Khrushchev and Gorbachev: A Contrast

...A further structural difficulty was the enormous stubbornness of the opposition Khrushchev had to cope with, one he could not ultimately overcome...

...While his leadership is thriving on the Brezhnevite principle of legitimation, it is also parasitic on the Khrushchev period in another respect...

...All signs indicate that Gorbachev's team intends to remain within the apparently safe walls of this establishment...

...Stalin had become an independent, destructive, and at the same time cementing historical force, a force from which the country suffered immensely but on which its political cohesion rested...

...The latter would either result in the restoration of some type of Brezhnevism or trigger a Soviet "cultural revolution," which has never been seen in Soviet history...

...and if it sends fewer children into the world to replace the older generations than is demanded by "the greatness of the fatherland...

...Can Gorbachev be more successful than Khrushchev in implementing, not just promising, lasting changes and outlive Khrushchev's term in office...

...5. Finally, it is incumbent on the Young Turks to invent and introduce new social structures that could keep the results of the modernizing momentum alive in institutionalized channels...

...Rather, he passed the burdensome legacy of the crisis of the empire on to his heirs...

...Accordingly, Gorbachev now has economic problems precisely because, although traditionalistnationalist legitimation is vigorously alive, an ailing industrial sector cannot live up to its duties, which would be to accommodate the superpower's strategies for expansion and at the same time satisfy at least some of the needs for consumer goods...

...Unfortunately, it is a long tradition in Russian history to hail the man on the summit without making the effort to share in his power...

...Clearly, the Soviet leaders' chief precedent in devising a new attitude toward the intellectuals is Kadarist Hungary in its "liberalizing" phase...

...In the Soviet media this situation is presented as resulting not from political obsolescence but from technological backwardness...

...There is no public recognition for private acts of greed and self-interest, not even in terms of a twisted philosophy of history...

...An active popular support would inevitably contain the demands for rights and pluralism, which would be as unacceptable for Gorbachev as for his adversaries in the apparatus...

...He never intended to abandon the self-proclaimed autochthonous character of the "socialist world market...

...He did not aim at reshuffling but remained content with merely "reeducating" his own Stalinist apparatus...

...Khrushchev showed his mettle when he came up with two apparently plausible answers to the crisis, one to cater to the party—collective leadership—and the other to address the country at large: substantive rationality...

...Khrushchev had directly inherited the thesis from Stalin that there were two separate and competitive world systems...

...It is an inhuman paradox of politics that self-justification for heinous crimes on a mass scale can be attempted: these crimes ostensibly had been committed "on behalf of the commonweal...

...These are directly political and sociological insofar as Brezhnev's gerontocracy blocked the career ambitions and chances of a whole new generation of younger functionaries...

...In the wake of Stalin's death in March 1953, symptoms of East European unrest appeared, reaching their first culmination in the June uprising in Berlin...

...The modi operandi of the two periods of a "drive for change" are widely different...

...If Soviet socialism does not function adequately to its "substance," its malfunction is due solely to the tyrant's personal irrationality, to his caprices, and to the artificially created chasm between science and political leadership...

...If he, one of Stalin's closest lieutenants, could become the main de-Stalinizer, there was no reason for others not to follow his example, Khrushchev obviously contended...

...It is no compliment to Soviet society when we predict that it will supply popular support for Gorbachev which is unambiguous, which therefore paralyzes his conservative enemies to a degree, but which is also passive...

...At any rate, in a totalitarian society, leaders could easily delude themselves that public opinion did not exist...

...We have seen why Gorbachev's conservative opponents are a collective lame duck almost incapable of resistance...

...Substantive rationality" was a heavily ideological blueprint designed by a leadership that subscribed to Stalinist tenets while fighting Stalin's shadow...

...Socialism, Khrushchev contended, is a type of regime superior to all others in its very substance— potentially superior, that is...

...Khrushchev failed spectacularly in this enterprise...

...For the purposes of copying Western economic and technological arrangements experts will do...

...In addition, the crisis is directly moral because the nationwide plague of corruption raised a dual and seriously threatening dilemma for the ruling apparatus...

...The self-acceleration has three different, disparate causes...

...Gorbachev, in turn, has inherited no crisis of legitimation...

...While himself breaking powerful, seemingly eternal and inviolable Soviet taboos, Khrushchev continued to treat the intellectuals as learned servants who could be used for limited assignments and sent packing when they became importunate...

