Sobering Views of the USSR
GEWEN, BARRY
Writers & Writing SOBERING VIEWS OF THE USSR BY BARRY GEWEN Allowing their hopes to outstrip their good sense, Americans from Ronald Reagan to Billy Graham have been rushing to embrace...
...Perhaps, therefore, the best way to describe the new openness is in the words aNovy Mir editor once used to characterize Nikita S. Khrushchev's spring:" It is a humane form of arbitrariness...
...In fairness to Heller, it has to be remembered that he wrote his Introduction in April 1987, and a great deal has happened since then...
...When he took his position with the WHO, a United Nations agency, he was told: "We shall assess your work not by what you do for the international organization but by the quantity and quality of the information you obtain for the Center inMoscow...
...His final assignment was in the press department of the World Health Organization (WHO), located in Geneva...
...Gorbachev's much-vaunted reforms have given him the opportunity to replace Leonid I. Brezhnev's followers with men of his own...
...It will take a great deal more "restructuring" than can possibly be imagined under the present circumstances before spying and lying cease to be growth industries in the Soviet Union...
...He was their ideal candidate—a war hero, devoted follower of Stalin, member of the dreaded secret police, and Party muckety-muck...
...He has not experienced the Gorbachev reforms, nor does he have much to say about the current general secretary...
...Heller declares, quite correctly, that "no law has been passed abolishing censorship, nor oneto protect the writer, artist, or filmmaker from the arbitrary actions of the regime...
...For the English-language version, Heller has written an Introduction devoted to the new Party chief, and it is this part of his book that deserves the greatest attention...
...In some of his most telling pages, Heller explains that the USSR is badly lagging in modern technology because computers, which have the potential of weakening the Party's control over information, constitute a threat to the entire system...
...Born in the Soviet Union and now a teacher at the Sorbonne, Heller is not easily distracted by the events of the day...
...Despite the obeisances to democracy that one can expect from any Soviet defector, his leaving, as he indicates, was a spur-of-the-moment decision, taken for purely personal reasons...
...power over memory and personal life...
...Even economic planning is a tool for producing the New Man, Homosovieticus...
...He has a repertory of personal cloak-anddagger stories, secret border crossings in the dead of night, bombs disguised as boxes of chocolates...
...During his stay in Geneva, he and every other Soviet employee of an international body were required to turn in a list of foreign acquaintances twice a year for scrutiny by the KGB...
...Lately even the holiestof holies, Lenin himself, has not escaped comment—though no one should assume that this particular type of iconoclasm will be permitted for very long...
...It seems clear, for example, that with the publication of Orwell and Zamyatin (among others) in the USSR, the appearance of Andrei D. Sakharov at a State dinner followed by a press conference in which he called for the release of all political prisoners, the ongoing withdrawal from Afghanistan, and so much else, Gorbachev's reforms cannot be dismissed as simply the "skillful exploitation of the mass media to project his image...
...The new freedom to criticize is the freedom to criticize what went before...
...He became disillusioned under Brezhnev, and says amajority of his generation reacted in more or less the same way...
...And Heller is certainly wrong in declaring that current criticism is restricted to the Brezhnev years, that the rest of Soviet history is out of bounds...
...In a period of ubiquitous cooing, he is an unregenerate skeptic, convinced of the persistence of the Cold War until the Leninist regime is overturned...
...But neither does he provide any reason to believe that the kind of work he performed for over three decades has been diminished in any way as a result of the new openness...
...The Soviets, Heller explains, have not fully succeeded so far in creating the perfect New Man...
...Newspeak," all the techniques described in 1984 and We have been employed at one time or another since the Russian Revolution in a massive experiment at remolding human consciousness...
...Writers & Writing SOBERING VIEWS OF THE USSR BY BARRY GEWEN Allowing their hopes to outstrip their good sense, Americans from Ronald Reagan to Billy Graham have been rushing to embrace glasnost and its progenitor, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, with embarrassing zeal and naivete...
...His new book is, rather, a study in continuities...
...controlled poverty...
...From the day he is born, the Soviet citizen is bombarded with propaganda and manipulated with lies, a prisoner in a closed society that denies access to the truth...
...Russians have never experienced an inexorable March of Progress: A century ago, the reformist Tsar Alexander II was followed by the viciously repressive Alexander III...
...It is also a warning to the West to be on its guard:" There is in the Soviet Union today only one Leader, only one Authority—Mikhail Gorbachev...
