Optimism and Post-Stalin Russia

...It is a healthy reaction insofar as it signifies simply the abandonment of a previous pessimism, the outgrowing of a rigid tendency to belittle all small symptoms of change in post-Stalin Russia as "insignificant"—as though things which seem insignificant from our point of view might not be quite significant from a Soviet citizen's standpoint and hence politically meaningful phenomena...

...Such were their lives under Stalin in recent years...

...These people, so far anonymous, represent a viewpoint of non-official Russia...

...Having made the secret police his personal weapon, Stalin shaped Soviet society into the mold of an Oriental despotism...

...But the force involved in this would appear to be better described as a force of inertia and apathetic failure of response than an active pressure from below for change...

...In the international sphere, this fact has made possible the partial decrease of East-West tension, the Korean truce, the Moscow-Belgrade reconciliation, the reestablishment of contacts across the Curtain, and the stirrings in the satellites...

...These are among the main official preoccupations of the present day in internal affairs, and, as in foreign policy, the innovating impulse emanates from above...

...Paradoxically, the new optimism about the prospects in Russia seems to share with the previous pessimism a fundamental premise which may be stated roughly as follows: Stalin's successors would vastly prefer to carry on in the old Stalinist way if they could, and therefore do not make changes in his policies and mode of rule unless some force absolutely compels them to...

...If it is only under iron compulsion from forces around them that the Soviet rulers set about changing and reforming things, then what has been happening lately in this line must—it would seem—represent a compromise with some powerful if unseen forces abroad in the society, forces which must at all costs be appeased...

...But the report records in part what actually happened...

...To ask this is to ask whether the hopeful vision of the future is grounded in a realistic view of the present...

...Over a period of years, the Soviet situation is likely to move in one of two opposite ways, either forward in the direction of liberalization or backward toward a harsher period than the present...

...It applies at most to one clement of the ruling group, represented particularly in Molotov, but not, for example, to the Khrushchev-Bulganin element which is currently in the ascendancy and still less to the Malenkov-Beria clement which was ascendant just after Stalin died...

...Many questions relating to censorship and freedom of expression would certainly arise...

...Here we have seen a definite tendency to depart from the late Stalin formula for cold war, from the methods of controlled violence and diplomacy of terror which produced the blockade of Berlin, the vendetta against Tito, the war in Korea, etc...

...This does not mean, of course, that the social factor can be left out...

...And from this logic flow highly hopeful further expectations...

...This would be a movement arising in society itself...

...Certain ossified forms of our diplomacy have been cast aside...

...To this fact are traceable the easing of police terror and repression, the tendency to curb the blood purge as an instrument of internal politics, the subordination of the security organs to Party control, the movement to decentralize certain administrative functions and, not least, the denunciation of the "cult of personality," i.e., the institution of personal despotism as developed and perfected by Stalin on the model of Ivan the Terrible...

...But the new optimism of which I have spoken goes further and falls into the assumption that Russia a decade or so hence will be moving under pressure of internal liberalizing forces in the direction of an open society...

...What the successors are trying to do in internal affairs bears a more than accidental resemblance to the shifts of method in foreign policy, and here again the impetus stems from the top...

...This is the twelfth, and final, article in our symposium on recent trends in Soviet Russia, a discussion launched in our June 18 issue with an article by George F. Kennan...

...Some of the worst is left out...

...Finally, there would be the demand for freedom of political groupings, both within and outside the present one-party structure...

...But these are being effected from above in the framework of a policy conception which envisages no weakening of the basic totalitarian structure...

...But how probable is it...

...If a "new Stalin" is extremely unlikely just now, this is not because any serious institutional safeguards against the contingency have been erected...

...By fundamental changes are meant a genuine liberalization of the Soviet order, its transformation into something resembling an open political system...

...Khrushchevism would preserve this basic mold intact...

...At bottom, his policy was motivated by the compulsive emotional need to gain a vindictive triumph over his hated enemies in the West, a need which was peculiarly personal to Stalin because it was neurotic...

...Apart from the concentration camp revolts of 1953-54, the picture on the whole, both at the popular level and among the bureaucratic strata, has so far been predominantly one of passivity, of relief at the internal detente combined with hope that it will continue...

...Leaving aside the question of classes and their interests in today's Russia, if the editors of Pravda consulted their historical memory they would be reminded by the case of the fateful split in the Russian Social Democratic movement at the turn of the century that political groupings, parties, are very often creatures of serious difference of opinion and values, and nothing more...

...These latter are sometimes thought to reside in the Army, sometimes in the managerial stratum, and sometimes in what is called the "new Soviet bourgeoisie...