...Five conditions have to be met for Gorbachev's rule to comprise more than a mere episode: 1. The New Team has to find Western financial support in order to import sophisticated technology...

...The present Soviet demographic crisis has many facets...

...he sought only to run the latter efficiently and "scientifically...

...With a slowed-down population growth it is impossible to maintain a huge army and navy while supplying an adequate young work force for industry...

...10 • DISSENT...

...The third reason for the self-acceleration is that Gorbachev has been selecting and finding allies with great tactical skill from the start...

...2. It has to defeat its conservative enemies in the state and party apparatus without major social upheavals...

...Khrushchev had perforce to be a schemer and a master gambler who pulled off his liberating, mostly bloodless coups in a deliberately theatrical manner...

...6i Substantive rationality" and "modernization," Khrushchev's and Gorbachev's respective programs, have, despite certain shared features, widely different premises as well as divergent social implications...

...Without the support or even the participation of "society," these gains stood or fell with the Great Improviser himself...

...The Soviet populace, after all, is determined to take seriously the propaganda statements to the effect that it resides in the leading nation of the world, and it expects to see this reflected in the household budget...

...He too keeps squaring the circle, reducing what is a major social and political dilemma to the level of a mere technical problem...

...Khrushchev's failed attempt at reform grew out of a legitimation crisis and the crisis of the empire...

...Therefore, he has been moving since he first took power to replace them en masse...

...Khrushchev's political vocabulary remained to the end homogeneously "Leninist"-ideological...

...In such an atmosphere, the self-appointed reformer could not count on any support from "society," which for decades had been lying prostrate at the feet of the charismatic tyrant...

...These structural rigidities predestined that Khrushchev's incursion into the territory of apparatchiks would be an isolated bridgehead, which could be and eventually was eliminated...

...The latter term, "substantive rationality," coined by observers, is not one that Khrushchev, who was not particularly erudite, ever used...

...Gorbachev's "drive for change," an extremely incomplete story as yet, has been emerging out of an economic crisis, a crisis of the ruling stratum with wide sociological implications, as well as a demographic crisis that has equally far-reaching implications for the regime's social policy...

...Nationalist-traditionalist legitimation, with its pride and pathos, is seriously interfered with if the nation is not healthy enough...

...The main 6 • DISSENT political battlefields were Poland and Hungary, whose upheavals and revolutions were crucial in shaping the political physiognomy of Khrushchev's short-lived regime of reform...

...Lastly, the Slavic component of the empire is declining in numbers in the face of a Moslem contingent experiencing a population explosion...

...The more difficult task is that of breaking, and in the same gesture preserving, taboos...

...The first is slow population growth, which is probably caused both by recurring demographic catastrophes in Soviet history and by the present low standards of urban living, in particular housing conditions...

...if it cannot control its self-imposed plagues (the spread of WINTER • 1988 • 7 diseases whose prevention is well within the reach of modern science in the West...

...The interests of the "Soviet way of life" —those of a strong, conservative, and oppressive authority, not reducible to mere ideological prejudices, which Gorbachev wants to update but not to fundamentally alter—will decide to what extent the New Team is going to copy Western principles of economic organization...

...Economic crises or malfunctions in the Soviet regime do not have "objective" indicators...

...Khrushchev, too, had of course inherited an economic crisis from Stalin...

...But who better to lend support to the patriotic and authoritarian, yet rationalized and efficient "Soviet way of life" than the intellectual ideologue who maintains, sometimes ingenuously, the deceptive facade of intellectual autonomy, and who anyhow does not harbor excessively democratic predilections himself...

...Second, this bureaucratic apparatus still possessed an enormous amount of historical selfconfidence...

...For modernization to succeed, the whole fossilized body of Marxism-Leninism should be buried, preferably publicly...

...It has a straightforward meaning, well known since Max Weber's anatomy of rationality...

...In this respect, Gorbachev is truly an heir to the worst illusion of the Khrushchev era...

...The second reason for a conspicuous lack of resistance is the moral disarray among the Brezhnevites...

...Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the Soviet ruling apparatus had indeed "returned to Lenin" at least in one respect...

...for them defeat meant the execution cell...

