Evolution of a Revolution

...Soviet intellectuals now look upon that era differently than their fathers and grandfathers did...

...and the very agenda of change, which included military, legal and localgovernment reform, in addition to the abolition of serfdom...

...Howland H. Sargeant was president of Radio Liberty from 1954 to 1975...

...New faces keep joining the cast as the tumultuous scene expands in Cinerama beyond your four walls...

...Gorbachev's penchant for personal rhetoric and organizational expedients are also eerily reminiscent of Kerensky...

...As for the rest of Soviet society, America has never loomed larger in the Russian consciousness, and Americans have become the reference group par excellence, from rock to habeas corpus, and from the Freedom of Information Act to designer drugs...

...Many of the samizdat documents consisted of letters and petitions that complained of various religious and ethnic repressions...

...The Union of Soviet Writers was holding its first Congress in 20 years...

...But in addition there are the business world's equivalent of soldiers of fortune, who descend on the Soviet scene innocent of any knowledge of country, language or mores...

...But the Kremlin has yet to brave a full-blooded NEP...

...In the early 1970s I became embroiled in a battle for RL's survival: Senators Clifford P. Case (R.-N.J...

...Petersburg "Bloody Sunday" of January 9,1905...

...Suddenly the ubiquitous defensiveness is gone: It is a relief that people can try to learn from the outside world...

...Even were Russiate let them all go freely (and concentrate on building a purely Slavic federation with full autonomy for the Ukraine, Belorussia, Siberia, etc...

...Convinced it will lead to anarchy and chaos, they seek "discipline" and the assertion of force, and they worry lest they too be turned out at the polling booth in local elections...

...They acted as a catalyst for arousing public opinion in the USSR...

...But my admiration is correspondingly great for those who, keeping their heads and their hearts clear, are conscientiously awaiting the day when free spirits will speak to the world again in the Russian language...

...Others believe that Stolypin's hangings and forced exiles made another revolution inevitable and insured that, once it came, it would be swiftly radicalized...

...The Party diehards who oppose the reforms and blame Gorbachev for the deterioration of public authority are gripped by a fear generated by instability—fear for their own rank and perks, and for the organization that most of them are professionally identified with...

...Aleksandr Kabakov's radio drama, The Non-Returner, last year offered a terrifying vision of such an outcome in 1993...

...Every Soviet leader since 1924 has had "his own" Lenin, and Gorbachev is no exception...

...Popular demonstrations of 100,000 or 200,000 strong, with banners asking for greater democracy, assailing the apparat, attacking the KGB, demanding the ouster of the neanderthals in the leadership, standing up against privilege and corruption—that is progress most of us had not expected to witness...

...Neither in terms of "class analysis" nor on the matter of the inevitability of the successive stages of historical development do the reformers of 1 990 operate within the ideological or political constraints of the Mensheviks of 1918 and their strictures against voluntarism...

...At first, parallels were drawn mainly from the Soviet period: New Economic Policy (1921-28...

...and J. William Fulbright (D.-Ark...

...When the initial accent seemed to be on economic reform, Soviet commentators often cited Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP...

...They were skeptical, he told me, but after the Soviet press finally admitted the tragedy, they looked up to him for citing a reliable source from abroad...

...Appropriately, the democratic "left" responded by scheduling mass demonstrations in Moscow, Leningrad and elsewhere for February 25, the traditional anniversary of the February revolution...

...He's a statue—he can afford to wait...

...By the end of 1991, a new constitution might crown the effort by reordering the Soviet Union as a genuine federation...

...One might just as well claim that Gorbachev had become a follower of Andrei D. Sakharov (who was never "accused" of Menshevism) or of John Stuart Mill...

...By 1964, in contrast, Khrushchev's inconsistencies had alienated virtually every social class as well as most Party leaders...

...and the rank-andfile efforts, with sit-ins and hunger strikes where needed, to dramatize the corruption and abuse of local officialdom, leading time and again to the departure of incumbent Party bosses...

...and now the electoral system too is being emulated in Moscow...

...And, unlike the productive, prosperous burghers of compact West Germany awaiting reunification, the Russians cannot begin to afford such massive dislocations...

...Paradoxically, while in fact abandoning significant elements of Leninism, Gorbachev keeps Lenin as a personal model and inspiration...

...Khrushchev (1954-64...

...The sources of Gorbachev's commitment to "democratization" have nothing to do with the Mensheviks, and there is not the slightest suggestion that anything the Mensheviks said or did has evoked a positive response from the present leadership...

...It must be admitted that the whole of Soviet history is not fit to serve as a legal basis for the Soviet regime...

...In contrast to Alexander II, Stolypin, the last effective Tsarist Prime Minister (1906-11), remains a controversial figure...

...By December 1954, the Kremlin apparently felt compelled to break its silence...

...Nonetheless, his "humane, democratic socialism" lacks definition...

