How new is Gorbachev's 'new thinking'?
Hahn, Jeffrey W
THE FUTURE OF SOVIET SOCIALISM How new is Gorbachev's 'new thinking'? JEFFREY W. HAHN remember the first time I saw Mikhail Gorbachev on television. It was in Moscow in December, 1984. The man...
...On the contrary, he acknowledges that "analysis began a long time before the April 1985 Plenary meeting" at which the general policy line of perestroika was initially articulated...
...He is a professor of political science at Villanova University, and the author of Soviet Grassroots (Princeton University Press...
...sus, given the rather differing perspectives of the three authors...
...It was not hard to predict...
...Since then, of course, Gorbachev has become something of a media star, a celebrity whose face appears regularly on serious magazine covers, and whose ability to command air time has been a source of some concern to White House communications staff seeking "spin control...
...His answer essentially is too much centralized planning and he concludes with refreshing clarity:' 'We can no longer run our affairs like that...
...and Marshall Goldman, a well-known specialist and policy advisor on the Soviet Union, teaches economics at Wel-lesley College...
...Yet it strikes this reviewer that Gorbachev is a new thinker in at least one important sense: he sees the world and his own country's place in it inter-dependently...
...Within the context of what the Western public had come to expect of Soviet elites, Gorbachev seemed startlingly new and different...
...At one point he asks rhetorically about the "main shortcoming" of the old economic system...
...Gorbachev himself emerges almost as an inevitable product of social change rather than a cause...
...reconstruction or rebuilding would be more accurate), while perhaps revolutionary, are not so new as they appear and need to be understood in the context of what preceded them...
...Yet one comes away from reading these books with a similar impression: perestroika is like an earthquake...
...If these ideas seem new to Western observers, it is only because of a lack of familiarity with this literature or a failure to take it seriously...
...To give one example, the Law on State Enterprise which was adopted following the June 1987 Central Committee plenum is the economic blueprint of perestroika and incorporates many of the approaches to reform urged by Professor Goldman...
...This is not especially new...
...Those who expect us to give up socialism will be disappointed...
...Moreover, the necessity and direction of change was largely determined by factors in motion long before 1985...
...Marshall Goldman...
...Aside from Gorbachev himself, Moshe Lewin is a former Soviet citizen now teaching social history at the University of Pennsylvania...
...the Liberman-Kosygin reforms of 1965) but are in fact rather conservative when compared with experiments under way in China and, to a lesser degree, in Hungary...
...He makes it quite clear that the ideas behind perestroika had been in motion for some time...
...As a result, Lewin informs us, "the interrelation of society and culture with the economy, the state, and the party remained unexplored...
...If the ideas behind perestroika are not new, his attempt to synthesize them is...
...JEFFREY W. HAHN remember the first time I saw Mikhail Gorbachev on television...
...In sharp contrast to the often infirm, always dour, unsmiling Soviet leaders who preceded him, here was a man of vigor and self-confidence, able and even eager to engage in the kind of public give-and-take one associates with experienced presidential candidates in full campaign stride...
...Such a view is about as far from Stalin's "two-camp" theories about international relations as you can get...
...Unfortunately, one also encounters throughout his book the same frequent, if less dogmatic, references to Lenin that one is used to in the speeches of Soviet leaders...
...the author jumps rather abruptly from one topic to the next...
...In Lewin's view the failure of Western analysts to anticipate what he calls the Gorbachev phenomenon is rooted in the continued attachment of Western Sovietology to the totalitarian model...
...If this is not naivete-and naivete is not normally a qualification for rising to the position of General Secretary-then it is certainly disingenuous...
...A good deal less optimistic, but perhaps no less deterministic is Goldman's analysis of the Soviet economy...
...In fact, it will take a decade or more to draw such conclusions...
...Moreover, the Soviet Union cannot simply import technology...
...without changing the system, it won't be able to absorb it...
...There is another theme that . resonates in all three of the books under review: the policies of perestroika represent the necessary adjustment of the political system to changes in Soviet society of longstanding...
...This point is made especially forcefully by Professor Lewin in his chapter on the evolution of the social sciences in the Soviet Union over the past two decades...
...The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation, Mushe Lewin, California, $16.95, 176 pp...
...Gorbachev is more a symptom of change than its cause...
...One expects more caution from a scholar of the first rank like Professor Goldman...
...It only went into effect in January 1988...
...Of these changes, none is more important than the emergence of an educated professional and intellectual elite over the past thirty years or so...
...In my own research on local government in the Soviet Union, for example, discussions in the scholarly literature about introducing competition in electoral practices can be found in the 1960s...
...There are also problems with the books by Lewin and Goldman...
...In short, it would appear that Professor Lewin is open to the same charge he makes throughout his work: unfamiliarity with the literature, only in his case it is with the Western literature...
...It was written, and perhaps published as well, in haste...
...Goldman's evaluation is that he "will have to settle for less than he aspires to...
...Authors appear pressed, perhaps by their publishers, to tell us whetherperes-troika will succeed or not...
...Yet the author persists in asking "so what are the prospects for reform?'' This tendency toward timeliness detracts from the provocative analysis offered in the rest of the book, especially regarding the introduction of new technology and the lessons of the Chinese and Hungarian reforms...
...There is little that is not already known from other sources, and indeed large sections are occasionally lifted out of speeches given earlier and patched together incongruously...