...Under Brezhnev, the conservative and nationalist tradition—the tradition of a long Soviet history that had become national history in the war and thus had embraced important elements of traditional Russian nationalism—became the principle of the regime's legitimacy...

...They change their meaning and forms of manifestation with the changing malfunctions and strategic priorities of the political structure...

...3. The New Team must enjoy unambiguous but passive popular support in order to implement its strategy...

...Since neither of these needs can be satisfied with zero growth, economic crisis now becomes manifest in an unconcealed form...

...By contrast, corruption, the collective vice of the Brezhnevites, could not be publicly excused...

...This, his strength, was also the weakness of his position...

...There is irony in this, since if there is a single major lesson to be derived from the economic reforms in Eastern Europe—reforms that have been suspended or suppressed in most countries and lastingly experimented with in others—it is the impossibility of separating economic modernization from social change...

...But if either the army generals or the proverbial "masses" were to draw conclusions from the iconoclasms at the top that are incompatible with the Soviet system as it now stands, what would happen...

...However, Gorbachev has inherited from Brezhnev the onerous legacy of an economic crisis, which became evident in the almost zero-growth rate of Soviet industry for the first time in fifty years...

...Furthermore, his own Stalinist training made Khrushchev insensitive towards such subtle and complex sociological terms as "public opinion" and the intellectuals' role in influencing public 8 • DISSENT opinion...

...The political implications of the demographic crisis are obvious...

...The new social actor and, in all probability, the main beneficiary of "modernization" is the patriotic and efficient, ideologically neutral, and flexible functionary, who does not deviate from the interests of the ruling elite either in the matter of corruption or through excessive social pluralism, who will be permitted to travel to the West to buy modern gadgets, who will be capable and prepared to conduct civilized conversations with businessmen in their own languages, and who can, no less than his predecessors, draw the line beyond which pressure from below is not permitted...

...When this charismatic tyrant died, neither the country nor Stalin's own loyal apparatus seemed prepared to tolerate the emergence of a new charismatic tyrant...

...First, Gorbachev's opponents no longer fear for their lives as did Khrushchev's...

...It implies the relative independence of the apparatchik from the apparatus through illegally accumulated private wealth, as well as the gradual emergence of a class from the ruling elite...

...Nor does he entertain illusions about "reeducating" them...

...Here, too, Khrushchev produced a number of elastic political formulas, but did not find even a temporary answer...

...One condition that clearly cannot be satisfied within Gorbachev's agenda is the creation of institutional frameworks capable of perpetuating the modernizing momentum if it can be set in motion...

...Ironically, the drastic change of personnel took place under Brezhnev, and for different reasons...

...Gorbachev might just capitalize on this Russian tradition...

...In the new generation of apparatchiks who had been living amidst an almost total disintegration of Soviet Marxism and the Brezhnevites' quasi-public indifference to their own official doctrine for two decades, there are no internalized ideological taboos...

...If the remaining nuclei of the Brezhnevite apparatus will not act in concert with his plans within a year or two, their only remaining move would be a military coup against Gorbachev, an extremely unlikely possibility...

...It is precisely this self-accelerating pace of the new line that creates the as-yet-undeserved aura of radicalism and thoroughgoing change around Gorbachev...

...His inherent ideological conservatism had two seriously negative consequences...

...and it is well known what price he paid for his unexpected optimism...

...What is more, Gorbachev has to go further than Khrushchev...

...Thus Khrushchev had economic dilemmas precisely because the principle of legitimation no longer functioned in the old way...

...Rapid though Soviet postwar industrial reconstruction was, neither the very modest needs of the populace nor the far larger needs of the army could be satisfied by Soviet industry in the 1950s...

...For "modernization" to break through, politics cannot remain a mere maidservant of technology...

...With Stalin dead, it was necessary for Khrushchev to assuage a dissatisfied populace in order to be able to introduce new principles of legitimation...

...In this sense, time is on Gorbachev's side, just as it worked against Khrushchev...

...The gradual unfolding of the crisis of the empire, accelerated by the fears and anxieties of the Soviet leaders themselves, had a tremendous impact on the Soviet political drama at home...

...The daily caloric intake of the populace at the time of Stalin's death hardly surpassed their intake at the time of the war, due to a chronically stagnant and ill-performing agriculture...

