Glasnost Comes to America

...From the caliber and accessibility of the more important representatives, it was clear that the Gorbachev leadership viewed the occasion as a splendid opportunity to try out its revamped promotional techniques on the U.S...

...The reproaches to Seitmuratova were interspersed with shouts of "She has every right to speak about the injustices done to her people...

...W hat, then, were the Soviets after at Chautauqua...

...Mercifully, my fears that the Kremlin's new, slick spokesmen would have Bohdan Nahaylo writes frequently on Soviet affairs for the London Spectator...

...These people aren't around or are writing worse than before...

...It may be hoped," she adds, "that just as the yeast makes the dough rise, so the activity of these dynamic people will gradually stir this present-day slumbering mass...

...As I stood there relishing this outburst, my mood was dampened by a Moscow city planner who drew me aside and said bluntly: "What you should know is that the real problem with the Crimean Tatars is that they are all evil...

...There are no longer the dark masses who could be ruled, whose minds could be controlled: they are thinking people...

...What is especially noticeable when talking to the younger officials like Dobrokhotov is their confidence that the system can cope with the stresses and strains produced by glasnost and the perestroika...

...At a panel on press freedom Izvestia's political observer, Alexander Bovin, who has played an important role in extending the scope of glasnost, declared outright, "There never was a free press, it does not exist today, and never will...

...The average age of the Soviet team was noticeably young—probably around forty...

...First, the continuation of glasnost is not assured by any institutional safeguards...

...But even more disappointing has been the Soviet side's failure to live up to its promises to provide extensive and fair coverage of the Chautauqua conference...

...Most of them, even those in the West for the first time, seemed self-assured, and quite a few spoke very good English...

...Then I remembered...

...In fact, the latter term has become another new Soviet buzzword...

...What they gloss over or ignore is that it was Lenin who created and consolidated one-party dictatorship, who wanted more, not less, terror enshrined in the Criminal Code (even after the New Economic Policy had been adopted), and who forbade dissent and factions within the ruling Communist Party itself...

...As for the intractable nationalities problem, Zaslayskaya bemoans the fact that this issue has not been adequately discussed in the USSR "for decades," and that even under glasnost "probably it is necessary still to learn to talk openly of these things...

...The Brezhnev years, he conceded, had had a "politically deadening" effect on social consciousness...

...We're so happy to have you here at last," exclaimed a middle-aged man with an anti-nuclear emblem, giving me a hearty slap on the back...

...The Soviet visitors constantly re-minded even the most gullible members of the Chautauqua audience why a healthy dose of skepticism about glasnost and its spokesmen is called for...

...The present leadership is not only intelligent but also more politically rational—this is the difference...

...In a new book due to appear early next year, she shatters the standard image of Soviet society as consisting of working class, peasantry, and intelligentsia...

...When the young man protested, the moderator retorted: "Are we not in a free society...

...The surprisingly frank coverage by the Soviet domestic media made the conference all the more extraordinary...

...For example, the usually dapper Vladimir Pozner stunned his American audience with a shocking tale of press censorship in their country, the details of which he claimed to have personally checked when visiting Cleveland, Ohio...

...It also becomes clear that for all her personal courage Zaslayskaya has little understanding of economic freedom...

...Why...

...On Afghanistan, for instance, the Soviets gave no sign they're ready to budge...

...It was of course encouraging to hear senior Soviet officials give repeated assurances that their country's Criminal Code is being made less repressive...

...The badges issued to members of the press, it turned out, were very similar to the tags worn by the Soviet guests...

...that same afternoon, the vice rector of Moscow University, Vladimir Dobrenkov, was emphasizing how important it is to "humanize" Soviet education...

...This was all part of the lavish effort by the citizens of Chautauqua in upstate New York to make their numerous Soviet guests feel welcome...

...Ambassador in Moscow, did not mince words...

...Resistance comes from all those likely to lose out if Gorbachev is successful: those who have enjoyed a privileged existence without effort, or those who have circumvented the system by relying on the second economy...

...It is one thing to criticize Stalin—but genuine glasnost will begin the moment Lenin is depicted in the Soviet Union as he really was, not as the legend portrays him...

...rr he only real sign I saw at Chautauqua that there may indeed be something to Zaslayskaya's optimism came shortly after the human rights panel had ended...

...1 This time the Kremlin sent one of its largest and most diverse contingents ever to visit the United States...

...Yet for the time being, while Gorbachev is still up against a force-field of resistance from the bureaucracy and a skeptical population, this is a risk that he and his supporters appear willing to take...

...But what little coverage there has been in Pravda, Izvestia, and New Times has been highly tendentious and obviously censored...

