I The Crisis
In its first three years under Mikhail Gorbachev the Soviet Union has passed through a period of crisis which began well before his advent to power and which shows no sign of ending. Of course one must be careful with this word “crisis.” When I used it recently in the presence of the émigré intellectual Vladimir Bukovsky, he rejoined that the USSR has been in a state of crisis for the last seventy years. And this is perfectly true if what one has in mind is the economic, cultural, or even demographic development of the country. But in the strictly political sense, can one say that there is a new crisis, a crisis of power, in the Soviet Union?
The power of the Soviet regime has always been maintained by force and does not derive from the freely given consent of the citizenry. We might therefore say that the regime has indeed been in a permanent condition of crisis for most of its lifetime, ever since Lenin had to concede that Soviet society was not voluntarily constituting itself along socialist lines but was in fact resisting, with all its might, what he had ordained for it. But the Soviet state is so constructed as, precisely, to face down all manifestations of social resistance, and in this respect it has proved itself extraordinarily efficient. Indeed, it is just this capacity to endure and to prevail according to its own lights that now seems somewhat enfeebled, and which in my judgment warrants the use of the term crisis.
Not that Soviet civil society has scored any significant advances or that it finds itself in any position to challenge, let alone reverse, the power of the state. Far from it. Though not completely suppressed, each and every one of the natural groupings within society—be they social classes, religious denominations, professional societies, organized political groups, nationalist movements—is kept under surveillance, penetrated, and periodically broken up or purged of its most dangerous elements. There is thus little or no chance of the various strands coalescing in order to form a united front against the state.
In any case, the real crisis is to be found not in society but at the very heart of Soviet state power: the Communist party.
Two factors have contributed to the erosion of the party’s position. The first is the decline of ideology (of which the Communist party is the official trustee, charged with the task of translating its precepts into practice). This ideology came into being as a system of belief, and those who perpetrated the 1917 Revolution did indeed believe in it. Up until the death of Stalin, and perhaps even up until the ouster of Khrushchev, many in the party still believed in it. No longer. The ideology still exists, to be sure, and indeed it enjoys a greater monopoly than ever. But not as a belief system; it is, rather, a language, an internalized mode of thought and behavior, a way of exercising power. For party members, it also serves as standing proof that they belong to the elite, while for all others who are compelled to mouth its slogans it serves as a living reminder that they belong among those who obey and submit.
But the question of whether anyone sincerely believes in this ideology is really irrelevant. It remains the language spoken on all public occasions and, among party members, in many private circumstances as well; and that is all there is to it.
The other factor is the decline of terror. Like ideology, terror too is still an operative force in Soviet life, where fear remains, as ever, a pervasive element. But old-style terror is no longer exercised against members of the party. Montesquieu once observed that in a true tyranny, the closer one approaches the top the greater the risk to one’s own top. Such was certainly the case under Stalin. For many people, the risk was bearable only by dint of their fierce belief in the ideology, their devotion to “the cause.” But ever since the execution of KGB head Lavrenti Beria in 1953, the greatest risk run by members of the Soviet ruling class has been disgrace.
Under these conditions what has been happening is that party members have tended to translate into material goods the precarious (and always revocable) benefits accruing to them as a result of their status. It is considered acceptable on Leninist grounds—so Gorbachev has lately acknowledged in his book Perestroika1 —for the party elite (the nomenklatura) to enjoy such privileges as access to better hospitals, consumer merchandise, vacations, special schools, and the like. Little by little these emoluments have turned into perquisites held as of right, virtually hereditary: the children of the nomenklatura are better educated, and physically better cared for, than the general run of the citizenry, and in practice only the schools reserved for the offspring of the party elite lead on to the highest positions within the party.
The more the party has developed along these lines the more it has transformed itself into a caste. At the same time, however, members of the party have been regularly interacting with civilian society, as peddlers of influence and sellers of protection in exchange for money or goods beyond those allotted to them by virtue of their status. The more the party has developed along these lines the more it has come to resemble a ruling class.
Yet in fact (and despite what many experts contend), the Communist party is neither an elite caste nor a ruling class. The closest analogy—favored by Stalin himself—is, rather, to a sect or religious order whose influential presence is felt in every corner of society while it itself remains scrupulously aloof from society. Historically it has been just for the purpose of isolating its members from civil society, removing them from all the temptations entailed in transactions of mutual exchange, that the party has showered them with generous remuneration and special benefits.
The problem is that, to the degree that the ideology has lost its power to compel belief, and terror has diminished, it has become necessary to raise the wall of separation higher and higher. To counter the corrupting enticements on the outside, the value of the benefits has had to be increased—but unfortunately those benefits are corrupting in and of themselves, and the typical party member feels that he never has enough. The wall therefore becomes porous in any event.
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As ideology has lost its sway, one single factor has come to form the ongoing basis of the party’s legitimacy, unity, and solidarity—power. To state the matter as an aphorism: the party rules, therefore it is.
This is not meant to suggest that the party is unaware of the many threats to its rule. For one thing, as Gorbachev well knows, the economy is slipping from central control. In all the border areas of the Soviet Union gigantic mafias have been formed, made up of businessmen, local party representatives, legal fixers, and the constabulary. These preside over a rampant privatization of the economy. To cite just one case reported by the Soviet press, the Riabtsev “firm,” with an annual turnover of six million rubles, supported a network of 60 enterprises able to sidestep the law by bribing local officials (to the tune of 400,000 rubles a year). If a member of the firm nevertheless fell into the hands of the law, he enjoyed the highest protection and lacked for nothing while in prison. This example could be multiplied many times over; even in Moscow its like is hardly unknown.