...It is a framework within which the movement's motivation from above is intelligible...

...The leaders would be predominantly intellectuals, and the followers would be drawn very largely from the ranks of the university student youth...

...Isaac Deutscher and others have erred, I believe, in thinking that Khrushchev's secret report, which came at the close of the Party Congress, was just an historic afterthought, an impromptu outburst...

...In any event, the political logic of the anti-Stalin speech was implicit in some of these main trends of the three preceding years...

...Thus, Khrushchev makes no mention of Stalin's war against the Russian peasantry, evidently because he and his associates mean to perpetuate if they can its institutional result, the rollectve farm...

...But safety at the apex would not suffice to bring Soviet society out of the creeping paralysis, the crisis of compulsion, and the bureaucratic stultification to which the eight postwar years of autocratic misrule and internal cold war had brought it by the time Stalin died...

...If the sketch is broadly accurate, it belies the idea that the Soviet ruling group has been borne along more or less involuntarily in all this by a tide of powerful social forces...

...But if the era of malevolent despotism is over, what is the program for Soviet society which the collective dictatorship offers...

...The protection against it lies mainly in the will of men in high places not to be subjected to a repetition of painful, humiliating experiences suffered by them at the hands of the historical Stalin...

...for these people, refrigerators and nice apartments are not that scarce...

...Now what were Stalin's intentions...

...It is a question, in particular, of correctly assessing the factors at work in the movement away from extreme Stalinism which has already become a tangible fact of Soviet life...

...100-per-cent Sovietism, it might be called...

...As for the professional military leaders whose rise in prominence has been so much commented upon abroad, they have given no signs to cause us to count them as anything but a conservative political force, fully loyal to the Party leadership and its goals...

...Now, however, when some measure of internal transition has become a patent fact, dramatized by the denunciation of Stalin, the same premise yields very different conclusions...

...And the historical residue of this, the notion of a change-resistant leadership, is not quite accurate...

...For that there had to be some decentralization of administrative authority, some relaxation of controls, some encouragement of managerial initiative, some attention to the forgotten question of incentives to work...

...We get the distinct impression that the architects of the new Soviet diplomacy of influence regard their methods and policies as much more effective ways of promoting the interests of the Soviet Union and Communism than those which Stalin practiced from 1948 onward...

...and USSR...

...And their effort to give this determination political effect by the expose of the historical Stalin may then have the result not of barring the way to a reaction but merely of assuring that it docs not come about under the banner of Stalin's name...

...He reduced the supposedly sovereign Communist party to political nothingness, destroying its leaders and loyal cadres by the tens of thousands in the process...

...More innovations along the same lines may be expected in the coming period...

...Finally, he kept his closest lieutenants, the members of the seemingly mighty Politburo, in a constant state of fear, never knowing today whether they would sup tomorrow in a hall of the Kremlin or a cell of the MVD...

...But the Soviet society of approximately 1930 was a society already shaped by Stalin's collectivization and forced industrialization into a very advanced, if not yet ultimate, totalitarian mold...

...The retrospective Utopia is a society of state-operated industry, collectivized agriculture and streamlined bureaucracy, all functioning with cheerful efficiency under the Party's omnipotent direction in an atmosphere of social peace...

...This is something worth pondering by everyone who interests himself in the causes of the palpable easing of international tension in the post-Stalin world...

...So far as American opinion is concerned, one might almost say that, largely under the impact of these events, a prevailing pessimism has given way to a nascent optimism, echoes of which have sounded even in some official quarters...

...It is a healthy reaction, further, insofar as it signifies an awakening to the fact that Stalin's death made an historic difference in Russia, altering the governmental atmosphere and giving potential outlet to ideas and tendencies long suppressed by his autocratic fiat...

...The truce talks were then still stalled over the prisoner issue...

...The pattern of an innovating impulse from above is in some ways most clearly visible in the field of foreign policy...

...Up to a certain point, the feeling seems justifiable...

...It would show that there exists, alongside the official Russia whose organ is Pravda, an unofficial populist Russia which craves a kind and scope of change not planned by the collective dictatorship, a freedom of expression not permitted within the present institutional setup...

...The issues posed initially would not be revolutionary in the maximalist sense of aiming at the overthrow of the regime, and would probably be argued largely in terms of "What is the true socialism...

...We may take the Korean affair as an illustration of this point...

...It is surely symptomatic that on July 6 of this year, in the wake of the ferment stimulated by the official anti-Stalin campaign, Pravda printed a stern rejoinder to unnamed elements who, according to its editorial, are asking: "Why does only one party exist in the USSR...

