The Perils of Perestroika

...That the Party embarked on perestroika is proof thatit "is still capable of a lot," and that its "healthy foundation" has not been undermined...

...Some believe that neither a scrupulously honest reckoning with the past, nor the establishment of the most beneficent parliamentary institutions could save the Soviet Union from what they see as its tragic destiny...

...In the pages of Literaturnaya Gazeta, Sarnov has held Lenin responsible for the atrocities committed under his rule: "We should not pretend that everything that happened was done without Lenin's knowledge, despite his will...

...Since this spring, however, a new and more radical wave of criticism has been galvanizing the intelligentsia...

...Its depiction of a scheming Stalin contending with a kindly Sergei Kirov was as accessible to the common man as it was serviceable to the architects of the new thaw...

...As the official crimes and blunders of the past are progressively revealed by the dialectic of glasnost, the Soviet people grapple with the riddle inside the enigma that has exercised Western Marxists for the last half century: Was Stalinism an aberration or a logical extension of Marxism-Leninism...

...When the "most healthy, active, vigorous" segments of the population are "systematically eliminated from the gene pool over the course of such arelatively short historical period, this must have an impact on the quality of the composition of the population," Shubkin says...

...His critique, a fervent indictment of the Party's guiding ideas, was forged of an improbable meld of the ideas of Edmund Burke, Leszek Kolakowski, Friedrich Hayek, and Lenin...

...The very pillar of Marxism, the class analysis of politics, was overturned in Tsipko's analysis...

...Until recently, the accepted answer heaped blame on Stalin and the " cult of personality" for all ormostofthe "mistakes" of his regime and its legacy...

...and collectivization.' So does Vladimir Shubkin, one of Russia's preeminent social analysts...

...Tsipko spoke inacorrespondingvem: "Inmany cases, the debunking of one easily exposable myth leads to the affirmation and propagation of other more plausible and therefore more dangerous myths...

...A series of searching inquiries appeared in the mass circulation press with titles like, "The Sourcesof Stalinism," "OneShouldn't Be Afraid of the Truth," "On Zones that Are Closed to Thought," and "Why Is It Difficult to Speak the Truth...

...Apoll of the readers of Lite raturnaya Gazeta, taken last March, found that 8 5 per cent of the respondents believe a catastrophe will strike the USSR...

...He traced his country's ills to a Utopian strain in Marxism that fused, to disastrous effect, with Russian messianism in the late 19th century...

...For all that Tsipko's analysis repudiated the core ideas of Soviet Socialism, though, it included old justifications that stood out in bald contrast to his iconoclasm...

...A current in Bolshevism that Tsipko called "Left-wing radicalism" attempted to realize this "demagogic fantasy," a proletarian Kingdom of Heaven on earth in a country of peasants, at the price of millions of lives...

...In the first five months of 1989, the number of crimes in Moscow involving firearms more than tripled over the same period a year ago...

...In other words, totalitarianism may be reversible, but its legacy is not...

...Acarnival of masks, terrifying bleached white faces on the eve of the end of the world...

...What was at that time the most farreaching excavation of previously forbidden ground was carried out by Tsipko, an ideological consultant to the Party's Central Committee...

...The anti-Stalinist orthodoxy was further consolidated with the translation of Stephen Cohen's biography of Nikolai Bukharin, in which the Princeton political scientist vigorously argues that there were Bolshevik alternatives to Stalin's program of forceddraft industrialization...

...Voices have begun to clamor for a multiparty system, too...

...Lenin," he argued, "explains the victory of Stalin in 1929...

...Soap is rationed at one bar per person every three months...

...Many of the Soviet intellectuals peering beneath the freshly varnished superstructure of "democratization" have grown bitter and fatalistic...

...As the Bolsheviks themselves proudly proclaimed, he observed, "the class approach 'does not know the so-called laws of war, the laws of humanity, and does not show mercy to the old or to the young, to women and children.'" In a country where 80 per cent of the population were considered "obstacles on the path to the idea, " the result of the "class approach" during the Civil War and collectivization was a level of "brutality" unprecedented in European history...

