Gorbachev Meets Up with History
Howe, Irving
I can think of at least two ways to approach history. There is the historian's way, usually celebrated as realism, and . . . the "unhistorical" way, claiming for itself, in the name of...
...And then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once been her face...
...They believe, with good reason, that whatever possibility there is for a gradual democratization of Soviet society is hindered by the Bolshevik legacy—its rationale for the party's monopoly of power, its arrogation of Vassily Grossman Does human nature undergo a true change in the cauldron of totalitarian violence...
...That these works have been legally published or are scheduled for legal publication in the Soviet Union is a heartening sign...
...But even this signifies that in the Soviet Union history remains the virtual monopoly of the party elite...
...As Marxists are wont to say, it's no accident that Bukharin is cited these days with increasing frequency in the economic journals published in China...
...Nevertheless, the fact remains that Bukharin caved in and Trotsky remained firm as critic and oppositionist...
...In other words: this approach to history would stress that what matters is not so much the fairly stringent limits within which Gorbachev proposes to confine glasnost and perestroika (openness and restructuring...
...It insists upon maintaining a sober view of Soviet (or any other) political power...
...These shrewd people continue to repudiate democratic parliamentarism...
...As [the Bolsheviks] see matters now, the road to the non-Statist social order no longer lies in the progressive atrophy of the functions and institutions that have been forged by the bourgeois State, as they said they saw things in 1917 [e.g., Lenin's "State and Revolution...
...And if so, how about publishing Solzhenitsyn's book on the Gulag...
...In short, once you let a little truth in, just a little, where are you going to call a halt...
...That grave difficulties would have attended Bukharin's proposals if they had been enacted is clear...
...What, however, can Trotsky offer to serious young people in the Soviet Union as they turn back to the past...
...Names long erased from official Soviet history—Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin—were mentioned by Gorbachev, though in a cramped and nervous manner...
...but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there): "Can you describe this...
...This yearning was suppressed but it continued to exist...
...He spoke for efforts to conciliate the countryside through permitting private allotments of land and a more flexible pricing mechanism, as well as arguing (but this Trotsky did too) against forced collectivization of agriculture—a set of policies that would have avoided the loss of the millions of lives destroyed by Stalin's forced collectivization and might also have ended or eased the chronic failures of Soviet agriculture...
...A true test would be not just Gorbachev's pronouncements, welcome as some of them are, but the ability of others within the party leadership (say, Boris Yeltsin) and those outside the party to argue with him in legal print, whether from "left" or "right" or whatever...
...Since Gorbachev's speech, word has come—it's welcome, of course—that Bukharin has been "rehabilitated...
...Trotsky, he said, was "an excessively self-assured politician who always vacillated and cheated...
...And the party...
...Yet even such dissidents have reason to be interested in the 1920s, as, of course, do those who regard themselves as a reformist strand within or near the Bolshevik tradition...
...Bukharin was praised by Gorbachev for 160 • DISSENT GLASNOST WATCH having joined Stalin to fight Trotskyism— which he certainly did—but about Bukharin's subsequent fate at the hands of Stalin there was no word...
...Who knows...
...As so often in the past, deep into the Tsarist years, it is Russian literature that bears the burden and splendidly enacts the responsibility of criticism and truth...
...Epigraph to the poem Requiem SPRING • 1988 • 161 the right to speak in the name of the working class, the people, the future of humanity...
...A frame-up too...
...and certainly not his rigid adherence to the ideology of Leninism...
...Some Soviet dissidents have rejected the Leninist heritage entirely, seeing it as the authoritarian foundation for the Stalin dictatorship...
...But what might excite the imagination of some young Russians is the intransigence with which Trotsky fought against Stalinist lies and terror, the example of a historical figure who, right or wrong, stood fast in behalf of his ideas...
...the vast partisan movement that flared up in dozens of countries enslaved by Hitler...
...Nothing of the sort, alas, can be said about Bukharin...
...In effect, Bukharin was advocating a sort of mixed economy along the lines of the NEP (New Economic Policy) that had been introduced under Lenin following the economic disasters of "War Communism...
