The 'Sovietologists'
LASKY, MELVIN J.
A report on the Oxford conference of Russian experts By Melvin J. Lasky THE SOVIETOLOGISTS It was a strange, monkish band of scholars who wandered in and out of the halls of the old Oxford...
...I suspect that to a certain extent Katkov, himself a product of the Russian intelligentsia (albeit in the cosmopolitan days of long ago), was defending the honor and integrity of "his" class...
...Let me make myself clear...
...From one point of view, this is good to know...
...A report on the Oxford conference of Russian experts By Melvin J. Lasky THE SOVIETOLOGISTS It was a strange, monkish band of scholars who wandered in and out of the halls of the old Oxford nunnery which is now St...
...there was a "Kremlinologist" whose files could correlate the public appointments of generals, agitators, functionaries and ministers with the most secret high-policy decisions...
...He found, at the top, a world of "roughnecks and bureaucrats," both filled with a deeply contemptuous anti-intellectualism...
...In a witty, friendly aside, Raymond Aron called him "the last great doctrinaire of Soviet society...
...How far can they be interpreted as temporary devices adopted by the Kremlin leaders to cope with a transitory situation and liable to be revoked at will, and how far must they be seen as the more or less irreversible result of fundamental long-term trends in Soviet society which will in turn modify the character of the Party regime itself...
...England broiled in the hottest June week in almost half-a-century, but the disputations went on, cool and keen...
...I remain optimistic about the long-term future...
...This kind of controlled relaxation is both difficult and dangerous...
...Idealist...
...I think I see at least some possibility that an oligarchically-governed totalitarian state may be transformed over the years into a more traditional type of authoritarian regime which provides at least minimal safeguards for the rights of individuals and groups and makes some adjustment to the plural energies which run in Soviet society...
...It is no longer a question of how twisted Russian socialism has become or how evil and dangerous the Drang vom Osten is...
...But his exercise in sociological abstraction struck many as a piece of dialectical ingenuity with just too many built-in staying powers of its own...
...With manpower shortages, the concentration camp is the most wasteful and least productive way of using up a man...
...I have been provoked by Professor Berlin," he began...
...that this was not couched in formulations which reflected Isaiah Berlin's notions of what constitutes high principle and positive philosophical ideals seemed to him only natural under the circumstances...
...It appears well on its way to becoming a theory supported by a footnote and wrapped in a bibliography...
...he, like many others who followed him, paid polite tribute to the "soundness" and "substantial truth" of both approaches...
...Of course, it was really only "perspectives of development" that Fainsod had been talking about, and he knew how reversible so many of the post-Stalin changes were...
...Empirical monist...
...Nor was it without modulations and variations...
...What would probably happen was that the Government would eliminate a few excesses, find a new adjustment—in effect, buy them off...
...The camps are gentler now, yet the camps are there...
...Two Americans began the discussions with a defense of their respective papers—Bertram Wolfe's "The Durability of Despotism" and Merle Fainsod's "Changes in the Structure of Soviet Power...
...Still, even in a group like this one, where the emotional rapport of like-minded liberal anti-Communism was so great as almost to induce the impression of unanimity, the factors of individual temperament and intuition intruded themselves...
...No more camps...
...But pessimist he surely was, and his brilliant paper was an implicit rejection of just those elements of hopefulness which stamped his colleague's interpretation...
...it would certainly reassure many of us that at least two nations were set upon an irrevocable course of free democratic evolution...
...Down into the buttery of St...
...Hume...
...Whereas the previous debate was among moralists, veering between hopeful optimism and prophetic pessimism, the clash here was among estheticians, caught between a fraternal sympathy for men of thought who have almost lost heart (and almost lost their minds, if not their heads) in a cruelly unequal contest with commissars, and a more critical fastidiousness which refused to concede the proud Russian name of "intelligentsia" to men of such small ethical and cultural achievement...
...But he was also making an important political point...
...Marxism had died as a positive ideal, and dialectical materialism was just so much "petrified gibberish...
...The whole dynamics of dictatorship calls for a personal dictator, authoritarianism for an authority, infallible doctrine for an infallible interpreter and applier, totally militarized life for a supreme commander, and centralized, undivided, all-embracing and 'messianic' power for a 'charismatic' symbol and tenant of authority...
...Kaganovich had asked: "Is Hegel taught in Oxford...
...and it was very much in character for him to conclude with a recitation of a new Russian poem and to call our attention to some inner echoes of lines by Pushkin which might otherwise have escaped us...
...In Khrushchev he seemed to sense "a desire to turn the clock back to the early Thirties, an almost wistful search to recapture something of the elan of the stirring years of the first Five-Year Plan, before the blight of the purges blackened the face of Russia...
...And little did they suspect that Nikita Khrushchev, over his own vodka, was at that very moment most deeply involved with these and similar questions, in his own donnish way...
...If the men at the telescope turned out to be moralists, the men at the microscope were scarcely less involved, personally or politically, with the wrigglings on their slides...
...there were historians, economists, students of philosophy, diplomacy and esthetics...
