The Soviet Union
Walzer, Michael & Howe, Irving
othing in our past thinking, or in anyone else's, prepared us for the remarkable turn of events in the Soviet Union. So much the worse for theory, so much the better for life! The word...
...Shifting to a multiparty system would reach the crux of democracy, and we had always said that such a shift would form the decisive barrier for the Soviet leadership...
...The Soviet Union is even harder to understand...
...Ordinary people are not yet politically engaged, but they can nonetheless be powerful in their resistance—as when they forced the Soviet government to end its January call-up of reserves...
...After forty years of Stalinist rule, it is entirely wonderful—and what comes next no one knows...
...Recalled with hatred by aging victims of the Stalinist terror, disdained by young people cold to all ideologies and sometimes all politics, suspected by unnumbered ordinary people, held in contempt by intellectuals, the party suffers from a visible crisis of confidence...
...In the peripheral republics of the "Union," by contrast, popular movements of considerable strength have sprung up, virtually replacing both the party and the state...
...Historic...
...What is happening in Central and Eastern Europe, however, looks more like a national democratic revolution, the fulfillment at last—in 1990...
...The Kerensky of our time...
...Or will he be remembered in his own name, without analogies: Gorbachev, the last known chairman of the CPSU, miraculously reincarnate as Russia's first president...
...Though this is still very much a revolution from above, it is driven by and at least partially responsive to discontent below...
...If not sufficient, such a move will surely be a necessary condition for solving the grave problems facing the Soviet Union...
...Meanwhile, the intelligentsia is in ferment, and we can recognize in its midst many people like ourselves, friends and (would they welcome the title...
...Rather, it must be redefined in terms of the new circumstances and aspirations...
...Were Russia to follow the lead of the republics, the country as a whole might well be engulfed in civil war...
...q Some Candid Admissions It is the end of the road for the communist system as we have known it: the central plan, the authoritarian state, the single-party system, the subjugated civil society...
...For liberals and socialists, committed in principle to democracy, the response to the remarkable changes announced in the Soviet Union ought to be clear...
...Deprived of any sure knowledge of the dialectic, our fingers are crossed...
...They have done somewhat better since, at least in agitation and propaganda, generating a near panic among Soviet Jews...
...It is easy to talk about "the democratic revolution" as if that were a well-anticipated and readily understood phenomenon, fitting nicely into our political chronologies (some would even say, eschatologies...
...At the end of the twentieth century, we find ourselves unexpectedly confronting the promises and problems of the nineteenth: nations in revolt, professors drafting constitutions, new parliamentary regimes in the making, the market being tested...
...And meanwhile we look forward to the formation, or reformation, of the Social Democratic party of the Soviet Union...
...comrades, whom we would help if we possibly could...
...On to the wars," cried he, while joining a mock battle in California...
...And the party's future...
...it legitimizes the beginnings—so far, only the beginnings— of political pluralism in the Soviet Union...
...How should we think of him...
...The actual changes will no doubt face enormous difficulties...
...A shameful response...
...Its power is also threatened, more immediately, by internal disintegration, both moral and intellectual...
...So much that was ugly has been recognized for what it was and repudiated...
...The decision by the Communist party's Central Committee to scrap Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution (the article guaranteeing the party a "legal" monopoly of power) is of revolutionary significance...
...If and when there are some modest economic successes, if and when the tendencies toward nationalist dispersion can be checked, we may expect sharpening differences within the Gorbachev ranks...
...The sclerotic but still imposing party machine, reaching into every locality and every socioeconomic enterprise, is threatened not only by the prospect of free elections...
...The new freedom, if it hasn't yet produced a coherent politics, has opened up space for opposition newspapers and journals, civic and religious associations, trade union organizing, sharp and exhilarating public debate—the re-creation of civil society...
...But the "long dark night" is definitively over...
...they lack any program except an implausible yearning to return to Brezhnevite stability, that is, a paralyzing stagnation...
...Not every morning, of course, is the start of a good day...
...of 1848...
...A democratic Lenin...
...and it opens the prospect—distant, barely visible, but authentic—of a major positive development in the future of that tormented nation...
...It was a blind alley, and while it survived it cast a long shadow over the prospects for the left throughout the world...
...From the keynote speech by MARTIN JACQUES, editor of Marxism Today, at the Congress of the British Communist party, November 25, 1989...
...A split at the forthcoming Congress or soon afterward is quite possible...
...they are held together by their leader's gifts and also by a shared sense that they must act together or everything will fall apart...
...Less likely—by now who will say anything is impossible?—is that Gorbachev, through or even apart from the party, may decide to change political SPRING • 1990 • 133 Comments and Opinions face and find a fresh political label, quite as several Communist parties in Europe have already done...
...Martov as dictator...
...In Russia itself, the nationalists did not fare well...
...As Emanuel Geltman has remarked in conversation, it's as if the Constituent Assembly dispersed in 1917 by the Bolsheviks because, as a result of Russia's last free election, it had a non-Bolshevik majority—it's as if this Constituent Assembly were now to be revived...
...Evidently, that barrier has begun to be surmounted...
...Whether the new civil society in Russia or in the republics will be genuinely pluralist and tolerant is as uncertain as everything else...