...Zhivago), Vassily Grossman (Life and Fate), and Anatoly Rybakov (The Children of the Arbat...
...but for the Soviet "political class" trying to orient itself to complex new developments and the intelligentsia trying to get a grip on the country's past, there seems obvious reason for being fascinated by the politics of the 1920s, the last time there was a semblance of democracy within the Bolshevik party, if not Soviet society...
...If and when democracy comes to the Soviet Union at some point in the future, belated justice may yet be done for those who spoke the truth...
...But what matters now is that insofar as Gorbachev may need a model from within the Bolshevik tradition—and in societies still pledged, if only ritualistically, to ideology, such models are needed—it is in Bukharin's thought that he can most readily find it...
...And if all three of these trials were frame-ups, what about the trial of the Mensheviks in 1931, which Trotsky at first thought was genuine but then later had the grace to admit he was wrong about...
...Still, it's deeply interesting that in a country where for decades history has served as a subsection of propaganda, many people should express a strong interest in the past...
...From the novel Life and Fate Anna Alchmatova 1 April 1957, Leningrad L the fearful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad...
...In reality Bukharin represents a serious embarrassment for the Gorbachev leadership since many of its current socioeconomic proposals seem, on the face of it, reminiscent of those advanced by Bukharin's "Right Opposition" in the late 1920s...
...In the middle and late 1920s, Bukharin proposed a slower pace of industrialization than was advocated by most of the other Bolshevik leaders, which would have meant a milder exploitation of the workers and peasants...
...Not much of his program of the 1920s has a contemporary bearing: not his theory of "permanent revolution," which has, I think, been damaged by subsequent events in the Third World...
...Perhaps someday, surely not tomorrow, young Russians intent upon a fearless inquiry into the past may discover that there were other voices, non- and antiBolshevik—those, for example, of Bertrand Russell abroad and the left Menshevik Julian Martov at home—which immediately after the October Revolution predicted that the Bolsheviks' insistence upon concentrating all power in their own hands, and systematically destroying any legal opposition, would become the foundation for a new tyranny...
...Now it appears that their way to a social order that would be free from the State lies in the hypertrophy—the excessive development—of these functions and in the resurrection, under an altered aspect, of most State institutions typical of the bourgeois era...
...He labeled some of Stalin's acts as "crimes," a step toward recognizing the simple truth, though he was far from precise about the scope of those crimes...
...The situation regarding Bukharin is stranger still...
...It has not done away with social hierarchy in production...
...The most significant developments within the Soviet Union seem to be in the sphere of culture...
...Does man lose his innate yearning for freedom...
...There is the historian's way, usually celebrated as realism, and . . . the "unhistorical" way, claiming for itself, in the name of an undogmatic moralism, nothing less than truth...
...One day somebody "identified" me...
...Not in a one-party dictatorship where, even when a portion of truth is meted out, the state retains control of both its quantity and its composition...
...Man's innate yearning for freedom can be suppressed but never destroyed...
...In his four-hour speech on the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, Gorbachev made an effort of sorts to deal with the Soviet past...
...When it becomes possible for Soviet citizens to read—I choose names almost at random—Russell and Martov, Arthur Koestler and Ignazio Silone, Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest—then we will know that a great step, perhaps the great step, has been taken...
...She had, of course, never heard of me...
...Now I don't imagine there are millions of Soviet citizens clamoring for the truth about Trotsky or Bukharin...
...If they too were framed (as of course they were), what, in the new Soviet orthodoxy, is the role ascribed to Stalin...
...And I said: "Yes, I can...
...It is the party that decides who, in the past or present, is a "person" and who a "nonperson...
...If human nature does change, then the eternal and world-wide triumph of the dictatorial State is assured...
...The ukases of the Communist bureaucracy bending the past a Julian Marlow The Soviet State has not established in any instance electiveness and recall of public officials...
...An honest scrutiny of the past would, you might suppose, require that this gross contradiction be accounted for...
