Russia's Manifest Destiny

...The worst shortages attract the biggest investment by coops, so their prices, as Ofer indicates, "are bound to be high...

...and a foreign gang, as Laqueur points out, could never govern a huge nation contrary to "the wishes of the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants...

...A tyranny of some sort became inevitable in October 1917...

...These are familiar questions in the West...

...Boris Kagarlitsky, the author of Farewell Perestroika: A Soviet Chronicle (Verso, 217 pp., $45), translated by Rick Simon, contends that only opponents of free-market policies dare advocate democracy in the here and now: "Socialist ideas, despite the changes in the political environment, are so firmly rooted...

...Stalinism was popular, added Kliamkin, especially in rural areas where there has never been much understanding of liberal (in the European sense) economic values...

...Martin's, 201 pp., $ 19.95)—which Laqueur edited, with pieces by himself, John Erickson, Paul A. Goble, Edward Luttwak, Gur Ofer, and Arthur Waldron—prudently neglects to answer its own question...

...A 1988 essay by Vadim Kozhinov, in the nationalist Nash Sovremennik, also observed that fewer people died in the purges than in the Civil War (when Stalin didn't play a major role) or in the famine (a result of dogmas held by Communists generally...

...Yet if Stalin had not risen to the top, it is unlikely that Trotsky or Bukharin, for example, would have killed an equal number of their fellow countrymen (20 million is a reasonable estimate...

...Economic reform is unpopular among the workers," Laqueur reports in Soviet Union 2000, "who assume, not without reason," that they will have to work harder to receive the same or less in return...

...Laqueur concludes that "all kind [sic] of things can be imposed, but it is not certain that political freedom is one of them...

...Or do they...

...Certainly, the huge human losses of the Civil War and the famine have a claim to our attention, though it is mainly Stalin's apologists—not, as the nationalists contend, liberals— who dispute this...

...and if we cannot know how long Lenin expected the NEP to continue, we do know that he never renounced the ideal of a command economy...

...No doubt Lenin's dictatorship was a necessary condition of Stalin's...

...intolerance...

...Indeed, the nationalist Right calls them unworthy of compassion because they created the force that destroyed them...

...There is no evidence that he advocated a more democratic regime" at the end of his life, remarks Laqueur...

...Kagarlitsky writes like, and apparently is, a Marxist...

...He is specific enough in his critique of Soviet liberalism, however, and in Soviet Union 2000, Laqueur and Ofer confirm a lot of his polemic...

...Stalin, Kozhinov implied, wasmerely another Bolshevik...

...and Stalinism was an international rather than a Russian disorder, for the Party was dominated by "Russophobic" minorities and, besides, Leftists everywhere celebrated his cult...

...His "precise definition" of democratic socialism is, "a society in which the workers would gain the opportunity to participate in making productive, economic and social decisions...

...Laqueur does not exaggerate the material's importance...

...Such nonsense, he also laments in Soviet Union2000, "is the only alternative at present" to the remains of the official ideology...

...Lenin permitted his colleagues to overrule him...

...And while the Bolsheviks purged in the 1930s were truly accomplices as well as victims, 7-10 non-Communists were arrested for each Party member...

...that any organization not advancing socialist slogans is perceived by the broad masses as suspicious...

...In a number of cases, I think, they reveal more about the Soviet Union today than in Stalin's time...

...Last April he was elected to the Moscow Soviet...

...Was Stalinism, in all of its ugly features and vast scale, the inescapable result of Leninism...

...Nor would another leader have used terror as indiscriminately as Stalin did: A majority of the people murdered in the mid- to late 1930s probably supported the regime...

...Walter Laqueur's Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations (Scribner's, 382 pp., $24.95) is a collection of essays—on agricultural collectivization, the cult of personality, the Great Terror, and other aspects of the era—that draw upon this literature and its findings...

...But merely a minority even of the intelligentsia is liberal in any way...

...In Tallinn, to the visitors' dismay, speakers demanded the expulsion of the local ethnic Russians...

...Communists often claim that the casualties of those years were not only loyal Soviet citizens but actually, in the main, Party members...

...Although Igor Kliamkin.aphilosopher, has been an optimist regarding thepresent, in 1987-88 he too argued (in Novy Mir) that Leninism led ineluctably to Stalinism by rejecting the free market, the chief impediment, in his view, to despotism...

