Conference Hopping in the Evil Empire

...You will have time to kill...

...This means that they want you to think that the East-West struggle has ended, which, in their view, means that the West should open the spigots and let capital and technology flow into the East...

...Yet all efforts to pry loose a specific vision of a reformed Soviet economy after perestroika or a plan about how to get from here to there will go unrewarded...

...In Soviet-run conferences, you don't so much do things—which implies the execution of some kind of intention—as have things happen to you...

...Reports that only a third of Soviet housing had hot running water and that another third had no running water at all suddenly became eminently plausible...

...The coffee table was only one or two rungs up the evolutionary ladder from a sawhorse...

...The only institution that prevents this from happening is the Communist party...

...But there was soap...

...Suddenly, evasions will multiply before your eyes...

...It was also equipped with an exhaust system that was somehow hooked into the car's ventilation and heating system, apparently, as I repeatedly found, a popular option among Soviet automotive consumers...

...F ortunately, on many international and ideological issues the Cold War has not ended...

...After all, I had heard all the Yakov Smirnov jokes...

...The lunacy of basing economic and political institutions of the late twentieth century on those of Soviet Russia in the twenties escapes them...

...A top adviser to Gorbachev summarized their bottom line by saying, "The issue of reunification should not move faster than that of the unification of Europe—that is, the dismantling of the blocs...

...The rapid changes in communications and computer technology, the theory runs, are the driving force behind social change around the world and will lead to a convergence of socialist and capitalist systems...

...Conference schedules and agendas have no meaning in the Soviet Union...

...Your Soviet counterparts will routinely resort to comparisons to Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP) in order to legitimate Gorbachev's reforms...

...and designed in a kind of out-of-date modernism, does not have much over Islamabad's...

...Thus, at least we could say that we fared better than Soviet coal miners...

...Yet theirs is an odd kind of pluralism...

...Kremlin leaders find themselves presiding over what Lenin himself would recognize as a classic revolutionary situation...

...They will emotionally rise to the defense of this man, who in his brief stay in power invented the Gulag and the secret police apparatus, crushed all dissent evenwithin the party, meted out sentences based on the theory of class culpability, and once cabled Stalin, "Threaten to shoot the idiot who is in charge of telecommunications and who does not know how to give you a better receiver and how to make a working telephone connection...

...All of this, the Leninists will claim, was dictated by necessity...

...There are a few things to see, but there is absolutely nothing to buy...

...He needs to have the power to make changes...

...As a high-level official explained, "Gorbachev has pointed out that there was a Leninist system after the period of War Communism...

...No mention was made of Najibullah's insistence on retaining all real power in any new government or his record as head of the state security apparatus, where he personally directed policies that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians...

...Shop hours are sporadic and unpredictable, and even the foreign currency stores have no indigenous goods you'd want to buy...

...Moscow's international airport, dirty Marin Strmecki is a fellow in international studies in the office of Zbigniew Brzezinski at the Center for Strategic and International Studies...

...Some Soviets understand individual pieces of the puzzle, such as the need to make the ruble convertible internationally, to vent pent-up inflationary pressures, to permit private property under another name, or to pull the economic planning ministries up by the roots...

...Consider yourself successful if you collect a few sociological observations while coursing the streets...

...Another chimed in, "The Gulag was necessary given the situation and political conditions at the time of the revolution...

...Roads were unpaved...

...Much has changed politically...

...Gorbachev has given the boot to scores of Brezhnev cronies at the upper levels of the apparatus, but ideological chameleons inhabit the depths of the system...

...There can be a blowup leading to chaos...

...Soon enough it dawned on me that as academic exchanges proliferate in the present armistice in the world ideological struggle, conferees from the triumphant side in the Cold War will need to know what to expect as they step across the ramparts...

...Lenin exercises a kind of posthumous veto over legislation that trespasses the lines of ideological probity...

...Unusual among Soviet buildings, the shopping mall near Red Square-GUM—appeared to have been painted within recorded history...

...It was clearly visible from 10,000 feet and became ever more apparent as the altimeter wound down...

...Yet few understand the centrality of free prices to the efficient allocation of goods...

...More important, you will see something on your visit you have always wanted to see—an enfeebled and crumbling Soviet Union...

...You will have to remind your Soviet counterparts which side of the Iron Curtain invented the scientific-technological revolution and which side has yet to produce a decent 64K personal computer...

...It was impossible to have shirts laundered, and dry cleaning had to be sent to Helsinki...

...Moreover, if you scratch some Soviet reformers, you will uncover unreconstructed Leninists...

...One of his top advisers stated that "Gorbachev alone can secure the transition to a new system...

...As the workers of Eastern Europe were throwing off their chains last fall, I was touching down in Moscow as part of a U.S...

