After Brezhnev: The Sources of Soviet Conduct in the 1980s
Byrnes, Robert F.
brutal and insidious, and the instinct of many people was to deny the reality of the problem. Once war had begun, Churchill faced this problem in the attitude toward Hitler adopted by the...
...Campbell lucidly defines the structural problems faced by Soviet economic planners...
...The John Reed Club didn't know what it was getting into when it allowed Phillips and Philip Rahv to start the magazine with the club's sponsorship early in the thirties...
...And were Lillian Hellman still not around to prolong her squalid lawsuit against Mary McCarthy, would we not all be deprived of one more reminder of just how difficult the life of the mind was for anybody possessing one in the 1930s...
...Gail Lapidus points out that the rate of population increase in Slavic areas has been dropping so rapidly as to provoke a serious debate over pro-natal|st policies that frequently takes on racial and ethnic overtones...
...I din't jazz nobody...
...GNP growth must henceforth arise from greater labor productivity, which has actually been falling of late...
...1 _9 It is must reading f o r every banker, investor, depositor I _9 and borrower...
...for two or three pages...
...1 | Can a financial cabal wrought by the American Govern- i _9 ment,,U.S, banks and the I.M.F...
...Nonetheless, it is salutary to remember in the face of all the negative news we hear about it that, like the poor, the Soviet Union will always be with us...
...In the twentieth century, the success of the Western world has been enormous, but it is precisely the habits bred by success which prove in the long run the most dangerous...
...L THE GREAT UNIVERSITIES provided the ground for the important political leaders, philosophers, theologians, scientists, lawyers, poets, and religious of the past...
...Since then, however,~growth in the labor force has stagnated or is occurring in the wrong regions, such as Central Asia...
...After three decades of postwar expansion, the growth rate of Soviet GNP started dropping dramatically in the mid to late seventies as the decline of labor force migration from the countryside to urban Francis Fukuyama is a member o f the Political Science Department of the Rand Corporation...
...The Polish experience indicates that there are limits to the degree to which consumers can be squeezed-the traditional Stalin|st remedy--and the last Brezhnev five-year plan in fact sacrificed investment (and hence longterm economic growth) in the interests of short-term satisfaction of consumer needs...
...AFTER BREZHNEV: SOURCES OF SOVIET CONDUCT IN THE 1980s Edited by Robert F. Byrnes/Indiana University Press $25.00...
...At a meeting of the club a letter from one of the blacks was read, which sounded like this: "I din't jazz no girls...
...Many of them soon did find out, in spite of the belligerence of the British and the French...
...Is _9 today s situation all that different from that on the eve of _9 _9 | the Great Depression...
...Except for the saga of the Hurricanes and Spitfires in the Battle of Britain, the phony war is a depressing story of inadequate equipment and men sent into battle without proper preparation...
...A WORLD IN DEBT, deluxe hardcover, 300 pp...
...Phillips seems to be such a nice man that one wishes he could have been spared the sixties...
...The past decade, moreover, has seen an unquantifiable but undeniable decline in civic morale, reflected in widespread corruption, a loss of optimism about the future, and a growing absorption i n private and family life...
...and if, in the last instance, it prevails over other disciplines, it does so through the medium of democratic controversy...
...tlartisan Review finished the decade still flying its banners of high culture and democratic leftism...
...lead us to financial ruin...
...12.50 paper Francis Fukuyama The Soviet Union has been receiving special attention in recent years, and with good reason...
...The letter of the law must not in supreme emergencies obstruct those who are charged with its protection and enforcement...
...The authors of After Brezhnev do not of course predict that the USSR will collapse or that the Kremlin leadership will face a major crisis in the eighties...
...The neutrals, on the other hand, followed an understandable instinct to lie low and pretend they weren't there...
...The response of the Soviet leadership to this economic problem is doubly interesting in that the economic downturn coincides with two back-to-back successions within the Soviet leadership...
...There are chapters on the political system, the economy, defense policy, foreign policy, Eastern Europe, and social and cultural trends...
