Gorbachev’s Teeter-Totter

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s new revolution has the one ingredient that no spy thriller can survive without. It crawls with suspense. Four years into his revolution, every important issue remains in doubt, while he goes on winning some and losing some in a fashion foreign to tyranny.

A few nights ago, an inept contingent of Soviet troops made the sensitive nationalities problem explode to new dimensions by spraying some kind of poison gas into a crowd of Soviet Georgian demonstrators. The gas seems to have killed some of the 19 Georgians who died; others were killed or maimed by soldiers hacking away with short-handled spades designed for digging trenches.

Not only did the troops fire poison gas, they were refusing yesterday to tell medical authorities what kind of gas it was that put perhaps 120 people clamoring for Georgian independence into hospitals. Without knowing the chemical composition of the gas, doctors were helpless to know what antidotes to try.

That is how things stood in Georgia when Soviet officers loaded 31 tanks onto a train in Hungary and headed for the Ukraine, away from the East-West border in Europe. Gorbachev has said the scene will be repeated until 5,000 tanks and 50,000 troops have left Eastern Europe as part of an attempt to reduce East-West tensions.

Reports from Moscow say market shelves are so bare that they are reminiscent of the days immediately after World War II when an exhausted Soviet Union was still trying to pull itself together. Savings soar because there is so little to buy, and growth in the economy, already faltering, slowed even more.

Then on Monday, during a one-day meeting of the Soviet Communist Party’s ruling Central Committee, the last of the Old Guard resigned--about one-fourth of the committee’s 251 members--clearing the way for Gorbachev to replace them with people who think more as he does. They include people like Yevgeny Velikhov, vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and Gorbachev’s chief adviser on nuclear arms control, and Valentin Falin, a Party foreign affairs expert.

The revolution lurches on, Gorbachev supervising from a seemingly secure perch on his geopolitical teeter-totter that bounces around from hope to despair. How the suspense will end depends more on the tolerance of Soviet citizens for descriptions of rewards without the rewards themselves than on the leadership’s record of wins and losses. Americans cannot and should not intervene in the accepted sense, but they need only look back at the brutality of alternative methods of rule to find cause to cheer the revolution on.