Russia still gropes. Whether toward freedom or tyranny, an ordered liberty or brutal chaos, remains as uncertain as in 1917. Without a tradition of law, legitimacy, and a civil society, the Russians must find their way through a wilderness of conflicting laws, competing pretenders to power, clashing ideologies, and increasing confusion.
One need not know Russian history to know who is on the side of freedom in this drama-Boris Yeltsin. There are indeed times when a cause is embodied in a man. Mikhail Gorbachev calls him mad. This mad Russian, mad enough to think democracy can work in his country, now seems a mercuric combination of Huey Long and Abraham Lincoln as he flits from role to role.
Those of us who have repeatedly prepared his political obituary-when he was a bumptious party boss and dissenter headed for Siberia, when he was brought back by Mikhail Gorbachev, when he bucked Mikhail Gorbachev, when the coup struck one August morning and he took to the top of a tank-have learned not to make his funeral arrangements too soon.
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin faces much the same challenge as Alexander Feodorovich Kerensky in 1917: to demonstrate that democracy can be strong enough to survive. Of course he is no Kerensky. Boris Yeltsin fights. He declares presidential rule and calls for a referendum to decide the issue between himself and the old order. He breaks through the net of legalities and obstructions that his enemies and democracy’s would throw around him, and comes out swinging. He may not survive, but this is sure: He will not go peacefully to spend his last decades in the stacks at Stanford. Western universities can reserve their carrels for the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev.
The line-up for and against Boris Yeltsin in this continuing crisis says it all. Comrade Gorbachev, who has yet to call a turn of history right, and who collapsed Communism by accident while trying to save it, says this declaration of presidential rule was a grave mistake. That settles it. It must have been the right decision.
Henry Kissinger, former immortal, author of Detente, our own Talleyrand, a brilliant and articulate power player with all the moral sensibilities of a chifferobe, disdains to take sides. (“This is fundamentally a power struggle between various groups in Moscow. We should stay out of this fight.”) He sounds like Charles Lindbergh warning America to stay out of Europe’s age-old power struggles, blissfully unaware that if tyranny wins there, it will soon enough threaten us here.
The world understands what is at stake. A chorus of support for Boris Yeltsin is heard around the globe, and the Clinton administration is to be commended for leading it. The last thing the world needs as it emerges from the dark age called the 20th Century is a Russia returned to its old ways. Imagine the results just in the Balkans and the Middle East if the Russian bear emerged from its welcome hibernation to support the most aggressive elements in Serbia and the Arab world.
Inside the Russian parliament, a collection of Communist apparatchiks elected under Soviet rules now uses democratic tactics to throttle freedom, and moves to impeach the freely elected Russian president. It is an old story. This century is littered with the paralyzed victims of such fastidiously legal techniques, from the Weimar Republic to Russia’s pitifully brief democracy between czar and commissar.
Outside the Russian parliament, the pro-Communist demonstrations are led by Anatoly Lukyanov, whose role in the August coup was sufficiently suspect to earn him indictment. You don’t need a scorecard to tell these players and to know what game they’re playing.
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In another century, another leader of a nation embroiled in turmoil was accused of violating its constitution when he suppressed dissent, declared martial law, and suspended the most basic liberties in order to preserve his and his government’s authority. Mr. Lincoln responded by saying he did not propose to let the entire Constitution be lost by refusing to risk various of its parts. “By general law life and limb must be protected,” he explained, “yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb.”
When “the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships,” Solzhenitsyn once said, “this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.” If Solzhenitsyn’s diagnosis sounds familiar to an American, it should.
Boris Yeltsin’s fight is not only Russia’s or freedom’s. It is ours.
As Alexander Solzhenitsyn observed years ago, there are no more Sealed Zones in the world, and what happens in one affects all. Wendell Willkie used the term One World to describe the same idea. So pray a prayer of petition for Russia, that it fulfill its destiny, and become a blessing and not again the curse and warning it was for so long this century.
Russia’s fight to save its light, to become the society of Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn rather than sink back into Gorbachev grayness or Stalinist darkness, should also inspire a prayer of thanksgiving-for another republic that once found itself foundering, its national government impotent before the forces of inertia and disorder, and whose leaders were legally authorized only to only amend its articles of confederation. Instead, they composed a new constitution, idea and vision of a civil society-a republic whose ordered liberty has become a model and aspiration for the world.
A foreign observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, would later write that “if America ever approached (for however brief a time) that lofty pinnacle of glory to which the proud imagination of its inhabitants is wont to point, it was at this solemn moment . . . .” It was, he wrote, “new in the history of society to see a great people turn a calm and scrutinizing eye upon itself . . . when the wheels of its government are stopped, to see it carefully examine the extent of the evil until a remedy is discovered, to which it voluntarily submitted without its costing a tear or a drop of blood from mankind.”
So may it be with Russia, whose great light has only begun to shine.