...It is indeed legitimate to ask whether these people actually represent a greater openness in the Soviet system, or whether they are not part of a larger and evidently successful Soviet effort to influence elite opinion in this country and in Europe...
...11 W. 25 Street, NY, NY 10010 R Please allow 3-4 weeks for delit~ry...
...A policy is simply the effective direction in which one throws all one's available political weight...
...It is here that William Barrett's charge that Partisan Review's high-mindedness sometimes constituted a kind of truancy from reality has the most validity...
...Bialer's discussion of Andropov is already somewhat dated as the latter's lengthy illness and recent death have moved us prematurely into the postAndropov era...
...They often mask their fear in self-righteousness, and affect a superiority to mere grubby partisans who cannot see beyond their limited point of view...
...Churchill's irritation with the neutrals is one of the persistent themes of this early period of the war...
...I t is perhaps appropriate to start with Robert Campbell's chapter on the economy, since it is problems in this area that will provide the major constraints on Soviet domestic and foreign policies for the rest of the decade, regardless of the outcome of the succession crisis...
...It is as lucid, accurate and frightening today i as it was when Freeman Tilden wrote it in 1935...
...Since this slowdown is structural, it is evident that Moscow cannot maintain its 3-4 percent annual real growth in defense spending of the last twenty years without cutting back sharply in other areas...
...Today these words would be considered a little nasty even in a conservative journal, but they in fact come from an editorial (written by Barrett) in PR's Summer 1946 issue...
...Our college program is based on the Humanities as discerned in the great books of Western civilization and as se~n through the eyes of the Christian humanist...
...The forces sent to Norway, for example, lacked even adequate maps of the terrain on which they would have to fight...
...A World in Debt is a historical tour de force written I [ for scholar and layman alike with delightful, biting sarcasm...
...As Phillips states: "Our hatred for Hitler and our concern for civil liberties and for the fate of the Jews made most of us passive if not active supporters of the war...
...And he went on: Why, Sir, the neutral Press makes more fuss when I make a speech telling them what is their duty than they have done when hundreds of their ships have been sunk and many thousands of their sailors have been drowned or murdered, for that is the right word, on the open sea...
...one is not going to find many new or provocative views expressed here...
...The evidence does not permit Bialer to be any more precise than this, which is unfortunate, since, as one of the other authors points out, long-term trends can be translated into policies only through the mediation of politics...
...lilt 1 n H i i i t n i l i im i i t l l m l i l l i I I 1 J and well thought-out, they are also rather unexceptional...
...It is uncertainties such as these which force the authors of After Brezhnev to make very general, conditional, and highly qualified prognoses...
...But neutrals are the pharisees of the modern world...
...The short answer provided by Seweryn Bialer in his chapter on the political system is no: While Bialer believes that the younger leaders who will come to power by the end of the decade are generally impatient with the older generation and share a vague desire to "get the country moving again," there is nothing in their upbringing or present status to suggest that they will be willing to take the risks required either to promote true reform, or to oversee a return to Stalin|st discipline...
...The average John Reed Club member viewed literature as a socialist tool roughly on the order of a truncheon or a rutabaga quota, but Phillips and Rahv somehow managed for the nine issues (a little more than two years) that the magazine lived under the club's dubious protection...
...THOMAS MORE INSTITUTE OF LIBERAL ARTS For Catalogue and Brochure Write To: Dr...
...There were, he remarked in an early broadcast, still thoughtless dilettanti or purblind worldlings who sometimes ask us: "What is it that Britain and France are fighting for...
...Editor Robert F. Byrnes's preface betrays what I regard as a rather curious desire of the project's organizers to achieve a consensus of sorts on each of these questions...
...and it was only luck, and the Channel, which gave them the opportunity to do so...
...The French were frozen in the attitudes of 1918, while a long decade of pacifism had sapped British morale and left her armed forces largely equipped with weapons that belonged in a museum...
...During the entire period covered by this volume of Gilbert's biography, the energies of the British were almost all devoted to building up the apparatus of trained men and material which would allow them actually to begin to fight a modern war...
...1 1 A World in Debt is a classic written in the depths of 1 i the depression...
