A Critical Comment
Pachter, Henry
In publishing this article more than one year after it was written, the editors are most uncharitable to the author. But they may be doing a service to those who shared his illusions during...
...As a method of analysis, the personal and subjective I77 approach of Deutscher and Fetjo may have certain advantages over the dogmatic theorem that the Soviet system, by definition, cannot change...
...He puts all his hope on the intelligentsia, as though it were a distinct class, and he attributes to it a power which it certainly does not have...
...In dubbing "rational" a Soviet policy which he liked, he did gain a tool to build a policy favoring further liberalization of the system...
...It is plainly an error to assert that Soviet journalists "fight the censor" or that Russian isolationism is crumbling...
...They did so in Stalin's time and they are doing so now...
...He speaks of the return to the "classical stimulants of the market economy" as of a new discovery, as though the NEP had never existed...
...It was only natural that these friends and partisans of the reformist intellectuals in Hungary, Poland, and even in Russia, should have overestimated the importance and the prospects of those for whose victory in inner-Party conflicts they hoped...
...The problem which the current reaction in the Soviet empire puts to the outside observer is precisely this: why does the system always return from its serious attempts at evolution into the groove of its earlier totalitarian routine...
...And, unfortunately, Mr...
...Fejto likewise puts great emphasis on the personal dispositions and intellectual abilities of the leaders—as though it depended on Khrushchev's insight to liberalize the regime, or on the zeal for reform among the intelligentsia to guide the evolution of the totalitarian state into a more democratic socialist...
...he deprives himself too of the possibility of suggesting policies to deal with this adversary...
...Fejto's school, Isaac Deutscher, recently has published interpretations of current Soviet policies which read not like an analysis of reality, but like an attempt to justify his earlier mistakes...
...commonwealth...
...Fejto attributes to them...
...In retrospect, the friends abroad of the so-called revisionists inside the Soviet empire appear to have been led into a tragic error by personal loyalties and information from onesided sources...
...They would rather plead for policies which from the Soviet standpoint would be rational, than formulate ideas which conflict with the rationale of the Soviet state...
...Khrushchev, he now asserts, was a good man inspired by the best of all intentions, but Suslov and other evil spirits unfortunately defeated these intentions...
...He deprives himself of a tool for analyzing the rationality of Khrushchev's policies...
...But neither is there any virtue in clinging to positions which no longer are tenable...
...NEVERTHELESS, the intellectual stirrings within the Soviet empire do reflect tensions within the system, and doubts or conflicts among its leadership...
...Fejto's article now are wrong, and a floored fighter does not have to be knocked down again...
...Djilas is a martyr make his theories any less simplistic than they are...
...It is very surprising that Mr...
...they had more than an intellectual stake in their cause...
...They go along with the frequent changes in Soviet policy and rationalize their motivations...
...nor does the fact that Mr...
...Fejto's method unfortunately turns against him...
...And here Mr...
...To answer this question, the subtle marshalling of inside dope is not subtle enough...
...In publishing this article more than one year after it was written, the editors are most uncharitable to the author...
...He concludes his article with a reference to the "irrationality of Stalinism" in contrast to the "new directions in rationality," as though the most gruesome characteristic of Stalinism had not been its cruel rationality in terms of the Soviet state...
...But they may be doing a service to those who shared his illusions during the time of the million flowers...
...The head of Mr...
...It is too obvious that all the tenses in Mr...
...But, as Mr...
...And inasmuch as confidence is a prerequisite for success, or even for the conception of a strategy, their error today looks much nobler than the bland pessimism of those who had no policy vis-a-vis the turmoil of the Thaw and now can gleefully say, I told you so...
...The fact that Mr...
...or adverse circumstances made enemies (for Khrushchev) among the economic bureaucracy and elsewhere, which, in combination with sinister visits to Moscow by the exiled Molotov, forced poor Khrushchev to resort to Stalinist methods...
...On the other hand, scientists have as little difficulty in accommodating their ideas to dialectical materialism as have their Western colleagues in bowing to the truths of the Bible...
...But this does not leave him any alternative to calling "irrational" the return to Stalinism...
...Certainly the Party wants "competence" and it opens its ranks to competent men...
...Paradoxically, it might even be said that some of the intelligentsia, inasmuch as they are part of the Party apparatus, have more power while others, as "free" practitioners of the liberal arts, have less power than Mr...
...Fejto supplements it with a sledge-hammer theory of Soviet evolution which is no subtler than the sledge-hammer of the defeatist dogmatists...
...Fejto was wrong does not make his opponents look any better...
...Fejto correctly says, these competent men would rather penetrate the bureaucracy than ally themselves with the working classes...
...To do so he makes it all a question of personalities...
...Nor do they display the ardor for liberty which the slogan of the Thaw was mistakenly thought to indicate...
...To have been right in this discussion, either way, should be no source of pride...
...Fejto should have forgotten the rhythm of liberalization and reaction in the forty years of Soviet experience...
Vol. 6 • April 1959 • No. 2
