The Soviet Union at 70
DANIELS, ROBERT V.
BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD The Soviet Union at Seventy BY ROBERT V. DANIELS On November 7, citizens of the Soviet Union will have two revolutions to contemplate: the one that brought the...
...If we retreat, society will not agree to a return...
...In addition, thanks to the quantitative industrial progress of the Soviet Union in the '60s and early '70s, the country now had a much larger and more self-confident educated class ready to back reform...
...Gorbachev laid bare his thoughts at an unusual off-the-record meeting with a group of leading writers in June 1986...
...if revolutionaries could clairvoyantly see the outcome of their efforts, they would usually not be revolutionaries...
...Gorbachev's initiatives have led to a conspicuous polarization in the Soviet hierarchy...
...There cannot be a society without glasnost...
...in France with the July Revolution of 1830, subsequent to the 1798 Revolution, Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration...
...If not now, when...
...and in Spain with the post-Franco restoration of democracy, subsequent to the Revolution of 1931, the Spanish Civil War and the long fascist dictatorship...
...Most recently, he has even made some very modest gestures toward loosening the grip of the bureaucratic hierarchy on the Communist Party—if not the Party's grip on government—by suggesting contested elections for local Party offices...
...As Edward Keenan of Harvard recently showed in his extraordinarily perceptive article, "Muscovite Political Folkways" (Russian Review, April 1986), the often unarticulated assumptions about government shared by both ruler and ruled in prerevolutionary Russia were unusual even among traditional societies in their penchant for central authority, bureaucratic control, conformity of belief, secrecy in all public affairs, and xenophobic distrust of the outside world...
...How then can we check up on ourselves...
...The complication is that each of these three principles is susceptible to more than one interpretation...
...Perestroika was hitting the Russian political culture head-on...
...The talk was only sketchily reported in the official press, but it was quickly leaked and circulated msamizdat...
...Thus was Marxism-Leninism turned from a revolutionary ideology into a legitimizing one, a new orthodoxy just as restrictive in the intellectual domain as State Socialism in the economic domain and Party totalitarianism in the political...
...BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD The Soviet Union at Seventy BY ROBERT V. DANIELS On November 7, citizens of the Soviet Union will have two revolutions to contemplate: the one that brought the Communist Party to exclusive power in their country exactly seven decades earlier, and the one their current leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev has been calling for since gaining power in 1985...
...Most prominent among the latter is Secretary Yegor K. Ligachev, the second-ranking Party leader, who has taken the lead in openly opposing what he regards as the excesses of reform and glasnost, and has stressed the dangers of dwelling on the crimes of Stalin...
...indeed, they have meant different things at different times in the Soviet experience...
...Gorbachev, of course, is indulging in metaphor: He does not really want to unleash a new series of events as chaotic as those of 1917...
...We still do not know whether the General Secretary can muster enough support within the Communist Party apparatus to bring about his proposed changes...
...Robert V. Daniels, a long-time contributor to The New Leader, is a professor of history ut the University of Vermont...
...As for Marxism-Leninism, it is merely one variant in a vast corpus of interpretations of Marx, although it gained preeminent exposure as a result of being embraced and enforced by a great power...
...And the further he goes, the greater the resistance he arouses...
...Revolutions never turn out the way those who create them expect...
...In fact, precedents for the repudiation of postrevolutionary authoritarianism in favor of a return to the early liberating principles of a revolution can be found throughout history...
...in (West) Germany with the post-World War II revival of the democratic aims of the Weimar Republic, subsequent to the 1918 revolution and the Third Reich...
...The main thing is— through glasnost...
...In reaffirming militarized socialism, monolithic Party rule and blind ideological discipline, the Brezhnev regime represented a historically unique prolongation of the stage of postrevolutionary dictatorship...
...Under Khrushchev's successor, Leonid I. Brezhnev, the country reverted to what can at best be described as neoStalinism—Stalinism without the mass terror...
...The USSR has suffered in every respect because Khrushchev's attempts at reform were too little and too brief...
...Originating as a radical analysis of society with Utopian overtones, the doctrine became obligatory belief for every Soviet citizen, while their leaders—Stalin, above all—reserved for themselves the right to determine its precise content at any particular moment...
