SOVIET REFORMERS: FROM LENIN TO GORBACHEV
Draper, Theodore
The past—to use a phrase of Marx—"weighs like a nightmare" on the Soviet Union of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. He is not the first Soviet leader to attempt to escape from the nightmare of...
...This strategy followed from Lenin's reasoning, which went as follows: The necessary condition for a full communist economy was the growth of large-scale industry, which in turn was the necessary condition for a growing proletariat...
...We will know that the system has achieved the goal of "a qualitatively new state of Soviet society" only when there is no more need for such Soviet liberators...
...Why has the obviously alien word "stagnation" appeared in our party lexicon...
...The former was critical of War Communism as a reflection of widespread working-class discontent, the latter was primarily interested in greater democracy within the party...
...Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in 1962 to much rejoicing and acclaim...
...6 Ibid., pp...
...The periods that followed them, headed by Stalin and Brezhnev, lasted much longer, from eighteen to twenty-five years...
...The political NEP was far from being a democratic "reform...
...Third, the Stalinist period of about twentyfive years, from 1928 or 1929 to 1953...
...The Mensheviks were largely urban and particularly influential in the surviving trade unions, where they had more proletarian backing than the Bolsheviks...
...In the process that is under way we are encountering everything imaginable—from wait-and-see philosophy to a lack of forethought and rashness...
...He now accused "quite a few people who understand very well what restructuring is" but do not accept it, because "their main concern is to preserve the old, outmoded ways, to preserve their privileges, even though this is not in accordance with our principles, laws and morality or with our current policy...
...In fact, it is hard to see that any other Bolshevik leader of the 1920s would necessarily have been indistinguishable from Stalin, but that does not absolve them of all responsibility for Stalin's ascendancy...
...and Gorbachev has been busy tearing down Stalin and Brezhnev...
...This does not mean that Lenin if he had lived long enough would necessarily have been indistinguishable from Stalin...
...Towards the end of his life, Lenin came to believe that the basic solution to the economic problem lay in the organization of cooperatives, but the culture of the people, he complained, was so low that it would take "a whole historical epoch" for a cooperative economy to take hold in the entire country...
...But Gorbachev has cut himself off from the use of force, Stalinstyle or anything like it, precisely by trying to put so much distance between his type of rule and Stalin's...
...At any rate, the leadership is not taking any chance of promising too much too soon...
...The question can be answered at least partly with what the new leadership itself has said...
...There is still a dispute over Lenin's basic attitude toward the NEP...
...Back in 1961, at the Twenty-Second Party Congress, Khrushchev had boasted of overtaking the United States by 1970 and building a full communist society by 1980...
...It has given itself fifteen years, to the year 2000, to achieve "a qualitatively new state of Soviet society," instead of the usual one or two five-year plans...
...If he resorts to force, he will make a mockery of his repeated professions of seeking to open up the Soviet system to increased democratization, and he will undercut his populist appeal...
...Sixth, after another interregnum, headed by Andropov and Chernenko, the third reform period, inaugurated by Gorbachev in March 1985...
...Hardly an issue of Pravda or Izvestia passes without a notice of some luckless bureaucrat losing his job for failure to pass muster according to the new dispensation...
...The answer, I think, must as yet be: Not very...
...The rot came from the top: "Many party members holding leadership posts were not subject to supervision or criticism, which led to failures in work and serious violations of party ethics...
...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...
...Much of this struggle turned ideologically on the future of the NEP...
...Confiscation was abolished and a "tax in kind" substituted...
...35 Ryzhkov, ibid., March 4, 1986...
...This article was presented as the Sixth Annual Stanley Plastrik Memorial Lecture...
...In this respect, he seems to have learned the lesson of Khrushchev, who was easily removed because he had not been able to put his own men into the Politburo...
...17 Ibid...
...23 How he could lead a revolution without shaking up and disorganizing the existing society, he did not say...
...But the emphasis in this article is on the particular circumstances of the time to justify a reformist "retreat"—a key term in this article—which Lenin says "is coming to an end...
...I would imagine that it helps to account for the zeal with which the Gorbachev leadership is trying to revive Soviet culture and give it some free air to breathe in...
...But Khrushchev was also a devotee of the pseudoscientific agronomist Lysenko...
...It realized that a scientific and technological revolution had taken place in the rest of the world but had bypassed the Soviet Union...
...Now that position has been threatened by two main developments...
...15 Gorbachev has also spoken of the Brezhnev era in the most scathing terms...
...What is new is the urgency with which they are now being advanced...
...The NEP was a remarkably ingenious and even grandiose gamble—this much I think must be conceded...
...All the White Guards, headed by the Mensheviks and SocialistRevolutionaries," he said, "wax jubilant and say, `Aha, you are retreating!' " 7 This crime brought out the most bloodthirsty language from Lenin...
...It was to be a period of undetermined duration during which certain freedoms were officially encouraged—the peasants to produce as much as they could for their own profit, small-scale private manufacturing and trade to increase, foreign and domestic capitalists to build up Soviet trade and industry, factory managers relieved of undue interference by the party and trade unions...
...What can possibly account for this extraordinary sense of crisis...
...Gorbachev himself has said: "One cannot help seeing that since the early 1970s certain difficulties in economic development 293 have begun to make themselves felt...
...32 Ibid., June 17, 1986...
...In my opinion, one of the main reasons is that a number of Party officials lack the courage to promptly and objectively assess the situation and their personal role, to tell the truth, even if it is bitter...
...To Our Contributors: A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your ms—the mails aren't always reliable...
...Far from having given up "revolutionary methods," Lenin looked forward to getting back to them as soon as the lack of "sufficient strength" had been overcome (Vol...
...Two other such Leninist pronouncements convey his attitude: "We are paying a high, an exorbitant price for these things [foreign tank cars], but still, it shows that we are receiving the assistance of large-scale industry of the advanced capitalist countries...
...It suggests that the changes they want to bring about are so farreaching that they must resort to rhetorical overkill to make the bureaucracy and the people aware of the full seriousness and basic nature of their plans for a renewal of the entire system...
...As if he thought that he had gone too far, Gorbachev himself has more recently given assurances that his shake-up would not result in "disorganizing society...
...If the NEP was a precedent for later periods of Soviet reform, we should expect to meet again with the encouragement of private initiative in a controlled economic environment, with a temporary improvement in economic conditions, and with an immanent intraparty struggle over how far the reform movement should go...