...You come away with the impression that if Gorbachev knows what he's doing he hasn't let anyone else in on the secret...

...NEP, peaceful coexistence, and the national constitution of the state were some of the components of that system...

...But the merchandise ranked in quality several grades below K-Mart's...

...The line may change, but the game remains the same...

...We soon arrived at the conference center, a dacha that doubled as a Young Pioneers camp and a facility to house children of visiting Council of Economic Mutual Assistance delegations...

...But among officials and academics, particularly those who held prominent positions in the now-reviled era of stagnation, some old patterns of thought persist...

...Though his rhetoric has begun to conjure up a revolution from below, Gorbachev so far has insisted on leading a revolution from above...

...The clothes seemed to be made from material only slightly more durable and stylish than Hefty trash bags...

...At customs, we were the only souls to pass through the line for those who had nothing to declare...

...You will hear a lot of what you want to hear—paeans to democracy, denunciations of Stalin, recantations of the Brezhnev doctrine, and so forth...

...The other lines were chock full with Soviet citizens who had successfully foraged for their consumer needs abroad...

...The aptness of the term "Communist world" was striking...

...Yet even such tutoring left me unprepared for Soviet reality...

...One Soviet academic insisted to me that Afghan President Najibullah was "a great nationalist and humanitarian who sought national reconciliation with all opposition groups, even the extremists...

...They become less categorical, and in fact begin to squirm, when you raise the possibility that a freely elected East German government will choose to ask the 380,000 Soviet troops deployed on its territory to make their way to the exits and then to unify with West Germany...

...A great deal of freedom to express opinions exists, and Andrei Sakharov was not alone in advocating genuine democracy for the Soviet Union...

...Meeting schedules will be spontaneously rearranged, unplanned events will suddenly crop up and then be canceled without explanation, and whole segments of the conference might dematerialize before your eyes...

...He saw no contradiction in his notion of pluralism without the prospect of sharing or transferring power...

...You will be told, as we were, that perestroika will move the Soviet Union "in the direction of" a less dogmatic approach to life, a mixed economy guided by market forces, a law-based state, and a more democratic and decentralized political order...

...In the interests of promoting international understanding, I've sketched a few fundamentals to keep in mind in planning your trip: Prepare for Third World conditions...

...One Soviet academic argued that "the Gulag existed for the re-education of the, reactionary classes" and that "the contradictions within Soviet society required drastic measures to bring the situation under control and to create stability...

...Remind them of the unresolved regional conflicts in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Laos, Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, where Kremlin leaders are spending themselves blind supporting illegitimate regimes imposed by force, or exporting the same revolutionary doctrines that worked so well in the Soviet Union...

...True Soviet reformers, some of whom you will encounter, will sheepishly grant your points...

...The shoes looked as if they could cripple a man in three hours...

...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1990...

...As one Soviet official neatly put it, "The failure has not been of the ideas of Socialism and Communism but simply of one model derived from those ideas...

...The systemic differences, and their socioeconomic consequences, have produced a genuine parting ofthe ways in terms of the human condition...

...The same people who used to tout the superiority of socialism are now pushing the line that glasnost and perestroika represent a fundamental and irreversible transformation of the Soviet Union...

...Tourism works as a last resort...

...As one of my American colleagues pointed out, if the Soviets ever I had heard all the Yakov Smirnov jokes...

...It looked like a cross between a rundown elementary school in Harlem, built during the War on Poverty and hardly maintained since, and an ancient minimum security prison somewhere in the South...

...Prepare for some good-natured ideological hectoring...

...All those Germans: Though masters of chess, the Soviets have already lost the positional warfare on the German question...

...side, your remarks will certainly prompt a lively response from the Soviet side...

...Muddling through reform: Ask your Soviet counterparts about the concrete goals of perestroika...

...The longest lines, however, were at the jewelry stores as Soviet 11117)1.1 ..91.1111111 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1990 citizens sought to dump their worthless rubles on anything that promised to retain real value...

...Others intoned that the process of strengthening inter-German cooperation cannot proceed "out of control" and hastened to add that other nations, including Britain, France, and Poland, shared the Soviet view...

...It was not utopian...

...It is worn out physically, declining economically, and fermenting politically...

...In our meetings, one Soviet official argued that the non-Russian nationalist popular fronts, the independent social and political groups like Pamyat, and the bloc of pro-democracy opposition deputies in the Supreme Soviet represented de facto pluralism...

...Houses were shacks assembled from stray pieces of wood, topped with corrugated tin sheeting and angular wood-stove chimneys that produced a pall of grey smoke over the whole village...

...Whistling past the graveyard, another argued that the East Germans will choose not to forego the security cooperation, economic advantage, cultural ties, and people-to-people contacts that bind the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies...