...Apocalyptic fears have been accompanied by a deepening polarization of Soviet society...

...In fact, Klyamkin warned that the descent into lying is inevitable "if the sources of the lies are alive...

...The Chinese Communitst leadership has answered this question in one way...

...Tsipko has come to appear almost timid in comparison with some of the enragés who are displacing him...

...Krushinski, a correspondent member of the Soviet Academy of Science, ponders "the genetic consequences of the October Revolution and the Civil War...

...Boris Rumer is a Fellow and Gabriel Schoenfeld a PhD candidate in political science at Harvard's Russian Research Center...

...There has indeed been an astonishing surge in violence...

...Simultaneously—or possibly as a result—the whirlwind of increasingly radical voices gnawing away at the ideological underpinnings of the existing order is gaining in intensity and reminding everyone, "all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned...

...The animus explodes in stores, on public transportation, wherever one must stand in tightly compressed groups...

...At the close of 1988, to attack Lenin apparently still meant to attack the very legitimacy of the Revolution, and Tsipko's stature notwithstanding, that was something he would not do...

...A confluence of many circumstances, in particular, the death of V.l...

...Nor would the dissident Marxist historian Roy Medvedev, who declared at the time that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, in which Lenin is featured as the Gulag's founding father, is "filled with slander" and its publication would be "impermissible" without the deletion of its "mendacious fragments...

...This Manichean explanation was reflected in Anatoly Rybakov's bestseller, Children of the A rbat...

...Amid the gloom there is a seemingly unquenchable thirst for fundamental explanations...

...Almost in the same breath that they inveighed against the existing order as a "carcass" and a "collapsing structure, " commentators of a year ago were already noting the fragility of the intellectual edifice being erected in its place...

...Several have publicly targeted Lenin, labeling him Stalin's tutor in crime...

...Similarly, while he claimed that Stalin's conception of Socialism did not differ significantly from that of other Marxists of his day— implying that liability for the Soviet Union's tragedy could not therefore rest with him alone—he also flirted with the "if only Lenin had lived" school of thought...

...Inhis words, "onlytheconstructive labor of culture, art, thought, and the development of religious feeling can create a personality...

...The feeling is that "things fly apart, the center cannot hold...

...Nevertheless, the most authoritative Party organ, Kommunist, has said in an editorial: " [Our] critical analysis of the mistakes of the distant and recent past has been first and foremost honest and penetrating self-criticism...

...He skirted the whole question of the Party's responsibility, for example, by blaming "the administrative system," "the bureaucratic system" and "commandmethods...

...And they do live...

...What the response will be in the Soviet Union may shortly become apparent...

...Tsipko dismissed revolutions because "by themselves, they create nothing...

...Undeterred, the Soviet leadership is bolting forward with reform at an accelerating pace...

...And Solzhenitsyn's Gulag, it has recently been announced, will be published after all this fall...

...The "idolatry of the future, orof somesortofexaltedidea," he asserted, "is not a weakness, a romantic enthusiasm, but a great sin before humanity, before one's own people...

...But Mikhail S. Gorbachev's revolution from above has spawned no less significant developments that have gone virtually unnoticed: The intellectual foundations of the Soviet political order are eroding under the relentless pressure of increasingly radical assaults against the basic dogmas of Communism...

...We live in an atmosphere of hate...

...it was, rather, testimony to the impossibility of constructing a "democratic Socialism" on the foundation of a nonmarket economy...

...The rock band DDT, appearing on one of the USSR's most popular television shows, wails to an audience of millions about "a boiling presentiment of civil war...

...Why in all cases," Tsipko asked, "in all countries, without exception...

...Rumer's most recent book, Soviet Central Asia: A Tragic Experiment, was published this spring...

