I'D have to live to 100 (and probably won't) to read historians' year 2020 evaluations of how two great powers -- China and Russia -- adapted to the late 20th century's final proof that state management of the economy, the core of communism, is a colossal failure. How Russia and China
adapt to changeWhich one will be judged to have done a better job for its people in adapting to a free economy -- Russia, which threw out the entire old order and put free-market democracy in its place, or China, which has allowed its economy to become much more free while retaining strong state control and repression of dissent?
Has China -- despite Tiananmen Square -- chosen a path to freeing up its economy that may look better in historic retrospect than Russia's?
Yes, says a former key aide to Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader whose failed attempt to save communism through openness (glasnost) and government restructuring (perestroika) led to his overthrow in 1991, the breakup of the U.S.S.R. into independent republics, and a turn to both democracy and free enterprise under Boris Yeltsin.
During the 1986-90 glasnost period, Ambassador Gennadi Gerasimov served as chief spokesman for Gorbachev and former Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. He was a familiar face on international television explaining to the world the dramatic transformations Gorbachev was attempting while still trying to save communism.
Until next May Gerasimov will be a visiting fellow at the Honolulu-based East-West Center, where he can engage in study and research and also join international seminars for journalists and others. The center considers him a prize catch.
In a recent center breakfast forum with local business leaders, he painted a glum view of his country today.
It is in the hands of "bandit capitalists," he asserted. It lacks the rules and regulations a free economy needs, and the bandit capitalists have become so strong they resist imposing them. Journalists have won freedom from government control but fear physical harm by the new powerful if they go too far in exposing them.
In the "New Russia," all wealth is in a few hands, he said. There is a great divide between those with money and power and the rest of the population.
In the old days people had money but there were no goods in the shops. Today shops are stocked with goods but most people have no money to buy them.
Moscow seems upbeat and demonstrates conspicuous consumption, but the provinces are bleak. There is a great divide between President Yeltsin's free-market policies and the parliament with a Communist majority.
The breakdown in morality is such that few pay the goverment the taxes they owe. Corruption is widespread. A former Pacific fleet commander is in jail for profiting from the sale of two aircraft carriers to South Korea, supposedly as scrap but still fully equipped with hi- tech electronics.
WITH all this, Gerasimov sees Russia as a nation with great potential. It has immense resources and a well-educated labor force.
Who took the better path to needed change -- China or Russia -- should be judged in the end, in my view, by which one attained the best mix of democracy and economic growth. It takes both to have happy citizens in a peaceful world.
The importance of a strong economy is obvious. The less obvious importance of democracy is that it is the best way to restrain leaders with aggressive intentions who are willing to go to war to achieve them -- as did Hitler, Stalin and Tojo in bringing on World War II. Democracy also restrains internal torture.