Reading Russia's Cycles

...For a time he managed to continue sparring with his challengers in the policy area, notably by breaking off his detente with the West in 1960 and launching into the rash initiatives that gave him such a bad name in the West, until his successors began to outdo him...

...Reviewed by Robert V. Daniels Professor of History, University of Vermont...

...Yanov's thesis in The Drama of the Soviet1960s is that the changes associated with Nikita S. Khrushchev and briefly with Aleksei N. Kosygin fell victim to oneofthe"counterreform" phases that have, in his view, punctuated Russian history ever sincethel6th century...

...Thehero of thelast effort, ahigh official in Kazakhstan by the name of Ivan Nikiforovich Khudenko, was removed and arrested in 1973...

...Stalinism equaled "National Communism," a"subideology of dictatorship," under the "metaideology" of Marxism...

...Eventually he was silenced for his dissident views and, in 1974, deported from the USSR...

...author, "Russia: The Roots of Confrontation" The advent of a vigorous, relatively young leader has opened the prospect of a new era in the Soviet Union...

...That, plus the attempt to split and restaff the Party organization according to urban and rural responsibilities, roused the ire of the rural political establishment and played into the hands of the neo-Stalinists...

...The message, maintains Yanov, is clear: The foreign threat has foiled Russian reform before, and may do so again...

...He hoped to support the maneuver by pursuing detente and diminishing the pressure for military expenditures...

...With his encouragement the so-called "link" movement arose, decentralizing the collective farms by encouraging small work teams that would receive a direct return of income from their labors...

...The West, however, failing to see that" his replacement would be much worse," turned a deaf ear...

...Having climbed out on a political limb with his disarmament grandstanding, Khrushchev was exposed to the Soviet conservatives once the West rebuffed him...

...Ultimately, they overthrew Khrushchev and brought his schemes to a halt after one brief flurry of renewed experimentation in the late 1960s...

...The damage had already been done earlier, though...

...Their appointees sustained Khrushchev's removal and went on to be the mainstays of the Brezhnev era...

...Russia is now entering a new cycle where the leadership might be able to shift its base from the "little Stalins" of theprov-inces to the constituency of modern-minded managerial elements, and begin to address foreign and domestic problems in a less hidebound manner...

...Khrushchev then launched his three-year renewal of the Cold War, starting with an appearance in Paris, flanked by the hulking Marshal Malinovsky, to abort the last attempt to date at a multilateral Summit Conference...

...The Revolution of 1917, according to Yanov, was a counteraction to the Western-oriented constitutional experiment of 190514, and Stalin's totalitarian drive to collectivize the peasants and set up the command economy was a counterreform in the 1930s reversing the pragmatic New Economic Policy of the 1920s...

...In contrast, the Central Committee membership set at the 22nd Party Congress in 1961 was scarcely altered at all after the 1964 palace coup...

...This Reformation in the Marxist church, if you will, was based on "diminishing the role of the Soviet priesthood," the Party ideologists, and"ade-mythologizing or secularizing of socialism...

...Neither does the author mention the genuine responsiveness of the West in the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 (concluded, incidentally, after Kozlov's heart attack gave the paunchy Party Secretary his final respite...

...The West's stance, concludes Yanov, could be crucial: "It is essential that another opportunity of such historic magnitude not be lost...

...Such prognostications, difficult to document empirically, might be put down as wishful thinking...

...This was followed immediately by a shake-up of the Communist Party Secretariat that put Kozlov in thedriver's seat...

...Khrushchev, he believes, wanted to shift his power base from the conservative rural Party leaders to the urban managers and con-sumerists...

...It "implicitly linked the legitimacy of the new reformist regime to the steady rise of living standards of the people.' As in all previous Russian reforms, the key aspect of Khrushchev's involved agriculture: the liberation of the peasantry from state-enforced bondage...

...He has become well-known to Sovietologists through two earlier, provocative books, The Russian New Right (191%) and TheOri-gins of Autocracy: Ivan the Terrible in Russian History (1981...

...Khrushchev's great merit, says Yanov, was to substitute for the rigorous dogma a "new consumerist-Commun-ist credo," a sort of "Soviet Protestantism...

...Belief in the inevitability of a new world war had been an imperative, conditioning belief in the all-saving capacity of the Father of the Fatherland...

...The record suggests that by 1960 the neo-Stalinists, led by Party secretaries Frol R. Kozlov and Brezhnev, with the gray eminence Mikhail Suslov standing behind them, had gained at least partial control of the Party machinery and started moving against Khrushchev...

...The guiding premises of this mode of thought were "paternalist, ascetic, isolationist, and anticonsumerist, with the fundamental imperative of national survival invoked to justify all sacrifices...

...Yanov does not address Khrushchev's considerable provocations, including the Berlin Wall and the Cuban missile affair...

...Now a professor of political science at the University of Michigan, Yanov studied history at Moscow University and worked as a roving j ournalist in rural Russia...

...Khrushchev was repeatedly rebuffed in his overtures to curb nuclear testing and in his initiative to cut ground forces, and he was virtually laughed out of court in 1959 when he proposed "universal and complete disarmament...

...The picture Yanov draws of a struggle between Khrushchev and the neo-Stalinist faction is supported by independent data on shifts in the Communist Party leadership during the crucial period...

...In all his writings Yanov stands squarely in the tradition of the 19th-century Russians who saw the salvation of their country in Western-style reforms...

...Turnover in this group, as it was periodically restaffed, reached its post-Stalin high not, as one would imagine, after Stalin died or after Khrushchev's ouster, but in the middle Khrushchev years of 1959-61...

...The turning point was the downing of the American U-2 reconnaissance plane over the Urals on May Day, 1960...

...he died in prison the next year...

...But Alexander Yanov's book, completed during Yuri Andropov' s interlude, offers a theory of Russian political cycles that at least supports the possibility of Gorbachev fulfilling the optimists' hopes...

...He steadfastly berates the native Russian nationalism, autocracy and obscurantism that he sees reincarnated in Stalinism and in the Communist Party bureaucracy under Leonid I. Brezhnev...

...Yanov sees a lesson for our own times in that contest, especially concerning the role of the outside world...

...Mikhail Gorbachev's takeover, after decades of neo-Stalinist rigidity, has naturally encouraged many observers of the Soviet scene to anticipate major efforts at reforming the system and even improving the state of East-West relations...

...In The Origins of Autocracy Yanov laments the turn he believes Russia took away from the Western path under Ivan the Terrible, and in The Russian New Righ t he warns of the chauvinist and anti-Semitic elements who still today have the ear of some people in the Kremlin...

...Yanov attributes Russia's repeated failures at adopting Western patterns to a combination of cultural unreadiness and a hostile international environment...

...These are well documented, too, in the makeup of the Party's Central Committee (encompassing the 200 or so top Party and governmental bureaucrats...