...In his view, if Gorbachev can hold on for two or three years,' 'the bells will have tolled for the old party...
...Gorbachev is its prototype...
...More, much of what seems so new about perestroika is in fact rooted in experience...
...The chief benefit of the book is that, taken as a whole, it offers an easily digestible potpourri of Gorbachev's thinking for a Western audience...
...Perhaps, but when it comes to Gorbachev's assessment of support for perestroika he waxes grandiloquent...
...it is introductory-level political science...
...Professor Lewin is, of course, quite right in pointing out this shortcoming in the totalitarian approach...
...Much of Goldman's analysis is based on information available before June 1987...
...To his credit, Gorbachev does not contradict this view...
...16.95, $7.95 paper, 296 pp...
...In fact, much of the scholarly literature on the Soviet Union jettisoned a rigid adherence to this view twenty years ago...
...As all three books point out, the ideas that form the intellectual foundations of perestroika have been around for quite a while...
...Indeed in at least two passages he specifically, if ironically, evokes Marxian dialectics to explain how changes in the mode of production-the "third industrial revolution" of high technology-are forcing commensurate changes in the political superstructure...
...It is certainly not radical...
...254 pp...
...JEFFREY W. HAHN was a Fulbright Teaching Scholar on the Law Faculty of Moscow State University from January to June, 1987...
...Perestroika as a book has other shortcomings...
...Despite "some differences of opinion," he insists that in the politburo "we are at one insofar as the main thing is concerned- we are unanimous in our belief that perestroika is indispensable and indeed inevitable, and that we have no other option...
...Stated simply, the title of the book refers to the author's central argument that Gorbachev is a product of the social structural changes which accompanied the Soviet Union's transition from a rural society to an urban one...
...Gorbachev's challenge is to break this gridlock...
...Economic change, however, is impossible without political change and political change will be tolerated only if there are visible economic benefits...
...Because this model focuses attention on political power at the top, Western students of the Soviet Union have failed to consider what has been happening elsewhere in Soviet society and how social change affects political institutions...
...Lewin's conclusions regarding this generation are very optimistic...
...In his chapters dealing with the evolution of the Soviet economy he convincingly demonstrates how inappropriate a command system using quantitative indicators of performance is for the introduction and development of high technology...
...In fact, many of the specific policies adopted in connection with perestroika represent the official expression of ideas which were often debated publicly by members of the Soviet intelligentsia for years before Gorbachev came to power...
...W. W. Norton...
...on the other hand, he is to be faulted for presenting this critique as new...
...I remarked to a Soviet friend that this man would come across well in the West...
...As for the public at large, he finds, "there is one thing common to all the letters-unreserved and passionate support for perestroika...
...If there are doubters about Gorbachev's commitment to socialism, for example, Perestroika will set them straight: "Any hopes that we will begin to build a different, non-socialist society and go over to the other camp are unrealistic and futile...
...Without diminishing Gorbachev's importance as a force for change in the Soviet Union, one theme that emerges from all three of the books under review is that the policies of perestroika (usually translated as restructuring...
...This is a surprising consenFemtroika: lew Thinking lor for Country and World, Mikhail Gorbachev, Harper & Row, $19.95...
...because the man is unprecedented in our experience, his policies must be also...
...The man who would become the general secretary of the party a few months later was shown in animated conversation with British Prime Minister Thatcher and, presumably for proletarian balance, with a group of factory workers...
...Interestingly, Gorbachev's own analysis of the situation does not greatly differ from Goldman's, except, of course, that he is far more upbeat about its chances of success...
...Professor Goldman's book suffers from an ailment common to many of the . recent works dealing with the Soviet Union under Gorbachev: a rush to judgment...
...a petunia in a patch full of undistinguished onions...
...In the end, what is so new about Gorbachev's "new thinking...
...Domestically, this means a clear-eyed recognition that you cannot change one part of the system without effecting change in all the others and that therefore the system as a whole must be changed...
...Without the transition to a qualitative basis for economic growth, the Soviet economy will remain second-rate in all but a few high-priority military sectors...
...Chernenko and Brezhnev said much the same...
...Internationally, it is a recognition that "for all the different choices made by nations in different times, this world is nevertheless one whole...
...Because Gorbachev's style represents such a radical departure from previous Soviet leaders, there is an understandable tendency to perceive him politically as a radical...
...He goes on to speak of a "new age," in which the, "vestiges of an age-old agrarian despotism" will give way to a new and more democratic state system...
...These Soviet yuppies provide the basis for a new, reform-minded "political class...
...There is in this sense a deterministic quality found in all three works...
...What is new, and even radical, is that ideas unacceptable only five years ago are now being given official expression and wrapped in the mantle of legitimacy which only the Party leader can bestow...
...Nowhere is this point more clearly made than in Lewin's The Gorbachev Phenomenon...
...Gorbachev's Challeaae...
...it is visible and dramatic, but the plates below the surface have been moving for some time...
...The interdependent relationship between society and government has been a dominant theme in the field of comparative politics since the 1950s...
...they received expression in legislation mandating more candidates than seats in the June 1987 local elections, an experiment in selected districts to be generalized nationally in the next election cycle...
...Professor Goldman's book reminds us that most if not all of the economic reforms now under way in the Soviet Union have not only been tried before (e.g., Lenin's New Economic Policy of the 1920s...
Vol. 115 • June 1988 • No. 12