...Just as in Eastern Europe last year pictures of spontaneous mass demonstrations bringing down the regime in one Communist country encouraged people to do the same in the next Communist country (and the Romanian events became truly a television revolution), so the pictures on Soviet TV were bound to have an infectious, destabilizing impact far beyond anything the authorities could have anticipated...

...Now(1990)noonecankeep track of all that's going on___ From the ashes of Leninism, historic Russia has begun to re-emerge in all its vividness and multinational complexity...

...Norman Thomas said to me with a grin after one of his interviewsin our studio, "You can't say that over the Voice of America...

...Similar messages were beamed to the Congress from Upton Sinclair, Thornton Wilder, John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell and the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, an organization of 300 writers, scientists, artists and scholars...

...they simply articulated the deepest aspirations of their audience for personal freedoms...

...Various pleas to Gorbachev to exercise a "strong hand" have made the discussion rather topical...

...Emigré writers who also broadcast their sentiments included Alexandra Tolstoy, the daughter and biographer of the novelist, and Boris Zaitsev, who had been president of the Moscow Writers Union in 1922, and was a leading candidate for the 1954 Nobel Prize in literature...

...RL earned a reputation for credibility among its growing Soviet audience by its frankness about the imperfections of U.S...

...Indeed, it is far easier to envision the Soviet Union becoming a law-govemed, multiparty democracy within a few years than to imagine any serious economic improvement—even with a substantial "peace dividend" and the most radical social reforms—in the coming decade...

...I was also impressed by the relevance of its program content to today's transformed Soviet Union...

...Leonid I. Brezhnev's regime had already demonstrated its obscurantism in the trials and convictions of Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel...

...It is now a race between managed change controlled from above, and chaotic change as people begin to take things into their own hands from Chernigov to Sverdlovsk to Ufa to Dushanbe...

...life AT (RADIO) LIBERTY BY GENE SOSIN A few months ago, after settling in at the National Hotel in Moscow opposite the Kremlin, I tuned my Sony portable shortwave receiver to the Russian-language program of Radio Liberty (RL) being broadcast from Munich (jamming had stopped at the end of November 1988...

...What Gorbachev now shares with the Mensheviks is presumably a commitment tothetolerationofa multiparty system...

...The Senators demanded that the stations be closed as "relics of the Cold War" in the new era of détente...

...As they have not failed to notice, the instability is ironically the result of glasnost and contested elections: After all these years, the Party's standing has been put to the test...

...Slowly—much too slowly —the inexperienced new Supreme Soviet is putting in place blocks of a constitutional order and inching toward a framework for a mixed economy...

...The diehards see such a course as suicidal for the system...

...Still trying to defend Lenin, he argues that events between July and October 1917 had ruled out a"bourgeois republic" as a viable alternative to a Bolshevik coup...

...A person less remarkable would not stand a chance...

...Estimates indicate that 14.4 million people tune in during an average day, and 29.4 million in an average month...

...President Richard M. Nixon then appointed a special commission of inquiry, under the chairmanship of Milton Eisenhower...

...Alexei Surkov, the Secretary of the Writers Union, declared that "the enemies of our country and our literature are not silent...

...revealed what had long been common knowledge to the Soviets and to sophisticated Westerners—that RFE and RL were financed by annual appropriations of the U.S...

...This may or may not be flattering to the Mensheviks (who, at least in their original incarnation, are effectively an extinct species), but in any event it is an inappropriate label...

...What has happened there and elsewhere proves George Orwell to have been wrong one more time...

...Television, telephones, Xeroxes, and computers have been important in this context...

...Surkov also assailed Farrell and the Cultural Freedom committee...

...When Gorbachev launched political reform by creating the Congress of People's Deputies, some saw a parallel with the Zemsky Sobor, the national assembly that, ending the Time of Troubles (Boris Godunov), elected Mikhail Romanov as Tsar...

...However, thanks to the peculiarities of shortwave propagation via the ionosphere, and to the steadily increased power of the transmitters, jamming was never completely effective...

...Having unleashed popular initiative, the leadership is faced with grassroots challenges —on ethnic and on civic grounds, from the"left" and from the "right...

...Yet it remains an unanswered question whether history will see Gorbachev, in the end, as the miraculous sorcerer or the sorcerer's apprentice...

...At his apartment in lower Manhattan I taped the following statement by Max Eastman: "My sympathy extends both to those who have knowingly abandoned their birthright to selfhood, and enrolled in service of the police state, and to those who have taken the corruption into their hearts so deeply that they don't know that is what they are doing...

...Despite the mind-boggling emancipation of the Soviet media, many "blank spots" remain...

...Congress channeled through the CIA...

...Although most of my career at RL was spent in the New York bureau, during the late 1960s I was stationed at the Munich headquarters for four years as senior adviser to the director...

...On all these grounds—as well as on foreign policy and the strategy of economic reform—the gulf dividing the feuding wings of the ruling Party is enormous...

...The New York office was then the fledgling operation's intellectual nerve center...