...The Russian public in the post-Stalin period has been something like a patient who, having lived for years in an iron lung and now being released from it at last, is content for the present to enjoy the simple experience of breathing and refrains from heavy talking, much less shouting...

...The depressed state of Russian society has certainly played a big part in energizing the rulers to sponsor a course of controlled innovation...

...But the conclusion is, I think, a faulty one owing to a flaw in the fundamental premise...

...If it is becoming clear, then, that the passing of so enormous a phenomenon as the Stalin autocracy could not fail to make the aftermath a time of flux and transition in Soviet affairs, this is to the good...

...Now no one could deny that this is at least a theoretical possibility, and hence a legitimate hope...

...The program is a retrospective Utopia...

...By this I mean that there are numerous people in Russia who aspire to a more far-reaching break with the Stalinist past than the official program allows, and in this time of relative fluidity and relaxation of terror their feelings and views stand some small chance of becoming vocal...

...Briefly, the image of Stalin's successors as a group of carbon copies of Stalin, who would not voluntarily institute changes in his methods and policies, is distorted...

...Who are these people...

...They have undertaken, we may say, to curb the domestic form of cold war which Stalin waged during the Thirties and then again after 1915 against Soviet society...

...The luxury hunger in this class, sometimes looked to as the best hope for liberalizing reforms of the Soviet system, is not actually a force which must find the existing order too confining...

...Only when and if this takes place will we know that a new optimism about the Russian future is well grounded...

...Yet the minimum conditions for its potential emergence may be taking shape...

...Summing up what has been said, the officially sponsored changes instituted up to now are genuinely meaningful in their limited way...

...These various trends and events are traceable to Stalin's death for the reason that, so long as he lived, he combined in his autocratic person the passion and the power to prevent or obstruct them...

...It appears that the forward movement is backward-looking, that what Khrushchev envisages is a return to the Soviet situation of approximately 1930 when Stalin was Party boss but not Oriental despot and the Communist party itself still survived as a political organism...

...The feeling of many minds seems to be: "We don't know just what is happening there or why, but evidently something significant is afoot and perhaps this means that fundamental changes will be brought about?not tomorrow, of course, but within a decade or so...

...Elements of the intelligentsia would question, for example, why, if Stalin now stands officially condemned for grievous misrule, his pattern of economic policy, his "general line," should be treated as sacrosanct for all time...

...It is rather one of eager and even exultant switch to new forms and fronts of advance in foreign affairs...

...It is a by-product of the Stalin era, when part of the price of advancement or even survival for any high Soviet figure was to sound in public more Stalinist than Stalin, giving the impression that the autocrat himself was a pillar of shrewd sanity surrounded by fanatical super-Stalinists...

...He ordered the repression of whole nationalities...

...In saying this, I do not mean to imply that these men may be lukewarm in their adherence to the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, or that they are in any way deficient in ruthlessness and the other qualities that go with it, or, finally, that they are inclined to depart from the basic conceptions of policy and society laid down in the early writings of Stalin...

...This is one reason why much may depend upon the appearance in the fairly near future of social forces from below-pressing toward real liberalization...

...Embassy in Moscow, is now consultant in the Social Science Division of the Rand Corporation...

...I he agrarian question would be raised, as it has been in the Russian past, and certain elements no doubt would advocate some system of peasant cooperation in place of the existing kolkhoz, which is in essence a revival of serfdom with the state as sole landlord...

...Certainly, Mikoyan did not seem to be mourning the Stalinist past when he said in his speech at the Party Congress last February: "Striking are the successes of Soviet foreign policy, especially in the past year...

...They would tend to revolve around the question of the limited-ness of the course of change upon which the regime has embarked under Stalin's successors...

...The hackneyed official answer to this question runs: "Because multiplicity of parties is inherent in a society with diverse classes, whose interests differ...

...This is the basis on which Stalin's successors are representing him as a Communist gone wrong, and themselves as the real thing, the "Leninist core"' that survived...

...It amounts to the attempt to revitalize a one-party system which never died in theory but in actual practice was eclipsed for about two decades by a one-person system...

...These words reflect no hankering to carry on foreign relations in the late Stalinist way if that were only possible...

...They are not to be found, I fear, in any significant numbers in that higher stratum of Soviet society which is often designated in our writings as the "new Soviet bourgeoisie...

...Robert C. Tucker, a former attache of the U.S...

...Apparently he meant to persist in this unacceptable demand with the end in view of keeping the Korean conflict technically open until, in a few years' time, it could be violently reactiviated by the Communist side under new world conditions of "mutual deterrence" as between the U.S.A...

...In the first period after Stalin's death, it was this premise which governed the West's prevailing low expectations for change in Russia in the near future...