The state sector is being emptied out, plundered by theft and embezzlement, and private entrepreneurs are virtually helping themselves to free materials and manpower. The “second economy” may have been tolerable to the extent that it could be strictly managed by the party; but it is no longer so managed. More serious still, party cadres themselves are sliding out from under central control, assuming the independent position of the businessman and representing outside economic interests. Some have even become art collectors, or patrons of artists, including artists not accredited by the canons of socialist realism.
These developments have progressed the farthest in the non-Russian republics. Central Asia and the Transcaucasus are effectively on their way to autonomy, albeit an autonomy still camouflaged by the fact of party direction. In Kazakhstan, a large proportion of the livestock has passed into private hands. Georgia and Armenia are run as self-contained units, far from the prying eyes of Moscow, and have developed a kind of national economy. Nationalist sentiment grows apace, fortified in the Asiatic republics by the resurgence of Islam, which is itself nourished in secret brotherhoods the state cannot penetrate. Sheltered by distance, the perimeter of the Soviet Union is discreetly extricating itself from Moscow’s grip while being careful to preserve the outward forms of Communist behavior; only an upheaval at the center is wanting before claims might even be pressed for independent existence. In the meantime, a civil society is slowly taking shape in these areas, and little by little integrating the party into its fabric.
The progressive weakening of the old levers of social command has entailed a similar and consequent weakening of the power of intimidation at home and of aggressiveness abroad. For a while it was possible for the government to say, in effect: let the productivity of the non-military sectors of the economy—the factories, the sovkhozes (state farms), kolkhozes (collective farms)—lapse as it will into inefficiency and irremediable waste and fraud; let the standard of living fall below that of the underdeveloped countries of Latin America. None of this in itself would be a cause of concern to the government, for after all it never put wealth or popular well-being among its highest priorities. But this rotting away of the civilian sector of the economy threatens Soviet military strength in turn, and that is a matter of the deepest concern.
By concentrating on the military virtually all of its resources, all of its research-and-development efforts, the Soviet Union has succeeded in building an armed force that is competitive with that of its principal rival. But the huge arms build-up on which the Soviet Union embarked after 1964, and which still continues apace, has become technically unsustainable and politically risky. Technological and scientific resources no longer suffice to maintain a competition in which the necessary level of sophistication rises from year to year. In a land innocent of technological achievement (except in the military arena), without highways, without telephones, without the means of disseminating information, how is a modern army to be supported?
More: the “human factor” too is beginning to present problems. Decades of living under a regime of lies, and in unrelieved servitude, penury, and fear, have taken a profound toll. The ordinary Soviet citizen works little and badly, and his tendencies toward self-destruction are given abundant outlet in his addiction to alcohol and drugs. All his energies are directed toward procuring for himself the simplest material goods; the range of his concerns hardly extends beyond the narrow sphere of his own existence. With the progressive corruption and degradation of the Communist elites, he no longer even has models to look up to. The newspapers he reads all testify to the general rot. The postal system steadily worsens, the trains run ever more slowly, sanitary conditions deteriorate alarmingly. According to demographers, the Soviet Union is the only country in the world in which, because of poor nutrition and bad hygiene, average height is diminishing and life expectancy is shrinking. How is a decent army to be built out of soldiers who are ignorant, sickly, drunk, and thieving, and who refuse to show any initiative?
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Of all this the Communist party and its bosses (to the degree that they are informed) are well aware. But what to do about it? Theoretically there are two possible lines of response.
The first is to return to a Stalinist form of government. To this end the initial step would be a grand purge of the party, a task for which no one any longer has either the will or the means. It would also be necessary to crack down everywhere, to smash the second economy completely, to institute a climate of terror. But that would be completely counterproductive. Stalin could stock the gulag and the industrial cities with peasant masses, and with this primitive human material build Soviet heavy industry and manufacture the relatively simple sorts of weaponry then in use. Today, breaking the second economy would be tantamount to breaking the first, which functions to the extent it does only by leaning on the systems of private exchange everywhere in place. Besides, with workers reduced as they have been to the condition of a frightened herd, it would be impossible to conform to modern-day production and technology standards.
The second course of action would be to liquidate the regime as it were from the Right, to repudiate the official ideology and adopt instead what has come to be known as “national Bolshevism.” The advantages would be immense. As Solzhenitsyn has argued, the main burden weighing on Soviet man is neither poverty nor oppression but the constant need somehow to pretend conformity with the lies of the reigning ideology, to keep one’s back turned on the truths with which one’s mind and conscience are assailed. Abandoning the ideology would lift this burden, and it would also allow the party at last to consolidate its privileges and transform itself into a true ruling class. Thus it could begin to administer the economy in a rational manner, without having to go through the absurd contortions engendered by allegiance to dogma. Military production would soar, state power would be reinforced.
But this route too is no longer practicable. The basis of the regime’s legitimacy cannot be changed without causing a severe power vacuum: as in 1917, everything would be in danger of falling apart, and very quickly. Besides, what would constitute the new basis of legitimacy, if not Great Russian nationalism? That, however, would not suffice for a government meaning to hold on to all the territories which Leninism now includes under its dominion. The Soviet Union is after all not coterminous with the old Russian empire, and the territory under its control beyond the borders of that empire it holds only through the “right” conferred on it by ideology. A government constituted purely on a nationalist basis would immediately excite the ambitions of many more or less latent counternationalisms, and the new Russian empire would soon disintegrate.