...Thus there were two faces to the NEP—one opened the Soviet regime to temporary, limited economic experiments of a quasi-capitalist nature, the other imposed a full totalitarian, monolithic political order by officially wiping out all types and degrees of political opposition or driving it underground...
...Inside the party, a "Left Communist" faction, whose main spokesman was Bukharin (later to go over to the other extreme), had sprung up in 1918 but did not outlast that year...
...Can Gorbachev succeed...
...27 Ibid...
...In this 289 respect, the political side of the NEP—the elimination of all political opposition—was a necessary, though not a sufficient, condition for the rise of Stalinism, whether or not Lenin himself would have gone all the way down the same road if he had lived long enough...
...Others "take a wait-andsee attitude or do not believe in the success of the economic and political breakthrough planned by the party...
...The term "communist intellectual" has become virtually an oxymoron...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...Ibid., p. 220...
...Both had long criticized War Communism as unnecessarily extremist and self-destructive...
...Thus Lenin was faced with an acute political as well as an economic crisis after the Tenth Congress...
...There is, however, a difference...
...He complained that "the restructuring itself is proceeding slowly so far...
...Gorbachev is said to have unburdened himself privately to a group of some thirty Soviet writers in June of last year: Between the people who want and long for changes and the leadership that encourages them, there is the administrative staff of the party apparatus and the ministries who do not want changes...
...He is not the first Soviet leader to attempt to escape from the nightmare of Stalinism in order to make a radical change in how the Soviet Union functions...
...in fact, it was just the opposite...
...This measure of limited private enterprise goes right back to the NEP and, in addition, merely legalizes what has been going on unofficially if not illegally for years...
...rbachev and his people prefer never to mention Khrushchev as one of their predecessors...
...The "scientific and technological revolution," as Gorbachev has put it, "is linked with the improvement of social relations, the restructuring of thinking, the cultivation of a new mentality, and the establishment of dynamism as a way of life, as a norm of existence...
...But if you only knew with how much anguish all this is proceeding...
...On the contrary, the leadership is making feverish efforts to stir up the masses, to make them more responsive to change, to shake them out of their accustomed ways, and to bring the utmost pressure to bear on them to change their habits of thought and work— habits instilled by the previous six decades of Communist rule...
...All this freedom to trade and develop a limited amount of capitalism was temporary and provisional...
...5 Ibid., p. 437...
...And it largely succeeded...
...the crisis of the 1970s came about as a result of diminishing returns from the same industrial base.24 For one thing, the rate of economic growth had begun to fall in the 1970s and continued to fall in the early 1980s...
...Because the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries were allegedly saying, "The revolution has gone too far...
...This circumstance may appear to be an insignificant trifle...
...Thus far almost all 299 emphasis has been put on the changes, most of which are still in the realm of intention or experiment rather than of accomplished facts...
...after paying the tax, he could sell the surplus for as much as the market would bear and take the profit for himself...
...The transformation is going ahead...
...Nevertheless, Khrushchev contributed one invaluable precedent for the benefit of the Gorbachev effort—Khrushchev showed that it was possible to repudiate at least the worst excesses of the Stalinist heritage and die in bed...
...467475), which had to wait for the present Gorbachev period to be taken up again, if as yet on a small scale, with official approval...
...Second, the first reform period of the New Economic Policy or NEP for about seven years, from 1921 to 1928...
...Fourth, after a brief interregnum or struggle for the succession, the second reform period, under Nikita Khrushchev, for about eight or nine years, from 1955 or 1956 to 1964...
...NEP-thinking is imbedded in the present...
...In one recent speech, he castigated party members who had "engaged in embezzlement, bribe-taking and report-padding," "manifestations of spiritual emptiness and skepticism," "a scornful attitude towards laws, hoodwinking, bribe-taking and the encouragement of servility and glorification," "banality, primitive tastes and spiritual emptiness...
...Gorbachev himself has frequently said that it is just about getting started...
...23 New York Times, February 26, 1987...
...20 Pravda, January 28, 1987...
...Was it a tactical retreat to last only as long as it provided the necessary preconditions for an advance towards an orthodox socialist economy, or was it itself "the road to socialism" and, therefore, not to be cast aside as soon as it had exhausted its usefulness...
...As a consequence, the growth rate of labor productivity and certain other indices of efficiency dropped substantially...
...It began with a reform of agrarian policy...
...Khrushchev left enough of the system intact so that Gorbachev has plenty of liberating work left to do...
...It must set the broad masses in motion and therein lies both its promise and its peril...
...Stalin accomplished a bloody revolution from above...
...28 Ibid., April 24, 1985...
...Needless to say, this does not involve changing the essence of our social system...
...The economics of War Communism was not the only cause of the crisis...
...Culturally the Soviet Union had been turned into a wasteland from which creative writers and artists had fled or been driven out...
...Gorbachev would obviously like to accomplish a bloodless revolution from above, though on condition that it succeeds in enlisting mass approval and support from below...
...Pravda itself reported that at a meeting with the writers Gorbachev had said: It [restructuring) is not coming easily...
...It is particularly important at present because it has been a source of both inspiration and legitimacy for what Gorbachev is trying to do...
...In any case, as he admitted, few "practical workers" in the party appreciated the "exceptional importance" of cooperatives (pp...
...24 "Through inertia, the economy continued to develop to a large degree on an extensive basis, oriented toward drawing additional labor and material resources into production...
...Thus far, intellectuals have benefited the most...
...But Lenin always returned to the theme that the capitalists could be permitted to operate only on condition that they should be strictly controlled: "The proletarian state may, without changing its own nature, permit freedom to trade and the development of capitalism only within certain bounds, and only on condition that the state regulates (supervises, controls, determines the forms and methods of) private trade and private capitalism...
...Thus we are not straying too far from the present in paying special attention to the NEP period...
...In its main outline, it was a daring maneuver...
...Its officials do whatever they want...
...But Lenin also said, in March 1922, of the party: "If we do not close our eyes to reality we must admit that at the present time the proletarian policy of the party is not determined by the character of its membership, but by the enormous undivided prestige enjoyed by a small group which might be called the Old Guard of the party...
...We Communists shall be able to direct our economy if we succeed in utilizing the hands of the bourgeoisie in building up this economy of ours and in the meantime we learn from this bourgeoisie and guide them along the road we want them to travel" (pp...
...6 Economically, the NEP did serve its immediate purpose...
...The peasant could now produce as much as he liked...
...Cultural Openness THE SHIFT HAS BEEN MOST MARKED IN THE cultural and journalistic fields...