...When I asked him publicly why we should believe him now, all that this smug time-server could say is that earlier this year he had told Westerners in Vienna that more Jews would be allowed to emigrate, "and you see I was right, wasn't I?" (No doubt Zivs will be one of the first to declare himself a true friend of Israel once Moscow and Tel-Aviv mend their fences...

...Indeed, he went out of his way to play There could be few better places for Moscow's representatives to promote Gorbachev, glasnost, and the perestroika than this charming enclave with its well-to-do and leftish population...

...Listening to her discuss this problem, it becomes clear that about every social group has some reason to feel threatened by the perestroika and its emphasis on hard work, efficiency, and stricter discipline...

...Aishe Seitmuratova, an indefatigable Crimean Tatar activist now living in the West, had just drawn attention to the plight of her indomitable nation...

...This concrete requirement is for us the main one...

...Leonid Dobrokhotov, an official of the Central Committee, stressed that glasnost had given all Soviet citizens the right to criticize so long as they were constructive...

...Iconfess to some disorientation that first morning in late August when I pulled open the curtains and found a large red Soviet flag flapping outside my hotel room window...

...Questions that only a few years ago would have been re-j ected as provocations were calmly taken on...

...Although only minutes before Pozner had quipped, "Whereas in both the United States and the USSR there is no such thing as freedom of the press, the Soviets know it and the Americans don't," Vlad was last seen wiping egg off his face...

...Zaslayskaya believes the Soviets must first face up to how their society is organized...

...We are sincere in our attempts to "democratize" all aspects of Soviet life, but remember, we have a different understanding of what democracy is...

...They simply believe there is no alternative...

...For a full twenty minutes the Soviets argued loudly among themselves...

...Bovin himself recalled earlier this year in the Soviet journal New Times how "my generation and I watched with bewilderment, pain and a disgusting sense of our own impotence," as the hopes raised by the 20th Party Congress and de-Stalinization "seeped through the bureaucratic sand...

...Little old ladies pushed greeting cards into my hand or implored me to pose for a photograph...

...In Chautauqua she confirmed that she was indeed the author of this samizdat classic...

...officials (who, to their credit, politely stood their ground), and a receptive if critical audience...

...Half of them castigated her as "one of theirs" for daring to bring up such a delicate issue in front of an American audience...

...Her views were considered so radical that as recently as 1983 one of her reports—the so-called Novosibirsk Document—generated considerable excitement when smuggled to the West...

...Accept us as we are...

...The Soviet spokesmen seemed prepared for anything...

...It was disconcerting to see among these spokesmen people like Samuel Zivs, the deputy chairman of the Soviet anti-Zionist Committee...

...Because "it is impossible to live in a society and to be free of it...

...In a system whose leadership can induce thaws or chills by turning the political thermostat up or down, what is to guarantee that what is acceptable today will not be forbidden again tomorrow, or that today's enlightened Kremlin leader will not soon be denounced as a hare-brained adventurer by his successor...

...Glasnost is now essential for restructuring the economy and stopping the rot...

...I've been searching in the pages of newspapers and books for those who demanded freedom and said that without it they cannot write...

...The most "constructive" proposal wasmade by Yevgeny Primakov, the high-powered director of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations who proposed that Washington declare a moratorium on arming the Afghan resistance...

...In other words, in accordance with the standard Soviet view, all those who write for the press are still first and foremost warriors in the battle of ideas and ideologies...

...Some 240 Party and government officials, cultural and religious leaders, academics, journalists, and entertainers arrived for a week of lectures, roundtable discussions, seminars, and concerts...

...For the entire week, all the Soviet representatives, some of the more notable of whom are not usually available to Western journalists, mingled freely with reporters and the public...

...it too much their own way were soon dispelled...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1987 23...

...Most of the visitors stayed with American families...

...And during the historians' discussion of U.S.-Soviet relations, Prof...

...All Tatars are evil...

...Dobrokhotov says that the most courageous editors daily probe the uncertain limits of the new tolerance...

...To Pozner's acute embarrassment, a journalist got up, announced that he was from the Plain Dealer, and offered a different account: It turnedout that Pozner's reporter had not only retained his job but also published several critical pieces about the power plant in his paper...

...Now that the Brezhnev era has been branded a time of stagnation and oppressiveness, the new refrain from Moscow is that not only is "democratization" needed but so is "humanization...

...By encouraging creative thinking, debate, and initiative, glasnost is meant to instill greater confidence in the Party leadership and its policies...

...Last year's follow-up in Jurmala, in Latvia, turned into something of asensation...