The policy effectively followed in their day by Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko consisted in navigating between these two extremes of neo-Stalinism and national Bolshevism. The monopoly of the ideology remained intact, while at the same time the old alliance between Bolshevism and Great Russian nationalism was tacitly preserved. Their position, a “centrist” one, reaped the advantages of each of the two other, impracticable courses of action—and also its disadvantages.
The domestic policies followed by these rulers were prudent and conservative. Conscious that the problems they faced were insoluble, they repudiated the daring schemes and dangerous visions of both a Stalin and a Khrushchev. They were content with keeping things from getting worse, a goal they essentially accomplished by disburdening themselves of bothersome elements in Soviet society; these they either allowed to emigrate or packed off to the gulag or to psychiatric hospitals. Simultaneously, beginning in the 70’s and accelerating under Andropov, a new development occurred—the expansion and strengthening of the KGB.
This agency was by definition in the best position to collect information on the general disaster occurring in the country. The idea—first put into practice by Geidar Aliev in Azerbaijan—was to have the KGB serve as a kind of reservoir of incorruptibles, who would replace rotten Communist officials when and where necessary. It was a matter of rescuing the party by means of an elite nucleus of hard men capable of reestablishing Leninist norms and enforcing law and order. (Unlike in the Chicago of Eliot Ness, however, these “untouchables” were recruited from the ranks of the mafia itself; thus, having been once exposed to the temptations of public life, the KGB’s incorruptibles were soon at risk of being corrupted all over again.)
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As passive as they were in domestic policy, however, so were Brezhnev and his successors extremely active, even bold, in foreign policy, where the prospects for success were anyway much greater.
Never since October 1917 have Soviet armed forces been adequate to the grandeur of Soviet military ambition, and periodic failure has also bedeviled Soviet intelligence and espionage activities. By contrast, in two areas Soviet policy has been an unmitigated success: in the conduct of diplomacy and in the manipulation of Western opinion. This is not due to the inferiority of Western diplomats or journalists, but to a simple built-in disadvantage from which they necessarily suffer, namely, the habits of traditional diplomacy and the habits of traditional journalism. Applying these habits of mind and action to so radically different a political phenomenon as the Soviet Union inevitably causes a kind of breakdown of the machinery.
From the moment Western diplomacy recognized the Soviet regime de jure, it conceded the premise that the Soviet Union was a state like any other, a state with which normal, peaceful relations could and should obtain. As the French President François Mitterrand declared to Izvestia just this past December, “The USSR is not our enemy, and not even our adversary.” With such a state, diplomacy must tirelessly seek to define areas of common interest and locate grounds for political accommodation. By the same logic it is forbidden for others to adopt a global strategy aimed at destabilizing or undoing the Soviet regime—in other words, to adopt a strategy like the one the Soviet regime directs against the West.
As for the press, the moment it comes to deal with the Soviet Union it too accepts as a working assumption the proposition that West and East are symmetrical: that there exist in the Kremlin, as in London or Paris or especially Washington, diverse currents of thought, “hawks” and “doves”; that everything in Soviet politics boils down to a question of individuals and of personality (for so it often does among us in the West); that something is always about to happen in the USSR, even when nothing is happening; that the country is going to change, is on the verge of changing, has already changed.
Under Brezhnev, and especially after 1975, the Soviet government undertook to educate itself more systematically about these spontaneous Western tendencies and rapidly became more adroit at exploiting them. Its efforts in this regard had two objectives.
First, to obtain Western subsidies. The “Great Grain Robbery” of 1972 demonstrated that it was more to the Soviet Union’s advantage to buy American wheat with the money lent to it by American taxpayers than to invest pointlessly in Soviet agriculture. Within a few years the Soviet bloc had received more than $100 billion in credit, a sum nearly equivalent to the entire Marshall Plan. The legal and illegal procuring of Western technology has represented a boon of no lesser value. The sums involved are in neither case truly colossal, but they impart a decisive boost “at the margin.” Insofar as the entire Soviet system is geared toward the military, the effect has been to enable Soviet armed forces to remain competitive.
Second, to extend the sphere of Communist domination. Within the space of a very few years in the 1970’s Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Mozambique, and Angola fell under Communist rule. The use of Cuban troops for these purposes was a remarkably innovative tool. Afghanistan offered the Soviet military a proving ground for its weapons and tactics.
In all, the extension of Communist rule has had the excellent result of instilling despair in those already under the yoke, like the Czechs and the Cubans, while, at the same time, reinforcing at home the seventy-year-old alliance between Bolshevism and Russian nationalism. The average Russian feels proud to belong to such a great power. As the Marquis de Custine put it more than a century ago, “The slave on his knees dreams of world empire.”
The balance-sheet of Brezhnev’s foreign policy was therefore a brilliant one, and in Perestroika Gorbachev accords it a due meaure of respect. Domestically, however, the rot continued, and it became increasingly clear as time went on that the political effects, though not yet openly manifest, could burst out at any moment. That is where things stood when Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the Communist party.
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II Gorbachev’s Domestic Policy
In the years immediately preceding Gorbachev’s accession to power, Soviet authorities had taken the measure of the internal crisis. The alarm was probably raised by the KGB, with its abundant access to information, and by the army, chafing under its inability to perform in accordance with its sense of mission. The authorities had also taken the measure of the needed remedies, which amounted, as we have seen, to gleaning what was possible from foreign-policy initiatives while attempting to regenerate the party with the help of its least corrupted elements. This explains the ease of the post-Brezhnev successions: there was consensus within the Kremlin that “something had to be done.” The person best placed to do it was Andropov, and after him Gorbachev.
