EDITORIAL: U.S. Aid for Gorbachev

{San Francisco Chronicle Feb 11 1990, Sunday Punch, p.1}

NOW IS THE TIME for the United States to come to the aid of Mikhail Gorbachev.

A critical point has been reached in the swirl of events now changing the once-implacable face of communism. We can seize the initiative and adopt a program of positive support for Gorbachev, the remarkable, new-style commissar of commissars who has opened the Iron Curtain to fast-moving democratization.

Or we can simply stand by - simply making encouraging sounds - and by such lack of action perhaps contribute to collapse of all the bright hopes raised by his efforts.

With policies of glasnost and political restructuring, Gorbachev has set in motion a series of revolutionary and positive events. We have seen the crowds in Prague, in East Berlin, in Bucharest, in Budapest - and our spirits have soared with the triumph of freedom in these cities, once so gray and lifeless in the grip of old-style Communist oppression.

There are crowds in Moscow, too. And ominous cracks and fissures erupt across the whole facade of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Deep-seated feelings of nationalism and ethnic rivalry have surfaced. The Baltic states clamor for autonomy. Soviet troops have been dispatched to control the festering divisions between Azerbaijanis and Armenians.

In this unstable state of affairs, the key to Gorbachev's survival lies in the state of the Soviet Union's general quality of life. If daily existence improves, even slightly, for the average Soviet citizens - if more goods and foodstuffs appear on retail shelves, if lines become shorter - then there will be demonstrable evidence that perestroika is working. Here is the prime condition for Gorbachev's survival.

The United States must embark on a program of providing assistance to the Soviet Union in the way of money, food and technical expertise. Action is needed - not just encouraging words.

Remember Lend-Lease, the program to support our future allies during the dark days before America entered World War II? Billions of dollars in American supplies - weapons, food and equipment - were transferred to Britain, China and the Soviet Union with the conviction that helping them contributed to our own defense. And ultimately it did.

President Franklin Roosevelt argued persuasively at the time that Lend-Lease was helping put out the fire in your neighbor's house before your own caught fire and burned.

There are also memories of the Marshall plan, the U.S.-sponsored program to bring order out of a chaotic postwar Europe. Billions in economic aid were provided broken countries to accord them strength and to combat the then-expansionist Communists. Its legacy is the prosperous, stable Europe we now see.

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MIKHAIL GORBACHEV has clearly seen that the ponderous, outmoded Communist machine does not work. He has turned his back not only on the Stalin legacy, but on Lenin's. His current move to dismantle the dominance of the Communist Party, to institute multiparty elections, is, as Richard Pipes, the Harvard professor and Soviet specialist, has noted, contrary to everything Lenin practiced almost from the moment he came to power in 1917."

Gorbachev's survival is by no means assured. Hard-line, doctrinaire party members resist him every step of the way. There is an emotional, near fundamentalist core of the populace that fears change and calls for return to the old, rigid - and predictable - ways of dictatorial control from the center.

Our own country has yearly agricultural surpluses; we are rich in expertise and economic know-how. Extending a hand to the Soviet Union in the way of a latter-day Marshall Plan would be a dramatic, constructive gesture. It would ultimately constitute an investment in our own future. It would mean grappling with, and helping channel, the extraordinary events of a dramatically changing world.