...By the time the first Congress of People's Deputies met, after elections in March '89 that trounced Party chiefs in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev, the top-rated Soviet TV program Vzglyad (Glance) had already raised the demand to remove Lenin's corpse from the Mausoleum and finally bury him, as he wished, next to his mother in Leningrad's Volkovo Cemetery...

...For more than 18 months the Soviet leaders ignored the existence of Radio Liberty, although they made every effort to interfere with the reception of the broadcasts by jamming all the frequencies we were using...

...Reading books and journals, listening to radio and watching television, participating in debates or attending conferences and classes, stimulated innumerable questions...

...He waits for fishing barges filled with mullet...

...Still on the air today, it informs listeners of their cultural heritage and of the vitality of Jewish life abroad...

...one in four young Muscovites, according to a recent poll, would like to emigrate...

...Last April RL relayed the story from Tbilisi that soldiers had killed demonstrating Georgians...

...A new Marshall Plan might prove a bargain if it secured world peace and a democratic order in the Soviet Union...

...The demand was reiterated at the Congress, before millions of television viewers...

...At times these led to changes of values that, between 1971 and 1984, could not fully be articulated yet started a process that meshed with indigenous sources of doubt and "new thinking" which, since 1985, has come to amazing fruition...

...If the leadership can stage massive infusions of food and consumer goods, it may gain some time to try for lasting solutions...

...A Rhodes scholar and an assistant secretary of state under President Harry S. Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Sargeant brought to his position a combination of Washington bureaucratic know-how and respect for intellectual creativity...

...I was fresh out of graduate school with a degree from Columbia's Russian Institute, plus a year in West Germany as a member of the Harvard Refugee Interview Project...

...Soviet estimates of the demographic loss, including unborn children and 26-28 million dead in World War II, now range from 60 - 90 million...

...Agood number of these appeals were from Jewish refuseniks and other victims of anti-Semitism...

...RFE and RL continued to be funded by Congress, and the Board For International Broadcasting, a separate Federal agency, was created to oversee the radios and preserve their journalistic independence...

...the intellectual euphoria produced by sudden glasnost...

...Often with a tinge of what the Germans call Zweckpessimismus (purposeful pessimism), some Western analysts like to draw parallels with Nikita S. Khrushchev's decade, especially the manner in which Party conservatives frustrated and then deposed him...

...The brunt of the struggle for democracy continues to be borne largely by the 1960s generation, now in its 40s and 50s...

...They see the new McDonald's in Moscow as the latter-day version of the Nazi tanks, and joint business ventures as novel forms and symbols of Wall Street's infiltration and corruption of the Russian homeland...

...It was at this time that we saw the emergence of other "free spirits" from the Russian intelligentsia who expressed their heretical opinions in samizdat—e.g...

...Perhaps the word that best characterizes RL's programming over the years is "glasnost...

...With the formal renunciation of the Party's power monopoly at the February 7 Central Committee meeting, a Rubicon of sorts appears to have been crossed...

...It is in their attitude toward the population at large, moreover, that a fundamental disagreement separating the supporters and opponents of reform can be found...

...Indeed, the Utopian radicalism that afflicted Russian intellectuals from 1861 into the 1930s, and that also could be heard in Khrushchev ("This generation will live under Communism...

...As might be expected, to some this is anathema...

...It is reassuring that the reformers prevailed inside, in the Central Committee, given the smug wise-guy posture of a number of American Sovietologists who have for years been predicting the imminent demise of Gorbachev and the failure of his political agenda...

...Eastman concluded by reciting Pushkin's famous poem addressed to the katorzhniki, the exiled convicts of the abortive Decembrist Revolution of 1825...

...Amid growing anger with economic misery, ecological poisons and corrupt political tutelage, and as non-Russian peoples reclaim their disparate national traditions, the galvanizing core, the sine qua non, of the current revolution in the USSR is a massive, conscious effort (on the part of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and some others " above" and millions more "below") to redeem Russia's modern history...

...In those days I never dreamed that I would work at RLforthenext33 years, let alone ultimately see the realization of many of its goals, including the relaxationof censorship...

...The Party platform and the near-unanimity of the vote agreeing to it are misleading if they make us forget the formidable challenges to the Soviet leadership and the ambiguities in its political posture...

...Despite incredible oppressions, the Russians, the people of Pushkin and Herzen, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy have survived to rise again, their conscience and talents more or less intact, even if their self-esteem is low vis-à-vis the fortunate West and their shame is considerable for the crimes committed in their name...

...None of this detracts from the exceptional nature of the new departures...

...Empty shelves in the shops continue to incite unrest, but glasnost, democratization and the "new thinking" in foreign policy enjoy overwhelming support...

...Andrei D. Sakharov's seminal essay "Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, " Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novels, Roy Medvedev's "Let History Judge" and Andrei Amalrik's "Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984...

...The perils of perestroïka have been reflected in the historical parallels that Soviet and other analysts have evoked in evaluating its prospects...

