Overthrowing Utopianism

...the other is a call for revolutionary struggle to make the inevitable come true...

...Every Soviet leader before Gorbachev, he maintains, was driven by the commitment to compel an ideology to come true, regardless of the circumstances and no matter at what cost...

...And gradually, step by step, more and more often, it nauseated me...

...Perestroi-ka was many years too late," he concludes...

...At the same time Yakovlev notes the internal weaknesses of the old regime—its loss of "spiritual monopoly," its general awareness of "ideological fraud, a coerced world view," the difficulty of controlling the proliferating interests of regions and specialists, and the temptation of corruption...

...under his successor it went too fast, and Russia has never ceased to suffer...

...It was wrong in belittling the political force of religion and of ethnic and national differences...

...Much of this thinking Yakovlev outlined in a July 1989 article marking the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution...

...The whole subsequent history of the Soviet Union was a struggle for survival in a hostile world, and for personal or oligarchic control of a beaten-down country...

...After Lenin seized power during a revolution he did not start and that his Marxist theory failed to map out accurately, his Bolshevik comrades imagined for a time that they would make the Marxist vision come true by force, despite Russia's unpromising circumstances...

...Yakovlev's book comprises three chapters of impressionistic reflections, plus the texts of five addresses he delivered abroad during the fall and winter of 1991-92...

...Reviewed by Robert V. Daniels Professor emeritus of history, University of Vermont...

...Early on, asserts the former Soviet chief of propaganda, it was converted by "coercive manipulation" into a "pseudoneore-ligion" in order to legitimize—fraudulently—the interests and caprices of a "monopolistic, absolutist power," a new bureaucracy fitting into the Russian tradition of absolutism...

...If believers continued their revolutionary efforts to bring about the Utopian vision, it could lead to an altogether unexpected and unwanted outcome...

...he says, rather, that he was repelled by American propaganda about the Soviet Union...

...And as soon as you begin to analyze what you believe, it begins to crack...

...In this book Alexander Yakovlev tells us from an insider's vantage point what actually happened to Marxism under the revolutionary rule of the Bolsheviks...

...The analogy with early Calvinism and the doctrine of predestination has often been cited...

...The Fate of Marxism in Russia is the record of his efforts to define the philosophical defects of Communist doctrine and the responsibility he believes it bore for both the horrors of Stalinism and Gorbachev's inability to reform the Communist system from within...

...He shares the assumption, common among both Communists and anti-Communists, that Marxism led to Leninism and Leninism led to Stalinism in an inexorable progression...

...It failed to anticipate Marxist-inspired revolution in countries thought to be too backward for socialism, such as Russia and China (unless one takes the position, as some Social Democrats have, that the Russian Revolution was not at all the kind Marx foresaw...

...but at the same time he warns against capitalism's coun-ter-utopia of pure individualism untamed by humanistic ethics...

...Along with the Polish philosopher Les-zek Kolakowski, among others, Yakovlev maintains that Marxism, with its fusion of determinism and messianism, is uniquely suited to excluding ethics from politics and justifying the employment of the most inhuman means in quest of a noble goal...

...Yakovlev's insights are particularly valuable because he was the main architect of perestroika under Mikhail S. Gorbachev...

...The first chapter, "Prelude," considers the philosophical dangers he now sees in Marxism: the materialist denigration of individual creativity and moral values, the "reductionism" of human affairs to abstract "essences," and the failed predictions everyone is today aware of...

...However illogical a ruthless struggle to achieve the inevitable may be, for the Bolshevik type of fanatical authoritarian personality it seemed to fill a psychological need...

...In any case, to Russian Communists Marxist determinism was basically an excuse for furious action, and the built-in paradox had to be concealed at the cost of suppressing all independent political thought...

...Without saying so concretely, he had become a Social Democrat and an advocate of the mixed economy, as well as an enemy of all forms of authoritarianism and monopolies of thought...

...I have to tell you I took the work seriously...

...Yakovlev had written the main body of this book before the attempted coup of August 1991...

...Conceding that barracks socialism found fertile soil in the Russian statist tradition, Yakovlev nonetheless argues that the whole concept has been exhausted, and that capitalism is the only alternative for achieving human progress...

...It was not, for the simple reason that it had already been invalidated or proven irrelevant within the first few years of the Soviet experience...

...Under Gorbachev it went too slowly...

...What would happen, though, if Marxism as scientific prognosis turned out to be mistaken...

...Finally, it was fundamentally incorrect about the proletariat being the successor to the entrepreneurial class or "bourgeoisie": If there has been any definable political trend in this century through either democratic evolution or revolution-ary dictatorship, it is the movement toward what Milovan Djilas labeled as rule by the "New Class" (1958), or what James Burnham described as the "Managerial Revolution" (1941...

...Applymgme finishing touches to the work early in 1992, he expresses regret at the breakup of the Soviet Union —yet he says nothing directly about the new Russian government of Boris N. Yeltsin, nor does Yeltsin appear in the Index...

...Marx' ideas thus became, in the phrase coined by Friedrich Engels, one more form of "false consciousness...