...With Stalinist sympathizers in so many of the editorial saddles that counted in New York in those days, it took a heroism scarcely imaginable to write about politics clearly and whole, a toughness that makes today's complaints about liberal bias in the media, even when they're right, seem like pantywaisted whining...
...This strikes me as rather like telling the Lord that, well, you won't interfere with the harrowing of Hell if He'll just be quick about it...
...Would, for example, the exposure of Anthony Blunt have been quite so edifying had he not still been alive to soak up its shame (and, admittedly, Me sympathy of the addled...
...He described as "one of the most extraordinary things I have ever known" the way in which German illegalities, atrocities, and brutalities "are coming to be accepted as if they were part of the ordinary day to day conditions of war...
...Each chapter was drafted by a principal author, reportedly in consultation with a committee of three or four other specialists and the other members of the project as a whole...
...DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR | i MONEY REALLY IS...
...Yet this is precisely what happened...
...Without substantial devolution or decision-making autonomy--and hence political power--to lower management levels, the system cannot provide incentives for innovation or responsiveness to consumer demands...
...Default of l n billions of dollars by third world borrowers can hapi pen any day...even as American banks continue to i renew massive loans with no means of repayment in ". _- sight...
...The decade ~vas rough on him and the magazine, which wobbled not only from the Zeitgeist without but from Philip Rahv's renascent Marxism within...
...Your money is n o t safe...
...Adam Ulam's chapter on foreign policy presents an informative and useful analysis of the considerations underlying Soviet decisionmaking in each of the major regions of the world, in a style that will be very familiar to his readers...
...Many of the more interesting recent developments in the Soviet Union lie in the social and cultural spheres...
...n | The whole nightmare is v i v i d l y and a c c u r a t e l y p r e d i c t e d i n ~, I i | A WORLD IN DEBT I i b y Freeman T i l d e n i m with a new introduction by _9 Albert D. Friedberg, the noted i currency and money market trader I | The nightmare of this century s n _9 second international debt crisis ~t looms menacingly...
...Thus Coat Blacker's chapter on the military details the impressive range and dynamism of the Soviet defense buildup, and comes down squarely in the middle of the debate as to whether the Soviets act out of offensive or defensive motives...
...35.00 [ i Credit card holders call TOLL-FREE (800) 323-1717/operator 377 I | (Illinois residents call (800)942-8881/operator 377) n i or send check/m.o, to: l _9 FRIEDBERG COMMODITY MANAGEMENT, INC...
...Name Address Clty State Zip Telephone THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 37...
...There has been a fairly consistent pattern among American observers of the Soviet Union to exaggerate the problems of the Soviet system and to underestimate its resiliency and dynamism...
...Part of this decline is due to a rather dramatic increase in the rate of Soviet infant _ 9 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 tality, which sets the USSR off from other industrialized countries...
...The doctrine of containment outlined by George Kennan in his famous 1947 "Mr...
...Churchill's irritation on this score comes out most clearly when he introduced the naval estimates to Parliament in February 1940...
...The British celebrated their victory, and succumbed to complacency...
...From this point of view, the story of Churchill's life in this period was a cliffhanger: Will the Americans come in...
...In the fifties, Phillips's anti-Joe McCarthy credentials would pass any liberal muster, but he remains proud that he "did not succumb to the hysteria that was whipped up at the time and is now coming back again, in a kind of retroactive indignation and an attempt once more to use the abuses of McCarthyism to suggest the innocence of the Communists...
...With his own ability to write blocked up for most of his life, he spent fifty years editing for others the honest patch of ground that has been Partisan Review...
...His conclusions are safe ones: 'The Soviets will continue their efforts to split Europe from the United States by a combination of peace initiatives and intimidation, and will continue to expand in the Third World...
...By the late forties, when the intellectual waters were once more befouled by fellow-traveling, Partisan Review was ready to take sides in the two-sided world that had emerged from the war: " I t is c l e a r . . , that the 'liberals' are embarked upon nothing less than a policy of appeasement o f Russia...
...I hope he felt better after writing this...
