HOW FAR CAN GORBACHEV GO?
Bialer, Seweryn & Coser, Lewis
We are at a major juncture in Soviet history. There is much potential for change. However, I stress the word potential because thus far in Gorbachev's rule, it is much too early to speak about...
...If a situation already exists, they are also quite eager to help history and push it a little faster...
...HOWEVER, I BELIEVE THAT GORBACHEV'S formula is not sufficient to deal with the crisis that the Soviets have...
...This turnover approaches the level of Stalin's in 1937-38...
...For us, it started before...
...First, as mentioned, there is the nature of the human material, the Russian versus the Chinese peasant...
...This new attitude can make discussion with the Soviets infuriating—especially to those of us who made the same discovery earlier...
...we started negotiations...
...Gorbachev has replaced virtually hundreds of ministers, directors of major institutions, and over 50 percent of the members of the Central Committee (Khrushchev replaced only 40 percent...
...This is Gorbachev's chief preoccupation...
...Angola and Afghanistan are commitments that remain from the old regime...
...His was the last attempt to revitalize the party and the ideology in the Soviet Union...
...Of course they will deal with Europe, but what do they want from Europe...
...In Moscow I was told that the man who was secretary of the Communist party of Uzbekistan (the largest central Asian republic) for twenty years committed suicide before he could be arrested for corruption...
...191 So, what is the current foreign policy...
...we have wasted ten to fifteen years...
...Until recently the symbol of technological progress was the United States...
...Retrenchment in Foreign Policy WHAT CAN BE SAID about Gorbachev's foreign policy...
...It was not the benevolence of the king but rather the united power of the barons that forced the king to grant this charter of English liberties...
...One group, which I call the ideologues, simply does not want to negotiate with the Russians...
...Finally we come to the leaders...
...I THINK THAT THE OFFENSIVE weapons proposals recently made by the Soviets are serious...
...I have my doubts about it, but there are people I respect who say that this is so—it's a question of possible first-strike potential and so on...
...If writing about it would bring support or legitimacy, of course they would do it...
...As one student of Soviet military doctrine describes it, a policy of total security is a policy of making everybody else insecure...
...an ideological crisis...
...Let's assume that the strategic balance as it exists now is really in Russia's favor...
...The parameters of the system are still direct planning, passivity of money and credit, and the role of profit as an accounting device...
...At the moment this effort is quite effective, but I don't know for how long...
...The second part of the formula is leadership: "Leadership is the key to our success...
...It is not reformist in terms of trying to introduce an institutional reform that will go beyond the parameters of the Stalinist economic model...
...What they want to change is the pattern of growth, which under Stalin involved a strategy of ever greater inputs of raw material, labor, land, capital, and subsequent expansions of Soviet industry...
...In my opinion, for a while the Soviet political leadership will have control over the military to a greater degree than it had in the past...
...his crusade against the excesses of the bureaucracy in the party and the state administration...
...When one speaks about Soviet-American relations, one must ask, "What do we want from the Russians...
...Again, this is very easy to understand...
...It's a vertical type of command...
...YET IT IS ESSENTIAL TO REMEMBER that all these concessions were granted at the discretion of the all powerful general secretary, and what he has given today he may again take away tomorrow...
...Every Soviet leader has started his rule with fighting corruption and improving discipline...
...And of course, the Soviet policy is also one of waiting for the trouble that will come to the United States one way or another without the Russians lifting even a finger...
...The general secretary wishes to bring about a relaxation of international tensions...
...This is partly because they don't have the money to pay for Western technology and do not want to get involved in a very major deficit...
...It was conservative in the sense that it didn't make reforms or change the system and corporatist in the sense that it was based on bargaining and agreements between various institutional elite groups—the army, the police, the party apparatus, the economic managers, the state apparatus administration...
...Over 35 percent are women in their forties and fifties...
...He has his people in place, some of whom, such as the new prime minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, and deputy prime minister, Nikolai Talyzin, are experienced, intelligent and responsible managers...