...It took a highly simplistic view of class divisions in modern society...

...His objective, declares the author, is not to establish the "responsibility" or "guilt" of Marxism, but rather to contribute to "understanding ourselves," to determine "how and why our country followed this particular social messianism and what became of it...

...In Yakovlev's repeated calls for the exercise of ethics and common sense to work out a civilized future, in his distaste for the extremes of capitalist individualism and Communist collectivism, one can see a coherent political philosophy emerge...

...As Alfred G. Meyer pointed out more than three decades ago (in Marxism: The Unity of Theory and Practice), the Marxist credo in fact contains two contradictory elements...

...The consequences of Marxism for Russia, Yakovlev contends in his second chapter, "The Collapse," were catastrophic...

...Thus it is the original dangerous doctrine that is held accountable for the behavior that ensued, although Yakovlev is willing to concede that the choice of so extremist a creed was supported by certain fanatical and authoritarian features of the Russian tradition...

...hence the lack of practical guidance for legislating a Socialist society into existence...

...It was wrong in predicting proletarian revolution in the capitalist West...

...By 1921 Lenin realized this would never succeed, and with his "New Economic Policy" charted a gradual advancement toward socialism...

...Like most people steeped all their lives in the mendacious dogma of Stalinism, Yakovlev is not entirely consistent about the relationship between Marxist theory —whether Utopian drive or false consciousness—and Soviet reality...

...But he does not quite clarify the distinction between socialism in its wide variety of forms and the particular creed of Marxism...

...When you are young, you simply believe, but when you get older, faith alone is not enough, you want to look more deeply...

...One is the "scientific" vision of history on an inevitable course toward "socialism" and then "communism...

...Yakovlev would no doubt agree that because it identified socialism with the horrors of revolutionary dictatorship in a cruel and authoritarian country, the Russian Revolution was the worst thing that could have happened to that ideal...

...Then I went back again to the primary sources...

...author, "The End of the Communist Revolution" WAS MARXISM invalidated by the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union, as the conventional wisdom holds...

...Stalin, while deifying his predecessor, rejected this approach and built a system of militarized industrialism ruled by terror that had nothing in common with the Marxist Utopia...

...Here he continues his assault on the collectivist Utopia, giving more explicit recognition to the input from the Russian tradition of authoritarian violence...

...Indeed, scientific Marxism did prove to be wrong in many vital respects...

...Throughout, Yakovlev polemicizes against utopianism and all dogmatic attempts to impose Utopia forcibly, which he holds to be the essence of Communist rule in the Soviet Union from Lenin to Yuri V. Andropov and Konstantin U. Cher-nenko...

...There he likened the Bolsheviks to the Jacobins in deciding "to use the means of terror not only to put an end to counterrevolutionary activities, but also to stimulate the processes involved in building a new society...

...Yakovlev recounts how painful it was for him to break with the past, and especially with the more distant Marxist past because it embodied the inspiring idea of socialism...

...His hope for Russia and for the world is a rational, pluralistic and ethical balance of the individual and the collective...

...Orthodox Marxism captured the European Socialist movement as a whole only very briefly at the turn of the century, before revisionism began to water it down in the West and Bolshevism built upon its worst implications in the East...

...He already was a highly placed figure in the Communist nomenklatura (following his stint as chief of propaganda, he was ambassador to Canada) when Gorbachev elevated him in 1986 to the Party Secretariat and in 1987 to member of the Politburo, where he became the strongest voice for glasnost and reform...

...The five speeches appended to Yakovlev's discourse are more focused and to the point, perhaps because they were written later and more quickly...

...The laws of history would take care of things...

...As Marx' Bolshevik descendants sought to bring his Utopia to life at the price of terrible oppression, degradation and the militarization of society, their "program of eliminating the market and market relations proved in fact to be a program to destroy the pillars of human civilization...

...The main thing that changed my world view, my ideology, was the fact that ideology was my business...

...It turns out that everything here is mixed up with power, hypocrisy, and lies, at least at the top level...

...But Marxism was never intended to be a blueprint for the future society...

...A cruel price had to be paid for these mistakes, for the immorality of pseudorevolutionary behavior...

...In a recent interview with the Independent Gazette, Yakovlev scotched the theory that he was subverted by exposure to the West as an exchange student at Columbia University in 1958-59...

...The final chapter, "Aftermath," reflects on the unfolding of reform once Gorbachev took over, and the stumbling blocks left in its path by an authoritarian Marxist heritage...

...By this reasoning, any anti-Lenin Marxist was a weak Marxist, and any anti-Stalin Leninist was a false Leninist...

...He even acknowledged the project at a caucus of conservative delegates to the 28th Party Congress in June 1990, where he observed, "If I publish those pages now, I'll be hanged from the nearest tree...

...As a genuine experiment, Marxism in Russia lasted no more than six months...

...In Coming Issues Jagdish Bhagwati on Bill Emmott's "Japanophobia: The Myth of the Invincible Japanese" Lewis S. Feuer on Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman's "Harold Laski: A Life on the Left" Karl E. Meyer on Brian Urquhart's "Ralph Bunche: An American Life...