When the last speech was over and the last television camera was switched off, tens of thousands of Soviets ended their latest pro-democracy rally last week with the promise of quick reform as dim as the fading evening light.
The protesters returned home to the same dingy apartments and the same ill-stocked pantries. The next morning many of them went back to work in the same mismanaged factories, or took their seats behind desks in the same overstaffed government offices.
The rally, held in defiance of a ban by the Kremlin and the deployment of 50,000 troops in the center of the capital to enforce that ban, was a dramatic symbol of the desire so many have for greater democracy-even if they have no real concept of how a democracy works.
But it also was a symbol of how little the reformers have been able to accomplish since being swept into power two years ago on the promise they would succeed where the Communists had failed.
”It is like a kindergarten,” said liberal commentator Alexander Bovin about the performance of thousands of reformers who won office in
multicandidate elections at all levels of government in 1989 and 1990.
”They captured Moscow, Leningrad, (the republic of) Russia, but they simply do not know what to do with them,” Bovin said.
Fed up with decades of communism, Soviet voters had responded to the reformers` vision of a future that stripped away the ponderous and inefficient bureaucracy, legalized private property and paid workers well if they worked hard and punished them if they did not.
The stage appeared to be set for change, but what happened was something far different.
A combination of naivete, inexperience, systemic inertia and open sabotage on the part of bureaucrats fearful of losing their jobs stymied the well-intentioned reformers.
From the start, the democratic movement often has been its own worst enemy, divided into factions so small as to be powerless.
While no law yet exists allowing the registration of opposition parties, there are hundreds of them across the Soviet Union. Some are composed of no more than three or four people, some have a few hundred formal members.
The leading reformers from President of the Russian Republic Boris Yeltsin on down have been caught up in personality disputes and internecine power struggles. Bickering and jealously have led to further divisions and wasted time.
Saturday, for example, Yeltsin came under withering criticism from lawmakers during the third day of a special congress of the Russian Federation called to hold a vote of no confidence in him. Although critics apparently lacked the votes to oust him, Yeltsin has been unable to win approval of a strong new Russian presidency, a post he has said he would seek.
Eager to learn how government officials in other countries managed their jobs, the newly elected reformers became objects of intense curiosity in the West. Soon they were flying off to inspect conditions in countries all over the globe.
Meanwhile, the lives of those they governed grew steadily worse. Indeed, although stores may be fully stocked Tuesday when new price increases take effect, consumers will find themselves paying as much as 200 percent more for meat, bread, flour and spaghetti.
And while the reformers` trips to Washington, Paris or Tokyo often were justified and useful, they sometimes were misunderstood at home, and this led to bitterness and disillusionment.
In the end, the voters and other ordinary people did not want to hear reformers` excuses that a bureaucracy built by decades of communism was to blame. They asked a question that in the Soviet idiom had even greater resonance than in America. They asked: ”Where`s the beef?”
It was under reformist governments, for example, that residents of Moscow and Leningrad were faced with food rationing for the first time since World War II.
It was under the reformers that the Soviets watched store shelves empty of goods while food piled up in warehouses and on railway sidings, sometimes to rot.
This often was not the fault of the reformers. They issued orders to factories and other production facilities under their control, only to learn they were being ignored by the fearful and angry bureaucrats.
Sergei Stankevich, the deputy mayor of Moscow and a leading reformer, recalled how his staff had discovered evidence that bureaucrats deliberately had canceled deliveries of meat and vegetables to the city.
Workers who had lost sight of the connection between their wages and what they produced worked no harder for their democratic bosses than they did for the Communist ones.
While the reformers pointed their fingers at the Communist Party and accused its enormous, multitentacled apparatus of working behind the scenes to weaken plans to revive the stricken economy, nobody ever produced a smoking gun to prove the allegations.
Meanwhile, the party sat back and reminded people of how much better their lives had been before all these neophytes started running things.
This was not a complete lie. Whether it was purposeful meddling, the inexperience of the reformers, the massive reforms under way throughout the country or a combination of all three, the supply of basic goods was much worse than in days before Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev began trying to tinker with the system.
”Those who opposed the democrats exploited this,” Bovin said, talking about the lack of basic consumer goods.
And when 100,000 demonstrators poured into the streets last Thursday calling for Gorbachev`s resignation and cheering in support of Yeltsin, the party responded by painting a picture of the reformers as failures who had fallen back on the crowds as a last resort.
”The same destructive slogans, the same calls to put the Communist Party on trial, the same cries of down with this or that,” the party daily Pravda wrote on the morning after the rally.
”In other words, Boris Yeltsin and his backers will be relying not on the force of law but on the force of the mob, on mob rule.”