...Aleksandr Tsipko, Igor Klyamkin and other critics attempted to locate the roots of Stalinism not in Stalin but in the Marxist-Leninist soil that nurtured him...

...A well-known Moscow writer, Benedikt Sarnov, referring to the divisions within the intelligentsia, also speaks of civil war...

...He then goes on to contend that "the experiences of the October Revolution represent not only a demographic but a genetic catastrophe...

...A succession of train disasters and shipwrecks, and the revelation of far higher levels of radiation contamination from the Chernobyl accident than were initially predicted, have only fueled the spreading angst...

...The Perils of Perestroika BY BORIS RUMER AND GABRIEL SCHOENFELD The labor strikes and ethnic violence gripping the Soviet Union have understandably captured the attention of Western observers assessing the prospects of perestroika and glasnost...

...L.V...

...Writing in Novy Mir, he reasons that repeated cycles of war, terror, famine, and emigration havelefttheirineradicablestamp...

...the norm for bologna that, according to one newspaper, "acat wouldn'teat," is set at slightly more than one pound per person permonth;theallotment of scarce sugar, now called "white caviar," has been reduced by a fourth...

...ut by the fall of 1988 facile denunciations of Stalin were beginning to prove too confining for Russian intellectuals...

...Exactly where the changes are leading remains unclear, perhaps even to those orchestrating them...

...We and our descendants will be compelled to reckon with its consequences for many decades, and perhaps hundreds of years...

...Aleksandr Yakovlev, Gorbachev's Politburo confidant, asserts that "Today we are tortured by confusion about how the country and the Leninist Party could have accepted the dictatorship of mediocrity and tolerated the Stalin years and rivers of innocent blood...

...But repentance does not at all mean that we renounce our ideas and programmatic goals...

...Can a political system that only a few years ago rested on the most rigid control of political thought remain standing when its brace is kicked out from under it...

...At the end of June, in the 21 million circulation Soviet weekly, Argumenty iFakty, a front page article recalled that in 1917 the "father of RussianMarxism," Georgi V. Plekhanov, diagnosed Lenin as "raving" and termed his program of introducing Socialism to backward Russia "utopian"—the ultimate insult to a fellow Marxist...

...On the face of it we have a crime crisis," says a high official in the Internal Affairs Ministry, "Such is the grim reality...

...The introduction of a multiparty system "as the so-called chief guarantee of democracy" is not necessary, Kommunist concludes...

...On the other hand, even as Tsipko and like-minded writers danced a jig around Lenin's tomb they seemed fully aware of the lacunae in their position...

...Conditions in the industrial city of Kirov are typical...

...The editor of a Moscow publishing house, who asks to remain anonymous, describes Soviet life at the moment as "a feast in the midst of the plague...

...Millions of reprints of their officially sanctioned yet subversive articles were put on sale and quickly bought...

...To protect the Party from the swelling tide of discontent, its senior ideologists have borrowed an old formulation from an old book: "Repent and ye shall be saved...

...does the absence of free money-commodity exchange lead to authoritarianism, to the strangulation of the rights and values of the individual, and the omnipotence of the bureaucratic apparatus...

...In his view Stalinism was decidedly not, as the traditional apologia maintained, a "deformation" of Marxism...

...One Soviet newspaper has mockingly reported that candidates in the USSR's latest elections were often asked their views about such a reform and were simply unable to answer, because they did not have "the slightest possibility of running to the telephone for supplementary instructions...

...Marx, Tsipko went on, drew an irremediably flawed blueprint of a marketless society with "real commodity exchange and absolute direct planning from above...

...Rumors are even heard of an impending military putsch, and Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov merely exacerbates the situation when he insists that a coup would be both "impossible" and "very difficult to carry out...

...The regime's creed, moreover, is being undermined in an atmosphere of foreboding...

...The "contradictions of Communism" wracking the economy are a major catalyst for the enveloping sense of doom...