...The bed was really a cot...

...Moreover, about two-thirds of the members of the Congress of People's Deputies eased into their seats without facing competitive elections...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1990 17 succeed in creating a dynamic economy, it will be a case not of convergence but conversion...

...When you meet and greet Soviet officialdom, Gorbachev no longer appears to be the master strategist and tactician depicted in Time's Man of the Decade issue but rather an improviser who is confronted with a mounting crisis and a gridlocked political system and who resorts to radical rhetoric but chooses incremental change...

...Despite its proven link to prosperity, private property remains out of bounds because, as one Soviet academic put it, "Marx and Lenin would not approve...

...The East-West gap has become so profound that to speak of the "industrialized world," which implies commonality among advanced Communist and non-Communist systems, obscures more than it reveals...

...Yet even such tutoring left me unprepared for Soviet reality...

...Prepare fall-back itineraries...

...Our rooms were furnished with what appeared to be the worst of the world's garage sale reject items...

...He later added, "We are in a deep crisis...

...It involved a newframework for socialist ideas...

...Article 6 of the Soviet constitution still guarantees the "leading role" of the Communist party, and only massive popular pressure has prompted Gorbachev to entertain debate on the issue...

...But most officials and academics, muscling square pegs into round holes, will argue that pluralism already exists within the Leninist political framework...

...Even the villages on the outskirts of Moscow were decrepit, worse than anything in the hills of West Virginia...

...Leninist pluralism: Most Soviets do not like to be reminded of the difference between "democratization," Gorbachev's slogan for political reform, and democracy...

...It really is another world...

...The appliances reminded me of items buried in the deeper recesses of the Smithsonian's museum of technology...

...Like the Berlin Wall, the dacha's perimeter wall served primarily to keep guests in rather than to keep intruders out...

...In 1990, when the political forces that overturned Communism in Eastern Europe will almost- certainly take their shot at the imperial center, I cannot help but think that it could not happen to a more deserving bunch of guys...

...The bathroom fixtures appeared to date from the Neolithic Age...

...Vodka cannot be bought before two in the afternoon, and bars close at ten at night...

...But you need to know what continues to get on Moscow's nerves so that once there you will not feel hesitant to talk back to your gracious hosts: Third world sparring: Soviet officials and scholars will often incant, in their awkward parlance, that as a result of global interdependence and Mikhail Gorbachev's new thinking international relations are losing their confrontational character...

...To ask about our plans for some future point was to hear the current version of an ever-changing reality...

...One Soviet official told us that the Soviet Union does not oppose the reunification of Germany in principle, provided that it takes place under the right circumstances...

...A s our jet dipped below the clouds of the overcast Russian skies, it was not long before a socioeconomic fact—the poverty of the countryside—cried out for recognition...

...Unrequited convergence theory:: The current rage among Soviet intellectualoids is the scientific-technological revolution...

...Three-quarters of a century of indoctrination has left its indelible mark...

...Apart from the privately owned cooperatives, restaurants have no food to serve...

...Thus, Moscow holds that German unification cannot be permitted until the two blocs are in effect transformed into rival debating societies—i.e., no time soon...

...And virtually no one puts the various pieces together into a coherent reform strategy, much less one that adequately copes with the severe economic dislocations and inflation inherent in the transition to a market-based economy...

...delegation of scholars and government officials to attend a weeklong conference on the future of Europe sponsored by the Soviet Diplomatic Academy and the Academy of Sciences...

...The dead hand of Lenin: The corpse in Red Square remains one of the most powerful political figures in the Soviet Union...

...Gorbachev has conceded, and his advisers and scholars will endlessly reiterate, that the Soviet Union will not interfere in the internal affairs of East European countries...

...There is still some fun to be had in baiting the Russian bear...

...As we drove into town, we were told that our car, which resembled a late 1960s Toyota Corolla, was a "ministerial level" vehicle...

...Socialism as such has not failed, in their view, but rather circumstances require the reform of the Stalinist model of socialism...

...But different rules apply in the Soviet Union...

...Setting foot for the first time in the Evil Empire, I thought I generally knew what to expect...

...V our discussions will not all be ideological jousting...

...While a grave faux pas in the eyes of any State Department type on the U.S...

...Its vinyl seats and filth-coated rubber floor mats reminded me of the ancient wounded cabs limping through the streets of Washington, D.C...

...In the next breath, Soviet officials and academics will justify Gorbachev's exclusive grip on real power on the grounds of necessity...

...The tattered linens and towels had the texture of sandpaper...

...In the bad old days, those who disagreed were condemned as revisionists...

...You can smoke them out by challenging the myth of Lenin as great humanitarian...

...Today, they are labeled obstructionists or even neoStalinists...