Time to Watch Liberties

Back in 1986, my friends and I were sitting around a kitchen table talking about why we did not believe in Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika. We had lived through too many propaganda campaigns to think this latest coinage was anything but empty rhetoric. Okay, one of us said, what would it take for us to believe perestroika was real?


Our wildest dreams back then stretched to a release of political prisoners, a Soviet pullout from Afghanistan and an end to Communist Party nomenklatura privileges. None of these seemed even remotely possible. But that very same year, academician Andrei Sakharov came back from his exile in Gorky, and thereafter other political prisoners were released one by one. Soviet troops were out of Afghanistan by early 1989. It took until 1991 for the Communist big shots to lose their high status.


Now Communists dominate the State Duma and a former head of the Soviet planning agency is the No. 2 man in the Cabinet. Just recently the lower house of parliament voted to return the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, mastermind of the Red Terror, to the square in front of the old KGB building. Could there be a more symbolic sign of a retroversion of history? Is the old system back? Or, as a friend called to ask me as soon as the Dzerzhinsky vote was announced, "Are we emigrating yet?"


Amid today's doom and gloom, it is useful to look again at those touchstones that more than a decade ago persuaded us that the absolutely impossible was happening - that the oppressive police state, the inhuman Communist system built to last forever, was crumbling before our eyes. The signs are not all bad.


Political prisoners? Inconceivable in today's Russia. When we see neo-fascists holding meetings and selling newspapers just like any other political activists, some of us aren't so sure that's an entirely good thing. But when three dissidents were convicted in China late last year, it sounded almost medieval to us in Russia. Their crime was to try to form an alternative party; in our parliamentary elections this year, several dozen parties are expected to compete. Liberal reformers may have largely lost their influence and popularity in Russia, but they have free access to the political scene.


No less diverse than that scene is our press, varying from liberal to Communist to fascist, with all the major newspapers being still on the democratic side. Mockery of the government, once confined to the kitchen tables of trusted friends, abounds in the papers and on television. And for those who think politics is too boring or too dirty, or both, there is uncensored choice of books, movies and modern art of the wildest variety. A Communist leader of yesteryear would have dropped dead of anger at such brazen lack of restraint.


Afghanistan? Forget about it. Russia's undernourished, poorly armed and poorly trained army disgraced itself even inside Russia, with its defeat in Chechnya. Military expansion is out of the question.


As for privileges for the elite, it's true that the old Communist nomenklatura has every reason to be jealous of today's Russian bureaucrats. But at least one thing is different: The Communist bosses enjoyed their privileges while depriving us of the opportunity. They could travel abroad, but we were locked up at home. They could read books that were off-limits to us. Today's bosses may grab what does not belong to them, but they could not care less what we read or listen to, or write or talk about, or whether we travel abroad, if our skills can earn us the money to do so.


Those of us who remember Soviet constraint and oppression can still marvel at the freedoms we enjoy today. Even if none of the contenders for president in the post-Yeltsin era seems very attractive, we still appreciate the opportunity to make a choice - the notion that we will elect our own president and witness the first democratic transfer of supreme power in Russia's history. As long as the government does not interfere with what is written or said, there is hope that Russia will not lose all it has gained over the years of liberal reform.


Unquestionably, our freedoms are fragile. A serious threat could come from the next government; none of the main presidential candidates comes across as an ardent advocate of liberal values. A real setback is as hard to imagine now as real liberalization was in 1986. But once again we are monitoring our freedoms as a touchstone. My hope is that our kitchen table will not be the only venue of the discussion. For now, despite the Duma vote, Dzerzhinsky remains in the park of abandoned monuments where he was dumped following his 1991 dethroning.


Masha Lipman is deputy editor of Itogi magazine. She contributed this comment to The Washington Post.