...It is hardly conceivable that such speculations would have been spun into motion without a growing recognition of some major turning point in Soviet Russia's social and historical development...
...its price may be a continuing decline in ideological militancy and messianic dedication...
...Russia is no longer the old Churchillian mystery inside a riddle wrapped up in an enigma...
...The dialectics of debate had come full circle...
...If one were to stretch the definition of a system in history to the rubbery limits of Wolfe's Ding-an-sich, then one could almost maintain that in the Western world very few "really basic changes" had happened for centuries—in the United States since George Washington and in England since Oliver Cromwell...
...But, according to his rules of totalitarian society, a change there either is not fundamental or is merely transitory or already assimilated...
...Berlin had returned to Moscow last year, and he found precious little among the Russian elite to give him encouragement...
...If knowledge were power, Moscow might almost come to fear a new encirclement...
...The phrase "within-system change" caught on like a slogan and for days practically dominated the conversations which raged in the St...
...Yes and no...
...He nevertheless repeated his impressions that the tendencies of intellectual dissent had still to become coherent, and that this would only be possible in the unlikely event of "the lid remaining open...
...And even in Richard Lowenthal's final summation what emerged were . . more questions: "What is the nature and impact of the economic and social, legal and administrative changes which the Soviet Union has undergone since Stalin's death...
...Fainsod's own travels in the Soviet Union last year gave him some ground for believing that "fundamental criticism" is not dead...
...That there was a ferment was for him undeniable...
...This was harshly put, but also sadly spoken...
...Our hopes and longings are apt to betray us again and again into readiness to be deceived or to deceive ourselves...
...Is it asking too much to believe that the future belongs to them...
...Charles Thayer, with a professional diplomat's feeling for possible alternatives, inquired as to the nature of potential "out-of-system changes...
...he knew the complications of wearing masks and indulging in double-think...
...Even Wolfe, as one came to know in a week of agitated give-and-take, was less the philosopher of history, writing for all time, than the Cassandra, troubled by fear for the day after tomorrow...
...Dressed out in persuasive theoretical terminology, Wolfe's argument was essentially a thing of biblical-prophetic earnestness...
...Everybody seemed to be in agreement...
...End of the police state...
...Whether we shall see a Reformation or a Counter-Reformation, or something quite different from either, it would be imprudent to predict...
...And who else...
...Wolfe's own considered judgment was formulated in these words: "Modern totalitarianism is one of those comparatively closed and conservative societies with a powerful and self-perpetuating institutional framework, calculated to assimilate the changes which it intends and those which are forced upon it, in such fashion that—barring explosion from within or battering down from without—the changes tend to be either inhibited or shaped and assimilated as within-system changes in a persistent system with built-in staying powers...
...But there was a sympathetic and more than academic understanding on the part of this young British scholar who took pains to learn almost perfect Russian within a year and spent another two wandering around the Soviet Union ("illegally," as the authorities later insisted) making friends and talking with "near-intellectuals...
...Brought up in a world of flux and openness, we find it hard to believe in the durability of despotic systems...
...For Wolfe, this was more than asking too much: The future, alas, did not belong to them at all...
...Moods of men and social classes take on different hues...
...Old Russia was always rough, with its Siberian exiles...
...Thus: Collective leadership...
...There was a Harvard sociologist who had amassed vast collections of facts by means of ingenious questionnaires...
...One should, however, remember that nowhere in Europe did the struggle end in the bourgeoisie taking over the power either of the Church or of the aristocracy, but in compromises of various kinds between these three forces...
...Antony's "buttery...
...A distinguished historian, only fifteen years ago, could write that "Russia, with all her changes, still largely remains the same": "All Russian regimes have been sudden and arbitrary...
...Richard Lowenthal, dialectician that he is, suggested that quantity might become quality when the number of "within-system changes" accumulated...
...He clearly felt the tragedy of caution and even cowardice...
...Fainsod's comment on this mood of disenchantment was: "New generations work their own mysteries, and the hallowed orthodoxies of one sometimes emerge as the discarded follies of the next...
...The scholars and scientists have taken over...
...The purge today resembles those of Stalin's 'benign' periods or of Lenin's day...
...To be heartened was all too human, but to indulge in sentimental self-deceptions was to prepare the road to ruin: "It seems to me that the Western world has found it hard to gaze straight and steadily at the head of Medusa, even if only in the reflecting shield of theoretical analysis...
...Fainsod, cautious to the point of tentativeness, was almost alarmed at the suggestion of such conflicting sharpness...
...I see little or no possibility that the Soviet system will soon evolve in the direction of the Western democratic model...
...Change, he seemed to be saying, was the rule in human history...
...If, as Aron suggested, Soviet society, with the improvement in its standard of living, its culture and its technology, is becoming "economically more rational" (and, at the same time, losing its ideological fervor), how far—over the decades—can one expect Soviet society to go in the direction of economic rationalization and "the return to common sense...
...Wolfe's word for the Directory and the Duumvirate was "transitory," and as he spoke the latter was in point of fact liquidating the former in Moscow...
