REVIEWS

...Sixty years after the revolution, the Soviet empire is more dependent on its supervisory and coercive apparatus—and more constrained by it—than it ever was in the days of the Czars...

...Even in the Third World, freedom is not a luxury: it is a birthright, the presupposition and the goal of all human striving...

...Few developing populations include enough industrial workers and competent administrators to utilize the European model of a trade-union welfare state...

...Yet, even apart from the corrupting effect of such absolute power, the model is deeply problematic...

...Just how enlightening can even an enlightened despot be...

...He might make the trains run on time but, in Europe or North America, it would no longer matter whether they did...

...This discrepancy between the needs of the Third World and its emotional preferences poses the chief problem for Soviet (and Chinese) foreign policy in 109 the developing countries...

...The label salved ideological consciences but changed no facts: the new regimes were nationalistic, wanted to modernize, and needed Western aid...

...As Lowenthal shows, colonial revolutionaries may respond to Soviet anti-Western rhetoric, but it is Western credits and expertise they need...

...The postwar decolonization immensely complicated that scheme by bringing to power "national liberation" movements that still retained their nationalistic ideologies and their ties to the West...

...Certainly, this does not mean that many Third World countries have the prerequisites or the desire for duplicating the trappings of European parliamentary democracy...

...That discrepancy between emotional impulse and real need is crucial...

...Today, most Americans would include all of Europe, including gradually even Russia, in the privileged area in which freedom should be the justification for technology...

...In colonial days, the revolutionary anti-Westernism seemed bond enough...

...is an incredibly rich book, essential for anyone who wishes to speak of the problems of the Third World and be taken seriously...

...The Third World Communists, loyally adopting the "anti-neocolonialist" posture, found themselves increasingly isolated in their own countries...

...Here, we are sure, personal freedom and human rights are what makes even precise technology worthwhile...

...The great value of Lowenthal's study is that he does...

...But perhaps the most important point is one that the evidence Lowenthal presents makes of itself: that freedom, not repression, is the most effective way of breaking the stranglehold of traditionalism and accelerating modernization...

...The West errs tragically when it sets aside its fundamental commitment to human freedom and rights in the Third World in favor of the assumption that "brown brother" needs Big Brother...

...Socialism here is relevant in its cooperative form, aimed explicitly at encouraging direct worker and peasant ownership of tools and land and direct initiative in generating efficient small-scale agricultural and basic manufacturing infrastructure...

...It has not significantly increased the autonomy of its citizens...

...But the Soviet model of state monopoly, capable at best of building steel mills, is even less adaptable to such conditions...

...In Africa and Asia, however, many entirely sincere Western liberals are still prepared to accept despotism as an unpleasant but necessary tool of modernization...

...The facts are there for the asking...

...As a way out, the Soviets invented the face-saving concept of "reparations": a Third World regime might accept Western aid as reparations for past exploitation without incurring the odium of "neocolonialism...

...The Soviets responded first by labeling such regimes "neocolonialist" to justify continued support for the Communist hard core within (and against) them...

...The myth of the enlightening despot is, after all, at least as old as Voltaire who, while staunchly liberal at home, professed to admire such distant despots as Catherine the Great of Russia or the Emperor of China...

...Increasingly, the Russians discovered that not ideology but the Soviet Army is the most reliable tool for building an empire...

...Lowenthal's reading has the advantage of bringing into relief the dogmatically "revolutionary" motif in ideological foreign policy...

...In assuming a monopoly of initiative, a ruler runs a risk of finding himself presiding over an inert society, obedient to his wishes but stripped of any life of its own...

...Rather, it is a classic modernizing despotism, the one-party state that Lenin developed after the civil war as a tool for what was to be a total transformation of the traditional Russian society...

...That is the underlying question of Richard Lowenthal's study of Communist policy toward the Third World—and a most welcome study it is...

...Whether Chinese Communists represent an alternative approach, as Lowenthal claims, or simply an earlier stage of the same weary road, as I would claim, seems a moot point...

...This had traditionally been the self-justification of colonial regimes: "white men" [sic] need freedom, "the natives" need discipline...

...It is anything but impressive...

...Whether it is more "modern" is far less certain...

...Lowenthal's Model or Ally...

...But this is not the point...

...It was a model of the one-party state with its monopoly of initiative, not the cumbersome Victorian freight of Marxist metaphysics, that appealed in the Soviet model to such revolutionary leaders as Chiang Kai-shek or Kemal Attaturk and their latter-day counterparts...

...It is not clear whether the shift salved any ideological consciences, but, by acknowledging openly the Soviet equation between socialism and despotism, it did help discredit the Soviets in the field of their putative advantage...

...The point is that, of the two alternatives to the stranglehold of traditionalism, freedom is a far more effective long-range tool than a repression that may produce spectacular immediate results but undercuts the dynamism of further growth...

...IDEOLOGICAL ACROBATICS simply could not eliminate the basic contradiction in the scenario of model-and-ally...

...Today his heirs, in a curious inversion of Marxist dogma, profess to regard Communist despotism as a necessary stage on the way to modernization—and tend to attribute to the Communists a special advantage in dealing with the Third World because, unhampered by humanitarian scruples, they are able to provide "brown brother" with the Big Brother's paternal hand...