...A fifth of the disappointingly small roster of private concerns may be "run by Mafiosi," Laqueur believes...

...But in the Soviet Union only during the past several years has it been possible to address them publicly in books and magazines...

...Nationalism in Russia has its counterpart in the Russophobia smoldering on both sides of all Soviet borders...

...it would be more politically correct, I suppose, to fail...

...The achievement of democracy may take generations, Laqueur speculates, and there will be reverses...

...He resigned himself to the return of free enterprise—the New Economic Policy (NEP)—from 1921 until his death...

...and a habit of idealizing the people...

...Privatization doesn't make sense, Kagarlitsky implies, because the USSR lacks a class of entrepreneurs: "Only the [Soviet] Mafia or the most corrupt segment of the bureaucracy could serve as capital investors, and neither of these are [sic] distinguished by any great economic and entrepreneurial culture...

...Laqueur therefore rejects the notion, fashionable in Soviet reform circles, that Nikolai Bukharin, the most prominent champion of NEP, was Lenin's rightful successor...

...In 1988 Kagarlitsky's Moscow Popular Front, which is not ethnically based, sent delegates to the congress of its Estonian counterpart, whichis...

...In any case, Communists outside the Soviet Union could not maintain the Party's rule in Moscow or Vladivostok...

...and numbers of them, remembering (as Laqueur puts it) that nearly "every change in Russian history, from the importation of potatoes onward, has been introduced by order from above," dismiss the people as too backward, particularly in economic matters, to govern themselves in the foreseeable future...

...Soviet Union 2000: Reform or Revolution...

...Kagarlitsky denounces the cooperatives for charging "excessively high prices" and "prospering in the midst of ageneral crisis...

...These predilections, he maintained, not those of the "skeptical" Lenin, produced Stalinism...

...Can any liberal agenda succeed in a land where ethnic hatred appears to be scarcely less natural than breathing...

...Three years ago, an economist named Vastly Selyunin recalled (in the liberal monthly Novy Mir) that in 1918 a decree bearing Lenin's signature condemned speculators to death—not to prevent shortages but because he hated capitalism in principle...

...Accidents do nonetheless occur, Laqueur insists, rightly complaining that Kliamkin's argument excludes them...

...Aleksandr Tsipko, a critic of Kliamkin, nevertheless agreed that Stalinism had its roots in characteristically Russian attitudes...

...in which there would be social guarantees for all citizens, and unlimited democracy...

...Yet the contributors do persuasively rule out several possibilities, including a rapid transition to democracy...

...But in articles published during 1988-89, in the science journal Nauka i Zhizn, Tsipko defended Marx and Lenin, representing them as humanistic realists quite outside the dominant tradition of the Russian Left: impatience at backwardness...

...In reality, he says, the negligible resistance inside the Party to forced collectivization was no accident...

...It does not automatically follow, though, that every element of Stalinism was prefigured in Leninism...

...a hankering after sudden, radical and violent transformations...

...This hardly lessens their interest, and Laqueur's running commentary is first-rate...

...the new works "had a far greater impact" on their Soviet readership...

...Tsipko was too respectful of Lenin...

...It says a good deal about the USSR at present that he arrived at this outlook spontaneously, without reading Friedrich von Hayek...

...Laqueur (in Stalin) is right to wonder why Russian nationalists are "not concerned with the real dangers, with their house on fire, but with the writings of some obscure Jewish-Communist poets...

...The author's goals are obscure...

...Did the Bolshevik police state become a foregone conclusion on the day Lenin seized power...

...Meanwhile, as republics and autonomous districts throughout the Soviet Union grandly assert their sovereignty, the nationalities seem almost to be more out of control than the economy...

...Can the USSR even now undo the legacy of its creators...

...The NEP was thus doomed at the outset, maintained Selyunin, whose pessimistic fatalism quite consistently extends to current events...

...Often "the essential facts" have been known in the West, he notes...

...Kagarlitsky warns, "the real fight is only just beginning...

...Gorbachev's rise, declares Laqueur, "was a historical accident," a consequence of the conservatives' inability to devise a convincing alternative to reform...

...Such considerations, it is sometimes held, diminish his responsibility for his successor's madness...

...He used terror, but not of Stalinesque dimensions, and mostly against real opponents...

...Market-inspired tinkering, Kagarlitsky tells us, has generated "worker discontent at market reforms which [have] only profited the leaders of cooperatives and a section of Soviet managers...