...The entire passage suggests that Lenin was something less than firm in his demand for Stalin's removal as secretary-general: "Stalin is too rude and this defect, although tolerable in our midst and in dealings with us Communists, becomes intolerable in a secretary-general...
...But Gorbachev appears to have far more support in the top ranks than down below...
...25 Pravda, January 28, 1987...
...He has gone so far as to say that the present crisis demands nothing less than some sort of revolutionary change...
...To this end, it is necessary to be more resolute in doing away with the practice of supplanting economic, soviet, and public organizations, to increase their independence and responsibility, and to dispense with the technocratic approach to solving political and social problems...
...Khrushchev gave the peasants more leeway in the disposition of private surpluses, as the NEP had done three decades earlier...
...After Lenin's stroke in May 1922, he was entirely cut off from all active participation in party work and appears to have given himself over to speculations uncharacteristic of Marxist thought...
...It rescued the Soviet regime from the danger of possible disintegration and collapse...
...not even an obituary was published at his death in1 9 7G1o...
...26 Ibid...
...26 It was not simply that the Soviet Union had fallen behind the United States or Western Europe in the new technology...
...IS If we may take Gorbachev at his word, the present crisis is so profound that it is systemic...
...The answer depends on what success is thought to mean...
...One figure recently revealed by Gorbachev will do to show the depth of the Soviets' economic retrogression...
...Gorbachev and his lieutenants have made clear that decentralization cannot be accomplished unless the dead hand of party bureaucracy is removed 298 from nonparty economic and other types of organizations...
...Lenin had little difficulty getting the better of opposition within the party, but the other two parties still functioning, if against increasing repression—the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks—were more formidable obstacles in the way of the monolithic party-state...
...Thus Lenin's brooding in 1923 cannot be taken as necessarily representing his view of the NEP in 1921-1922, when he was still fully engaged in promoting it...
...In any case, Lenin's political contribution to the ultimate benefit of Stalinism is hardly negated by this belated, somewhat equivocal criticism of Stalin's personality...
...The most notable thing about his removal was the ease with which it was accomplished...
...It made cooperative societies a further advance of the NEP and maintained that they were "all that is necessary to build a complete socialist society...
...t was left to Stalin to decide on the date and the method, but it was Lenin who had set forth the basic strategy...
...It was also a period that looked forward to the day when a "last and decisive battle" would be fought against the very same peasants, smallscale manufacturers and traders, factory managers, and foreign and domestic entrepreneurs...
...And those who see the new line as threatening the "socialist" foundations of the Soviet political and economic system...
...The social basis of Stalinism was largely, if inadvertantly, brought about by Lenin...
...Now the NEP appeared to justify their opposition to War Communism and put the Bolsheviks on the defensive as having belatedly agreed with them...
...Just how far they really mean to go—or how far they will be able to go—may be debated, but that they sincerely believe that something is deeply and dangerously wrong—and that something drastic must be done about it—cannot, in my opinion, be denied...
...3 Ibid., p. 470...
...31 Pravda, June 21, 1986...
...270-273, 288-291...
...Certainly they have not been backward about carrying out a systematic purge of middle-level bureaucrats and administrators who have failed to live up to their demands...
...The Soviets have struggled for decades to obtain a position of accepted parity with the United States in a world of only two superpowers, with all other nations trailing behind...
...propose to accomplish this delicate operation of centralizing and decentralizing simultaneously will be most interesting to observe...
...When the Testament was revealed to members of the Central Committee some months after Lenin's death, the proposal to remove Stalin was turned down with the help even of some, such as Zinoviev, who at that time were considered particularly close to Lenin and were later to live to regret their lack of foresight—and to die for it...
...This return to a NEP-type reform is particularly characteristic of the unfolding Gorbachev period...
...300 19 Pravda, August 2, 1986...
...The impetus has certainly not come from below...
...9 Ibid., p. 313...
...290291...
...What you [Bolsheviks] are saying now we have been saying all the time, permit us to say it again," Lenin replied: "Permit us to put you before a firing squad for saying that...
...He introduced it in March 1921, defended it to his last breath, and died in January 1924, while the NEP was still untouchable...
...Glasnost is also a means of showing how bad Gorbachev's predecessors were...
...Judging from the public complaints that Gorbachev and others have made about the resistance they are encountering, this source would seem to be credible...
...296 But by far the greatest threat to the Soviets' world position has come from its scientific and technological retrogression...
...292 By extricating the party from the dead hand of Stalin's vengefulness, Khrushchev gave party members a new sense of security from that terror...
...That was how the short, happy life of the NEP came to an end...
...Except for these blessings, little seems to remain of Khrushchev's policies, for one reason because they were inconsistent and even self-contradictory...
...If the victory of Stalin in 1928-1929, which brought about the demise of 288 the NEP, is to be understood, Lenin's NEPinspired politics was a significant contributing factor...
...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...
...Another reason may be that the new cultural policy is least likely to cause trouble in the party and in the economy...
...One reason for this favoritism may well be that this second cultural thaw pays off the most in foreign 294 appreciation...
...Among the great powers today, it is only in the Soviet Union that a leader can appear to be a liberator by not subjecting his people to the inhumanity, the barbarism, of his predecessors...
...In this speech, Gorbachev saw fit to evoke the memory of the NEP "when V.I...
...But once the masses of people get the idea that they have been released from automatic party tutelage and obedience, they may take things into their own hands and test the limits of Gorbachev's invitation to democratize and initiate from below...
...Here again we can learn a good deal from what Gorbachev and others have said publicly about the difficulty they are having pulling and pushing the party into the new age...
...4 Ibid., pp...
...2 I The term "revolution" need not be taken literally...
...One was that the final outcome of the world struggle for socialism "will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc., account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe," rather than by the proletariat in the more advanced industrial countries (p...
...33, p. 480...
...Stalin took Lenin at his word that the NEP could not go on forever or even for very long and imposed the order of a concentration camp and extermination chamber on the increasingly recalcitrant Soviet reality...
...Reprinted by permission of the Digest...
...Towards the end of 1986, Gorbachev declared: The foremost task today is to radically improve the style, forms, and methods of party organizations' work...
...Why the urgency...
...This statement appeared in the comment, "Our Revolution," written in January 1923 in reply to Nikolai Sukhanov's well-known Notes on the Revolution...
...The paradox is that Gorbachev's main political mechanism for change is the habit and enforcement of Communist party discipline...
...He could succeed by persuasion alone only if he commanded the support of the overwhelming majority in the party and country...