...It is especially good to see longevity granted William Phillips, who is instructive and admirable, and whose Thomas Mailon teaches English at Vassar College...
...Apparently, according to the present doctrine of the neutral States, strongly endorsed by the German Government, Germany is to gain one set of advantages by breaking all the rules and committing foul outrages upon the seas, and then go on and gain another set of advantages through insisting whenever it suits her, upon the strictest interpretation of the International Code she has torn to pieces...
...A PARTISAN VIEW: FIVE DECADES OF THE LITERARY LIFE William Phillips/Stein and Day/S19.95 Thomas Mallon I f longevity were granted only to the admirable, we would be denied some instructive spectacles...
...Up until the midseventies, the enormous waste .and inefficiency inherent in the Soviet system could be masked by extensive mobilization of labor and natural resources...
...areas brought an end to easy productivity gains...
...let the best "ism" win" "Marxism in culture, we think," said a statement of editorial alms in the first non-John Reed issue, "is first of all an instrument of analysis and evaluation...
...Yes--but...
...I | World financial collapse may be imminent...
...Ulam implicitly disagrees with Bialer's contention that the foreign policy decisions are increasingly tlnfluenced from below by specialists in the various institutes that have sprung up in Moscow over the past decade, among whom Bialer has many contacts...
...We leave Churchill signaling to Eden: "The accession of the United States makes amends for all, and with time and patience will give certain victory...
...In Chapter 21 he says it was a "tr~ling period...
...Throughout this period, Churchill's faith was pinned on the United States, the greatest neutral of them all, and in the end the Japanese solved his problem for him...
...It is this hierarchical structure that robs managers of any incentive to exceed plan quotas and leads to the paradoxical situation in which new capital spending actually lowers productivity by allowing for the replacement rather than the maintenance of broken or underutilized equipment...
...Further, none of them had the slightest confidence in the military capacity of the British and the French...
...When the reading was over, one John Reed Club member jumped up and announced, "This is literature...
...Once war had begun, Churchill faced this problem in the attitude toward Hitler adopted by the neutrals: Small nations [he declared] must not tie our hands when we are fighting for their rights and freedom...
...Even before AnTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 35 dropov's conspicuous absences from public view put into question his health and viability, it was clear that the longanticipated Brezhnev succession was going to be considerably different from previous ones...
...In the absence of systemic reform, which none of the book's authors regards as likely, Soviet political leaders will inevitably have to choose between cutbacks in consumption, investment, and defense spending...
...Some of Barrett's other charges about the various derelictions of PR's writers are not nearly so well founded...
...What does history teach us...
...It was a bracing, instead of runny, pluralism...
...The advanced age of all of Brezhnev and Andropov's peers and likely successors suggests that before the decade is out the Soviet Union will experience a wholesale generational change among its top leadership apart from a prolonged struggle for the General Secretary's mantle...
...From one point of view, Churchill's irritation was merely a lack of imagination...
...Peter V. Sampo Thomas More Institute of Liberal Arts One Manchester Street Merrimack, NH 03054 Piease send me information about this program...
...Communist thinkers had, says Phillips in a sentence he doesn't seem to realize is funny, their own range: "Communist intellectuals ran the gamut from the natural or induced innocence of the rank-and-file mentality to the professional cynicism of those who knew what they were doing...
...story shows a man both made and worn out by the ideological course corrections of a lifetime...
...As a result, AfterBrezhnev has many of the advantages and defects of a book written by a committee: While its interpretations tend to be sound, balanced, l IT'S THE ELEVENTH HOUR...
...Humanity, rather than legality, must be our guide...
...While the overall prospects for the Soviet Union as a society presented in this book are not encouraging from the Soviet leadership's standpoint, it is important not to get carried away by current trends...
...The collection, published under the aegis of the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies, is the product of a collaborative effort by a large number of well-qualified specialists on various aspects of the Soviet Union--indeed, the entire list reads like a Who's Who of American and British Sovietology...
...X" article was premised on the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union as a result of its internal contradictions...