...He promises "humane, democratic socialism," but it is hard to see how he can achieve anything like that in the absence of a popular movement for either democracy or socialism...
...The sullen hard-liners, mired in bad faith, might then decide to go their own way, quite as have their cothinkers in some Eastern European countries, declining into narrow sects (though the sect in Russia would contain a large potential for mischief...
...The word "historic" has been reduced to shreds in discussion of the latest moves by the Gorbachev leadership, but it is exactly the right word...
...134 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions Michael Walser . . . AND WITH FINGERS CROSSED In the old days we confronted historic events with theories of history in hand, and so we placed the events in their appropriate sequences and evaluated their likely outcomes...
...Cut military spending radically in both superpowers, and use the funds and energies saved to cope with urgent social problems...
...Also a "triumph...
...What belief...
...On the very day the Central Committee in Moscow said it intended to scrap Article 6, that dinosaur in the White House proposed that . . . Star Wars be expanded...
...The time also seems ripe for a measure advocated by economists near Gorbachev but for some reason not yet initiated: a purchase abroad of consumer goods in order to ease the lot of the people and gain time for perestroika...
...It would be foolhardy to say much about the economic problems in this brief comment, though I think it clear that an end to forced collectivization in agriculture, a more rational price system, and some encouragement to modest entrepreneurship that avoids profiteering would surely help...
...And yet, while only the insane and the simpleminded will give up worrying, this is a moment of hope...
...A failed Peter the Great...
...But I have no theory of history with which to address the extraordinary events now taking place in the Soviet Union...
...Terror gone, belief cracks...
...On the right, the hard-liners offer little but resentment...
...The resources necessary for renewed repression don't seem to be waiting for some demagogue or hard-liner to seize: they just aren't there...
...But unless there occurs a violent counterrevolution led jointly by the communist hard-liners, fearful of losing their powers, and the xenophobic nationalists, eager to gain some powers—something which seems unlikely right now but is not to be ruled out for a later moment—the direction of events seems clear...
...Perhaps in some way rich with historical symbolism, it may yet be...
...The old communist bloc represented no way forward for the left...
...Meanwhile, the most important political event is Gorbachev's intent to widen the distance between state and party, thereby gaining greater independence for the state and minimizing party dictate or "vanguard" directives...
...At the center politically and in control of the Moscow apparatus is the Gorbachev group, nervously aware that the country it rules, or seems to rule, could any day burst into violent chaos...
...In some regions, the nomenklatura (the entrenched party-state bureaucracy) will strive to trip up the burgeoning democratic movements...
...On the left, the radicals, anxious lest time be running out, believe Gorbachev must move more urgently toward democracy and economic reform...
...Formally these tendencies or factions exist in one party, but increasingly they draw apart...
...There are others too, however, distinctly unfriendly...
...We, on the contrary, believe that it is in the interests of all humanity to provide economic help to the Gorbachev regime in order to enable further democratization and economic improvement...
...But these are so fiercely and singlemindedly nationalistic that other aspects of their politics remain radically unclear...
...And we are appalled by those American political and intellectual figures who, openly or with a sly wink, hope for an apocalyptic blowup in the Soviet Union, a catastrophe that could only give comfort to the darkest, most xenophobic and anti-Semitic forces...
...And the Russian people seem disorganized, angry, cynical about the possibilities of politics...
...It is, however, suddenly and happily, morning again...
...I find myself, a little reluctantly, wishing him the success that Machiavelli wished for his prince: power for a moment and democratic heirs...
...Stalinism is dead, and Leninism—its theory of the state, its concept of the party, the absence of civil society, its notion of revolution—has also had its day...
...And even in the ranks of Gorbachev's followers, there is a spectrum of opinions...
...Who is the Soviet Irving Kristol sagely denying this to be possible...
...As our conservatives were prattling about "the triumph of capitalism," the news appeared that there has been—after all these years!— a large growth of child labor in American sweatshops and that a tide of homeless youths, numbering some 500,000, sweeps across the country...
...It would form part of the trend toward a civil society, one in which the precondition for both political and economic reform would be the breakup or significant weakening of the nomenidatura, that bureaucratic slug that weighs down upon the Russian people...
...It formalizes the end of "MarxismLeninism" according to Stalin and his successors...
...We might, in a few years, even reach the piquant moment when Gorbachev or a segment of his party would apply for admission to the Socialist International...
...And who knows...
...And in the half-democratic elections of 1989, people turned out in large numbers, treating party functionaries with contempt and displaying considerable sophistication in the choices they made among opposition candidates...
...Not, this time, between "red" and "white" armies: we would need a far more complicated color scheme...
...Does anyone still give credence to the "MarxismLeninism" poured into the ears of the young...
...One man has made too much of a difference...
...SPRING • 1990 • 135...
...We hope, with whatever critical reservations, for the success of Gorbachev's program...
...We welcome them...
...One tradition which belonged to a particular epoch may be exhausted, but that doesn't mean that socialism itself is over...
...A "peace dividend" makes good sense in the Soviet Union, quite as in the United States...
...The party has become an arena for two or three quasi parties...
Vol. 37 • April 1990 • No. 2
