The Perils of Perestroika

...I saw a double-edged political button in Moscow, "All Power to the Soviets," It was the old revolutionary slogan of 1917, except today it implies a lack of confidence in the Party...

...In place of their old dead conformity, the newspapers and literary reviews debate with each other...

...It further had begun to appear that the planned June Party conference (a sort of midterm convention, last held in 1941) would not, as was hoped, reaffirm the reform line...

...Two appointees of Leonid I. Brezhnev were dropped, and three new candidate members were designated...

...On the face of it, Gorbachev scored an important political success when he unexpectedly convoked special meetings of the Party's Central Committee and the Supreme Soviet to ratify the leadership changes he had pushed through the Politburo...

...Consequently, it seems from the record, Gorbachev made the radical decision to attack his own Party apparatus, the traditional power base of Soviet leaders...

...Ligachev's new responsibility now seems only pro forma, and may be merely a way station toward his political demise...

...Though the area is vital, the job narrows Ligachev's role and implicitly reduces him to fourth or fifth place in the hierarchy...

...Important changes have also been made at the level of candidate, or nonvoting, members of the Politburo...

...We can't have any more white spots and black holes in our history...

...He responds to complaints by telling people that it is their responsibility to restructure work, to get the economy moving again...

...IN the course of a variety of conversations over several weeks with intellectuals and with ordinary people, I found that Soviet political attitudes are beginning to crystallize across a wide range from reactionary to ultraliberal or radical...

...The shake-up has all the marks of a preemptive strike, launched by the General Secretary so as to catch his conservative opponents unprepared to offer effective resistance...

...His reform program was stymied by conservative opposition, especially as expressed in the now famous "Andreyeva letter" planted in the Leningrad newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya last March to embarrass the campaign against Stalinism...

...We now have a normal intellectual life," say scholars at the Institute of MarxismLeninism, who claim they are giving up that agency's old function of defining ideological conformity...

...I thought I would needle him a little: " Since I have written a lot about Trotsky, I wonder if he will be rehabilitated...

...Other traditionalists idolize Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn...

...Of the new people at the top, the person emerging as especially interesting is Vadim A. Medvedev (not to be confused with the longtime dissidents Roy and Zhores Medvedev...

...They want reform, but in the disciplinarian style of the late Yuri Andropov, and they resent the now fashionable notion that the Soviet system under Stalin and Brezhnev achieved nothing positive...

...Unlike the Baltic peoples, for instance, the Russians mostly just wait for orders from above...

...They are afflicted with deep cynicism...

...But despite the latest shake-up, he has only bought time...

...The third was Aleksandr V. Vlasov, up to then the Minister of Internal Affairs (in charge of the uniformed police), and a close associate of Gorbachev's from the North Caucasus region...

...No one outside Moscow's inner circle actually anticipated the sudden leadership shake-up that took place the weekend of September 30...

...The reactionary outlook, involving nostalgia, Russian chauvinism, antiSemitism, and a yearning for authoritarian leadership—in short, "traditional values" in the Russian context—is represented in its most extreme form by the Pamyat ("Memory") organization, thought by many Soviets to have great influence...

...They draw conclusions all over the political map, often with a degree of certainty that the evidence scarcely warrants...

...The most significant steps of all in the September 30 maneuver involved no actual removals, only shifts in responsibilities...

...Secret police chief Viktor M. Chebrikov was transferred to the Party Secretariat and seems to have been neutralized by being given the nebulous function of running the new Party commission on legal affairs...

...head of the Central Committee's Academy of Social Sciences, which used to guard the Party line...

...A parallel consideration was the broadening of his institutional power base so that he could rest his authority a little less on the undependable Party apparatus and more on the popular interests represented by the Soviets...

...Free discussion within the Communist Party and measures to represent all the diverse interests in society are supposed to take care of the issue, in accordance with the principle of "Socialist pluralism...

...Many workplaces don't even answer their phones until 11 in the morning, and then lunch may last a couple of hours...

...He is a very effective politician, as Soviet TV showed night after night during his Siberian trip in September...

...The country remains unfathomable as well to the vast school of foreign Sovietologists who try to amass clues to the Soviet decision-making process...

...Second Secretary Yegor K. Ligachev, Gorbachev's obvious conservative rival (however much both parties have denied it), was shunted to the supervision of agriculture...

...To date the radicals, who would have been dissidents under Brezhnev, are mainly critics rather than advocates...