...Yet the process is bound to advance cautiously, especially given the fear of centrifugal tendencies among the Soviet national minorities and the Eastern European satellites...
...One was the transition from idealistic fanaticism to opportunistic authoritarianism that, many historians have observed, occurs naturally in tired post revolutionary societies...
...There is reason to believe that the unresolved tensions and pretensions of a postrevolutionary regime will sooner or later make basic changes indispensable, if not inevitable...
...Is the postrevolutionary totalitarian regime immutable, as Jeane Kirkpatrick maintains...
...Restructuring is going very badly,' the General Secretary conceded...
...In the Soviet Union the occurrence of such a "correction" has long been inhibited by the extraordinary apparatus of coercion and terror that Stalin fashioned, as well as the country's long habituation to despotism...
...He is currently working on a comparative history of revolution...
...Quite possibly it was the Chernobyl disaster in April 1986, and the manifest stupidity of the early attempt to cover it up, that prompted him to expose national problems to public discussion by unleashing the intelligentsia from some of the constraints normally imposed by the Party...
...Or does he...
...When Nikita S. Khrushchev launched his de-Stalinization effort in 1956, he lacked a sufficiently strong following in the sectors of society possessing political clout...
...In his second phase, he has undertaken to dismantle the dogmatic control of thought and expression, including the practice of concealing dark chapters of Soviet history...
...In his initial phase Gorbachev set about rectifying the Stalinist distortion of the Revolution's socialist economic legacy...
...Certainly, given the broad historical forces at work in the USSR, what happened during the Stalin era went beyond the intentions of any of his precursors...
...Results, though, were less than dramatic, owing to resistance from the bureaucracy, which feared the devolution of its responsibilities, and from the masses, who were afraid they would have to work harder...
...The other circumstance determining the Soviet Union's postrevolutionary course was the Stalinist revival of the political culture of old Russia...
...Immediately after being designated general secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985 (in a Politburo decision against the Old Guard that even Soviet writers today admit was very close), Mikhail S. Gorbachev set his sights on radical reform of the Soviet economy...
...Perestroika ("restructuring") became the watchword, meaning in practice a partial dismantling of the Stalinist command economy and a revival of some elements of the market socialism that flourished briefly under the New Economic Policy of the 1920s...
...The move, unprecedented in Soviet history and at odds with Russian political custom, was heralded by the slogan glasnost...
...In all of these cases, the liberal and constitutionalist aspirations behind the original revolution were resuscitated, but without the fanaticism and divisiveness that had previously produced a dictatorship of the Left or of the Right...
...Two decisive circumstances underlay these modifications of the Soviet revolutionary legacy...
...Does the process end here...
...Soviet society is now 30 years more mature, sadder, wiser—and anachronistic...
...He went on, revealingly, "Society is ripe for a changeover...
...Socialist economic systems exist in a variety of models, in practice as well as theory, and no single one can claim priority...
...others filled the shoes of his purge victims in the 1930s...
...While that might not mean regression to a carbon-copy of Brezhnev's neo-Stalinism, it would surely arrest any incipient renaissance of Soviet society...
...Nor should his words be taken to imply a rejection of the legacy of the October Revolution...
...Alter Stalin's personal victory at the end of the decade, however, the course was set toward totalitarian rule through the Party's bureaucratic apparatus...
...That was more or less what happened in England with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, subsequent to the Puritan Republic and the Restoration...
...It was only with Stalin that the Soviets declared their State Socialist command economy the sole legitimate version...
...Some accompanied Stalin on his climb to the top in the 1920s...
...What he is confronting the Party machine with is, after all, tantamount to an invitation to commit suicide...
...But once figures like Lenin take the plunge and press for the overthrow of the existing order by every means, they cannot escape a measure of responsibility for what follows—even though, in the midst of historic convulsions like those besetting Russia, their personal forbearance might not have made the outcome any more benign...
...The factions might be described as the liberals and the Andropovites...
...The emergence lately of a variety of unofficial environmental and cultural groups, the relaxation of the pressure against dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, and the toleration of the unsanctioned journal Glasnost all signal movement toward democratization...