In a number of respects the task facing Gorbachev upon his accession resembled that facing Stalin at the beginning of the 1930’s. Stalin of course had to deal with an actual military threat in the form of Nazi Germany. To do so successfully, and to avoid falling into a position of the most dangerous inferiority, it was urgent that he assert absolute control over the machinery both of political power (hence the purges of the Great Terror) and of economic power (hence industrialization).
Gorbachev in 1985 was in nothing like so perilous a position externally; no one was dreaming of attacking the USSR or of trying to finish off the Communist regime. But it was plain that the general Communist offensive against “imperialism,” which in 1975 seemed on the eve of triumph (as Brezhnev said in his secret speech on the day after the fall of Saigon), was coming upon rough times. The international “correlation of forces” was no longer so favorable. The Western powers had reacted to the oil shock of the 70’s by launching a veritable new industrial revolution, itself resting on technological breakthroughs whose consequences were to create a new and possibly unbridgeable gap between the Western and Communist countries. In Ronald Reagan, the United States appeared to have found a President capable of healing the “Vietnam syndrome” and of restoring the nation’s political will. The Grenada episode resonated loudly in Moscow, more loudly than in Washington, for it marked the first time a sovereign Communist government (however tiny) had been overthrown.
The necessary task was therefore all laid out: to take the machinery of state in hand, to reabsorb the second economy and revitalize the official one, to reestablish the authority of the center, to rally the morale of the populace and put it back to work. It was Stalin’s program, but it would have to be implemented without the political means at Stalin’s disposition. Hence the very large element of theater in everything Gorbachev has undertaken to do.
In the fashion of more than one newly promoted General Secretary before him, Gorbachev set the stage by blaming everything bad on the policies of his predecessor(s). Thus did Khrushchev do in condemning the crimes of Stalin, and Brezhnev in condemning Khrushchev. Gorbachev took care to emphasize, however, that his criticisms were aimed not at the Communist system but at certain faults of implementation that were perfectly reparable with the proper will. He conducted a modest purge (again like his predecessors at the beginnings of their terms) and like them he gathered a group around him with whose past careers he was familiar and the range of whose ambitions he thought he knew. Withal, he ostentatiously took it upon himself to defend the whole of Soviet history, including that Stalinist test case, the collectivization of agriculture, a policy that cost upward of 15 million dead. In this he hardly went further in both directions than his predecessors: for him, Trotsky and Bukharin would define the outer limits of Bolshevik legitimacy; Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev the inner.
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A single word serves as Gorbachev’s slogan, and in its Russian form it has become world-famous: perestroika. What does it mean? Gorbachev himself has offered several definitions: “overcoming stagnation,” “mass initiative,” “democracy,” “all-round intensification of the Soviet economy,” “a resolute shift to scientific methods,” “priority development of the social sphere,” “the elimination from society of the distortions of socialist ethics,” etc. His objective, he says further, is “to revive the Leninist concept of socialist construction both in theory and practice.” Put differently, perestroika signifies nothing other than a Leninism, or Soviet Communism, that includes within its self-definition (if not in practice) the initiative of the masses, democracy, economic enterprise, etc.
So why use the term perestroika at all? The word functions as a kind of fetish, a magic formula whose meaning is purposely vague and whose true significance is that given it by the party, that is to say by the General Secretary. What Gorbachev and the party decide is perestroika. Consequently, the task of every Communist and of every Soviet citizen is to pledge public allegiance to perestroika, and so they do, every day, in innumerable articles, speeches, public meetings, resolutions. Above all, everyone stands afraid of being accused by his neighbor of only pretending to be for perestroika while secretly working to subvert it.
Perestroika is not a thing, or even a movement; it is adherence to what the party says. In an interview in Literaturnaya Gazeta, the French Communist Georges Soria declares: “Those in the West who demand to see evidence of perestroika in the Soviet Union are either fools or provocateurs.” One must simply believe in it, or appear to believe in it. Perestroika is an exhortation, an adjuration, an incantation. Those who respond to the call have the right, themselves, to be heard, over the heads of those who are trying to curb its forward progress: that is what Gorbachev understands by democracy. In his book he cites a letter written to him by a worker:
Thank you. . . . You have cured us of civic passivity and indifference and have taught us to believe in our own powers, in justice and in democracy. . . . Many people didn’t use to take Central Committee Plenary Meetings or even party congresses seriously. Now even my seven-year-old son yells to me whenever he sees you on television: “Daddy, come quick, Gorbachev’s speaking.”
This worker, in manifesting his enthusiasm, in reclaming the right to be enthusiastic, has achieved democracy, Gorbachev-style.
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Another emblematic word associated with perestroika, and likewise world-famous, is glasnost. Moscow has seen to its translation into the principal non-Russian languages as transparence, apertura, openness, etc. Its meaning is similarly indefinite, its functions many.
The first function is to implant in people’s minds the belief that things are really changing, that the time has come to get to work, that henceforward one will be rewarded in accordance with one’s effort, and that thieves and shirkers will be punished. Glasnost is intended to inspire confidence in the regime, to make people forget its duplicities. If confidence can be restored, the party might at last hope to overcome the divided habits of mind and speech by means of which Soviet citizens evade its grip. Glasnost thus aims at manipulating the erstwhile reflex of justice and the common good to entice the individual back under the discipline of the party.
A second function is to broadcast the right of all, or rather the duty of all, to criticize the enemies of perestroika, and in the first instance those cadres still loyal to Brezhnev or insufficiently loyal to Gorbachev. Glasnost is institutionalized squealing. As such it is particularly encouraged in the various border republics for the purpose of breaking up the local mafias.