...After speaking to Soviet citizens and sampling the flood of letters from Soviet listeners pouring into RL's offices, it becomes clear that Radio Liberty's mission has not yet been accomplished...

...Not long after the beginning of the Gorbachev era I retired from Radio Liberty, but I have followed its progress as it has adapted to the new conditions of glasnost and perestroïka...

...In fact, the nationalist writer Valentin Rasputin scornfully compared today's new democrats to "[Aleksandr] Kerensky, [Paul] Miliukov, [Aleksandr] Guchkov, and [Nikolai] Chkeidze" (liberal and moderate Socialist Duma leaders who ultimately formed the Provisional Government), in rejecting their advocacy of parliamentary democracy by quoting Tsarist strongman Pyotr Stolypin: "You, gentlemen, need great upheavals—we need a great Russia...

...From Minsk to Magadan, crowds assemble at mass graves to mourn their losses between 1918 and 1953, which exceeded the Holocaust many times...

...From the very outset, hard news was the backbone of the programs in Russian and more than a dozen languages of national minorities...

...seems to have been cauterized by the experience of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot...

...There are, of course, thelegitimate representatives of serious concerns seeking business in the East...

...The challenge is how to achieve a "normal" society in a multinational empire riven by economic crisis...

...Trouble is, they say, we can no longer afford such generosity, even if it were to encourage 285 million people to emulate our ways and become accustomed to buying our products...

...Above all, whether or not the label fits Gorbachev is an irrelevant question...

...The miners' strikes last summer evoked similar memories...

...If the central authorities can negotiate a "Hong Kong solution" with the most separatist national republics, such as Lithuania, providing for a gradual, orderly transition to independence at a future date by mutual consent, and with fair settlement of the many thorny questions between them, they may avoid traumatic disintegration...

...Such quietism is notable among younger Russians: Many of them consider the Soviet situation hopeless...

...While tightening political controls, it permitted free trade, independent farmers and voluntary cooperatives, small-scale private enterprise, and industrial "concessions" to Western capitalists...

...encouragement of ethnic identity and self-determination on the part of the national minorities...

...Furthermore, though a minority of intellectuals still accents Russia's distinctiveness from the "decadent" West, pan-Slavism, the "Third Rome" syndrome and the notion of Russia's special mission to the nations now seem quite dead (as are the old "Populism" and "world revolution...

...the actual broadcasts were to be recorded and aired in Munich, headquarters of RL and its sister station Radio Free Europe (RFE), with which it was formally merged in 1976...

...Whenever we obtained some of them and were convinced of their authenticity, they were disseminated over RL...

...On the occasion of our Congress, the White émigré Boris Zaitsev was dragged out of the literary trash basket to babble poisonous words of impotent malice over a White Guard microphone...

...During my recent travels in the Ukraine, I spoke with a factory foreman who had heard that broadcast and shared it with his co-workers...

...The repression of Tbilisi demonstrators on April 9,1989 was instantly compared with the St...

...Catherine II (1762-96...

...Even the nationalist, anti-Semitic ultras preach Russia's isolation from the West (if need be, they say, for centuries) rather than its predestination to redeem mankind...

...In addition, victories by the "left" are apt to spur the far "right" to more drastic actions...

...Broadcasts for Christians and Moslems had been aired by RL since the 1950s...

...As historic issues begin to be confronted, Soviet politics (once branded "monolithic") have become as complex and nuanced as in any Western country...

...In 1987, priorities began to shift from economic to political change...

...BY ALEXANDER DALLIN STANDING LENIN ON HIS HEAD The adoption of a new Party platform in Moscow that gives up the Communist monopoly of political power is no copycat anticlimax after the East European events of recent months...

...Then someone opens a window, and somehow (1987) the edges uncurl, contrasts return, the focus sharpens, individual faces become distinct and lively...

...The turn of events has inspired an invasion of the Soviet Union (and to an even larger extent, of Eastern Europe) by a peculiar legion of entrepreneurs and adventurers...

...He deserves great credit for the radio's role as an independent voice, a surrogate domestic service concentrating on internal Soviet topics...

...Barely had Gorbachev relaunched de-Stalinization and weathered the Nina Andreyeva neo-Stalinist attack in the winter of 1987-88, than citizens began challenging the Leninist heritage, unfurling the pre-Bolshevik Russian tricolor flag and raising demands to "go back [from October 1917] to February...

...Suffice it to say that in the Soviet Union (and not only there) it would make eminent sense for us to avoid a facile—and false —equation of political democracy with capitalism...

...Even in a benign international environment, coping simultaneously amid conflicting political advice and pressures with the deteriorating economy, the collapse of governmental authority, rampant corruption, goon squads, and militant ethnic self-assertion is a formidable task...

...But can a fire break be erected between the Baltic and Moldavian cases—areas incorporated in 1940 as a consequence of the NaziSoviet Pact—and all other nationalist movements within the USSR...