...As far as Gosplan is concerned, there is no authority, there is no General Secretary, no Central Committee...
...36 Ibid., October 24, 1986...
...Lenin THE PROTOTYPE OF THE SPECIES 1S the first one—the New Economic Policy or NEP...
...Throughout the NEP period, however, freedom to trade was limited to small-scale producers and the state retained a monopoly of largescale or heavy industry...
...3° First published in the Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, October 7, 1986, cited by Stephen F Cohen, the Nation, November 15, 1986...
...What it has to tell us for the future is that the Soviet system is far from being as rigid and inflexible as it is sometimes thought to be...
...On the other hand, to mollify the discontented, Gorbachev has also resorted to doubletalk...
...The peasants went on strike, because anything they produced beyond their own needs was subject to confiscation...
...A country that cannot hold its own technologically with South Korea or Taiwan has reason to worry if it also claims to be one of the world's two superpowers...
...Once the urgency of the task had sunk in, it was realized that there was no shortcut to the new era...
...He was almost singlehandedly responsible for the decision to go ahead with the seizure of power by reversing the Marxist sequence of revolution— to take power in the name Communism or Socialism and create the social and economic conditions necessary for it afterwards...
...This recalls the same type of accusation by so-called Left Communists against Lenin's NEP...
...22 Pravda, November 7, 1986...
...that will you be able to build up a communist republic...
...Still, even Khrushchev's liberation of Stalin's prisoners is not without a shadow...
...Nevertheless, the very use of such a term as "revolution" for what Gorbachev & Co...
...And it was in that year that Stalin became general secretary of the party and systematically put his henchmen in key posts in the party apparatus, an advantage that stood him in good stead during the internal party struggle later in the decade...
...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...
...THE EDITORS 301...
...Lenin, Collected Works, Vol...
...A major transformation from top to bottom can release huge energies hitherto held back by enfeebled leadership and enervated bureaucracy...
...Lenin himself put it this way: "We are retreating, going back, as it were...
...Also in the mid1960s, the economist Professor Liberman attracted a good deal of attention by advocating decentralization of controls and the replacement of quantitative production quotas with an emphasis on quality and price...
...Fifth, the reaction, headed by Leonid Brezhnev, for eighteen years, from 1964 to 1982...
...Lenin seemed to recognize that "rudeness" would seem to be a "trifle" to other Bolsheviks and, therefore, sought to bolster his case by relating it to the rivalry between Stalin and Trotsky...
...The best proof that Soviet cultural or intellectual status had sunk abysmally is what has happened in France...
...Lenin once put it this way: "Get down to business, all of you...
...Lenin actually anticipated Stalin's campaign against the peasantry by warning that the day of retribution was coming...
...All translations from Pravda hereafter are taken from the Current Digest of the Soviet Press, published weekly at Columbus, Ohio...
...So far we hear of widespread resistance to his restructuring, but not a word of it has been permitted to get out in the Soviet media, which he controls as tightly as it has ever been controlled before...
...The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries drew their support mainly from the peasantry...
...want to do is most revealing...
...Inasmuch as subsequent reform leaders have specialized in repudiating Stalin, they would be ideologically naked if they did not claim to go back to the pristine communism of Lenin...
...Soviet "liberators," such as Khrushchev, liberate within a system that, unless it is dismantled, requires more liberating...
...21 Katrina vanden Heuvel, the Nation, March 7, 1987...
...To understand the present effort, it is useful to look back historically at other such "reform" periods in Soviet history for what they can tell us about the general problem...
...to shake up the party, to make it enter a new economic and technological age, should not be in doubt...
...8 He also spoke of using machine guns against the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries for their crime of saying: "You say you are retreating towards capitalism, and we say the same thing...
...Attempts to rectify the problem through new construction exacerbated the problem of balance...
...FINALLY, THE NEP ANTICIPATED FUTURE NEPtype reforms by generating a fierce intraparty factional struggle...
...But he also upset the party by attempting to tinker with it...
...Quite a few party members, he said, "have a political understanding of the need to work in a new way but simply don't know how to do this in practice...
...It also had, however, a political side of even greater long-term significance...
...Today there is hardly one who is...
...2 Ibid., p. 67...
...And what if the comrades could not find some paragon among them having the only advantage mentioned by Lenin...
...26 Ibid., July I, 1986...
...If persuasion fails, it is hard to see them giving up without a struggle...
...He also said scoffingly: "Forgive me, but what is the proletariat...
...A resolution on "party unity" denounced these two groups as "syndicalist and anarchist deviations" that were incompatible with party membership...
...The Bukharin-Stalin faction argued that the NEP had been such a success that it deserved to be continued...
...25 The lesson that the present leadership has learned is that extensive, quantitative exploitation of resources, natural and human, must be replaced by intensive, qualitative development...
...Notes 1 Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Printers, 1966), Vol...
...Having rid himself of Zinoviev, Trotsky, and their followers, with Bukharin's help, Stalin turned on Bukharin and finished him off...
...33, pp...
...not so long ago they had been allies of the Bolsheviks and had even collaborated in the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918...
...There is a basic problem with evaluating what Gorbachev is doing or plans to do...
...33 Gorbachev has given an even more serious reason for another type of resistance...
...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...
...Khrushchev KHRUSHCHEV WILL PROBABLY BE REMEMBERED most gratefully for two things—his so-called Secret Speech at the Twentieth Congress in 1956 exposing the evils and crimes of the Stalinist epoch, and the liberation from the gulag and its camps of hundreds of thousands of prisoners, many of them former party members and even staunch Stalinists...
...I 7 One of Gorbachev's most outspoken associates, the Moscow party first secretary, Boris Yeltsin, has gone somewhat further in assessing the blame: Why do we raise a number of the same problems Congress after Congress...
...Those who do not wish to adapt to it owing to its threat to their vested interests...
...Khrushchev himself became a nonperson...
...it shows that the large-scale industry of the capitalist countries is helping us to restore our economy, although these countries are governed by capitalists who hate us heart and soul" (p...
...12 He also spoke in this vein: "We shall make as many concessions as possible within limits, of course, of what the proletarian can concede and yet remain the ruling class...
...29 That scientific and technological revolution is almost an obsessive theme in Gorbachev's speeches...
...he needs party discipline in order to loosen party control, but the loosening of party control may well threaten the party's unity and even lead to a factional struggle resembling that of the late 1920s or by his abrupt removal a la Krushchev...
...Meanwhile, you will learn from them the business of running the economy, and only when you do *Lenin, Collected Works, Vol...