A third function is to turn the Western media into an instrument of Soviet propaganda at home, where that propaganda is by and large not believed. Now, under the flag of glasnost, Western correspondents in Moscow are inundated with planted rumors, sensational happenings, news-breaks of all kinds, which, duly transmitted to Western papers and radios, are then reimported into the Soviet Union with their credibility heightened. This is why Gorbachev has stopped jamming certain “enemy” radio services: they have become partial accessories to Soviet disinformation within the Communist bloc.
But whatever else it is, glasnost is not freedom of information. Its themes are imposed from above. Gorbachev himself has enunciated the main principle: “Criticism must always be conducted in the spirit of the party.” As for the “power of the press,” that, too, as Pravda insists, “is exercised according to the direction of the party.”
The catchwords perestroika and glasnost are aimed at dramatizing the form, and disguising the content, of measures already effectively taken. In the case of each, one discerns a strengthening of the role of the party.
In the area of the economy, the state has indeed been taking the “second” or parallel economy in hand. The regulation against illegal sources of income has had the result of draining the markets but even more strikingly of authorizing a vast repression. One reads in Literaturnaya Gazeta (December 3, 1986) of 800,000 employees who have been arrested or have absconded for fear of arrest. In the campaign against alcoholism, charges were brought against another 130,000 individuals (ibid., March 18, 1987). Laws governing private enterprise seem to be aimed at channeling some of the hitherto inactive into the workplace: retirees, housewives, college and high-school students. Child labor is especially affected by statutes on “education for work” and on the “self-financing” of orphanages.
Gorbachev wants to use to the maximum all the manpower reserves he can locate. But he does not envision paying them overmuch. A state commission set up to control the quality of production—one could not expect this task to be left to the forces of competition or to consumer choice—holds businesses responsible for shoddy goods; businesses in turn hold the workers responsible, which means cutting their pay even if (as they can correctly allege) the poor quality of their manufacture is owing to the raw materials furnished by the state or to inadequate manufacturing equipment. With this new commission, which goes by the name of Gospriemka, we thus have the addition of one more bureaucratic cog, and another instrument for keeping wages low.
“Social justice,” another slogan that makes frequent appearances in Gorbachev’s discourse, means annulling the advantages enjoyed by people employed in or profiting from the second economy. Benefits are to be restored to people occupying slots in the party hierarchy, excluding those who have been exploiting their positions in order to enrich themselves. “Preoccupied with economic tasks, a good number of cadres had relaxed their vigilance on political questions,” declared Gorbachev at the January 1987 party plenum; he was talking about the local party mafiosi, warning them to shun further corruption; he was also inviting the “masses” to lodge complaints against the local party machinery, with the approval of the center and under the justification of glasnost.
Something on the order of 200,000 party cadres were prosecuted in 1986, and death sentences for economic infractions are multiplying. Individual party members are being speedily retired from the economic sphere, and here again Gorbachev is relying for help on those insulated from profit (low-level workers, retirees, certain categories of intellectuals), who have been invited to denounce the most corrupt. That is the sum and substance of the new “democratization,” and of some other easily manipulated procedures like the “secret ballot” and “multiple candidacies.”
Gorbachev, in short, does not attack the party; with its consent he is applying rough medicine to save and restore its authority.
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As we shall see, all these measures have been ineffectual. First, though, it is worth looking at the one area in which Gorbachev’s domestic policy has scored a great success: the conquest of the intellectuals.
Under Brezhnev, the Soviet intelligentsia lost to exile or the psychiatric gulag many of its dissident elements—which is to say its most brilliant members. What remained was an intelligentsia decapitated, exhausted by twenty years of semi-opposition, compromised by twenty years of semi-submission. Gorbachev, however, was in need of this group. He had to ensure that, unlike what happened in Poland, these people would not join the popular opposition and give it a voice; on the contrary, he meant to keep them isolated and even devalued in the eyes of the populace. But he also needed increased intellectual and especially scientific activity, and he could hardly repeat the obscurantist “pogroms” of Stalin, symbolized by the Lysenko affair. He needed the intelligentsia to serve as highbrow spokesmen for his political ideas and to applaud his innovations. He also needed them, or rather the moral authority and the prestige they enjoyed in Europe and the United States, for his foreign policy: to seduce and possess them would be to acquire a precious advocate vis-à-vis the West. But one would have to be subtle about it, and noncoercive. Thus, if one were stepping up anti-religious propaganda, it would be positively valuable to have the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko praising the cultural riches of the Bible. If Russification were being imposed, how useful for the intellectuals to be spontaneously mourning the decline of national languages. Dissonance camouflages the true situation much more effectively than the wonted uniformity of yesteryear, which fooled no one.
Seducing the intellectuals cost Gorbachev very little. He improved their material conditions and threw them a few symbolic gifts: a Pasternak museum, the issuing of a number of books by authors long dead, the restoration of some historic monuments. In return for these pittances today’s Soviet intellectuals content themselves by and large with speaking out on patriotic themes, or about the environment, or about the condition of Soviet morals, and they scrupulously avoid questioning the political system. The intelligentsia has thus been relegated to a kind of moral sharashka2 where it cannot jeopardize the regime but can render it important service. (The case of Sakharov is more complex and should not be confused with that of the others.)