...For months before it opened, RL had mounted a major campaign to review the suppression of the arts under Stalin, and to restore the "missing pages" of popular Soviet writers whose works were banned...

...Alas, a primitive and extreme sales pitch can here domoreharm than good, especially if the seller is ignorant of Soviet political culture and the neuralgic sensitivity on the issue of "social justice...

...German-language radio in Berlin...

...In addition, restoring historical truth and discussing viable alternatives to centralized control of political and economic life were among the constantly reiterated themes...

...Gorbachev is said to acknowledge the obvious similarities between his own circumstances and those of Alexander II: the conditions at the outset of the reign (decades of repression, elite dissidence, a losing war, economic failures...

...The Soviet socioeconomic mess (the lamentable state of public health and education are very much part of the dismal picture) must be experienced to be believed...

...RL is now the station most frequently heard from the West...

...It strongly concluded that the free flow of information into Eastern Europe should be maintained because this was in the long-range interests of American foreign policy...

...These days the debates in the Congress of People's Deputies refer repeatedly to the way things are done in the U.S.: coverage of "fast food" on television leads to questions about why there is none in the USSR...

...The rise of "popular fronts" and informal groups, the election platforms of Sakharov and others recalled the activity of Russian liberals in the winter of 1904-5...

...Suddenly (1988), the photo begins to turn into living color...

...Still, a remarkable step has been taken...

...So, eloquently, does the continuum of Russian literature in the great tradition from Evgeny Zamyatin, Andrei Platonov and Mikhail Bulgakov to Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, Vassily Grossman and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn...

...Zemsky Sobor (1613...

...Ihadbeenhired by Boris Shub, a brilliant and innovative American propagandist for Russian democracy who headed the New York programming section, a position I assumed within a few years...

...Western legal conventions and institutions—for example, the jury system—are cited as models and precedents...

...the resurgence of religion...

...Meanwhile, elections in the national republics and towns may have strengthened democratic forces in the country at large, impelling the Supreme Soviet to enact long-awaited legislation on freedom of the press, freedom of conscience, emigration, land, property, uniform taxation, and local self-government...

...For the modernizers among the Soviet reformers the Western connection has, in fact, come to occupy an almost embarrassingly central role...

...He and many of the American executives on the staff were regularly vilified by the official Soviet media, while the dedicated émigré writers, editors and announcers were labeled "traitors to the homeland" and " hirelings of the intelligence services...

...But since the spring of 1988, glasnost, de-Stalinization, religious toleration, détente, and democratization have all moved far beyond the limited horizons of Khrushchev's baggy-pants Politburo...

...Stalin was still in the Kremlin, holding his subjects in an iron grip...

...In the course of the next six months, Gorbachev might conceivably emerge at the head of a "renewed" CPSU (not very likely), at the head of a Social Democratic wing of a CPSU split forever, or —like General Charles de Gaulle in 194445—as an integrating President above the strife of parties and factions...

...Considering the ambitious legislative agenda set for the Congress and the new Supreme Soviet, a more relevant precedent is that of Catherine II, who four years into her reign summoned a Great Commission of elected representatives to prepare a new legal code based on the principles of Montesquieu (also very much in vogue these days...

...At the very least, though, Gorbachev needs three things: stability, a clear strategy and support...

...Often the central Soviet press ignores or delays reporting events in cities far from Moscow like Baku and Dushanbe, where workers' strikes and ethnic conflicts have erupted...

...time and again the "streets" have been well ahead of the (Party and government) "of fices...

...The emergence of the Interregional Group of Deputies, united by concern for civil liberties and responsible government, was reminiscent of both the Constitutional Democrats ("Kadets") of 1906 and the "Progressive Bloc" formed around them in the fourth Duma after 1912...

...Concern about the CPSU's future position has been heightened by the rise of grassroots initiatives...

...What is more, starting in 1988 events began consciously to "echo,"and to invite comparison with, earlier dynamic phases of Russian history...

...Many prominent American and émigré writers sent messages to the Congress through RL, too...

...Her dependence on the service nobility can be compared with Gorbachev's solicitude for the Party nomenklatura...

...The scriptwriting unit preparing future programs consisted of political exiles from the postrevolutionary "first emigration," as well as postWorld War II Soviet Army defectors who had fought for their country but abhorred Stalin's regime...

...After the years of stultifying and depressing isolation—the intellectual and political analog to economic autarchy—in the 1970s, policy and technology combined to expose a whole generation to concepts and practices ranging from tolerance to abundance...

...There are many other differences as well...

...A quixotic reformer, he was overthrown by Guards officers loyal to the old order...

...If force is used judiciously to demonstrate Moscow's determination to maintain law and order whenever communal violence or riots break out, this might gain Gorbachev the backing of some conservatives and convince the doubters that he means to play for keeps...

...But how can the troops be prevented from repeating the sort of massacres that were perpetrated in Tbilisi last April and that undermine the regime's legitimacy...