...The Future of Communism OPTIMISM AND POST-STALIN RUSSIA By Robert C. Tucker Khrushchev's expose of the Stalin tyranny at the 20th Party Congress and the ensuing campaign of "de-Stalinization" have perceptibly affected Western attitudes toward the present situation and prospects in Soviet Russia...

...It is no exaggeration to say that the majority of changes in the Soviet scene and policy since Stalin's death have their liberating source, their sine qua non, in the simple fact that Stalin died...

...A reversion to the autocratic pattern of full Stalinism seems out of the question for the time being...

...Of such a movement from below we have so far had no more than a few very faint signs...

...Would it be any wonder if the majority of them felt that it was time for a change...

...The evidence is not conclusive, but what there is does not necessarily weigh in favor of this hypothesis...

...It is a force which expresses itself in listless labor, in shirking of work on collective farm fields, in mechanical performance of bureaucratic duties, in apolitical indifference to official goals, in widespread alcoholism, and so on...

...But the chances of some such tendency may increase rather than lessen with the passage of the years if meanwhile the basic Soviet structure remains intact in accordance with present official designs...

...As late as mid-February 1953, when he was still actively in command of the Kremlin, he extracted and flaunted on the front page of Pravda a mighty public vow from Mao Tse-tung to fight on to "complete victory" in Korea "no matter how many years American imperialism may intend to carry on the war" (see Pravda for February 14...

...In any liberalizing movement that may arise, the military would be represented, in all probability, not by men of Marshal Zhukov's stamp and generation but by some elements of the younger educated officer class...

...The Soviet press has hinted that this question has already been voiced by certain circles within the Party membership, which it calls "rotten elements...

...Large parts of this story of total terror and permanent purge are told in Khrushchev's secret report to the 20lh Congress...

...I have tried to sketch, as I see it, the political framework of the movement away from extreme Stalinism which has manifested itself in Russia...

...Here is a context in which the official denunciation of Stalin and the propaganda campaign growing out of it find a part of their explanation...

...For if mysterious social forces have already extracted a series of changes, such as the decline of terror, the talk of legality, slight relaxation of controls on travel and so on, is it not plausible that by and by they may compel much more far-reaching changes, which will finally crack the monolithic structure from within...

...So when they conclude that "in Soviet society there is no social soil for the rise of other parties than the Communist party," we may be certain that those to whom the political homily is addressed remain quite unpersuaded...

...What made it possible to end the war after Stalin died was the abandonment by the Communists of their unacceptable demand for forcible repatriation of all war prisoners in UN hands...

...These concerns would dictate the pressing need for certain innovations quite apart from any imperious promptings from forces active in the society...

...The Soviet Government has vigorously taken the path of elimination of the defects of our work in the sphere of foreign policy...

...There is strong reason to believe that Stalin had no intention of concluding a formal armistice in Korea...

...Tucker has written on world Communist ideology and political strategy for the New York Times Magazine, the Review of Politics, World Politics and other publications...

...But as these men pass out of the picture, the determination that "it shall not happen again" may, to a significant extent, wither away...

...If this structure ever loosens, it will do so only under persistent pressure of a very different kind of movement from this official one...

...But when full allowance has been made for all this, we must still reckon with the presence within the ruling group of impulses toward change, impulses stemming chiefly from a concern for the interests of the Soviet state and Communism, for the reasonably efficient operation of the Soviet system, and for their own peace of mind and personal security—all of which were gravely impaired or jeopardized during the long national nightmare of Stalin's final years...

...They are designed to further these various aims by persuading the public, and especially the bureaucratic strata, that "collective leadership" is there to stay, that the internal cold war is all over, that the Stalin period is past and done with...

...The argument is logical...

...They are making Russia a less oppressive place for many Russians to live in than it was for many years...

...But the picture which unfolds is decidedly not one of reluctant retreat under duress from this line...

...Another question which might well come to the fore is whether the ambitious new foreign economic programs of Moscow arc not premature when grinding poverty remains the lot of a vast proportion of the Russian people...

...The nucleus of the trend would be in the Russian intelligentsia, just as it was in the 19th century...

...It is a society in which the MVD is restrained but ever present, in which heavy industry must for some reason eternally have "priority," in which there can never be space for more than one party, and in which even the one party cannot permit itself to debate its fundamental issues openly before the public...

...The impulse toward change finds expression at the apex of power in the principle and practice of "collective leadership,' the real substance of which seems to mean simply this: There shall be no new Stalin among us, no one in a position to carry on a cold war in Stalin's way against the others, hence no one leader in personal control of the secret police...