...Endless questions follow: If Bukharin is "rehabilitated," that is, declared not guilty of the charges made at the third Moscow trial, what of the other trials...
...But they no longer repudiate, at the same time, those instruments of State power to which parliamentariansim is a counterweight within bourgeois society: bureaucracy, police, a permanent army with commanding cadres that are independent of the soldiers, etc...
...Man's fate may make him a slave, but his nature remains unchanged...
...Gorbachev also dealt with Soviet politics in the 1920s, the years when there could still be open factional disputes among the Bolshevik leaders, and before Stalin brought them to an end through his reign of terror...
...It has not suppressed the professional police...
...The great Rising in the Warsaw ghetto, the uprisings in Treblinka and Sobibor...
...So even if Gorbachev were correct in his description of Trotsky, it is still very far from the once-official slander that millions of the party faithful repeated throughout the world...
...The fate of both man and the totalitarian State depends on the answer to this question...
...On the contrary, the Soviet State shows a tendency in the opposite direction...
...Discounting the realpolitik limitations that are said to confine Gorbachev's actions, the "unhistorical" approach observes that in some respects Gorbachev has been less bold in his revelations than Khrushchev was thirty years ago...
...It shows a tendency toward intensified centralism of the State, a tendency toward the utmost possible strengthening of the principles of hierarchy and compulsion...
...To the secret police...
...if his yearning for freedom remains constant, then the totalitarian State is doomed...
...Democratization...
...And the party leadership has shrewdly judged that, from its point of view, a loosening of literary censorship entails fewer risks than a relaxation of political controls...
...the riots at this time in Poland, the number of factories that went on strike and the student protests that broke out in many cities against the suppression of freedom of thought...
...At present Bukharin would seem to offer more than Trotsky to young people in the Soviet Union who are groping for a fresh start...
...Gorbachev and his colleagues apparently recognize how important for them is the support of the intelligentsia...
...And yet . . . how meager the news and the revelations from Moscow must still seem when measured by the "unhistorical" standard of simple truth and simple freedom...
...It is only fair to add that Trotsky spent his later years in exile, not immediately subject, as were Bukharin and other Bolshevik leaders, to the ministrations of Stalin's secret police...
...The historian's way prompts one to say that Mikhail Gorbachev's policies in the Soviet Union could set into motion a historical process not only significant in its own right but also raising a hope for unforeseen positive consequences...
...But no...
...q SPRING • 1988 . 163...
...Excessively selfassured politicians don't characteristically, let alone "always," vacillate—but let that go...
...Clearly, the historian's way is essential, but perhaps there's also something to be said for the "unhistorical...
...It shows a tendency toward the development of a more specialized apparatus of repression than before...
...the uprisings in Berlin in 1953, in Hungary in 1956, and in the labor-camps of Siberia and the Far East after Stalin's death...
...It holds fast to actuality and truth, as it sees them, no matter what the political consequences...
...all these bear witness to the indestructibility of man's yearning for freedom...
...What matters is that there may now be opportunities for as-yet-unformed trends and movements toward democracy and popular expression going beyond, or in opposition to, the one-party dictatorship that Gorbachev seeks to preserve...
...Exactly how Trotsky "cheated" Gorbachev failed to mention, but far more important is the fact that his characterization deviated radically from what had until recently been the official Soviet line: that Trotsky was "an enemy of the people," an "accomplice of fascism," as witness the Moscow show trials of 1937...
...Beside me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips...
...So speaks an "unhistorical" mind, socialist variety...
...Zinoviev and Kamenev (trial one), Radek and Pyatakov (trial two)— are they "persons" or "non-persons...
...From his pamphlet The State and Socialist Revolution, 1921 162 • DISSENT GLASNOST WATCH GLASNOST WATCH little this way, a little that way can only appear feeble only so long as independent historians and writers—indeed, all citizens in the Soviet Union—remain unable to express freely and publicly their own judgments...
...A Soviet citizen who wants to know what it was like to live through Stalin's terror will turn, not to any politician, but to the novels of Boris Pasternak (Dr...
Vol. 35 • April 1988 • No. 2
