Gorbachev's Manifesto

...author, "Stalin as Revolutionary, " "Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia" What has been happening in Mikhail S. Gorbachev's Russia can best be understood if we see it in the larger context of what has happened in other countries at other times...

...That will do as a characterization of where we stand...

...How well this will work in practice remains to be seen...

...The perestroïka plan was formally inaugurated at a Party Central Committee meeting in April 1985—even though, writes Gorbachev, awareness of the country's serious plight and the need for radical reform had begun to grow in various Soviet minds long before...

...Since it was also the position of Nikolai I. Bukharin and fellow moderates in the Party controversies of the post-Lenin 1920s, it is no wonder that Gorbachev took a step toward Bukharin's political rehabilitation in his speech last month marking the Revolution's 70th anniversary...

...Stress on glasnost and (guided) democratization as "the main motive force of perestroïka" is strong in this book, suggesting it would be a mistake to see Gorbachev as a merely technocratic reformer...

...Reviewed by Robert C. Tucker Professor of politics emeritus, Princeton...

...those pertaining to postwar East European history, or to the origin of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan...

...We the people—all 5 billion of us—do need a perestroïka of international relations...

...This, hesays, was Lenin's political testament...

...The General Secretary frankly acknowledges that systemic reform is still an uphill battle...

...The idea that security between our two countries has become necessarily mutual did not, of course, originate with Gorbachev and his fresh bevy of advisers...

...A familiar case in point would be FDR's New Deal of the 1930s...

...Gorbachev sees an urgent need for global as well as domestic reform—in effect, for a perestroïka of international affairs—on a planet where nuclear weaponry has deprived humanity of its immortality, where all nations have become interdependent, and where worsening problems such as environmental deterioration and resource depletion, poverty and starvation cannot effectively be addressed save in a cooperative effort...

...Despite Gorbachev's thus conceding that resistance to perestroïka is being encountered at various levels as it enters the phase of enactment, he insists that harmony prevails in the highest political councils...

...Capable and clear-minded leadership in the world's most influential nations, ours included, will have to muster sufficient support at levels high and low for a basically cooperative approach to security and other increasingly acute global concerns...

...But in the United States its proponents (this writer among them), have so far remained quite remote from the precincts of high political office...

...In particular, each superpower has, willy-nilly, an interest in the other's security as a prerequisite for its own...

...Bureaucratic heel-dragging is formidable, he notes, and some who laud perestroïka do so hypocritically in the hope that it will turn out to be just another transitory campaign...

...Unless cut short by internal or external reverses (as Czechoslovakia's liberalization under Alexander Dubcek was when the Soviet military intervened in 1968), the movement may alleviate the crisis and, in the process, substantially reshape the society...

...The apparent aim is to dismantle the centralized command economy established during the Stalinist 1930s, and to introduce elements of a market economy...

...And it is not too late for humans to save themselves and their earthly habitat from destruction, swift or slow...

...A new leadership comes to power, defines the situation as critical and prescribes reform policies...

...Yet the abrupt fall of Gorbachev supporter Boris N. Yeltsin after his fiery outburst against the slow pace of reform in a closed Central Committee meeting on October 21 puts this claim in a dubious light...

...If sizable elements of the society are responsive, a reform movement emerges...

...Gorbachev minces no words in diagnosing the USSR's unhealthy state at the close of the conservative Brezhnev era in the early 1980s...

...Hence, "security is indivisible...

...Whatever the details that remain to be revealed about the Yeltsin episode, it ill accords with the Soviet leader's statement here that "today members of the Politburo and Central Committee are unanimous as they have never been before, and there is nothing that can make this unanimity waver...

...Moreover, through his tireless propagation he has gained its acceptance, however halfheartedly, among a Soviet ruling elite still heavily populated by people who made their way to high office under Leonid I. Brezhnev, and who remain influenced by the political culture of centralism, command and conformism handed down from Joseph V. Stalin's time...

...But there is also much that represents a genuine advance in the Kremlin's view of the rest of the world and deserves to be taken very seriously...

...There are, to be sure, passages with which no knowledgeable reader can agree—e.g...

...Old habits and attitudes die hard...

...The General Secretary probably had this agenda for the future in mind when he came to Washington to formalize a Soviet-American accord on abolishing intermediate-range nuclear weapons...

...Whatever the contributions of such reform-minded Soviet intellectuals as Abel G. Aganbegyan, Evgeni Velikhov, Georgi Shakhnazarov, Tatiana Zaslavskaya, Georgi A. Arbatov and others, Gorbachev has formulated the new thinking in his own fashion...

...In order to prevent disaster, political leaders should rise above their narrow interests and realize the drama of the situation...

...A society is in crisis (not necessarily overt, like our Great Depression...

...Fully half of the book deals with international affairs...

...Albeit with signs of reluctance, the Central Committee agreed...

...Its centerpiece is a restructuring of the productive sector over a period of years, with a shift from administrative to economic methods of management slated to commence on January 1, 1988...

...In summing up his diagnosis of the current international state of affairs, Gorbachev comments that "the nations of the world resemble today a pack of mountaineers tied together by a climbing rope...

...Naturally, no two systems and situations being exactly the same, there are bound to be substantial differences as well as significant resemblances between any two attempts at national renewal...

...consequently, "we have a long way to go before perestroïka gains momentum...

...So," he concludes, "adversaries must become partners and start looking jointly for a way to achieve universal security.' Gorbachev's implication is clear: The overwhelming need of our time is a joint regime of war prevention in which the two superpowers would inevitably play a major role...

...Gorbachev ideologically validates this course by invoking the last writings of Vladimir I. Lenin, who advocated a reformist approach to building socialism in the frame of the market-tolerating New Economic Policy (later liquidated by Stalin...

...Perestroika is the name that has been given to the program developed in the Soviet Union since Gorbachev became the Party's general secretary in March 1985, and this book is his account of, as well as brief for, the undertaking...

...In its reminiscences of his early years, statements culled from his speeches, exchanges cited from his talks with foreign leaders, and ideas he has made his own, the volume bears his personal imprint, although he doubtless had expert help assembling it...

...In January 1987 Gorbachev went before a key Central Committee meeting with a proposal to enlist support from below for perestroïka through "democratization"—for example, by allowing multi-candidate elections for factory directorships and other offices...

...The symptoms, he says, included economic deadlock and stagnation, prevalent bribe-taking in the bureaucracy, servility, eyewash and disrespect for the law, public passivity and disbelief in Soviet slogans, moral decay, the spread of alcoholism, drug addiction and crime, and an increasing divergence between "the world of day-to-day realities and the world of feigned prosperity.' The country was "verging on crisis...

...But that requires fundamental changes in our set ways of thinking and acting...

...Perhaps the most important single strand of the new Soviet international thinking expressed by Gorbachev in this book is his recognition of the fact that in a nuclearized world where accidents and miscalculations can be expected, no amassing of military power by a single state or grouping of states—such as NATO or the Warsaw Pact nations—can guarantee its safety...

...They can either climb on together to the mountain peak or fall together into an abyss...