...As far as he could make out from his talks with Russian "near-intellectuals," they were "amiable, sincere, unambitious, with no real plan or even hope of change...
...Planning, a characteristic feature of the new regime, is not as new as at first glimpse it looks to be...
...and Wolfe, passionate, eloquent and argumentative, vigorously denied that there was any scientific meaningfulness in having the approaches classified in terms of "pessimism" and "optimism...
...Was Wolfe, then, denying that anything had changed in the Soviet Union...
...And the 'journalistic' nature of our culture has made us too ready to inflate the new, because that alone is 'news,' while we neglect to put it into its tiresomely 'repetitious' historical and institutional setting...
...Russian intellectuals, who have been imprisoned and intimidated for decades, now refuse to say the word "yes" on command (he was referring to the literary "conspiracy of silence" which has been so infuriating to Pravda) —"and this you don't call political...
...The techniques of the blood purge have not been forgotten—only held in reserve in case of need...
...From the NEP to 'Socialism in One Country,' from the Popular Front and Collective Security to the Grand Alliance and One World, from 'Peaceful Coexistence' to the 'Geneva Spirit,' the occupational hazard of the Western intellectual has been to read not too little but too much into planned changes, involuntary changes, and even mere tactical maneuvers and verbal asseverations...
...The new leadership has, of course, been quick to clamp down restrictions wherever elements in the population probed the limits or overstepped the bounds of 'the new freedom.' But surely it is heartening to observe that, after nearly forty years of conditioning the new 'Soviet man,' there are still those who probe limits and dare overstep bounds...
...No, the young people are not what they were...
...Max Beloff, who was the first "discussant" (the word was in the program), found nothing to dissent from...
...No, but Kant is...
...Taken all in all, the System was likely to remain...
...The problem of Bolshevism has passed out of the hands of the left dialecticians and, to judge from Oxford, out of the framework of cold-war propaganda...
...This is Kaganovich's last recorded philosophical conversation...
...How far we have come from the old-fashioned debates on what used to be called "the Russian question," with their outraged idealist's sense of betrayal...
...An armistice ends the hostilities of war...
...The changes, if not "fundamental," were at least "dramatic"—the amnesty decrees, the release of prisoners from the forced-labor camps, the rehabilitation (albeit frequently posthumous) of many "enemies of the people...
...Yet, somewhere during the course of the morning it was discovered that the two papers were, if anything, "polar opposites...
...The pressure of the state-bourgeois ethos on the ruling Party elite may be compared with the pressure of the Western private bourgeois ethos on the Catholic Church in the 15th and 16th centuries, as described, for instance, by Max Weber or R. H. Tawney...
...But it does telescope with an astronomical calm all the so-called "within-system changes," which might include wars, depressions, crises, times of trouble and despair, and times of hope and rejoicing...
...Max Hayward registered in precise detail the constraints imposed on contemporary Russian writers, and their restlessness under them...
...I reel under Katkov's blows," said Berlin gently in his rejoinder...
...But George Katkov, Russian philosopher and Fellow of St...
...In the final conference phase of "high seriousness," the main discussion revolved around the deliberately speculative views of Raymond Aron and Hugh Seton-Watson on the evolution of the Soviet system toward a more "rational" order...
...Antony's College...
...I say we've got young people, but no youth," one Russian had sighed...
...Even the 'Party'—that unique misnomer of the vocation of leadership—is not really new, but rather a new application of an ancient institution, the priesthood...
...temporarily converted into a bar...
...From the very outset, there seemed to be a lurking storminess behind the fagade of intellectual calm...
...Victor Zorza of the Manchester Guardian discoursed skeptically on "When is a change not a change...
...It was Isaiah Berlin who introduced the latter note into the discussion...
...The step from total commitment to total rejection may be shorter than most students of totalitarianism have been prepared to concede...
...I am accused of begging the question," ran Aron's defense in the debate, "but I am only putting it...
...Sir John Maynard) In contrast, Seton-Watson strongly urged the conference to divert its eyes from the spectacle of the unique Russian past to the illuminating patterns of the general European evolution: "The similarities between the Soviet 'toiling intelligentsia' and the Western bourgeoisie of the middle period of industrial development (say, Britain in 1880, Germany and the United States in 1900), especially the similar character of its social prestige and privileges, of its power over the masses, and of its cultural philistinism (with its peculiarly 'Victorian' flavor), seem to me to be more important than the differences...
...Antony's, was moved only to anger...
...Dictators die...
...Antony's went the experts for their final scotch and their last licks...
...And, beneath them, an effectively bullied semi-intellectual class, cut off from their roots in the past, deadened to the impulses of genuine controversy, eager not for the electrifying word but for a few paltry shared privileges...
...Still, he was impressed by the importance of the pattern of concessions and pressures: The role of the secret police had been reduced, the atmosphere of Byzantine fawning and servility checked, and the popular desire for a higher living standard and greater security and freedom recognized...
Vol. 40 • September 1957 • No. 37