...We have to make the process irreversible...
...No matter how firmly ensconced in the top job Gorbachev may seem, heremains vulnerable to removal by the Politburo and Central Committee—as the fate of Khrushchev reminds us...
...Gorbachev has the understanding, and appears to have the opportunity to press reform more fundamentally and more permanently...
...In any case, it was the addition of modern methods of organization and repression to a mix of revolutionary fanaticism, postrevolutionary opportunism and traditionalist authoritarianism that gave rise to the distinctively 20th century compound known as totalitarianism...
...If Gorbachev actually puts an end to the Soviet mania for total political unity and opens the door to what emigre publisher Valery Chalidze calls "one-party democracy," this would be an epochal development, perhaps truly irreversible...
...It is the irony of ironies that these became the dominant attitudes in a revolutionary Marxist regime through the coming to power of a generation of men risen from the peasantry (or from the working class, itself scarcely one remove from the village...
...The demise of Brezhnev in 1982, at age 76, was followed fairly quickly by the passing of the next two men who succeeded him, his near age-mates Yuri V. Andropov and Konstantin U. Chernenko...
...A year or so of slow-going seems to have persuaded Gorbachev that the success of his economic reforms depended on a change in the political atmosphere...
...This cleared the way for the accession to power of the post-Stalin generation, and for a renewal of the early revolutionary principles embodied by the decentralized and democratic soviets of 1917...
...He and his supporters among the intelligentsia finally were helpless to prevent his overthrow in 1964...
...Is its grip irreversible, unless it is overthrown by outside forces (as happened to the major totalitarian states of the Right in World War II...
...Like Cromwell in England, Napoleon in France and Hitler in Germany (as heir to the German Revolution of 1918), Stalin effected a characteristic synthesis of nationalist sentiment and revolutionary rhetoric that further strengthened the hand of the new governing elite...
...In the 1920s, when Leon Trotsky and his allies were still battling the Stalinists, the tendency was in the direction of a multifaction system within a single-party framework—a situation that Yugoslav political scientists say obtains in their country today...
...The Soviet revolutionary heritage can be stated, without gross oversimplification, in terms of three basic principles: socialism in the economic order, Communist Party rule in the political order, and Marxist-Leninist hegemony in the intellectual order...
...There are already two parties in the Party, " was the way an editor of the liberal monthly NovyMirput it in a talk last spring...
...Western Sovietologists continue to debate whether Lenin—or perhaps Marx—was to blame for Stalin, and if so to what degree...
...Then, echoing a familiar Jewish exhortation (hai originated with the Rabbi Hillel, Gorbachev exclaimed, " If not us, who...
...Nor can the threat of a conservative nationalist backlash with I'ascistic overtones—of which the fervent Pain vat (Memory) group is a symptom —be ignored...
...The opening coincided with a practical need to overhaul the sclerotic Soviet command economy, made increasingly obvious by the country's inability to move ahead in the age of information and microtechnology...
...We have no opposition...
...Ironically, in their opposition they will be contributing lo a real multifaction political competition, and therelore to the very pluralism they have all along set themselves against...
...Whereas Gorbachev and the liberals seek a return to and a reinvigoration of the revolutionary legacy, Ligachev and the Andropovites—who installed Gorbachev to begin with—wish only to see more discipline and less corruption in the existing system...
...The record of certain Communist regimes—Yugoslavia, China, briefly Czechoslovakia—suggests that the answer is no...
...Following this extraordinary acknowledgment of the value of pluralism, Gorbachev supplied his answer: "Only through criticism and self-criticism...
...Failing an overthrow of Gorbachev, the Andropovites will continue to take every step they can to counteract his influence...
...One-party rule has also taken more than one form...
...It would not be democracy by Western standards, but would nevertheless be a decisive retreat from Stalinism...
...They suggest, rather, a desire to dramatize his perception that somewhere along the line under his predecessors the trajectory of the Bolshevik Revolution became seriously skewed...
...Anyone who doubts this might consult a remarkable six-volume work just published by the French Eurocommunist scholar Jean Elleinstein, entitled World History of Socialisms...
Vol. 70 • October 1987 • No. 15