...That, at least, tends to be our conventional wisdom, but do the facts support it...

...In recent years, they have concentrated on a military consolidation and a mercantilistic subordination of the countries within the Army's reach while, beyond it, they sought to build a largely ideologically neutral system of shifting alliances by the traditional tools of imperial diplomacy—foreign aid backed up by gunboats and, in the case of Angola, by marine landing parties...

...THAT MODEL understandably appeals to impatient men convinced that only the knavery and folly of their fellow humans blocks the realization of their right and good will...

...Hitler is a classic example: having used the combination of monopolized initiative and a messianic ideology to mobilize his nation for war, he went down in defeat because that ideology demanded, inter alia, the destruction of Jewish scientists and the alienation of potentially friendly populations in the Ukraine and in Russia...

...To the generic characteristic of revolutionary power— that it is unrestricted by any legal constraints— Lenin added a freedom from restriction by any plurality of autonomous centers of economic, political, or intellectual initiative, ruthlessly eliminating not only his opponents, but even his erstwhile allies and any potentially autonomous followers...

...The mark of modernity is the spontaneous dynamism of a society that makes possible an extensive replacement of the coercive and supervisory apparatus by popular initiative and so by greater freedom...

...As an ally, the Soviet Union had to tread most warily in seeking to export its peculiar institutions...

...After some hesitation, the Soviets settled on a policy of supporting "national liberation" movements in the expectation that the Soviet Union would serve first as an ally, then as a model—that is, that the relatively few Communists in such movements would first infiltrate and then take over their leadership...

...Lowenthal brings insight and erudition to an area in which most of us have little to guide us beyond a most ambiguous conventional wisdom...

...Once again, ideological consciences were salved while reality remained unchanged...

...The result is a revolutionism that has far more in common with nihilism than with Marxism—and nothing at all with the needs of modernization...

...While the local variables that Lowenthal documents are staggering, a common pattern does emerge...

...We are far less certain that this is also true of those who fail to match our technological accomplishments...

...To counter that risk, the ruler can try to fire the initiative of his subjects with a messianic ideology but, as he succeeds, he is likely to become a captive of that ideology...

...But nowhere did the results bear out the expectations...

...The Chinese, lacking virtually everything else, remained far more keenly aware of the need to channel rather than displace popular initiative, and they have treated revolutionary dedication as the driving force of history—an intriguing twist in what still purports to be a dialectical materialism...

...Lowenthal's great contribution, however, is his scrupulous documentation of its record in practice...

...Its basic principle is the total monopolization of all economic, political, and intellectual 108 initiative in the hands of a centralized apparat...

...Work before play: first let them modernize, then worry about freedom...

...Although a Soviet-style command economy may appeal to the temperament of many Third World leaders, the objective needs of their lands are far more compatible with the Western conception of a pluralistic society...

...Without a messianic ideology, the monopolization of initiative is stultifying...

...but we seldom ask for them...

...Not so long ago, Lenin and Mussolini, while not benign, did seem to many Westerners peculiarly "appropriate" for their respective countries...

...Where such initiative is missing the state may have to foster it, but to displace it with state initiative is a prescription for disaster...

...The instrument he designed, which Stalin perfected and Brezhnev inherited, is the enlightened despot's dream: a state totally subservient in all its aspects to a single will...

...As selfjustifying, it becomes irrational—and, in fact, the Chinese have at times encouraged their clients to sacrifice the goal of modernization to keeping the revolutionary means pure and unsullied...

...From the "pillar of hope for the comradeship of nations" (druzhby narodov nadiozhdnyi oplot) of its anthem, the Soviet Union has become as anomalous as its ideology: a classical 19th-century aspiring imperial power set down in the latter half of the 20th century...

...The one-party model may suit the predilections of ambitious leaders, but it does not suit the objective needs of development...

...But the idea of a revolution is rational only as a means for breaking down an obstacle to development or for imposing a particular model of development...

...Certainly, Russia is far more industrialized today than at the time of the First World War—but what country isn't...

...Could it be that, in our heart of hcarts, we still believe that while white humans need freedom and dignity, their "brown brother" really needs a Big Brother...

...with such an ideology, the real needs of development become subordinated to ideological demands...

...Contrary to Western assumptions about "brown brother" and Big Brother, the objective needs of development are far more compatible with a Western conception of an open society than with the Communist model of a monopoly of initiative in the hands of an enlightening despot...

...The model that Lowenthal examines is not unfamiliar...

...For ourselves, we are utterly convinced that a despot can be neither enlightened nor enlightening...

...As Lowenthal points out, it is, strictly, neither "soviet" nor "socialist...

...But where it came to serve as a model for a native one-party state, its special connection to an autonomous faction within the state, the local Communist party, made it suspect...

...After a series of expensive failures, the Soviet Union made a last attempt to exploit its ideological advantage by treating as "objectively socialist" all regimes seeking to establish a monopoly of political, intellectual, and economic initiative, even if such regimes were jailing their native Communists and embracing conservative nationalist or religious ideologies...

...The monopolization of initiative has certainly increased the might of Russia's rulers...

...Even Western socialism is a case in point...

...WHAT OF the "Soviet socialist" model...