...Not insignificantly, the American press came to our defense...

...there was no such "left" in Khrushchev's day...

...full exposureof Stalin's crimes against the people...

...It is an effort to revive, refine and at last fulfill the humane, democratic aspirations of the Russian intelligentsia since 1825—aspirations derailed in the chaos of World War I by sectarian fanatics who thrust Russia back to the savagery of the 16th century...

...Local stringers call in that news, too, and RL immediately "cross-reports" it to the rest of the Soviet audience...

...We were not arrogant enough to conclude that our mere 10,000 watts had helped to dispatch the tyrant...

...When Boris Yeltsin, Yuri Afanasyev and other radical reformers in the Congress of People's Deputies and the Supreme Soviet are denied full coverage in the press, RL broadcasts their interviews with "stringers" in Moscow, many of whom are prominent independent Soviet journalists who regularly telephone Munich...

...But it is a good bet that, amid a variety of influences, a surprisingly significant role was played, unwittingly, by the West in the 10-15 years preceding Gorbachev...

...In which case—as perhaps a fittingly ironic close to this tormented century—the Germans will take up the job...

...The new Congress of People'sDeputies was awaited with high expectations, much as the first State Duma had been in 1906...

...They talk profit and market share to the natives as they seek to position themselves to conquer the Soviet Union for American toilet paper, deodorants, Disneyland, and more exotic products and services—not to mention the greater glory of the mighty buck...

...In the end technology has not served the Big Brother—popular behavior in Eastern Europe should dispose of the myth of successful brainwashing by the Communists—but on the contrary has shown itself to have a liberating potential, too...

...Indeed, it will be very much in order to reassess the impact of the period of détente, aborted though it was, in opening up for the Soviet intellectual elite, for some dissidents as well as for university students unprecedented opportunities to acquaint themselves with the best (and also the worst) of Western thinking and writing...

...and the development of genuine public opinion, gradually influenced by ideas and information from the West and by the human rights struggle of a small group of dissidents inside the Soviet Union...

...The main obstacles to so felicitous an outcome are the disintegrating economy and spreading nationalist unrest in the non-Russian republics...

...Glasnost + technology + an end to terror makes for an explosive mix, and the men in the Kremlin know it...

...It is also reassuring considering the resistance he certainly faces in his own milieu...

...The counterattack to RL's barrage of programs came at the close of the Congress...

...The February Revolution (1917...

...At the time of the earthquake in Armenia in December 1988, the liberal weekly Moscow News praised "the Munich station [for offering] its channels to listeners in the earthquake areas searching for their relatives...

...These measures are valuable but will not show any quick results...

...From the mid-1950s on, RL sought to establish a bridge between Western intellectuals and their Soviet counterparts in spite of Moscow's continual attempts to discredit the radio station...

...There is no current equivalent of World War I (the overridingly divisive issue of 1917), but the "deficitary" economy, nationalist upheavals, and the rapid ebb of popular confidence in the entire Soviet system form a volatile mix...

...But if there is a common denominator emerging from election results, opinion polls and conversations with ordinary citizens, it is that the peoples of the USSR in their vast majority yearn to live "normally"—i.e., as most people do in Western Europe and North America...

...Now, some fear that the election of another Mikhail in 1985 mayinstead turn out to have been the start of a new Time of Troubles...

...The son of David Shub, a wellknown Menshevik and unauthorized biographer of Lenin, Boris had previously been political adviser to was, the U.S...

...Vladimir Bukovsky, the Soviet dissident, later called jamming "KGB jazz...

...The current Moscow production of a pre-revolutionary play by Dimitri Mereshkovsky suggests contemporary parallels with Catherine'ssonandheir, Paul I (1796-1801...

...A cursory reading of the speeches of the historic February 7 meeting is sufficient to convey the great alarm, the profound discord, the pervasive frustration, bitterness and personal stress of the Central Committee's members...

...Soon it became widely known that thousands of uncensored manuscripts protesting the regime's violation of human rights were circulating clandestinely among a limited group of readers inside the Soviet Union...

...But as the era of the "collective leadership" began, so did a unique phenomenon in international communications: an Americanfinanced shortwave network, largely staffed by former Soviet citizens...

...Describing the governor of Odessa in the early 19th century, the Duke de Richelieu, whose statue stands at the top of the famous Potemkin steps leading down to the port, the poet says: And Papa Duke stands on his pedestal With outstretched arm, but he is offered nothing...

...That the country is full of cynics, and that those venturing into direct political action for the first time are hopelessly divided or lack a coherent vision, scarcely relieves the anxiety of the oldline officeholders...

...The Baltic states may yet succeed in negotiating acivUized divorce from Moscow (although this is by no means certain), but the southern and particularly me Moslem republics pose more difficult problems, as the battle over Nagorno-Karabakh has demonstrated...

...It begins (in Eastman's own translation): "Deep in the Siberian mine, /Keep your patience proud;/The bitter toil shall not be lost, / The rebel thought unbowed...