But the intellectuals are the exception; elsewhere things have not gone nearly so smoothly. Thus, in the campaign to repress autonomous groupings within the party and to cut down the local mafias, Gorbachev has collided with local nationalisms. Although purges were conducted without untoward incident in Uzbekistan and Georgia, this does not mean that everyone in those republics has knuckled under to the new order. In Kazakhstan there was serious trouble, in Lithuania and lately Armenia, impressive demonstrations. The Ukrainian potentate Vladimir Shcherbitsky, whose fall from power was once confidently predicted, is still there. This resistance has obliged Gorbachev to move cautiously. The trend seems to be to rely on the Russian people, and on the worst sort of Russian nationalism, as expressed for example by the anti-Semitic Pamyat group.
As for Soviet Jews, the verdict so far is mixed. The Soviet government has long understood that it can be costly to rouse the emotions of Western Jews, and in this regard it has tried to erase the unfortunate impression left by Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev. That is why it is permitting a few of the most notorious “refuseniks” to leave, those who have attracted the greatest media attention. The regime also encourages the hope that the doors will soon open wider, even though there is simply no question of giving passports to all 400,000 who are said to have applied. These days Moscow is actually capable of turning on the charm, for instance by mounting an exhibition of the works of Marc Chagall. Behind such moves there probably lurks the recognition that continued persecution of Jews, who despite everything still play an important role in the economic, technological, and scientific life of the country, may accelerate the decline of Soviet power. The regime therefore has an objective interest in striking a compromise that will win over at least a portion of Soviet Jews to its side.
Some such calculation, at any rate, explains why, on the one hand, the “anti-Zionism” campaign has not in the least abated, anti-Semitic writings are widely distributed (including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), and Pamyat operates in a way that recalls the worst traditions of the Black Hundreds, while—on the other hand—the Soviet state, which is surreptitiously stirring up all this muck, poses simultaneously as the great protector of the Jews. Gorbachev wants to force the Jews to seek refuge under the wings of the state. That would yield an international benefit, allowing him to present himself at the bar of Western opinion as a modern, rational statesman confidently braving the bigotry of native Russians and Ukrainians. And the fact is that the maneuver has worked, at least to a degree. Some Jews have indeed been taken in, and believe that Gorbachev will not only let large numbers leave but will assure the future of those who remain.
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III Gorbachev’s Foreign Policy
The columnist George Will has recently argued, in connection with the new round of arms-control treaties now being negotiated between the U.S. and the USSR, that either the Soviets have really renounced the Leninist intention of imposing their rule on the entire planet, in which case the treaties are not needed, or they have not, in which case the treaties must be viewed as but a tactic in their ongoing global strategy.
Actually all one need do is to open the pages of Gorbachev’s book Perestroika to see that he has preserved intact the Leninist vision. According to this conception the world today remains divided, as it has always been, into two “camps,” that of the “imperialists,” which represents the past, and that of “socialism,” representing the future. The Third World is a disputed area between the two camps.
Gorbachev, who was born in 1931, has experienced only the international successes of the Soviet camp: the victory over Nazi Germany, the Sovietization of Eastern Europe, Communist triumphs in Asia, Africa, Central America. He has also seen the long-term weaknesses and confusion of the West and its inability (despite temporary aberrations, as under the early Reagan) to construct a coherent strategy. Gorbachev thus has no reason to disown the glorious heritage of Brezhnev, and he does not disown it. For three years now we have been able to observe his behavior in foreign policy: it is more activist, daring, and imaginative than that of his predecessor. The global strategy remains the same, but the tactics have been improved.
The strategy implies a designated principal enemy. The United States is, as ever, it. The strategic locale where victory will be decided is, as ever, Western Europe. The objectives are to decouple Germany from Europe, and Europe from America, and to impose a protectorate over Western Europe that will render it subservient to the Communist bloc. At the same time, however, Gorbachev has introduced important tactical changes which have led some in the West to believe—such, indeed, was the intent—that he has altered the strategy.
Soviet military doctrine is now being deliberately oriented toward the non-nuclear. To many Soviet theorists, nuclear weapons since their inception have seemed a disagreeable infraction of the laws of history. They upset the natural “correlation of forces,” by enabling any country possessing them to resist destabilization and intimidation from without and to exercise a disproportionate influence in world affairs. Nuclear weaponry renders war uncertain and strategic calculation hazardous. By contrast, conventional warfare, particularly when it is conducted with modern, “smart” weapons, confirms the natural geostrategic advantages of the “socialist camp.” Moreover, in conventional warfare of this kind one can better predict the flow of battle and calculate more precisely the relation of forces.
A number of military analyses appearing in 1986 and 1987 enable us to understand how the Soviet army views the next conflict. According to these studies, a third world war is a “probable” event, which could be sparked by almost any kind of local conflict. The “socialist camp” must prepare to enter hostilities under the best possible conditions. To this end it is necessary to relearn the lessons of the last world war, namely, the importance of the element of surprise, and the importance of preserving this element through a diplomacy that continuously stresses the themes of peace and the renunciation of violence. It is also necessary to remember the way in which, during the last war, the Soviet Union formed an “alliance with the capitalist nations” and with their aid was able to triumph over the common adversary. This means that in the coming war the USSR is contemplating the possibility of counting on the neutrality if not the technical and economic assistance of several European countries, whether the “little states” of Scandinavia and Benelux which it has been pushing toward neutralism or, indeed, Germany itself.
None of this means that Gorbachev has appointed the hour and is even now readying against Europe his version of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa. Certainly, however, the USSR is preparing for war—why else would it devote to this end most of its essential economic and technological resources, while being well aware that no one is thinking of attacking it? But, ever faithful to Lenin, the Soviets view war as an extension of policy—a policy which cannot succeed unless the escalation to war seems always a plausible recourse.
