The Union: A Long, Mighty Struggle

Upon returning to Moscow in 1944 after a seven-year absence, the American diplomat George Kennan was struck by the enigma of an empire both yearning for its rightful place in the modern world and clinging to the enfeebling insularity of its past. "The Anglo-Saxon instinct is to attempt to smooth away contradictions," he wrote. "The Russian tends to deal only in extremes, and he is not particularly concerned to reconcile them. To him, contradiction is a familiar thing. It is the essence of Russia."

Contradiction has also become the essence of its second revolution, the radical crusade by Mikhail Gorbachev to create nothing less than a new Soviet Union. In fits and starts, using such hybrids as socialist markets and one- party pluralism, he has directed one of the most transfixing spectacles of modern times: an encrusted political and economic system being brought, stumbling and blinking in amazement, into the light of a new era. In the tradition of Peter the Great, who opened up Russia to the West almost 300 years ago to rescue it from backwardness, Gorbachev is trying to transform, neither slowly nor surely, every aspect of his nation's political, economic and psychological life.

Gorbachev has been in power for four years. In some ways, he was running for a second term in last Sunday's election of a new Congress of People's Deputies, seeking a mandate for his three-pronged pitchfork of perestroika (economic restructuring), glasnost (openness) and demokratizatsiya (democratization). Not since the Bolsheviks were trounced in the Constituent Assembly races of November 1917 had citizens of the Soviet Union been given the chance to vote in a real national election. This time some highly visible keepers of the Bolshevik faith fared poorly. But for Gorbachev the results could be, if he uses them adroitly, the mandate he sought to move to the next stages of reform.

In a land hardly famous for political comebacks, Boris Yeltsin, the brash populist who a year ago was ousted as Moscow Communist Party boss and candidate member of the Politburo, has become a symbol of the opportunities and obstacles that Gorbachev now faces. Yeltsin's triumph, along with the defeat of party hacks from Siberia to Lithuania, represented a rousing endorsement of Gorbachev's vision of perestroika. But it also represented a feisty revolt against the failure of his reforms to improve the harsh realities of Soviet life.

Gorbachev had already secured one of the seats in the new legislature reserved for top party officials. Thus he did not have to confront personally the deflating question that dogs American candidates: Are you better off now than you were four years ago?

The answer again involves contradictions. Life is clearly far better these days: the fear that was the most oppressive aspect of daily existence has been replaced by a torrent of free expression, while experiments with market principles show faint signs of sparking economic success. Life is just as clearly no better at all: the shelves in the shops are more barren than when Gorbachev took office, the limited economic reforms serve mainly to reveal how hopelessly ossified the economy is, and the flirtation with freedom has frayed the seams binding the empire's diverse nationalities.