...once, furthermore, science is given its fair share in policy-making (a change that never eventuated, largely because of Khrushchev's own arbitrariness), then socialism will show its hidden, superlative substance, the United States will be overtaken in terms of per capita production by 1980, and communism will be built...

...Gorbachev's strategy of modernization has an implicit axiom that the Young Turks are in no particular hurry to spell out: Western economic performance and technology is the criterion of what is modern...

...In the USSR alone among the industrially developed countries, we find a decreasing life expectancy, probably a conjoint result of massive alcoholism and the inadequate system of health care...

...Here corruption means more than bribing and bribe-taking...

...While their corporative and WINTER • 1988 • 9 organizational autonomy continues to remain nil, intellectuals can individually join the apparatus in increasing numbers, all the while retaining a collective self-delusion regarding their social role as autonomous intellectuals...

...More political in nature are the symptoms of the crisis of the ruling stratum...

...Brezhnev's twenty-year-long rule, against which the Young Turks now turn with the typical ingratitude of ambitious political newcomers, had created a new and lasting formula of legitimation...

...Its philosophy of history encouraged it to justify mass murder as "historical necessity," as the "necessary price paid for progress...

...Gorbachev's chances are better than Khrushchev's were as far as the first three of these preconditions are concerned...

...They now heeded the advice given by the dying Lenin to Rykov, the advice so curtly dismissed by Stalin, "No blood should flow between you...

...By contrast, Gorbachev's offensive has been an unbroken triumphal march almost without resistance...

...But economics in the USSR, a political society, is a function of the political structure...

...The former was to become the accepted political mechanism of the nomenklatura under Brezhnev only...

...Once a realistic body of strong, self-appointed but collectively acting politicians is at the helm (Khrushchev never abandoned an unmistakably authoritarian model...

...As a result, Gorbachev cannot use the Brezhnevite apparatchiks with their fossilized biases, ingrained habits of corruption, and baffling inefficiency...

...Gorbachev is, like Khrushchev, détenteoriented — if it is understood that détente does not require renouncing expansionism, but instead demands different, less overtly confrontational methods...

...Khrushchev appeared on the scene as a reformer after decades of mass terror, when even doubt was criminalized...

...Once the Reagan period is over, or perhaps even in the last phase of Reagan's paralyzed presidency, Gorbachev may achieve his targets, while Khrushchev had to struggle in vain against the double burden of still vigorous cold war biases and the Western perception, which was correct, of his occasional expansionist and menacing escapades...

...His extremely brutal handling of the Pasternak affair now provides a unique opportunity for Gorbachev to exercise his tact and generosity...

...Improvising reforms in one series of changes after another proved insufficient for the consolidation of what had been gained though the repeatedly brilliant performances of this master gambler...

...The strategy of "modernization" furthermore prescribes a mode of relating to the intelligentsia that is different from Khrushchev's...

...A very simple fact lay at the root of the legitimation crisis that Khrushchev inherited...

...Since the beginning of Gorbachev's rule the political dimension has been treated as ancilla technologiae (the maidservant of technology...

...When he broke the charismatic taboo and questioned Stalin's authority, he let the genie of an irreverent Enlightenment out of the bottle...

...4. It must destroy taboos of a half-century's standing but must also preserve the party's political prerogatives...

...The second trend threatens the credibility of one of the main ideological claims of the ruling elite: the claim that its strategic goal is a "classless society" radically different from the Western pattern...

...Finally, without a strong and growing Slav and above all Russian component, the home empire (that is, the USSR without East Europe) is in jeopardy...

...This shared fantasy of the intellectuals about their function and about the condition of their inclusion in the regime lends credibility to the modernizing pretenses of the bureaucracy...

...The first trend runs counter to the corporative interests of the nomenklatura, whose discipline and unity of will would be undermined if it were increasingly composed of private proprietors...

...It is in their respective, and widely different, stories of birth and emergence that we find the key to understanding the new courses of Khrushchev and Gorbachev...

...It is precisely the old Khrushchevite intelligentsia, which had survived the Brezhnev period either at the price of humiliating compromises or by living beyond the pale of official tolerance, that now constitutes the spearhead of Gorbachev's incursion into the phalanx of the apparatus...

...First, Stalin's apparatus could not but think in Stalinist terms...

...The cause of this dogged resistance was twofold...

...In their perception, there is one world technologically with two sharply different ways of life, Western and Soviet...