Gorbachev understood from the beginning that the ceaseless accumulation of nuclear weapons was leading to an impasse. An arms race with the United States could not be won, at least so long as the latter was determined to keep up its end. To the contrary, such a race only served to expose the deepening technological and economic inferiority of the USSR. Making profitable use of his supreme diplomatic advantages, Gorbachev in effect opened a new front, translating into the military sphere the reasoning that had succeeded so well in the “Great Grain Robbery.” Instead of investing heavily and fruitlessly in nuclear weaponry, why not try to disarm the adversary, or at least render problematic his continued reliance on the arms he already has? Gorbachev thus accepted the “zero option” the Americans had offered in 1981 as a sop to European opinion.
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Once the INF treaty is ratified and the theater weapons are out of Europe, the next phase will consist of isolating the United Kingdom and France by rallying pacifist opinion in Western Europe against these countries’ continued retention of nuclear arsenals. Then, once Europe has been rid of nuclear weapons, and once the American troops are gone—for without nuclear cover, how long would American public opinion abide their remaining?—it should be easy to brandish the Soviet strategic nuclear threat as a means of deterring the United States from even thinking of intervening in Europe in the event of conflict.
From that point forward, the only way to defend Europe will be with a conventional army capable of offsetting the hugely superior Warsaw Pact forces. Building such an army presupposes an unlikely degree of political will, all the more unlikely in view of the intense pacifist sentiments that will already have solidified behind the drive for nuclear disarmament, and the by now widely implanted belief in the peaceful intentions of the Soviet Union. At that point, and under conditions dictated by Moscow, Europe will find itself in the position of placing its economy and technology at the service of the long-range survival of the Soviet Union—which, as we have seen, is precisely the principal aim of Soviet foreign policy.
In preparation for this eventuality the Soviets have been deploying a number of stratagems, some of them predating Gorbachev.
One is the effort to endow the Soviet Union with an image that differs from reality. In fact the USSR has been disguising both its Leninist nature and its global aims since the New Economic Policy of 1921. In the 20’s it strove to create the impression of a maturing revolution, something along the lines of the normalization of France after Thermidor. In the 30’s it presented itself as a country bent principally on industrialization, modernization, and development. (Gorbachev has resurrected this particular image.) During the war, it emerged as Eternal Russia, defending an age-old identity and way of life which only happened to be encased for the moment in the skin of Communism.
In 1975, when Georgi Arbatov was sent to Washington to press the Soviet position on SALT II and the Helsinki accords, he portrayed a USSR that was now a superpower perfectly and symmetrically matched with the United States by reason of global responsibilities, spheres of influence, legitimate interests—and also by reason of an internal political life as variegated and diverse in its way as America’s own. This new image was “sold” not to those who were once the officially designated Western consumers of the Soviet myth, the working classes and the intelligentsia, but to businessmen, diplomats, experts on Soviet affairs. It was in fact Western Sovietologists, especially the Americans among them, who marketed the new doctrine of political (not to say moral) equivalence in its most sophisticated and elegant form, and who in turn made it credible to Western politicians.
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Thanks to its new image, which implied among other things a sound financial reliability, the USSR was able to participate actively in international capital markets: By now the actual debt incurred by the seven nations of the Eastern bloc has reached $127 billion, a jump of 55 percent in the last three years alone. To this may be added the secret credits that pass through Soviet financial institutions located in London and Paris. Agricultural surplus of the European Common Market is bought at a tenth what it costs the Europeans to produce, with the difference made up by the European taxpayer. The USSR is lobbying for membership in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It is conducting “joint ventures” with German and Japanese investors, taking care to maintain control of the enterprises so created. Having nothing of its own to sell but weapons, gold, and oil, commodities not in overwhelming demand just now, the Soviet Union is endeavoring by political means to manipulate the terms by which international trade is conducted.
The Communist movement worldwide has been assigned its part in this grand design. The fact of this movement’s existence, while not exactly denied, is hardly stressed these days, and its centralized direction is carefully dissembled. Still, the essential structure of the movement remains what it has always been, and in its new director, the former long-time Soviet ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Dobrynin, it has found a man of considerable worldly experience.
In Western Europe, with the exception of Italy, the movement seems to have abandoned the effort to form mass-based parties; operating out of conspiratorial structures reminiscent of the early days of Bolshevism, it is content instead with small, tightly disciplined organizations that aim to seize control of a few key sectors (in France these include the electrical and railway workers, the ports, a number of municipalities). These narrowly based efforts can be counted on to engage the sympathies and the collusion of some within the more broadly structured social-democratic parties—such, for instance, has been the successful experience of the small Communist party in West Germany.
The grand design for Europe renders subordinate the other theaters of Soviet foreign policy. But those theaters have hardly been abandoned, even if, globally speaking, the USSR may be in need of a pause. In Perestroika Gorbachev declares his intention to be active in Asia, and the Soviet navy has for quite some time now been pushing methodically forward in the South Pacific. In Angola the annual offensives continue, striving to put an end once and for all to the rebellion led by Jonas Savimbi. Ethiopia, wrapped in its new constitution even as the Ethiopian people are wrapped in starvation, has won entry to the sacred rolls of “people’s democracies.” In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas with Soviet assistance are building an enormous offensive army. Soviet troops have not been withdrawn from Afghanistan, and will not be withdrawn until the political victory for which they were sent to fight has been secured.