...22 Needless to say, there can be no revolution, for a Marxist, which does not change the essence of a social system...
...It was, in effect, pure communism, with no outlet for private initiative and the profit motive...
...the more the resistance, the more likely the pressure from above to overcome it...
...Gorbachev's revolution will not succeed if it remains "from above...
...Where is your industry...
...The party has now been put on notice that the economy cannot enter the new era unless it surrenders a good many of its former prerogatives...
...His second in command, Yegor K. Ligachev, recently entangled himself in the same Marxist contradiction...
...One thing may be noted immediately...
...Nevertheless, it would be a gross mistake to scoff at the whole enterprise...
...The future tactics of Gorbachev's revolution may depend on the resistance it encounters...
...The famine was relieved after only one year of the NEP By 1925, agricultural production had approached the prewar level...
...This requires, above all, complete and effective use of the truly inexhaustible possibilities that are opened up by the scientific and technological revolution...
...The same problem has been posed by one of Lenin's last articles, "On Cooperation," of January 1923...
...His wrath was mainly directed at "executives [who] are set in their ways, and they don't want to change their old thinking...
...The turn to quality, efficiency and new methods of leadership is taking place painfully and with difficulty...
...Thus glasnost is being practiced in almost every sphere of Soviet life at the expense of past leaders and does nothing to threaten Gorbachev's own record or prestige...
...And please remember that we can't return articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...The peasantry soon began to produce surpluses of grain and food...
...Brezhnev took over without a struggle...
...The process of restructuring that is now unfolding is revolutionary in nature— both in scale and in content," he said...
...More recently, in January of this year, he reiterated that the new leadership had in mind "truly revolutionary and comprehensive transformations in society...
...One clear lesson would seem to be that it is premature to pronounce upon the ultimate fate of this effort...
...If the Soviet Union had not been driven to make good on Lenin's miscalculations, of which not the least was his expectation that a European revo*This complaint about Stalin's "rudeness" refers at least in part to a telephone conversation during which Stalin spoke insultingly to Krupskaya, Lenin's wife...
...At just about the time Gorbachev is said to have complained bitterly to the Soviet writers, he made much the same charges—if less emotionally— at a plenum of the party's Central Committee in mid-June 1986...
...109-110...
...but we are doing so in order, after first retreating, to take a running start and make a bigger leap forward...
...18 Pravda, February 27, 1986...
...By the time Gorbachev came to power in March 1985, the full force of this critical economic state of affairs had hit the top leadership...
...If the real trouble is with the system, and it actually requires some sort of "revolution," my advice to anyone waiting for the outcome would be: Don't hold your breath...
...His main problem is with the party and ministerial bureaucracies...
...Lenin's tactics were brutal in the extreme...
...STALIN OWED HIS VICTORY, at least in part, to the political system Lenin had put in place beginning in March 1921...
...Superpower Slippage MY OWN BELIEF IS THAT THE NEW SOVIET leadership has been shocked into action primarily by the prospect of a precipitous decline in prestige and power on the world stage...
...The ultimate beneficiary was Stalin, who succeeded in imposing his own type of "party unity" prescribed by Lenin...
...33 Ibid., September 20, 1986...
...Lenin legitimated the monolithic party with a monopoly of power in the country, and Stalin took the next step of giving himself a monopoly of power in the party and, through it, in the country...
...Lenin showed how much it could compromise, twist and turn, retreat and advance, without losing its essential character...
...Plays have been put on, books published, films shown, and articles printed that were never before permitted...
...37 Ibid., June 17, 1986...
...The NEP was adopted for a reason that is similar to that of subsequent reform periods, namely, the country was faced with some sort 287 of crisis...
...In this same speech, Lenin acknowledged that "the proletariat has disappeared...
...it could not produce what Japan, South Korea, and even Taiwan were turning out in mass production and with which they were flooding world markets...
...This was the rationale for inviting foreign capitalism into Soviet Russia in the form of mixed enterprises and economic concessions...
...The shock was all the greater if we recall the ambition and pretension that the Soviet leadership had once had...
...It must be said that such moods are still common among party personnel...
...Two years later, after Lenin's final stroke, his so-called Testament called for the removal of Stalin as general secretary on the ground that Stalin was "too rude" for the job, but it was too late.* Rudeness was not one of the most damaging charges in Bolshevik circles, which were not without a tradition of political rudeness, including that of Lenin himself...
...He was apparently completely isolated...
...12 Ibid., p. 185...
...If taken seriously, it implies that the entire Soviet order desperately needs redoing from top to bottom...
...160, 177, 392, 470...
...34 This latter line of opposition implies, ironically, that Gorbachev might be charged with trying to carry through a counterrevolution, not a revolution—a counterrevolution, that is to say, against the kind of society that communism had come to represent in the Soviet Union for most of its past...
...Over the past three five-year plans [that is, a period of fifteen years]," he disclosed in January of this year, "the growth rates of national income declined by more than 50 percent...
...It is the class which is working in large-scale industry...
...Other innovations, such as joint enterprises between the Soviet state and foreign businesses, were introduced later...
...Gorbachev himself has invoked the precedent of the NEP, as if it gave him a license to do what he wants to do...
...the Zinoviev-Trotsky Opposition held that the Soviet economy was losing its socialist character, that it had favored the peasantry too much, and that it was now necessary to emphasize industrialization...
...Where is your large-scale industry...
...6) Please bear with us—we have accumulated quite a backlog of material, and you may have to wait for a few issues before you see your article in print...
...The monolithic Soviet party-state was not born in 1917...
...In effect, the past reform periods did not succeed in making themselves irreversible...
...But now, natural and human resources can not be stretched any further...
...In the case of the NEP, the crisis went back to the previous period of War Communism...
...Why is it at a standstill...
...By 1920, two more serious Communist opposition groups had arisen—the "Workers' Opposition," made up mainly of trade unionists, and the "Democratic Centralists," mainly intellectuals...
...The emphasis on glasnost suggests that, if only the people knew how bad things are, they would move to correct them—as if people did not already know how bad things are...
...The NEP was Lenin's strategy for withdrawing from the precipice to safer ground...
...Gorbachev has sufficiently reconstructed the top leadership so that he probably does not have to fear being overthrown from that quarter soon...
...The only way the new, weak Soviet state could get large-scale industry was to get capitalists, Russian and foreign, small and large, to create it for the ultimate benefit of the Soviet state...