...Among other things, to the acute discomfort of their official hosts and the delight of the Latvian public, they reaffirmed that the United States continues not to recognize the Soviet occupation of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia...

...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1987 down the importance of freedom of expression, as in this cynical remark: A few years ago when we asked some of our Soviet journalists and writers why their articles and books were so bad, they replied that this was because there was no freedom of self-expression...

...the senior delegates were housed in the grand Athenaeum hotel, which remained open to everyone day or night...

...We are strengthening not weakening our socialist system, and our Party has no intention of giving up its monopoly of power and permitting genuine pluralism...

...Genuine differences of opinion on such fundamental issues as Stalin are being voiced in the press, and society seems to be becoming polarized between those who are shocked by what has already happened under Gorbachev and those who are impatient for more radical change...

...The Americans, led by John Matlock, then a special assistant to President Reagan and now the U.S...

...Only yesterday under Brezhnev Zivs was denying that there were any human rights abuses whatsoever in the USSR and extolling the virtues of Soviet democracy...

...As I made my way to the Athenaeum hotel, where the daily press briefings took place, I was mistaken several times for a Soviet visitor...

...What he did not dwell on was who decides what is constructive...

...Over and over they delivered the same message: We want to be friends with you...

...Each one of us has his values which we defend and struggle for...

...Viktor Malkov of Moscow University showed precious little glasnost...

...Things are different now," Zaslavskaya maintains, "although perhaps not enough has changed yet...

...In fact, she and her co-author have identified no less than seventy-five distinct social groups...

...True, Primakov did acknowledge that Moscow had made "mistakes" in its policies toward the East European states, but that was as far as it went...

...At Chautauqua, the Soviet participants confirmed that glasnost is strictly a means to an end, not an end in itself...

...A reporter on the Cleveland Plain Dealer, he recounted, had been fired for daring to criticize conditions at a nearby nuclear power station whose bosses were on good terms with the paper's owners...

...no more...

...She is radical only by Soviet standards...

...In this light, Bovin's subsequent description of glasnost begins to make sense: "At this time," he told the audience, "freedom of the press means for us in practical terms ensuring the maximal effectiveness of the press, so that it serves as a lever for effecting the changes that we are carrying out and helps us to restructure our society...

...rr he possibility to speak out without .1 fear—this, in a nutshell, is what Moscow would like the West to believe is the essence of glasnost...

...But the other half took her side...

...Thus, at Chautauqua, the minister of justice of the Russian Federation, Alexander Sukharev, spoke of the need to "humanize' the Criminal Code...

...Give us credit for what we are attempting to do, that is, acknowledge our efforts to carry out a restructuring or perestroika ("all Americans should know this Soviet word just as they already know the word glasnost") of our social and economic life...

...Second, these younger officials regard Lenin as the main source of their inspiration, and invoke him to justify "democratization" and "humanization...

...Furthermore, she argues, society is moresophisticated these days...

...Would you act any differently if your nation had been treated like the Crimean Tatars...

...Many of the representatives were in their late twenties or early thirties—ambitious and energetic young men and women whose careers have taken off...

...And with the first questions put from the floor it became clear that this was going to be an exciting week with no-holds-barred exchanges among the makers of the new Soviet policy of greater openness, U.S...

...True, Soviet television did briefly show Peter Reddaway, the director of the Kennan Institute, saying that meetings such as Chautauqua should not be used to "sentimentalize" U.S.-Soviet relations...

...rr he most elevating experience of 1 the week—apart from Senator Bill Bradley's generally excellent speech—was the opportunity to talk at length with the remarkable Tatyana Zaslavskaya, the 60-year-old sociologist from Novosibirsk who was coming out with bold criticism and constructive proposals long before Gorbachev came to power...

...When discussing the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, he simply reiterated the orthodox Soviet explanation: the USSR was forced to come to terms with Nazi Germany because the Western European states had appeased Hitler and were anti-Soviet...

...in return Moscow would withdraw "more" of its troops...

...Which may explain why she feels that Gorbachev has more of a chance to succeed where Khrushchev failed...

...people were afraid to show initiative or independence of thought...

...Glasnost and the perestroika have "opened the doors" for the "active, energetic people who want to act...

...Gorbachev's favorite sociologist is also highly critical of the cumbersome and inefficient collective farm system but argues, not entirely convincingly, that after so many decades of state-run agriculture the "psychological prerequisites" do not exist to make a return to individual farming feasible...

...Everybody has the possibility to speak...

...Although the atmosphere was soured by the arrest in Moscow of the American journalist Nicholas Daniloff, both sides were represented by high-ranking officials...

