Perestroika
Howe, Irving
Iremendously important changes are taking place in the world today, so rapidly it often seems impossible to keep track. The great powers are starting to back away from their military...
...Change comes...
...it only suppresses...
...A little bit of freedom can be a dangerous, that is, a wonderful thing...
...What is crucial, absolutely crucial, is that in a society of blood and muteness there has begun to appear ferment, speech, discussion...
...The Soviet Union has started to pull its troops out of Afghanistan and has signaled the Sandinistas that it wants to limit its involvement in Nicaragua...
...Still more remarkable are the changes within the Soviet Union itself...
...The whole perestroika venture might even collapse—too late, or too little too late...
...History, despite the grim forebodings of the 1950s, does not stand still...
...East European dissidents have been burned too often...
...We want freedom for our political friends, like the young people in Moscow now forming independent political groups apart from or in opposition to the Communist party...
...but real...
...If the Soviet regime is in turmoil, the Communist parties are in decay...
...The great powers are starting to back away from their military interventions, not because they have concluded that lions should lie down with lambs but because they are discovering that military interventions just don't work in the twentieth century...
...There are skeptics...
...But right now what's needed is openness, responsiveness, receptivity to surprise...
...Let the theories rest a while, and later we can see whether they still hold...
...Limited, yes...
...If the glasnost policy continues, there will surely be major changes not only in Soviet political life but its culture as well...
...Once forbidden topics, like the possible connection between Leninist doctrine and Stalinist deed, are now treated— gingerly, so far—in Soviet periodicals...
...What a remarkable difference from the way Europe looked only a few decades ago...
...Some anti-Stalinist leftists, like some ideological conservatives, may be relucFALL • 1988 • 397 Comments and Opinions tant to give up or modify their theories about the nature of Communism...
...that the current loosening up is still far from genuine democracy...
...It begins to seem that the era of bipolar domination in the world may be approaching an end...
...that strong elements in the party-state bureaucracy will do their best to thwart perestroika—all true...
...It's only natural—none of us is exempt from this inclination—to cling to one's "positions" even as events may be complicating or undermining them...
...So there is reason to look forward to the 1990s as a time of at least moderate progress in the "advanced" countries, a time when there will be fresh social and intellectual energies in both Eastern and, by ricochet, Western Europe...
...It's as if a people is emerging from a dungeon, blinking in the light...
...We should be sufficiently principled democrats—I think we are—to welcome every authentic and decent Russian voice now starting to declare itself, whether or not we agree with it...
...Nor is there much difficulty in foreseeing major problems for the Gorbachev regime: • The limited rights granted under glasnost must in time lead to demands for a genuine pluralism, that is, a multi-party system with a bill of rights, which a major portion of the Communist bureaucracy will bitterly oppose...
...that Gorbachev is not a liberal or a democrat...
...It's rather good to be alive...
...Perhaps the "positions" will finally be vindicated, at least in part...
...Still, to make such estimates into the sole or even dominant response to the events in the Soviet Union seems to me a failure of imagination...
...Unless the clamps are reinstated, there will reappear strands of Russian literature and thought not always to our taste, for example, the tradition of mysticism traditionally strong in Russia...
...And each day brings fresh reports of initiatives by independent political groups in major Russian cities, sometimes tolerated and sometimes suppressed—though even when suppressed, in ways that seem mild if compared to the past...
...Meanwhile, on a world scale, the entire Communist movement has entered a deep, perhaps final crisis...
...we also want freedom for those with whom we will disagree...
...That hope for a deepening democratization is a major reason for responding with excitement to what is now happening in the Soviet Union...
...That power in the Soviet Union remains in the hands of a one-party dictatorship...
...We may anticipate that in time the dynamic of events will move beyond what Gorbachev and his allies want...
...For it appears that totalitarianism never quite destroys anything in the country it holds down...
...All the talk about "the wave of the future" and "captive minds" now seems obsolete...
...Such changes can be unsettling, especially to people with large investments in theories: totalitarianism, bureaucratic collectivism, state capitalism, what you will...
...q COMING IN DISSENT • David Brody on Unions in America • Peter Mandler on the "Double Life" in Academia • Todd Gitlin on Post-Modernism • Joanne Barkan on Marketing Children's Literature 398 • DISSENT...
...The United States, despite Reagan's huffing and Elliot Abrams's responsive puffing, is shying away from intervention in Nicaragua...
...Each day brings fresh reports of articles in Soviet papers revealing further facts about the horrors of Stalinism...
...Old Bolsheviks slaughtered by Stalin are "rehabilitated...
...The economic reforms of perestroika must necessarily proceed more slowly than the political reforms of glasnost, and this may well create disillusionment within and evoke resistance from both the political-managerial bureaucracy and the working class...
...The Gorbachev leadership, and probably a significant portion of the population, will regard these as threats to the unity of the state...
...National and ethnic communities in the Soviet Union that have been mistreated are starting to speak out, with the Armenians and Estonians in the lead...
...That's not so terrible, just as long as they recognize that extraordinary changes, whatever their eventual significance, are occurring in the Soviet Union...
...that we don't know how long Gorbachev will stay in power...
...The famous "national question" will plague Gorbachev, as it has plagued his predecessors and will plague his successors...
Vol. 35 • September 1988 • No. 4