...Phillips illustrates the subtlety o f the prevailing Left literary sensibility of those days with the following story: It was the time of the famous Scottsboro case, which involved the arrest of several young black men accused of raping two white girls...
...In politics, nothing fails like success...
...Will a new generation of Soviet political leaders make fundamentally different choices, either in the direction of reform or a reallocation of resources away from defense...
...It is instructive to go back and read earlier prognoses of the USSR: Even as hardheaded a book as Strategic Power and Soviet Foreign Policy, written by Myron Rush and Arnold Horelick shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, rejected the likelihood of a massive Soviet buildup of ICBMs on the grounds that the Soviet leadership could not afford to squeeze consumers to the extent such a policy would imply...
...many 'liberal' minds, but it is none the less a policy for all that...
...Campbell points out that while Soviet planners are aware of existing inefficiencies and have instituted an unending series of small reforms to correct them, the real problem lies in the hierarchical administrative structure of the Soviet economy which can be addressed only by a radical systemic reform that would carry grave political implications...
...It is easy to read large parts of Finest Hour as a moral fable for our times, no less than a moral legend of Churchill's...
...After Brezhnev is a highly competent and informative collection of essays which attempts to deal comprehensively with the question of where the Soviet Union is headed both domestically and in its foreign and defense policies...
...But this is an attempt at self-control...
...This may exist as a confusion and a fear in 'William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (Doubleday, $15.95/$8.95...
...They were terrified of doing anything to attract the attention of this ghastly wild beast on the prowl...
...Come on, Bill, let it rip--let's go back to what you said in Chapter 2: "the counterculture and the new l e f t . . , their ignorance, their petulance, their selfi n d u l g e n c e . . , an infantile l e f t politics and pop culture that managed to be both ~tlienated and modish...
...When Partisan Review came fuUy up from the club's fetid air to begin its "raucous, impious, and intransigent" life as an independent magazine, it stuck to its heroic guns and kept its pages open to the surgeries of New Criticism, the delicacies of Lionel Trilling, and, yes, the Marxism of those like Rahv...
...Seeing the conflict in moral terms, in which the British stood for goodness, legality, and the rights of small nations, he found it difficult to understand why he could not count upon their wholehearted support...
...It is not at all odd that His Majesty's Government are getting rather tired of it...
...If the Rosenbergs died for anyone's sins it was their own, not ours...
...and they were on this point dead right...
...It is a useful book for general readers who want to know something about the status of current thinking on the USSR within the Soviet "profession," and in fact is too long and diverse to summarize effectively...
...It would not be right or rational that the Aggressor Power should gain one set of advantages by tearing up all laws, and another set by sheltering behind the innate respect for law of their opponents...
...To this I answer: " I f we left off fighting you would soon find out...
...The thirties: Was there ever a decade when the playing was more for keeps...
...There is, of course, a happy ending...
...The possibility _= _9 - - e v e n p r o b a b i l i t y - - o f massive i default stares us in the face...
...But the Second World War that followed was not its most honorable hour...
...The allies of 1939 could hardly have protected them from an angry pussy cat, much less a ferocious tiger like Nazi Germany...
...And every penny they lend comes from your .i deposits...
...I am getting rather tired of it myself...
...Nobody jazzed no girls," etc...
...Phillips, never a Communist party member himself, had in mind a magazine that would "reconcile the modernist spirit, which was often conservative and antihistorical, with a political consciousness that emphasized the historical dimensions of a r t . " If he didn't think literature existed in a social vacuum, he still believed in letting it breathe a little air of its own...
...Twenty years after emerging victorious from the greatest war in history, the British and French had very largely allowed their military capacities to fall into disrepair...
...You won't learn this from Coover or Doctorow or Garry Wills, but Phillips remembers...
...Some gamut...
...Such caution is commendable, . . but may also cause the nonspeclahst to wonder how much there is to the field of Sovietology...
...Even under the most pessimistic assumptions about future productivity the Soviet economy will continue to grow at slightly under 3 percent per year for the rest of the decade, which as Campbell points out is higher than Western growth rates between 1978 and 1982...
Vol. 17 • April 1984 • No. 4
