A dash of openness can be a dangerous thing in an autocratic state.
Mikhail Gorbachev discovered this two decades ago when his campaign to inject some daylight into Soviet society doubled back on him like a heat-seeking missile.
Now China's leaders are playing with the same volatile political chemistry as they give their own citizens and the world an unexpectedly vivid look at the earthquake devastation in the nation's southwest regions. The rulers of cyclone-battered Myanmar, by contrast, are sticking with the authoritarian playbook, limiting access and even aid to the stricken delta region where tens of thousands of people were killed by the storm.
While China's response to its natural catastrophe is certainly more humane, and is only a small step toward openness, it could set in motion political forces that might, over time, be unsettling. That's especially true in an age of instant communications, even in a nation like China, which tries to control Internet access.
"When you start opening up and loosen controls, it becomes a slippery slope," Jack F. Matlock Jr., the American ambassador to Moscow during much of the Gorbachev period, said last week as he watched the events in China. "You quickly become a target for everyone with a grievance and before long people go after the whole system."
Chinese leaders are well aware of the Soviet experience. The bloody crackdown against the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989 seemed motivated in part by fears that a relaxation of repression would lead to a replay of Soviet turbulence in China. It was no accident that China was the first country to translate and reprint Mr. Matlock's 1995 account of the demise of the Soviet Union, "Autopsy on an Empire."
And China has taken a different reform path, in effect offering its people robust economic growth, with a degree of responsiveness when problems can be blamed on local officials, in exchange for continued one-party rule. Playing up the response to the earthquake, even as China restricts coverage of repression in Tibet, could prove a shrewd move, rather than one that cascades into instability.
Still, it is worth recalling a time when a little openness flew out of control.
As a correspondent and bureau chief for The New York Times in Moscow in the late 1980s, I had a ringside seat to observe the slow disintegration of the Soviet Union under Mr. Gorbachev. The collapse of the Soviet empire and dissolution of the Communist Party were not exactly what he had in mind when he took power in 1985 and launched his twin policies of glasnost (greater openness) and perestroika (political reform).
As events unfolded, it was like watching a scientist start a nuclear chain reaction that races out of control, eventually consuming him and all those around him.
Mr. Gorbachev realized his country was rotting from within, paralyzed by repression and ideological rigidity, a backward economy and a deep cynicism among Russians about their government. "We can't go on living like this," he told his wife, Raisa, hours before he was named Soviet leader, he recalled in his 1995 memoirs.
But he clearly had no inkling of where his initiatives were headed when, shortly after taking office, he broke new ground for a Kremlin leader by mingling with citizens in Leningrad and giving unscripted interviews.
In those early days of glasnost, it was hard to tell whether the changes were purely superficial or the start of something more profound.
One day in late 1985, Allen Ginsberg, the American beat poet, unexpectedly turned up at the Moscow bureau of The Times, bearing a package from Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Soviet poet. It was the text of a speech that Mr. Yevtushenko had given to the Writer's Union.
Serge Schmemann, my colleague, described it a few days later in a front-page story: "The session was a closed one, but even so the poet's strong words against distortion of history, against censorship, self-flattery, silence and privilege in the world of letters were strikingly bold."
As glasnost gathered force in the years that followed, it ripped away the layers of deceit that were the foundation of the Soviet state. Each step undermined the authority of the party and the government.
The explosion of a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in April 1986 shattered the Kremlin's credibility — and gave a powerful impetus to glasnost. The Kremlin, like the Burmese leaders after the cyclone, seemed paralyzed by the accident. The first government announcement — an innocuous 44 words — came more than a day after the reactor meltdown, and hours after Sweden detected alarming levels of radiation in its air, 800 miles north of Chernobyl.
The glacial flow of information imperiled thousands of people living in the accident area. Mr. Gorbachev, embarrassed by the debacle, redoubled his efforts to make the government and party more transparent.
The truth about Stalin's brutality, and even Lenin's, was exposed as a bright floodlight illuminated the hidden recesses of Soviet history. Newspapers and journals wrote honestly for the first time about government corruption and mismanagement. Artists, playwrights, filmmakers and writers looked unsparingly at the abuses of the Soviet system.
"Children of the Arbat," a long-suppressed, unvarnished novel about life under Stalin by Anatoly Rybakov, was the sensation of Moscow when it was published in 1987. "Repentance," a bitingly satirical film about Stalinism, was freed from the censors the same year.
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