...From what I know I would conclude that the best way is the first, the way of meeting our real strategic concerns through negotiating with the Russians and seeing if we can make a deal...
...Everything that will happen will be your responsibility, not ours...
...I could go on...
...Congress, would be less willing to spend the money necessary for military expenditures...
...Beyond survival—which, by the way, is a good beginning—we should try to achieve changes in Soviet security and foreign policies...
...The first is an increase in social discipline—reducing alcoholism and absenteeism among the workers and fighting corruption...
...188 There is no doubt that the new Soviet leaders understand that they are in a major crisis...
...Why not...
...My conclusion is that we now have a situation in Soviet foreign policy where there is a breather, what the Russians call peredyshka, a pause between a phase of greater activity and one of defensive activity...
...There is no change in this respect...
...These are rational men in a nonrational situation...
...You cut the Ministry of Computer Industry by one-third, you put three or four other ministries together and reduce their personnel by one-fourth, and so on...
...He would not be interested in the variety of his product or in his competition...
...The size of the country, the role of the military-industrial complex, and, more important, the question of political security are too different...
...Search for Security MY PROPOSITION HERE iS that while the Soviet Union is in domestic crisis, the prospects of a new and larger arms race are frightening to the Soviet leaders...
...The third element is various policy changes...
...I think that Gorbachev has consolidated his power at the top level...
...In my opinion, they are making and will continue to make proposals that will bring their position closer to meeting American strategic concerns...
...The Soviet commitment to Angola and the invasion of Afghanistan can best be described by de Gaulle's explanation of his first meeting with Churchill: "I was too weak to show weakness...
...In my opinion, this is not possible...
...Under the ratchet principle each factory receives its plans for the next year on the basis of the plan it fulfilled last year...
...In this area they are coming close to a bargaining position where it might be possible to work things out in two or three years of negotiations, They are willing to be open-minded and to change...
...I cannot explain the situation with total confidence, but it seems to me that the current Soviet leadership fears an American breakout resulting from unrestricted basic and applied research on what they call "space strike" or "exotic" weapons...
...we started to communicate again...
...It has increased significantly but is not sufficient to provoke a confrontation with the United States...
...One of these was Afghanistan...
...Neither is Gorbachev's program one of major loans or credits to import technology, a course of action some people think would provide the industrial democracies with greater leverage over Soviet policies...
...But they have gotten used to the system and how to work within it, how to take advantage of it...
...The typical minister, ten to fifteen years younger than his predecessor, is sympathetic to the goals of Gorbachev and, of course, very grateful to him...
...We know it isn't...
...Gorbachev's leadership is managerial in the sense that its model is the chief executive officer on every level...
...Many people predicted that Russia, like so many empires in the past, would look to foreign adventures simply to escape the consequences of domestic crises...
...They want Europe to press the United States to change its policy...
...In the Soviet Union, Russians constitute about 50 percent of the population and non-Slavic peoples, 30 percent...
...Therefore, while Russia could survive a devolution because of the force of Russian nationalism, in these other countries nationalism works against the communist regimes...
...Whether this is possible I do not know...
...We underestimate the social questions which, even if the political conditions were different, would present an enormous obstacle to the success of the leadership...
...However, I stress the word potential because thus far in Gorbachev's rule, it is much too early to speak about major change...
...The Soviets now understand, or say that they understand—they are writing in quite high official papers—that the concept of security in the nuclear age is common security, that Russia and the United States have to be concerned with each other's security if they want to be secure themselves...
...But coercion and exhortation alone do not suffice to make for discipline...
...Perhaps it is too early to say this...
...They are two professional groups without bonds of friendship or a symbiotic relationship in which they think the same way, where the political leaders would immediately approve any security suggestions made by the military...
...My proposition is that the Soviet Union does not have sufficient resources as of now to provide an anchor for a really global policy, a global role such as played by the United States...
...We have to defend our way of life, among other things...
...I am not sure that something along these lines will happen in the near future in Soviet society, but only then could one conclude that the structural characteristics of the Russian state have changed fundamentally...