...Room exists for a serious study of the etiology of Soviet reformism, Gorbachev style...

...In Odessa I heard the quintessential expression of their frustration in verses written by a local satirical balladeer...

...Emelian Pugachev's peasant rebellion (1773) put an end to Catherine's liberal pretensions...

...It is no longer an idle speculation or a subversive thought to wonder how long it can hold together as a single political organization...

...On March 1, 1953, RL inaugurated its first broadcast...

...In the six weeks I spent in a dozen cities and five republics, talking freely with people on all levels of Soviet society, I learned that they still depend on Western radio broadcasts of the VOA, BBC, Deutsche Welle and RFE/ RL to supplement their knowledge of what is going on in their country...

...By admitting this, we would be taking a step toward the creation of a democratic society, —yuri afanasyev, july 1989 Visiting the Soviet Union the past few years, one experienced something like this: Imagine, if you will, looking at an old black-and-white photo from your desk drawer, a fading group scene slightly out of focus, curling at the edges...

...The move has its own logic and its own problems...

...The information revolution has been one of the significant differences between 1956 and 1989...

...Even if Boris Yeltsin's warnings of imminent revolution pro ve to be exaggerated, for at least a year it has been very much an open question as to whether—Gorbachev's charismatic personality and the dictates of self-interest aside—the intrinsic prestige of the CPSU is any higher than that of the Romanov Establishment on the eve of its demise...

...What price glory...

...Although Gorbachev initiated democratization while Nicholas II granted limited rights only under extreme popular pressure, 1988 and 1989brought many echoes of the stormy years that gave Russia a semi-constitutional regime...

...one may hope that it proves as nonprophetic as 1984...

...The reformers have departed from Leninism to espouse spontaneity and autonomy at the grassroots level, and to bridge the gap between rulers and ruled...

...It is not entirely impossible...

...In many ways, however, Gorbachev has become far more emancipated from Marxist categories of thinking than the Mensheviks were...

...True, opening the door to a multiparty system is easier than solving the USSR's economic ills or managing the country's ethnic tensions...

...It also reflects two closely related phenomena: first, the extraordinary learning process Soviet leaders have undergone over the course of the last five years (in spite of considerable fumbling and stalling on their part...

...FragilePoland will be a very quick fix, by comparison...

...Restricting parallels to the Soviet context, however, slights both the "historical memory" of Soviet society (refreshed by republication of classic histories, documents and memoirs) and the culture of Russia's current leaders (the first with liberal educations since Lenin...

...It has further been confirmed by public opinion polls and by anecdotal evidence— with more people leaving the Party than joining it in many districts, and with overt disorientation over its role in a new Soviet society, if and when...

...the sharp upsurge of ethnic self-consciousness and demands for sovereignty, plus, in Transcaucasia and Central Asia, brutal pogroms and communal violence...

...the only other real choices by that time, he says, were anarchy or a Right-wing military dictatorship...

...The proposition is debatable, to say the least, as a matter of historical analysis...

...And, mirabile dictu, the first halfway-free elections since 1917 brought forth new, intelligent and (above all) honest political leaders committed to democracy, nonviolence and the rule of law—among them industrial workers, journalists, historians, law professors...

...Large demonstrations in Soviet cities, organized by the democratic "left," helped Gorbachev withstand last year's conservative offensive...

...By opting for contested elections, they have in effect surrendered the prerogatives of the nomenklatura...

...Shortly after my return to the New York bureau in 1970, we therefore began a weekly series for Soviet Jews called Judaism...

...Because Gorbachev and his advisers have presumably learned from the past, and because most of the world is at peace, Mikhail Sergeyevich may yet fare better than the late Aleksandr Fyodorovich...

...Millions of Soviet citizens, once stunned, weary spectators, have become active political participants...

...These include the phenomenal growth of "informal" organizations, from environmental groups to Hare Krishnas, and from "popular fronts" to clubs dedicated to sanctifying the last Tsar...

...Sunday Talks, a program for Orthodox Russians conducted by Father Alexander Schmemann, regularly elicited an enthusiastic response from listeners, including Solzhenitsyn...

...Whereas revolutionary tradition honored the terrorism that climaxed in the assassination of Alexander II, today's intellectuals (like Tolstoy at the time) view such violence as tragically misguided...

...Political and academic leaders in the West welcomed the opportunity to participate in the effort...

...Preparations were under way for launching the broadcasts six months later...

...Unless, as in 1922 with Herbert Hoover's American Relief Administration and 1941 with Franklin D. Roosevelt's Lend-Lease, America were to come generously to the rescue...

...Over the next six weeks, everywhere I traveled in Russia, the Ukraine and the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, I listened to RL...

...By the summer of 1988, a year before Gorbachev and his Politburo ally Aleksandr Yakovlev began formally revising official ideology to address such issues, the pernicious role of the Party was already Topic Number One among the youth milling about Pushkin Square in Moscow—and elsewhere...