...As yet, unfortunately, the Soviet Union is still in the stage of getting special commendation and reward for permitting a play or book that would be permitted as a matter of course in most Western countries...
...3 ' But where is the resistance coming from— and why...
...He has vowed in almost the same breath "to improve centralized principles in the management of the national economy" and "in every way expand the rights and economic independence of enterprises and associations and increase their responsibility for the results of their activity...
...Still others claim "that the directives voiced at the [Twenty-Seventh] Party Congress [in February 1986] apply to the sphere of high-level policy, while practical work should take its normal course, following beaten paths...
...It is apparent that something happened some time in the 1970s that caused the rising generation of Soviet leaders to become acutely apprehensive of the future...
...Lenin's "reformism" was a tactical retreat to enable the Soviet regime to go on the offensive again at a later time when the "reform" had exhausted its usefulness...
...This shift in agrarian policy was the foundation of the NEP...
...Gorbachev blamed various types of resistance...
...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...
...What kind of proletariat is it...
...Glasnost, or openness, is the latest miracle cure for whatever ails Soviet society—poor harvests, infant-mortality rates, alcoholism, drug abuse, prostitution, earthquakes, shipwrecks, hijackings, airplane crashes, even traffic accidents, classified as state secrets...
...Once this move was successfully made, he let loose a social upheaval that increasingly went out of control...
...Lenin himself had finally reached a stage of disorientation by resorting to the Napoleonic maxim: "On s'engage et puis...
...Khrushchev tore down Stalin...
...3 We may call the NEP "reformist," because that is just the word used by Lenin for it.' He also called it other things that reveal what its practical function was intended to be—a "respite," an interval of time "in which the old and worn-out forces can 'recuperate,' " a partial reversion to "capitalism," a "flanking movement," a "retreat to a form of state capitalism, to concessions, retreat to trade," a "breathing space," and a product of "sheer necessity...
...H Lenin, Collected Works, Vol...
...Two or three decades ago there was hardly an influential intellectual who was not a member of the French Communist party or at least a fellow traveler...
...They will squeeze profits out of you amounting to hundreds percent...
...A year later, in the summer of 1986, he put the same thought this way: "We should, we simply must, make socialism stronger, a dynamically developing system that competes successfully with capitalist society in all parameters...
...If Gorbachev meant "revolution" literally, he would be committed to overthrowing the allegedly existing proletarian state and putting a new class in power—at least he would have to do so from a Marxist point of view...
...At the very outset of his regime in 1985, Gorbachev struck this note: "The country's historical destiny and the positions of socialism in today's world depend in large part on how we handle matters from now on"—by which he meant "making broad use of the scientific and technological revolution and bringing the forms of socialist economic management into line with present-day conditions and requirements...
...The national economy, which has vast resources, ran into resource shortages...
...In 1922, when conditions were showing signs of improvement, he already looked ahead to the next, postreformist stage: "Permit me to say this to you without exaggeration, because in this respect it is really 'the last and decisive battle,' not against international capitalism— against that we shall yet have many 'last and decisive battles'—but against Russian capitalism, against the capitalism that is growing out of the small-peasant economy, the capitalism that is fostered by the latter...
...In any case, the prospect was put far off, because "it will take a whole historical epoch to get the entire population into the work of the cooperatives through NEP...
...He then turned around again and adopted much of the program of the former "Left Opposition" by pushing through a policy of increased collectivization and rapid industrialization...
...Such creative minds as were left had their freedom of expression stifled or suppressed...
...2 The precipice was marked by famine, drought, large-scale banditry, peasant revolt, abandonment of the factories and, finally, the Kronstadt rebellion, which was put down bloodily at the very time the NEP was being introduced...
...19 For an excellent account of this episode, see Robert C. Tucker, Stalin As Revolutionary (New York: Norton, 1973), pp...
...Still later, he said that catching up with capitalist countries would take only "several years...
...To get the overwhelming mass of peasants into cooperative societies, however, required a "cultural revolution" among them—a term unexpectedly introduced in this context and hardly one to be expected in the foreseeable future...
...Without Lenin's imposition of a one-party totalitarian state, there is some chance that Stalin's imposition of a personal dictatorship through a Stalinized party might have been avoided—or at least made far more difficult...
...In any case, revolutions from above are notoriously treacherous...
...Most of all, the renewal of the system requires scientific inventiveness and intellectual creativity which cannot be obtained without greater freedom of expression and experimentation...
...34 Ibid., August 2, 1986...
...15 Pravda, June 12, 1985...
...Despite these caveats, the determination of Gorbachev & Co...
...27 All this is a rather tall order—technological, social, ideological and psychological...
...Unlike Stalin's era, however, loss of job has not meant loss of head...
...The NEP, then, was peculiarly two-faced in its economic policy as well as in its political policies...
...the surplus was subject to a small tax in kind...
...The economic system of War Communism was, as Lenin put it, "a direct transition from the old Russian economy to state production and distribution on communist lines...
...An article, "The Importance of Gold Now and After the Complete Victory of Socialism," published in Pravda, November 6-7, 1921, has been interpreted as bearing out the latter sense, because it cautions that revolutions are doomed if it is believed that they "can and must solve all problems in a revolutionary manner under all circumstances and in all spheres of action...
...Conflict situations are showing up, and various stands are being fully revealed...
...500...
...14 At the Central Committee plenum in September 1965 (Pravda, September 28, 1965, cited by Hanson Leung C.K., Studies in Comparative Communism, Winter 1985, pp...
...In the past, the Soviet economy had moved forward "extensively," that is, by using up more natural resources, building more factories and multiplying the labor force, with little or no modernization of the means of production...
...the problem now is to catch up and make up for lost time, not to overtake and overcome...
...What, then, is driving Gorbachev's team to such extremes with such urgency...
...What happens in the party is more than anything else going to decide whether he succeeds or fails...
...Kosygin proposed the decentralization of management, the simplification of central planning, the improvement of productivity and efficiency, with the increasing use of such economic "levers" as profits, prices, incentives, bonuses, loans, and credits...
...A gap formed between social requirements and the achieved level of production, between effective demand and the amount of goods available to meet that demand" (Gorbachev, Pravda, February 26, 1986...
...The entire piece shows that Lenin was haunted to the end of his days by the argument with the Mensheviks over the prerequisites of a socialist revolution and finally admitted that the Bolsheviks had decided to "create the fundamental requisites of civilization in a different way from that of the West-European countries...
...The complexities of this struggle would take too long to unravel—it is enough to say that it took Stalin, who now had effective control of the party machine, only about a year to get rid of the leaders of the Opposition, who were expelled in late 1927...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc.—they're the author's responsibility...