...It is sufficient, in my opinion, to prevent the overthrow of the Sandinista government...
...It's reformist in the sense that it wants to change the personnel and introduce policy and organizational modifications and stricter controls...
...He would not pay any attention to quality...
...Recently, when one official was giving me this kind of thing, I replied, "Look, for you, life started with Gorbachev...
...There are younger people on the middle, upper-middle, and upper levels of the government, the party, and the military...
...While agricultural work hours constitute over 35 percent of the total Soviet work hours per year, only 18 percent of the agricultural population are men aged fifteen to fifty-one...
...they truly want to avoid it...
...This change can only be compared to Stalin's Great Purge of 1937-38...
...Without the hard work and complete dedication of each and every one, it is not even possible to preserve what we have achieved...
...194...
...They say, "Can't you understand that this is the truth, that this is what you have to do...
...It is also not a "Europe first" policy...
...In the 1970s we were looking for strength through negotiations...
...If a manager produces 103 percent, his basis for next year will be 103 percent...
...What is clear is that it is a trend and that we do not know how long it will last...
...In the meantime, let us rejoice at the loosening of the controls over the Russian people...
...One of 192 the reasons for this is that the current generations of younger party and military leaders have no past ties...
...What we do know is that it is a crisis of effectiveness and not of survival...
...the strong indications that Dr...
...For better or worse, neither we nor they can escape from each other...
...The Russians are starting to learn how to use the media in both Europe and the United States and to ask questions that Western governments, especially our government, will find very difficult to answer...
...It is absolutely clear that we are now much more in the driver's seat in our negotiations with Russia than we ever were before...
...It is a characterization of the Soviet situation that I find even stronger than Khrushchev's descriptions of Stalin's crimes...
...The reasons for this are primarily social...
...Our thanks to the academy...
...We can influence the Soviets very little in domestic affairs but quite clearly in security policies...
...This is why I don't think that the Chinese kind of experiment is likely in Russia...
...China, also, is not a model, for a number of reasons...
...I am rather pessimistic...
...I think here of, for example, the way the Magna Carta came into being in medieval Britain...
...Another major reason that China cannot serve as a model for the Soviet Union is that China doesn't have an empire...
...Nevertheless, these cuts represent an attack on a bloated bureaucracy...
...And in many cases he avoids those mistakes but makes other mistakes that are even bigger...
...Although this time it's not bloody, many people have been arrested...
...It's about the Japanese and the Soviet worker...
...He doesn't have problems in the Politburo, the Secretariat, or in the Presidium of the Council of Ministers...
...More important, China is an ethnically homogeneous country...
...Each also believes, as every new leader believes, as every new American president believes, that his predecessor made very stupid mistakes and that he will avoid those mistakes...
...Obviously this is a prescription for an arms race...
...Gorbachev understands, as Stalin did and Brezhnev did not, the impact of the domestic program on foreign and security policy...
...This triviality is reflected in the formula that Gorbachev has adopted for change, a formula containing four elements...
...A devolution of power in Russia would give an inescapable signal to the Poles, the Hungarians, the East Germans, and everyone else that one can make 190 liberalizing reforms...
...Most of the new leaders were formerly the deputies of the now-dismissed ministers...
...If he were given a choice between working more and getting paid for it or working less and stealing what he is not being paid, I am not certain which the Soviet worker would select...
...In the Soviet Union there is an ongoing reexamination of the foreign policy of the 1970s, a policy which, in my opinion, did very much to destroy detente...
...But I think it is legitimate to ask the question: How much and what do we want to achieve beyond survival...
...The whole cycle will then go on and on...
...Instead of building new factories, the Soviets are buying or producing new machines to put into old factories...
...You meet Soviet managers...
...It is, with minor adjustments, the same model that was created by Stalin in the 1930s...
...such a danger exists...
...In a year, two years, three years, bureaucrats find a way to return to those ministries through back doors...
...The changes brought about during the first year of Gorbachev's ascension are not just cosmetic...