...Their supreme confidence in the Soviet future was matched only by their indifference toward some of the blank spots in their country's troubled history, and by their contempt for the far more numerous young Soviets who remain skeptical, politically apathetic, or alienated from official life...

...When a young Latvian emigre asked a very good question of a Soviet panelist, the Soviet moderator attempted to deflect it by turning it over to lawyers from the Baltic republics who just happened to be in the audience...

...Perhaps the most telling instance of how some of the Soviet visitors were eager to exploit Western conventions about free and fair discussion occurred during a panel on human rights...

...There could be few better places, I thought to myself, for Moscow's representatives to promote Gorbachev, glasnost, and the perestroika than this charming enclave with its well-to-do and leftish population...

...T his year's conference was the third 1 of its sort...

...Instead, Zaslayskaya says, collective farms should be reorganized into comparatively small and flexible units in which the farmers would have a real material interest in their work, while the state retains ownership of the land...

...Another striking difference was the absence of the obvious KGB types who used to chaperone or guard Soviet delegates and interrupt conversations just as they were getting interesting...

...The youth were especially affected and political apathy among them was especially worrying...

...Afghanistan, human rights, 'See "Latvia's Chautauqua Circuit," by Ojars Kalnins, in the April 1987 TAS...

...A young girl wanted to hand me flowers...

...The first, a modest affair, took place in Chautauqua in 1985...

...For an entire week, glasnost, at least the sort reserved for export purposes, was to be closely scrutinized...

...The "Russians" were here in force, but by invitation for an important conference on U.S.-Soviet relations—emissaries from the court of Gorbachev the Reformer in one of the bastions of Americana...

...It is "very perceptible," Zaslayskaya confirms, "especially among the governing apparatus, both in the Party and state branches...

...There were also moments when even the most sophisticated Soviet spokesmen were caught out, or simply lost their cool and revealed a less benign side of themselves...

...They divide these into four general categories, the first of which, significantly, is the Party and state administrative apparatus...

...Now, much has changed in the Soviet Union and the policy of glasnost is being pursued...

...The work ethic had dissipated...

...Setting an impressive example of just what needs to be done, she is openly challenging the traditionally prescribed view of the Soviet Union'sclass structure...

...The answers may not have been satisfactory and the thinking behind them scarcely new, but at least no topics were considered out of bounds...

...As could be expected of such a carefully selected and privileged group, these younger representatives—tomorrow's Soviet diplomats, spokesmen, and newspaper editors—came across as champions of Gorbachev's "new course...

...And what of the resistance to Gorbachev's new course that one hears so much about...

...it thus stems, Dobrokhotov stressed, not so much from any desire to improve the Soviet Union's image abroad, as from very real domestic exigencies...

...yet the lively panel on legal and human rights issues at which Reddaway shone has not been aired on Soviet television or reported in the Soviet press—another useful reminder that Moscow continues to make a clear distinction between the external and internal uses of glasnost...

...Soviet spokesmen gulled the participants at Chautauqua with daily assurances that the proceedings were being transmitted by satellite for use by Soviet television, and were being covered "in full" by the Soviet press...

...At the opening session, the pride that filled the huge amphitheater as the several-thousand-strong crowd burst into "The Star-Spangled Banner" was a reminder, as some of the Soviet guests later confided, that in this country one can criticize the government's policy toward, say, Nicaragua and still be very much a patriot...

...Glasnost, too, could take on a life of its own only to end in further repression...

...They seem, however, to overlook two basic considerations...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1987 21 the fate of the Baltic states, the aspirations of the East European nations, and other thorny issues came up time and again...

...Once the session was over, this one-time Soviet political prisoner was surrounded by a dozen or more of the visiting Soviets...

...While there was definitely a different Soviet style at Chautauqua, there was no noticeable change in content...

...For instance, I am against war and for peace, against capitalism and for socialism, against evil and for good, against falsehood and for truth...

...What was disconcerting, however, was to see among these spokesmen people like Samuel Zivs, who, among other things, is the deputy chairman of the Soviet anti-Zionist Committee...

...After all there was glasnost of sorts and "democratization," not to mention a cultural thaw, under Nikita Khrushchev...

...Later, at a long breakfast with several journalists, Dobrokhotov elaborated on the nature and purpose of glasnost...

...For one, the quality of the leadership has improved...

...Today she is one of the main theoreticians of the perestroika, the best evidence yet that there are people close to Gorbachev who are serious about far-reaching reform...

...ut the crucial question, of course, .13 is whether glasnost is something that can be turned on or off by whoever is in control in the Kremlin...

...In fact, the Soviet leaders and Soviet press repeatedly point out that glasnost is not the same as freedom of expression...