...In fact, some of the questions and answers have changed so little that they too go back to the NEP...
...He can, to my mind, certainly make the present system work better, if only by such means as the campaign against drunkenness and absenteeism...
...BUT, AS I HAVE NOTED, the NEP also had a political side to it...
...I would not underestimate the cost to Soviet prestige and influence of this worldwide phenomenon...
...Gorbachev is making no such promises...
...In Khabarovsk in the summer of 1986, he said: "I would equate the word restructuring with the word revolution...
...Here was a system that had to put hundreds of thousands into the gulag in order for Khrushchev to liberate them...
...There is a second important reason for taking another look at the NEP...
...The Soviet intellectuals' new freedom looks good only against the backdrop of the cultural horrors of the past, not as it might be judged by any standards that Western intellectuals recognize as minimally acceptable...
...It is that we must consider not only what is changed but what is left unchanged...
...8 Ibid., p. 283...
...Politically, Lenin's decision in 1921 to suppress all opposition was bad enough in its consequences without going so far as what Stalin did with it...
...We will not know how to draw up a balance sheet of Gorbachev's "restructuring" for quite a while, and for that we will have to know what he has not changed as well as what he has...
...Here we shall have a fight on our hands in the immediate **The "proletariat" for which Lenin claimed to speak at this time, October 1921, was admittedly a fiction...
...33, pp...
...the whole system had to be reshaped—or as the current slogan has it, "restructured"— to advance to a higher scientific and technological level...
...The effect was to make official a policy of banning opposition groups or tendencies at least in principle, though it did little to inhibit the factional struggles later in the decade...
...Why have we been unable for so many years to eradicate from our life bureaucratic excess, social injustice, and abuses...
...In economic policy, which is the main arena of the present reform, Gorbachev's changes have been remarkably reminiscent of the NEP For example, a new law has given individuals and families the right to go into private business to manufacture consumer goods like toys and souvenirs and perform services like repairing cars and garden tools...
...That Lenin, for personal as well as political reasons, wanted to remove Stalin from that particular job, not yet considered to be predominant in the party hierarchy, is a noteworthy historical sidelight, but that the others did not take his advice all that seriously and preferred to keep Stalin in charge of the organization is surely equally or more significant...
...That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other aspects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc...
...This is all for the best and no one would begrudge the Soviet intellectuals their newly increased freedom of expression...
...Khrushchev's final fate was easily as significant as anything else that happened in his relatively short-lived period...
...Moreover, there was little or nothing for peasants and workers to buy, even if they produced a surplus, because large-scale and small-scale production had almost completely broken down...
...By 1926, such a struggle broke out between a faction headed by Bukharin and Stalin, who were then allies, and a socalled "United Opposition" that temporarily brought together Zinoviev and Trotsky...
...A key reason for the preeminence of the NEP period is that it is irrevocably linked with the name of Lenin...
...And he foresaw that putting the entire population into cooperatives would take "a whole historical epoch...
...It has even more reason to worry if its leaders finally realize that they cannot go on in the old way, that the rules of the game were changed while they were not looking...
...but when one thinks of the system that put them into a hell on earth, one is almost driven to despair...
...Brezhnev tore down Khrushchev...
...Improvisation was substituted for principle...
...the country had gone through three years of civil war and foreign intervention...
...When one things of their liberation, even if so many of them came out wasted and broken, one must rejoice...
...The Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union had become an ideology to be scorned, when not ignored...
...He also mentioned that the NEP would give way to the new, fully communist society "twenty years earlier or twenty years later," as if the time factor did not matter...
...Evaluating the "Reform" IN ANY CASE, THE LENINIST LEGACY Of "reform" through the NEP was far more complex and double-edged than it is usually made out to be...
...37 How Gorbachev & Co...
...With virtually no proletariat, it was the party, not the proletariat, or at best the party self-appointed as the representative of the proletariat, that was "the ruling class...
...The reason given by Gorbachev and his lieutenants is that the Soviet Union fell back disastrously during the Brezhnev era...
...These are people who "have difficulty in accepting the word `restructuring' and who even sometimes can pronounce it only with difficulty...
...Lenin frankly described the NEP as a "retreat," "respite," "breathing space...
...Ironically, the Mensheviks had to be suppressed because, with their preponderant influence in the trade unions, they were far more "proletarian" than the Bolsheviks...
...He once said that the NEP would have to last "for a long time, but, of course, as has been correctly noted, not forever...
...Since Lenin here equated cooperatives with socialist enterprises, there seems to be little more than a change of terminology, inasmuch as he eliminated the difference between them "if the land on which they are situated and the means of production belong to the state, i.e., the working class...
...As long as the new Soviet freedom is judged by the standard of Stalinism, it is going to leave much to be desired...
...If a German chancellor tried to claim credit as a humanitarian for not putting millions of people, including little children, into gas ovens, we would consider him to be a moral monster...
...it certainly goes further than anything that Lenin or Khrushchev ever thought of proposing...
...The traditional means at hand are basically persuasion, force, or a combination of both...
...Lenin had to exert considerable effort to prove the need for a new economic policy," as if Lenin's effort was similar to and justified his own...
...153)—and, he might have added, we hate them heart and soul...
...One of the odd things about the stir that the new intellectual permissiveness in the Soviet Union has aroused is that it implicitly assumes that anything better than hard-core Stalinism or soft-core Brezhnevism is a great advance in the history of human freedom...
...What is striking is that it has been so hard to carry them out before...
...In any case, we can now identify at least three types of resisters: • Those who are unprepared to adapt or are incapable of adapting to the new line...
...33, p. 61...
...By 1921, however, the civil war and foreign intervention had been overcome, and something still had to be done about War Communism...
...The Soviet party has long been accustomed to controling all the levers of power, large and small...
...what can be set off from above can also be reversed from above, as the Chinese case is now demonstrating—and not for the first time...
...How basic the changes will actually be is something for the future to decide...
...There are still people, he said, who "often see not what it [restructuring] in fact contains but [what is to them] all but a shaking of foundations, all but a renunciation of our principles...
...Why, even now, is the demand for radical changes getting bogged down in an inert stratum of timeservers with party membership cards...
...The whole Soviet system was not prepared for it...
...At the TwentySecond Party Congress in 1961, he pushed through changes in the statutes to provide that top officials could hold their jobs for a maximum of fifteen years and middle-ranking officials for only six years...
