Can He Bring It Off?

At first glance, Moscow this summer looks much as it has for decades: office workers queuing up at street-side ice cream stands, red-kerchiefed flocks of Young Pioneers fidgeting in the mile-long line outside Lenin's Tomb, old women sweeping courtyards with twig-bundle brooms, faded red signs proclaiming VICTORY TO COMMUNISM. But beneath the capital's seedy, socialist exterior there is an unaccustomed hum of excitement. Passersby pore over posted copies of Moscow News, marveling at articles on (gasp!) official corruption and incompetence. Once banned abstract paintings hang at an outdoor Sunday art fair. In public parks and private living rooms, families plan futures that many believe will be better, richer, freer than ever before. To the delight of many Soviet citizens -- and the dismay of others -- their country is in the midst of its most dramatic transformation since the days of Stalin.

Mikhail Gorbachev's calls for glasnost (openness),* demokratizatsiya (democratization) and perestroika (restructuring) have become the watchwords of a bold attempt to modernize his country's creaky economic machinery and revitalize a society stultified by 70 years of totalitarian rule. In televised addresses, speeches to the party faithful and flesh- pressing public appearances -- often with his handsome wife Raisa -- he has spread his gospel of modernization. Translating his words into action, he is streamlining the government bureaucracy, reshuffling the military, moving reform-minded allies into the party leadership and allowing multicandidate elections at the local level. He has loosened restrictions on small-scale free enterprise and introduced the profit principle in state-owned industries. His policy of openness has encouraged the press to speak out more freely and produced an unprecedented thaw in the country's intellectual and cultural life. In the human-rights field, scores of political prisoners have been freed and the rate of Jewish emigration has been increasing -- to 3,092 for the first half of this year, up sharply from last year's level but far below the peak of 51,320 in 1979.

For all his innovations, the Soviet leader has hardly, at 56, become a convert to Western-style democracy. He rose to power through the Communist hierarchy and deeply believes in the tenets of Marx and Lenin. His goal is not to scrap that system but to save it from permanent economic decline through a series of bold, pragmatic measures. As he told a gathering of editors and propagandists in Moscow on July 10: "We intend to make socialism stronger, not replace it with another system."

Gorbachev's rejuvenating crusade raises the question of whether he can achieve durable change without provoking insurmountable opposition from party conservatives and fearful bureaucrats. After all, Nikita Khrushchev was swept from power 23 years ago for attempting reforms far less daring than Gorbachev's. More recently, when Deng Xiaoping's economic liberalization in China began to spill over into the political sphere, hard-liners rose up and forced the ouster of reformist Communist Party Chief Hu Yaobang early this year. Even if such internal party opposition does not stop Gorbachev, how far can he push change without unleashing democratic forces that could ultimately destabilize Soviet society? Mindful of that danger, Gorbachev warned the editors and propagandists that openness "is not an attempt to undermine socialism."