...Medvedev wants to redefine socialism, using "the experience of mankind as a whole, including the non-Socialist world," with particular respect for the law of supply and demand and the virtues of individual and cooperative enterprise...

...As for assuming the chairmanship of the Supreme Soviet, Gorbachev certainly was not simply concerned about prestige or protocol, as was the case with predecessors Brezhnev, Yuri V. Andropov and Konstantin U. Chemenko...

...Trying to reverse the old attitudes, Gorbachev mingles with the crowds...

...Some fear a Polish type of crisis...

...Nevertheless, he was fairly restrained, taking advantage of the age of individual conservatives and isolating rather than destroying his chief rival...

...The conservatives, represented by Ligachev, are very strong in the Party and among elderly intellectuals...

...For someone who has closely watched the Soviet scene through the gray years under Brezhnev—the "era of stagnation" as the Soviets now call it —the current atmosphere is extraordinary and exhilarating...

...To judge from my small sample, many consider the Communist Party bankrupt and want a fundamental political upheaval—either real democracy or a new dictator like Stalin who can straighten out the country...

...He revert ed to the old style of secret political maneuver at the top, and directly exerted the authority of his personality and his office to get a Politburo majority behind his surprise blow at the conservatives...

...Instead of battling to the death, "capitalism and socialism will inevitably intersect"—an echo of the theory of "convergence" long taboo in the Soviet Union...

...But even that is a far cry from the line through the 1970s, calling for the "monolithic unity of the Party" and the "iron solidarity" of the Party and the masses...

...All direct police representation in the Politburo has been eliminated...

...They are typified by Yuri Poliakov, a senior member of the Institute of the History of the USSR, who insists that Stalin, whatever his crimes and errors, sustained the Soviet people's faith in socialism...

...But the General Secretary did shore up his reformist group within the Politburo by adding one more vote, that of new ideological secretary Vadim Medvedev, to those of himself, Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze and Party Secretary Alexandr N. Yakovlev, who has been made responsible for international affairs...

...The mood in Moscow on the eve of the leadership reshuffle was apprehensive...

...and since 1986, Party secretary in charge of relations with the Soviet satellites...

...The liberal position is that of Gorbachev and the Party reformers...

...Intellectuals argue publicly from virtually every point on the political spectrum...

...The answer: "I hope so...

...With the relaxation of the tight grip at the top, the system seems to be performing worse, not better...

...Meanwhile, the national minorities are taking advantage of Moscow's new leniency and threatening to tear the country apart at the seams...

...There is a dearth of middle and lower management capable of coordinating effort and economizing labor time...

...since it claimed total power in the past, it is now expected to answer for everything...

...One Politburo conservative was knocked of f, the elderly chairman of the Party's disciplinary commission Mikhail S. Solomentsev...

...One historian assured me that there would be more rehabilitations of lost figures from the past...

...Nor could they: Top-level politics in the Soviet Union are still conducted according to the old Muscovite rules of secrecy within the upper oligarchy...

...This answered the complaint heard at the special Party conference last June that he and Gromyko, though presumably backers of Gorbachev three years ago, were dragging their feet on substantial reforms...

...And the first Soviet edition of an American monograph, Stalin in October by Robert Slusser of Michigan State University, is due out this winter...

...This danger quite possibly explains Gorbachev's surprise action, requiring Foreign Minister Shevardnadze to interrupt his negotiations at the United Nations in New York to return for the vote...

...The developments that led up to Gorbachev's quick action in September were roughly the following...

...some would welcome it...

...The worse it gets, the better," said one gloomy citizen convinced that this was the only road to genuine change...

...They aim at total honesty about the country's past and present...

...Instead of changing their own ways, they blame the government...

...Hence the apprehension felt in Moscow in early fall about Gorbachev's prospects...

...The gambit largely failed, and probably strengthened the opposition...

...American Sovietologists are being invited to lecture and contribute articles to Soviet publications...

...I am a Soviet Tory," Poliakov acknowledges candidly...

...Everyone felt frustrated over the failure of Gorbachev's "restructuring" to improve the economy's performance...

...One was Aleksandra P. Biryukova, now a deputy prime minister and the first woman to reach this level in almost 30 years...

...He laughed knowingly, and responded, "It's a riddle to us, too...