...This sort of thing may be called reforms within the system...
...opposition groups and parties continued to exist for some time inside and outside the main Bolshevik party...
...One of the prime aims of the new leadership is to decentralize the economy and to give more decision making to the managers of individual and group enterprises...
...You will have capitalists beside you, including foreign capitalists, concessionaires and leaseholders...
...This is not like any reform movement of the past...
...32 Three months later, in September 1986, 297 Gorbachev made more serious charges about the nature of the resistance...
...By 1929, Stalin was supreme...
...At the root of the crisis was the refusal of the peasantry to produce a surplus to feed the rest of the population...
...36 It should not be hard to understand why this kind of talk strikes some elements in the party as subversive of all they had been taught and had practiced for decades, why it should appear to them as "shaking the foundations" and "all but a renunciation of our principles...
...291 future, and the date of it cannot be fixed exactly" (emphasis added...
...For example, it was a time of cultural "thaw...
...As Gorbachev has repeatedly stressed, only a start has yet been made...
...33, p. 277...
...Its essence was to use capitalists and capitalist methods against capitalism, to use capitalism against itself...
...That is why every reform period goes back to the cult of Lenin against that of Stalin, not so much because Lenin was a permissive Communist and Stalin was not, but because the conditions that faced Lenin demanded a strategy of flexibility, compromise, concessions, indirection, partial retreat, and a breathing space...
...Take Gosplan [the State Planning Committee...
...290 lution was about to rescue the Soviet Union and put it back on the orthodox Marxist path, it could well have been spared the Stalinist furies...
...The crisis was so acute that "the revolution," as Lenin put it, "is on the brink of a precipice which all previous revolutions reached and recoiled from...
...In theory, much of Gorbachev's program was put forward as early as 1965, soon after Khrushchev's overthrow, by Alexei N. Kosygin, then the Chairman of the Council of Ministers...
...Most of the current attention to the NEP is almost wholly concentrated on its economic aspect...
...For this purpose, it is best to start with a brief view of Soviet history since the end of 1917...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...Or take a chance and send us your article...
...10 As for the still hotly debated question of how much Lenin's legacy was responsible for Stalin's ultimate power, my own belief is that there are two types of errors to avoid—that Lenin had everything to do with it and that he had nothing to do with it...
...Inasmuch as Gorbachev has revealed that the Central Committee meeting in January of this year had to be postponed three times, presumably because the leadership was not sure of its backing, there is reason to believe that the resistance extends into the higher, if not the highest, echelons of the party...
...This seems at present to be unlikely, or there would not be so much talk about the strength of the resistance...
...One of the peculiar aspects of the present Soviet scene is the anxiety of Soviet spokesmen to stress how great the internal resistance is...
...There is no evidence that the Soviet leadership is responding to mass unrest...
...Gorbachev and his supporters use none of these terms...
...5 The NEP period was foreseen by Lenin as quite long, sometimes very long, though on this point he was not altogether consistent...
...Gorbachev IF WE LOOK AT THE PRESENT PERIOD under Gorbachev from a historical perspective, we might well ask: How original or innovative have Gorbachev's economic policies been...
...And in February of this year, he told an audience of over 900 people, mainly foreigners, at the so-called International Peace Forum: "You have arrived in the Soviet Union when essentially revolutionary changes are under way...
...on voit," which he freely translated as "First engage in a serious battle and then see what happens...
...One may be described as ideological or cultural...
...New Soviet leaders invariably tear down the old ones—Stalin tore down Lenin's closest coworkers who opposed him, though not Lenin himself...
...109-116...
...Yet Pasternak was persecuted in that very same period...
...That history can be divided into five main periods, with a sixth now in progress...
...Still, Gorbachev and his close associates seem to have burned their bridges behind them...
...Hardly a visitor to the Soviet Union these days comes back without having been regaled with tales of the extent of such resistance throughout the huge bureaucracy...
...16 Pravda, January 28, 1987...
...old approaches pull us back, and inertia is still strong...
...If more machinery was turned out, it was a replica of the old machinery...
...Elsewhere Lenin had already found flaws in all the other contenders...
...The essential Gorbachev ideas for the Soviet economy are hardly new or original...
...Limits there almost certainly are and will be, but no doubt the present leadership considers them to be something to be worried about if and when they have been reached...
...Another indication of how serious the present leadership is in its determination—one might almost say its desperation—to pick itself up by its scientific and technological bootstraps is the amount of resistance the program is said to be encountering...
...This sort of party reform apparently created a sense of threat in the ranks and later served to turn the whole party against him from top to bottom...
...Let them...
...The international, military, economic, and social implications of falling so far behind must be equally obsessive...
...we agree with you...
...But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and from the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky it is not a trifle, or it is a trifle which can assume decisive significance" (January 4, 1923...
...they will enrich themselves, operating alongside of you...
...He denounced the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks as pure and simple counterrevolutionaries, mainly because they had dared to criticize War Communism prematurely and were likely to benefit from his late conversion...
...But, if we are to take seriously Gorbachev's analysis of what ails the Soviet system and what must be done to cure it, he needs to accomplish more—much, much more...
...One wonders how much glasnost there would be for anyone who wished to criticize Gorbachev...
...First, there was War Communism for about three years, from 1918 to 1920...
...If any one factor may be said to have shaken the leadership out of its accustomed self-satisfaction and inertia, it is this—the failure to meet the competition of what Gorbachev has 295 referred to as "the capitalism of the 1980s, the capitalism of the age of electronics and informatics [sicj, computers and robots...
...in fact, they were rather easily reversed and for lengthy periods...
...231-232...
...The two full reform periods of the NEP and Khrushchev lasted from beginning to end for less than ten years...
...Among these people were workers and peasants, he said, but his real targets were "executives and administrative personnel" as well as "some among our intelligentsia...
...The monolithic party was officially ordained in March 1921 at the same time as the NEPand both at the behest of Lenin...
...One can sympathize with party members and ordinary bureaucrats who have seen these campaigns and slogans come and go, knowing full well that what comes from the top can go from the top...
...This visionary article cannot be easily assimilated in the corpus of Lenin's previous writings...
...The present political line, he protested defensively, "is aimed at fully disclosing the potential and advantages of the socialist system," not at renouncing or betraying it...
...Threat to Party Bureaucrats THERE IS AN OBVIOUS REASON why the whole party is not overjoyed with his grandiose plans...
...71-72...
...By 1922, little or nothing remained of opposition in or out of the party...
Vol. 34 • July 1987 • No. 3
