The Russian heart is beating faster these days, not alone because hopes have been dramatically reborn, but also because the future is so laden with risks and unknowns.
Abruptly and dizzyingly, the Communist system that unsettled world affairs for most of a century has caved in. The overriding need of the moment is to prevent disorder from dissolving into chaos.Across the crumbling Soviet realm, from Tallinn to Kamchatka, the spirit of rebirth is in the air. Born of Mikhail Gorbachev's bold policy of glasnost, those hopes for true freedom only now are able to burst free. Perhaps no episode in these days so captured this transformation as the heart-wrenching funeral for the three victims of the failed putsch, where the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church and a Jewish rabbi shared in offering laments for the dead.
Their prayers, echoing across the newly named Square of Free Russia, reflected not only the durability of faiths that had survived decades of official Communist atheism. They also told of a rebounding human spirit among the Soviet peoples, a spirit that now, with the Communists in disgrace and the dreaded KGB no longer a serious threat, is finding its voice. Sorrow has been eased by a shared sense of exultation and renewal.
These hopes may sustain the Russian nation and its impatient neighbors for some time, even as adversity deepens. Its people, having known far worse in years past, can withstand real hardship - if, that is, they have a cause in which they believe, and can have confidence in a future. But evidence that could justify such confidence has yet to be discerned.
As of this writing, Mikhail Gorbachev remains president of a dwindling union, but this looks like an increasingly hollow position. Seven of the 15 Soviet republics have declared independence from Moscow, and even if not all of them make good on this boast, the die is cast for an utterly transformed system of rule.
Gorbachev is warning darkly that he will quit if the union can't be held together in some form. Meanwhile, in a rare show of humility, members of the Soviet parliament have been confessing their sins and admitting that they have absolutely no answers at all.
It may be tempting for watchers in the West to rejoice in all this clanging and clamoring, and to wish for an even greater collapse of the Soviet state. The Soviet monolith has loomed as a sinister foe for so long, after all, that a shattered empire might now seem preferable beyond question. Yet anarchy, if it came to that, would carry risks at least as profound as any that would result if a truncated Russian state kept limping along. Border disputes, ethnic clashes, itchy fingers on nuclear buttons, starvation - any of these emergencies becomes possible if civil rule should collapse.
This is why, even as most people are cheering the Communists' ouster from their citadels of power, the case needs to be made for a bit of common sense, lest more flywheels spin off and the decrepit Russian machine utterly come to a halt.
It appears that two unlikely rivals, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, might be able to make common cause, at least for long enough to patch things up and preserve what is left of a union after the Baltics, Moldavia, Georgia and a few others finish their secession.
Even if they manage this feat, however, no one has been able to define what kind of a union would work best. The favored new national name of the hour appeared to be "union of sovereign republics," but since no one knows what this really means, no one was taking bets on the outcome.
The reformers' best hope is probably to let the secession-minded republics leave in an orderly fashion, then bend their energies to crafting a constitution and calling elections to patch up what is left. But in the world's largest nation, everything seems caught in a freeze-frame mode. No one has ever restructured anything like the Soviet Union, and no one really knows how to begin.