In all this Gorbachev’s only original contribution has been to persuade the West that the Soviet Union intervenes so far from its borders as a matter of self-defense; that he, Gorbachev, bitterly regrets these engagements; and that it is therefore incumbent upon the Western democracies, if they desire peace as intensely as he does, to help him achieve the undisturbed political dominion at home which will permit him to work for their mutual and common good. That he has indeed largely succeeded in thus persuading the West is testimony to the progress the USSR and the Communist movement have lately made in their understanding of, and hence their ability to manipulate, public opinion in the democracies. Where once upon a time they were hampered by Leninist ideology with its preordained “class analysis” of democratic institutions, today, no doubt owing in good part to the labors of specialized agencies like Arbatov’s Institute of the USA and Canada, the Soviets have developed a much better feel for the internal workings of democratic polities. If one may put it this way, they have passed from Lenin to Tocqueville, and the realism thus gained has given them a handle on the intrinsic weaknesses of our way of life.
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IV The Crisis (Again)
What are Gorbachev’s prospects? Is there any chance he can overcome the Soviet crisis—that is, the threatened loss of global power and of Communist party authority?
To address the domestic scene first: Gorbachev’s entire career suggests that he is doing the only thing he knows how to do, and it will not succeed. He is the complete apparatchik, a man who won his first stripes in the Komsomol and then served a long apprenticeship in the provinces where he tasted the pleasures of absolute power. Gorbachev found political mentors in the likes of Kulakov, Suslov, Andropov, and Brezhnev himself. Throughout this period he never distanced himself a whit from the positions of the party.
There is no reason to doubt Gorbachev’s sincerity in launching his campaigns of perestroika and glasnost. Something had to be done, and he is doing it, in conformity with the seven-decades-long practice of the Communist party. As in other reformist campaigns launched periodically by the party, what we see is essentially crackdown and centralization, aimed at recovering authority, combined with appeals to civic enthusiasm and exhortations to industriousness and honesty in the workplace. Gorbachev’s campaign has benefited from the atmosphere of expectation that has accompanied the advent of a new and relatively young General Secretary, but substantially he is not doing much more than Brezhnev did in similar circumstances.
Nor can he undertake more so long as it remains out of bounds to tamper with the leading role and the absolute political monopoly of the party. A single example: the law on private enterprise published in Pravda on July 1, 1987. Here one needs to recall that the 1936 Soviet constitution, promulgated by Stalin and proclaimed “the most democratic the world has ever known,” included an article (126, which in the present constitution has become Article 6), completely invalidating every other article of the same constitution on the grounds that “The party represents the leading nucleus of every organ of society.” Last year’s regulation states, similarly, that “The party apparatus in each enterprise, which is the political nucleus of the collective, directs the work of the collective, of the organs of autogestion [sic], of the syndicates, of the Komsomol, and of other organizations.”
But—our Western experts will object—the law also foresees the election of boards of directors. True. And it also adds: “If the slate chosen by the workers’ collective fails to win the approval of the superior authorities, new elections will be held.”
And therein lies the contradiction. The 19th-century historian Vasily Klyuchevsky observed that “Peter the Great wanted the slave to remain a slave and also to act boldly and freely.” Gorbachev wants Soviet man to engage with enthusiasm in the task assigned to him by the party. And perhaps he believes he will.
But he will not. Soviet man even now is resisting with all his might, marshaling every habitual resource of inertia and covert sabotage, looking elsewhere to find the means of providing for himself and his kin. The survival methods which Soviet citizens learned under Brezhnev are serving them still: the financial schemes, the well-constructed networks of pilferage, the arrangements for mutual benefit struck with local party functionaries. As Gorbachev progressively destroys this network, life will become more risky and difficult for everyone. In short, the vast economic reconstruction he has promised can only lead, as the average Soviet citizen knows, to utter chaos.
The government itself has foretold “difficult years,” a prophecy that will allow it to impute to the travails of perestroika the economic and social disaster it both dreads and is precipitating. But there are other strains as well. The nod Gorbachev has given to Great Russian nationalism will inevitably stiffen the opposition to his programs of the other nationalities. Those party cadres whose security and immunity have been compromised are already maneuvering to recapture the tranquil luxury they enjoyed under Brezhnev. The ignominious fashion in which Boris Yeltsin was condemned, forced to “confess” the error of his ways, and dismissed, shows the capacity of the apparatus to resist the least disturbing change.
After three years in power, Gorbachev already finds himself facing Brezhnev’s impossible choices—as can be seen from his speech on the 70th anniversary of the Revolution (November 2, 1987). Neither a return to Stalinism nor a turn to right-wing national Bolshevism is a practicable solution. So he is compelled to follow once again the via media, staving off collapse at the price of a relentless process of national immobilism.
Foreign policy once again offers a compensatory avenue of hope. Several times over in the course of its history the Soviet regime has tottered on the edge of collapse; each time, Western aid has come to the rescue and provided a new lease on life. In large part the entire thrust of Soviet foreign policy today is aimed at securing those means of survival which the West has hitherto afforded periodically and as if by miracle but which henceforth, perhaps, it may be persuaded to provide permanently and as if by obligation. A race is thus on between the continuing and deepening process of internal decomposition, whose aggravating symptoms, although masked today, must sooner or later burst into the open, and the so-far successful policy of external diplomacy which may yet procure a lengthy reprieve, if not, indeed, eventual triumph.
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1 Harper & Row, 254 pp., $19.95.
2 A prison like the one described in Solzhenitsyn’s novel The First Circle, housing scientists whose forced labor takes the form of research on projects useful to the state—Ed.