...More important, even if the authority of the Party throughout the Soviet Union is collapsing with amazing speed, its preeminence in all Soviet institutions—including the Army, police, ministries, and economic enterprises—is something the Mensheviks would never have condoned...

...What is striking, though, is how by the start of 1990 Gorbachev's own situation, "between the people and the nomenklatura" (in Yuri Afanasyev's dichotomy), had come to resemble that of Kerensky, who in the summer of 1917, was caught between the Army and the Allies, ontheonehand, and the Bolsheviks, anarchists, "left-internationalists," and the Germans, on the other...

...his 1989 draft constitution may yet provide a sane blueprint for the Soviet future...

...Those ideals seemed chimerical at the time that I came to the New York office ofRL...

...Like some Western antiCommunists, they do not believe there can be a viable "soft Communism...

...Gorbachev's view of 1917, and his own present position, stand in paradoxical contrast...

...Some (including Solzhenitsyn) argue that his combination of authoritarian politics and radical land reform might have stabilized old Russia but for the war in 1914...

...popular culture from the West has a way of seducing and spreading...

...But how often can it pay for that kind of extravagance, and how can it make certain that emergency imports are fairly distributed throughout the land...

...They did not preach violent overthrow of the regime...

...Now, with the economy in worse shape, such cardinal questions as land, property, prices, and free trade are back on the agenda for 1990-92...

...Before you know it (1989), the old print starts to expand beyond its borders—and to become a moving picture, with sound...

...Alexander II (1855-81...

...In September 1952 when I joined the staff of Radio Liberation, subsequently renamed Radio Liberty, the station was not yet on the air...

...and second, an astute, if almost hysterical, effort to respond to grassroots initiatives that threaten to take power out of the ruling Party's hands—an attempt to preempt what has been the most dramatic among the unintended consequences of the unraveling of the Soviet leviathan...

...He has not yet moved to abolish the ban on factions within the Party (a fiction, these days, to be sure, but one the oldstyle Party hacks swear to as orthodox Leninism) or the notion of " democratic centralism...

...But in many areas local elections have been scarcely contested and remain controlled by the old apparat...

...Here is a modern leader dealing with present-day issues and challenges, not with refighting the battles of the past...

...But we cannot help cheering the political changes taking place in Moscow...

...Having stood Lenin on his head, Gorbachev faces a challenge of immense complexity...

...Much of the frenzy of these conquistadores would be pretty innocuous, if unappetizing, were it not for the mindless insistence, from Washington and elsewhere in the U.S., that our mission to the benighted Soviets must be to bring them the ideology of the market...

...society...

...Several times in recent weeks, on various Op-Ed pages and television news shows, prominent pundits have referred to President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's adroit pirouette on Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution as a shift by him to a "Menshevik" position...

...All the more so when one witnesses the disillusionment and impatience of the people with the snail's pace of economic reforms...

...Broader strata of the intelligentsia, however, have been attracted anew to the message of Vekhi (Landmarks), a famous 1909 essay collection by former Marxists, who urged Russians to abandon their quest for perfect social institutions and instead look inward for salvation...

...Or as they themselves might have lived had Russia not "missed the turn" in the 1860s, in 1905-7, in 1917, and (some would say) in 1927-28...

...anna akhmatova, march 1956 To give a legal foundation to a regime that was brought into being through bloodshed, with the aid of mass murders and crimes against humanity, is only possible by resorting to falsification and lies—as has been done up till now...

...the exodus of Russian troops and settlers from the inflamed borderlands might be as traumatic as the return of French colons from North Africa...

...Their verdict on Lenin's experiment is aseptic: "72 Years on the Road to Nowhere" and "Worse than the Mongol Yoke" were among the slogans raised in 1989...

...The newspaper added, "We heard on a foreign band what we should have heard on our own...

...The very magnitude of the repression testifies to the scope of the resistance...

...If the local and regional elections continue to oust the diehards and demonstrate that the public mood favors Westernizing reform more than nationalist conservatism, Gorbachev may be able to ride that tiger...

...By a remarkable coincidence Stalin died four days later...

...Some of it no doubt stems from the formative experiences of the reformers themselves and their families, such as memories of collectivization, terror, World War II, and the heady post-Stalin atmosphere of thaw and change...

...Moreover, as in the dark of autocracy the genius of Pushkin epitomizedRussia's "Renaissance" and "Enlightenment," so in our time its finest scientific and civic traditions fused in the remarkable person of Andrei D. Sakharov: His 1968 essay on "Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom" saw well beyond perestroïka...

...THE First Revolution (1905-7...

...For me, a former executive of the radio network the Soviet regime regarded as anathema during the entire Cold War, hearing RL inside the USSR was exciting...

...Since the defeat of many of its functionaries at the polls a year ago, aprecipitous decline in the authority of the Party, and of other traditional institutions, has been manifest...