George, poor Mikhail!

Poor George Bush. He wanted so much to save the USSR for Mikhail Gorbachev and it didn't work. The Soviet Union is disintegrating faster than you can say "coup d'état."

So anxious was George to save the union that he went to Kiev and told the Ukrainian people that they should forget nationalism and stick with Gorby.

That, too, didn't work. Ukraine declared its independence on August 24.

Was President Bush really concerned for the welfare of his buddy when Mikhail was removed from power? One wonders. In his first press conference following the coup President Bush employed the word "prudent" so often it was nauseating. "We must do what is prudent," he kept repeating. It was only after the leader of the free world spoke to British Prime Minister Major and Boris Yeltsin that we heard the first strains of condemnation.

One also wonders how "prudent" President Bush was prepared to be. Was he ready to follow the lead of French President Francois Mitterand who in the early hours of the coup all but recognized the self-proclaimed new Soviet leaders as the legitimate rulers of the Soviet Union? Does "prudent" mean doing whatever it takes to maintain "stability" and "the new world order?"

Lesia and I followed the coup and its aftermath on our car radio as we drove home from Boston. Talk shows were most interesting because they usually included a Soviet "expert" who tried to explain what happened, predict the future, and answer questions at the same time. Some were good. Most were terrible. The terrible "experts" were convinced that the only way to make the Soviet Union safe for democracy was to send billions of dollars in aid, fast. George Bush is partially responsible for the coup one "expert" proclaimed, because he refused to commit himself to direct aid to President Gorbachev.

The best of all the Sovietologists we heard was Prof. Richard Pipes of Harvard who argued in favor of greater recognition of, and support for the Soviet republics. He suggested that Mr. Gorbachev's star was fast descending.

Interestingly, Prof. Pipes also spoke of his time in Washington when he dealt with various other academic and State Department "experts." Few could appreciate the significance of the republics in the Soviet scheme of things. So many of our "experts" just couldn't comprehend the fact that the USSR was not a nation, but an empire of suppressed nations, recalled Prof. Pipes.

I was reminded of still another Soviet "expert," Dr. Jerry Hough, a political science professor at Duke University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Testifying on Soviet disunion before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee last March 6, Prof. Hough criticized America's intelligence community for predicting the dissolution of the USSR. "Now when it is 99.9 percent certain that the radicals both in Russia and the republics are in major decline and that there will be no two-three years at a minimum, the intelligence community seems to have become even more united in the view that this is 1917, that the situation in the Soviet Union is deteriorating further instead of stabilizing, and that reform is over and the revolution is the only hope."

"In my opinion," concluded Prof. Hough, "that is a profound misreading of the situation. I have been extremely proud of my record of prediction both in domestic and foreign policy...I deliberately put that reputation on the line in what I say today."

With his reputation on the line, Prof. Hough declared that:

"Gorbachev is a modernizing; Westernizing tsar with enormous power...This is more the beginning of the Gorbachev era than the end."
"...while it was already clear that Boris Yeltsin and the radicals like Leningrad mayor Anatoly Sobchak had made a major political mistake in criticizing Gorbachev for taking steps to hold the country together and in not supporting the referendum on national unity, they have since dug themselves into an even deeper hole. Yeltsin has been repudiated in the Russian Republic's Parliament by virtually all of the leadership he helped put into place... They are telling Yeltsin to cooperate with Gorbachev or be dumped. That is his choice."
"Everything I see suggests to me that Gorbachev will be successful in his electoral hopes in 1995 (and the Communists probably successful in the legislative elections of 1994)..."

Given the fact that a revolution has indeed taken place, and that it is Yeltsin who is in the ascendancy with Gorbachev in a hole trying to dig himself out with Yeltsin's (and not the Communist Party's) help, it appears that Prof. Hough's reputation is a bit shabby right now. Will he stop being a Soviet "expert"? Of course not. Since when has it been a requirement for America's Soviet "experts" to be correct?

Do I blame President Bush for being such an illiterate on Soviet affairs? Not really. It is obvious that George Bush doesn't listen to the intelligence community despite the fact that he was once head of the CIA. President Bush listens to his hand-picked "experts," some of whom held similar positions with President Gerald Ford and misled him as well. George Bush is really Snow White surrounded by many dwarfs.

Can you imagine the job anxiety that now exists among Soviet "experts" in the State Department? Where will they go when the very term "Soviet" becomes an anachronism? How can any of them possibly deal with Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine or even any of the Baltics when for all of their professional careers they have denied the very existence of these nations?

For America's sake, it's time for a little housecleaning. Mikhail is doing it; George should follow suit. He can begin with the twit who drafted his speech to the Ukrainian Parliament.