...GORBACHEV BUYS TIME The Perils of Perestroika By Robert v. Daniels Waiting in line at a halfempty Moscow restaurant last month and observing newcomers being admitted out of turn by the head waiter, I commented to the Soviet citizen standing next to me that the procedure reminded me of Winston Churchill's description of the USSR, "a riddle wrapped up in a mystery inside an enigma...

...Yet as Tocqueville underscored in his work on the French Revolution, attempts to reform a repressive system may unleash an anger far outweighing any appreciation they win for the reformers...

...His new emphasis on individual farming exemplifies his commitment to such methods...

...There was concern that the high hopes for glasnost, for speaking the truth about the present and the past, had reached their limits...

...The most immediate effect of Gorbachev's new display of political clout, and particularly of the course Medvedev put forward, will be to encourage the reformers at every level...

...But this mood reflected an underestimation of his skill as apolitici an...

...The fact that the Soviet scene is currently colored by Gorbachev's promising "new thinking" tends to obscure the depth and dimension of the problems that have to be confronted over the long run...

...Ultimately, everything depends on whether or not the performance of the Soviet economy will validate Gorbachev's premise that his country will respond better to freedom and incentives than to discipline and coercion...

...And there was widespread fear that the conservative opposition in the Communist Party machine was either forcing Gorbachev to retrench, or preparing to remove him as it had removed Nikita S. Khrushchev back in 1964...

...He would break out of the old and unreliable structure by appealing to the intellectuals and writers, and to the rank and file membership of the Party...

...They doubt that Gorbachev's political reforms will bring meaningful democratization...

...Meeting with farmers a few days ago in Ligachev's absence, Gorbachev announced his commitment to free enterprise in agriculture and thus underscored his own dominance in that field...

...Medvedev does not concede any place for opposition parties...

...What is striking, however, is how far they have come from their neo-Stalinist past in a very short time...

...Aside from small restaurants, though, the immediate results of this approach have been discouraging, partly for cultural reasons that Gorbachev and his entourage may not fully understand themselves...

...In other words, don't throw out the baby with the bath water...

...The presumed middle-of-the-roaders lost the 79-year-old Andrei A. Gromyko, who had to retire as chief of state to accommodate Gorbachev's plan to combine the highest party and governmental posts...

...Soviet citizens do not only complain universally about the economy...

...They believe with Vadim Medvedev that the system really can be reformed and democratized without giving up the Communist Party's political monopoly...

...Yet less than a week after his promotion, in a speech to a conference of social scientists from the Communist bloc, he made the most advanced statement of the reform philosophy heard thus far...

...Three centuries of serfdom, reinforced by half a century of barracks socialism, have left the Russians a heritage of indifference to work and evasion of responsibility...

...Another was Anatoly I. Lukyanov, a nuts-andbolts administrator from the Party Secretariat who becomes vice-president under Gorbachev in the Supreme Soviet...

...They complain that the Institute of Marxism, guarding the Party archives, "still has the right of first night in history...

...Optimists about Mikhail S. Gorbachev's reforms have gone so far as to describe the recent Kremlin reshuffling as a new revolution...

...Official journals like Kommunist and Problems of History have been transformed...

...His latest book, Is Russia Reformable?, will be published next month...

...To be sure, they were not as broad or dramatic as some in the West hastily suggested...

...The liberal stance is deeply distrusted in the ultraliberal or radical camp, represented by the historian Yuri Afanasiev, the weeklies Moscow News and Ogonyok, and many eminent writers...

...The pressure has been dramatized by the demands of the Armenians and the Baltic peoples...

...Pessimists have put it down as a veiled victory for the neo-Stalinist conservatives...

...By Western standards of intellectual freedom and political pluralism, to be sure, the Soviets have quite a distance to go...

...His credentials are not exciting—a Party propagandist under Brezhnev...

...It will take a long time to transform a nation of shirkers into a nation of real workers...

...This ingrained habit lingers even though a KGB official, of all people, published an article in the leading Party journal Kommunist just a few weeks earlier berating the "cult of secrecy" and calling for the country's transition to the "information society" that everyone in the West talks about...

...This was a step toward implementing the constitutional reform he proposed in June, designed to create a strong executive based on a presidential structure, in preference to the present system of prime minister and cabinet...

...Robert V. Daniels, professor emeritus of history at the University of Vermont, has just returned from a stay in the USSR under an exchange program with the So viel A cademy of Sciences...

...His appointment came in preparation for his being named four days later as the Prime Minister of the Russian Republic...

...Not only peaceful coexistence but world ecology take precedence over the Marxist class struggle...