...Then and now Russian rulers took progressive and enlightened measures, provided these measures would not undermine their power in the Empire...
...To the extent that Gorbachev follows similar lines it behooves us to applaud, as Diderot or Voltaire applauded Catherine...
...Perhaps in the Philippines, Pakistan, Mexico, or the international financial economy, or wherever—the Soviets are waiting for it...
...Similarly, in industry there is the Soviet joke that says the government pretends to pay the workers and they pretend to work...
...A colleague of mine, Richard Pipes, a distinguished historian teaching at Harvard, has written a very interesting piece called "Survival Is Not Enough...
...You cut the bureaucracy, you make government smaller...
...I would like to make three propositions, one each about the domestic situation in the Soviet Union, foreign policy, and security policy...
...It's a policy of trying to preserve what they already have achieved, to preserve their credibility as a global power, a credibility which suffered very much in the last four or five years...
...Let me say first what it is not...
...This concept forgets the fact that if you overinsure yourself and build those twenty bombers rather than the ten that you need, your adversary will become alarmed and build twenty bombers too...
...At the same time, I think that their position on SDI research is immovable and will preclude any agreement on offensive strategic weapons in the foreseeable future...
...Brezhnev was very ineffective, and the ineffectiveness of the coercive bureaucracy saved people from it...
...Let's hope that we have the wisdom to use these options well—for the good of all of us...
...His personal telephone call to Sakharov telling him that he could return to Moscow from his long exile...
...These people are intelligent and experienced...
...There is another joke I heard from an adviser to Gorbachev...
...At a recent closed party meeting Gorbachev put it in a nutshell: "What is at stake today is the ability of the Soviet Union to enter the new millennium in a manner worthy of a great and prosperous power...
...And let us be aware that Gorbachev's reform measures will be followed up only if he feels that he is not forced to tighten the reins because of Reaganite threats and the beating of war drums by American rightist diehards...
...They know it very well...
...I cannot say that this think193 ing is totally wrong...
...I fully agree with him...
...Of course, everybody will try not to perform 103 percent but 100.1 percent so that next year's plan will not be so high...
...However, they are not interested in adventures in foreign lands far away...
...We had a summit meeting...
...The fourth element is organizational change...
...This has not proved the case...
...This article is adapted, with permission, from a paper presented in the Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences...
...Brezhnev's leadership represented conservatism and corporatism...
...You meet them one on one, and they can tell you about everything that's gone wrong...
...But those countries have illegitimate governments, governments that the people did not elect, that are maintained by power...
...television factory and placed him in the same position in Moscow, if he were really intelligent and rational, within two weeks he would behave like a Soviet manager...
...They are very impatient and self-righteous...
...On the other hand, the Soviets are now rethinking their future commitment to the Third World...
...The Russian people are committed very much to their empire in Eastern Europe: they regard it as legitimate...
...Khrushchev's leadership was populist and ideological...
...Now Japan more and more is the object of envy...
...The Soviet Union will not suddenly turn away from the world and not want to play a role as a global power...
...The disarmament offers that Gorbachev presented in the Iceland meeting with Reagan are likewise not just window dressing but were meant to be taken very seriously...
...This reevaluation is to be expected because most of the ten or eleven men who are now in the Politburo were not there when the decisions of 1976-79 were made—decisions that were so detrimental to Soviet-American relations...
...The Soviet peasantry cannot be described as a class...
...What we witness in Russia today has much in common with the policies of enlightened absolutist rulers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, Catherine the Great...
...We were kicked many times by Russia in the 1970s, and, of course, there is always the temptation to kick back when you get up...
...I by and large agree with the main thrust of Seweryn Bialer's article...
...I do not know what Gorbachev will do three or five years from now...
...the relaxation of rigid controls over the visual arts and literature...
...In Washington, there are two opposing schools of thought on this matter...
...We have to remember what has happened in the last forty years, not only in the last year...
...Independent observers and analysts on the democratic left will have to develop a very complex position in regard to recent trends in Soviet Russia...