...The young, he feels, are worse, believing in nothing and nobody at all...
...Yet if we are not willing to acknowledge that something genuinely interesting and exciting is taking place today in the Soviet Union because it does not come up to our standards of freedom, then the best, as Voltaire once said, will truly by the enemy of the good...
...As a soldier in the Red Army and a KGB agent after the War, Dzhirkvelov deported, kidnapped and assassinated...
...every day the press reports another startling pronouncement...
...Many Americans may prefer not to hear them, but these are important points, and any U.S...
...In Gorbachev's terms, glasnost represents permission to speak publicly about the ills of the system that have long been apparent to everybody...
...In the light of all that has taken place recently, it seems a definite overstatement to say that "the main source of the ideas, slogans and tactics of the Gorbachev era is actually Stalin...
...Dzhirkvelov estimates that about 40 per cent of all Soviets stationed abroad are intelligence agents...
...Fear...
...With frequent reference to George Orwell and Evgeny Zamyatin, Heller reminds us of the efforts that have been made over 70 years to stamp out individuality in the Soviet Union...
...As others have done, he cites the top-down nature of the recent opening in the USSR, observing that the Stalinist structure has remained in force...
...Had a superior not undermined his career he would probably still be busy toiling away for Socialism and the State, a cog in the wheel spreading propaganda, planting disinformation...
...He describes being trained by the KGB to use a gun and a knife, as well as less conventional weapons like lethal fountain pens and cigarette cases...
...Nonetheless, Dzhirkvelov did not quit the USSR out of ideological motives...
...I do not think so, because operations involving the kidnapping or assassination of an opponent are not organized only by the KGB: every intelligence and counterintelligence service does the same...
...Dzhirkvelov left the USSR in 1980, long before glasnost and perestroika became words in Western vocabularies...
...But then he goes on to place the Gorbachevian measures into a larger context, showing how they fit into a familiar pattern: Every new general secretary, Heller notes, with his eye firmly on the ball, has consolidated his own power by attacking the policies of his predecessor...
...What does distinguish the KGB, however, is its relation to its own society...
...Some things, it is fair to assume, are almost immune to change...
...With the restoration of Nikolai I. Bukharin, a reconsideration of the Stalin period became inevitable...
...President, present or future, should be sure somebody is sitting at his side to whisper them into his ear whenever he deals with the Soviet leader...
...For this reason, Mikhail Heller's Cogs in the Wheel: The Formation of Soviet Man (Knopf, 282 pp., $22.95) arrives at a propitious moment...
...Never before in Soviet history has a general secretary created a cult of his own personality with such speed...
...Even if he has proved he is not, one should then regard him as someone who had not yet committed an offense...
...In every case, his job was more than appeared on the surface, and his activities included bribing newspapermen, discrediting foreign operations such as the Peace Corps, and in general promoting his country's interests...
...Reading between the lines, one can even sense an unrepentant Stalinist trying to break through, or at least a sentimentalist hankering for "the good old days" when people knew where they stood...
...Cogs in the Wheel first appeared in France in 1985, the year Gorbachev assumed power...
...Only the most starry-eyed would predict that a country with a millennium of authoritarians and totalitarians to its credit will evolve into a Western-style democracy during our lifetimes (if ever), and it probably requires an unhealthy amount of optimism merely to expect the current climate to outlast Gorbachev...
...The agents, Dzhirkvelov relates, were taught to view every Soviet citizen as a criminal...
...To judge from the piquant memoir of Ilya Dzhirkvelov, Secret Servant: My Life with the KGB and the Soviet Elite (Harper & Row, 398 pp., $22.50), they have a considerable way to go...
...Yet there is a fine line to be walked in this matter, and if Reagan may have tilted too far in one direction, Heller leans too far in the other...
...In the less murderous post-Stalin years, Dzhirkvelov was employed first by the Union of Journalists and then as a functionary for TASS, the news agency, with posts in East Africa and the Sudan...
...love of Big Brother...
...Did I have any doubts about the propriety of employing such methods against our opponents...
...hatred of the enemy selected by the Party...
...Dzhirkvelov is by no means a soul mate, and that is precisely what makes his book so fascinating...
...Meanwhile, Soviet citizens are obtaining the opportunity to read Boris Pasternak and Vasily Grossman, and that is both a step away from the Orwellian society Heller depicts and a development warmly to be cheered for its own sake...
...Every social institution is directed to the same end...
Vol. 71 • June 1988 • No. 11
