Mikhail Gorbachev's speech to the Central Committee calling for the surrender of the party's monopoly on power signals the onset of a two-month period that promises to be the most significant in Soviet political history since Stalin completed his seizure of power in 1929.
By the end of March, the country, which faces national catastrophe, may well be radically transformed.Forces beyond anyone's control have been propelling the Soviet Union toward a fork in the road. There are only two turns. First, a true multiparty democracy, with unconditional return of land to the peasants and privatization of the economy. Second, abandonment of glasnost and a return to rigid economic centralization.
The middle course, perestroika - gradual democratization, gradual and contradictory decentralization of the economy, preservation of a benign one-party dictatorship - no longer satisfies the left or right.
Severely factionalized and thoroughly discredited, the Communist Party has become an albatross around Gorbachev's neck. Whenever he has been perceived as under attack by hard-liners, his popularity has soared. Whenever he has been seen as defender of the party, his popular support has plummeted.
The potential catastrophe that the country and the leadership faces is cosmic: a near-total breakdown of the economy; a collapse of local party and state authority in the republics and the emergence of a Solidarity-like, rapidly politicizing workers' movement in the major mining regions; food shortages, which in some areas have caused the rationing of even potatoes; inflation, which by unofficial estimates just passed 20 percent and continues climbing; economic and political hostilities between Moscow and national republics, as well as warfare in Azerbaijan; and a rapidly worsening energy crisis.
While radicals push for dramatic reform, hard-liners are bound to seek ways to prolong the one-party dictatorship. They cannot wait any longer. By May, it might be too late to halt, much less reverse, the collapse of the political system, the demise of the Soviet domestic empire and the further evaporation of its former Eastern European holdings.
Four developments may compel the hard-liners to try to strike soon - or vanish from the political scene.
First, the Supreme Soviet (Parliament), which reconvenes this month, is likely to complete, victoriously, the assault Gorbachev carried forward yesterday on Article 6 of the Constitution, which guarantees the party's "leading role."
Second, elections are due in city, district and republic legislatures this month and next. No one doubts that party candidates will be swept from power.
Third, by the end of April, newly institutionalized political structures will be in place in key independence-minded ethnic republics following popular elections.
Finally, by the end of May, multiparty democracies will be institutionalized by popular elections in Hungary, Romania, East Germany, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. However inconceivable, if Moscow decided to intervene to restore its Eastern European empire, the political and military mechanics of such a reversal would be greatly complicated by the fact that the Soviet armed forces would be overturning the new status quo. Besides, the Kremlin can no longer count on Warsaw Pact forces to cooperate.
If the more than 100,000 demonstrators who marched through Moscow demanding democratic changes on the eve of the crucial Central Committee meeting symbolize the nation's mood, the hard-liners have no future.
(Leon Aron is a Soviet specialist at the Heritage Foundation.)