...It is not a neo-isolationist policy...
...We can meet them in one of two ways...
...With regard to security questions, the Russians have both a maximum program and a minimum program...
...They are now much more cautious, and they understand that economics is in many respects a key to the Third World...
...Their maximum program is to avoid a new arms spiral, to avoid it by making a deal about the SDI where major concessions on offensive weapons will be translated into a moratorium on the testing and development above the subcomponent on the American side...
...The present leadership wants to achieve the type of intensive growth that exists in developed capitalist countries, but without changing the Stalinist model of the economy...
...In my opinion, the Russians are aiming for self-reliance in the economic field in the sense that they want to have self-generated technological progress, not progress based on imports...
...The Soviet worker replies, "You know, I, too...
...Finally, Gorbachev's policy is not one of foreign adventurism...
...Some people are suggesting that the Soviets will turn away from the United States and Reagan in disgust and deal only with Europe...
...He would be uninterested in the consumer, or in the cost of transportation because the government pays for it...
...They should not fall into step with reactionary fanatics such as Norman Podhoretz or Richard Pipes who claim that nothing of significance has happened in the Evil Empire with the advent of Gorbachev, but neither should they be taken in by a resuscitated fellow-travelerish line that claims democracy is about to blossom under the new general secretary...
...The Japanese says to the Russian worker, "You know, in my factory, two hours I work for myself, two hours I work for the boss, and four hours I work for a greater Japan...
...Second, there is potential for change in foreign policy partly because there is a change in U.S.-Soviet relations...
...If the Soviet Union tomorrow introduced the revolution that China has done—the reprivatization of agriculture—the result would be a catastrophe...
...There are only 4-5 percent non-Chinese distributed along its peripheries...
...As much as the Soviet leadership understands the systematic crisis, there is a triviality in explanations for its cause...
...They are coming to the conclusion that they have been reckless and that expansion of their influence in the Third World cannot be achieved by military power without economic power to follow...
...In the Soviet Union there is no such guarantee...
...I will speak first about the domestic situation because I believe it is central to an understanding of foreign policy and security...
...The Soviet leaders clearly believe in the system...
...Furthermore, the new leaders of the Soviet Union have not given any sign that they want to change this model...
...You don't find articles on Afghanistan in the Soviet press...
...There were so many irrationalities in the eighteen years of Brezhnev's leadership that I once started a list and stopped at twenty-eight changes made without major alterations in the Soviet system...
...Among the Russian population and even among the elites, foreign adventures are not very popular...
...Gorbachev has repeatedly quoted Einstein's statement that the nuclear age has changed everything but our way of thinking...
...If ten missiles or ten bombers are good, twenty are much better, regardless of your opponent...
...The bold, the imaginative go to the city, leaving only the very young, the very old, and middle-aged women in the countryside...
...For example, all investments are now frozen and channeled into new technology...
...What has happened in Russia and what I find immensely interesting to observe is that they have suddenly discovered a new concept of security...
...Even the fact that Raissa Gorbachev appears at home, and especially abroad, in stylish "Western" dresses has a symbolic significance, as has the increasing freedom for rock groups to perform unimpeded...
...Some of them are genuine concessions intended to relax the stranglehold of the party bureaucracy over the living forces of Russian society...
...a crisis of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe...
...This is the Soviet system and the managers do not know how to work differently...
...Their commitment to Nicaragua is a typical example of this...
...I must stress also that Gorbachev's leadership is reformist but not liberal...
...Two hours I work for myself...
...But the economic crisis is only part of a general crisis— a political crisis that is primarily a social crisis...
...If Gorbachev is successful in making the Soviet Union more efficient in this regard, his regime may be more oppressive...
...I have no boss and why should I work for a greater Japan...
...I would describe the current Soviet leadership, in contradistinction to the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, as managerial and reformist...
...Today we are looking for negotiations through strength...
...What should be our response...
...Still, there is no institutional change, no structural change...
...If you took the first-rate manager of a U.S...
...Without a strong base, you will not have a strong security and foreign policy...
...Of course, in a situation where they have a shortage of labor, this is the only course to take...
...Do we want a homogeneous world of democracies...
...The new Soviet leaders believe in the system or consider the price they have to pay for a structural-institutional change too high to be paid yet...
...But for the foreseeable future, this seems to be the situation...
...In my opinion there is also a Soviet reexamination of military programs and policies and their relation to preventing an arms race...
...In my opinion, they oppose negotiations not because of anything the Soviets will or will not do but because such negotiations might create an atmosphere in which American society, and therefore the U.S...
...The third area of potential change involves a critical point—the next two, three, four years —in the arms race and arms control...
...It would not work simply because of the differences in human material...
...In the Soviet Union there is a crisis that is most often described as economic...
...Hungary can never be a model for the Soviet Union, although the Soviets will borrow pieces here and there...
...Although the goals of the Soviet leaders are difficult to achieve, the Soviet Union is still a stable society, not one in the throes of revolution or in danger of disintegration...
...a crisis of a society without a goal, without ethics...
...At the same time, there will be no major change in performance in comparison to industrial democracies, in coping with technological developments and catching up with the West...
...I must say that I have seen too many such cuts in the last sixty years of Soviet history to be much impressed by them...
...Is it practical and possible...
...We may also hope the thaw will bring consequences not willed or anticipated by the ruler...
...Survival is not enough...
...The Russians are not so confident...
...It is a policy of retrenchment, of greater integration of Eastern Europe into the Soviet economy, and of orthodoxy in Eastern Europe...
...He is intent, I believe, upon opening up Russian policies, domestically as well as in foreign affairs...
...I am not certain that I know what our goal is, and I am not certain that the people in our government know either...
...Zhivago is soon to be published in the Soviet Union—such moves are surely more than just "public relations...
...However, I agree more with the other group, which I call the pragmatic conservatives— people like Senators Nunn and Goldwater and Secretary of State Shultz—who argue that we have to negotiate and that perhaps we can achieve a breakthrough even though we are now out of phase with the Soviet Union...
...What is our goal...
...Gorbachev is making the same kind of changes...
...My guess is that he would choose stealing...
...We can either go the way of negotiation of very radical offensive arms reductions or we can go through SDI in its ABM defense version...
...The Soviet minimum program, if they cannot achieve the maximum, is to start a peace offensive of gigantic proportions...
...Second, the Chinese elites and leaders believe in themselves much more than do the Soviet elites...
...Stalinist Economics MY FIRST PROPOSITION is that the economic model that exists in the Soviet Union today is purely Stalinist...
...Deng Xiaoping and the people around him are very confident...
...Every one of us would like it very much...
...First, the potential comes from the new generation of leaders that has taken over...
...This is not the kind of language used in the debates of the 1920s between Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Stalin...
...It is not clear whether the Soviets will be able to hold their position without major changes in their domestic growth...
...It is a fragmented group that was brutalized and ostracized by Stalin and later isolated and fragmented under Khrushchev and Brezh189 nev...
...It is quite clear that we have now before us a few years in which the new Soviet leadership and new opportunities in arms control provide options for us...
...Their old concept was very simple— total security...
...The correlation of forces, to use the Soviet term, has changed...
...In such a multiethnic state, devolution of power would not mean simply devolution to the Russians but devolution to people of other nationalities who have their own republics and desire greater autonomy...
...Hungary can have experiments in the market economy because there are 40,000 Soviet troops there and more divisions on its border, so if anything goes wrong politically, if there is a devolution of power from the economy to the polity, those troops will guarantee that nothing will happen...
...BUT WE SHOULD NOT CONFOUND these reformist policies with measures of reform and change that have come about, not by the will of the ruler but by the gathering of autonomous forces within the society...
...So, what can we reasonably hope to achieve...
...As a matter of fact, I think that it will be harsher in some respects than the leadership of Brezhnev...
...Let's assume that we have real strategic concerns...
Vol. 34 • April 1987 • No. 2
