What is going on in the Soviet Union? There have been astonishing changes. But in the very same areas we see elements familiar from totalitarian politics as practiced decades ago. The elections this past spring, for example: in some places, there were free contests in which the official candidate lost. But in most places, they were rigged: “leftists were screened out,” according to one Soviet commentator, and there were results such as 45,534 for, 430 against—in Armenia! Which of the clashing facts should we use to interpret the phenomenon?

Because we in the West have problems in understanding, we have greater problems in responding. Some people are simply thinking of what we can give away next. Another, firmer position, common in the Bush administration, is that “we are impressed,” but as the President recently exhorted Mikhail Gorbachev, “Don’t stop now.” This sort of view implies, perhaps unintentionally, that Gorbachev is on a slope toward Americanization and that we can slide him farther and farther. Yet because it does not advance an interpretation of what Gorbachev is doing, this perspective at the same time assigns no limits to what he might do, or to what we might do to slide him farther.

Gorbachev is not the kind of politician we are used to praising in the West, a “pragmatist” who tries to solve problems that his environment presents to him. Gorbachev’s disposition is not to solve problems but to create problems for others. Rather than submitting to the political setting out of which he emerged, he is trying to shape that environment through an active political strategy.

This strategy has responded to the logic of the process by which one Soviet leader succeeds another, as it has operated over the last sixty years. Professor Myron Rush of Cornell has demonstrated a cyclical pattern in that process. An American President inherits, when he is elected, authority which is usually as great as it will ever be; therefore we speak of a President as enjoying a “honeymoon” at the beginning of his administration. In a Soviet succession from one leader to another there is an opposite movement: first, dispersion of the old General Secretary’s power to a “collective leadership,” then the gradual recovery of power by a new General Secretary. Thus, a newly-appointed General Secretary normally begins with a Politburo majority working against his taking greater control of the government. Indeed, after four years Gorbachev probably still has a majority against his further consolidation of power.

In order to secure dominance over rival leaders, Stalin, Malenkov, Khrushchev, and Andropov all tried to bring elements of society normally excluded from politics into the political arena. Nikita Khrushchev (as Professor George Breslauer of Berkeley has shown) used the strategy of threatening his colleagues with the eruption of a dissatisfied public if he were not given power. Gorbachev has adopted this same strategy of mobilization on a gigantic scale, with glasnost in the press, the freeing of intellectuals and dissidents to voice demands for drastic change, the organization of “popular fronts” and other informal groups outside party control, street demonstrations against the delegates chosen by local officials to the 19th party conference last summer, and now multi-candidate elections. At the April 25 meeting of the Central Committee, Gorbachev virtually admitted what he was doing and that it is aimed at his Politburo colleagues:

And the main thing, comrades—and this I especially want to single out—is . . . the wide politicization of the masses and the emergence of new millions of people into the arena of social activity. . . . If the first stage of the process went in a way from above, now the process is to a decisive degree characterized by a mighty movement from below. . . .

I ought to tell it straight, comrades, that party organizations, that our cadres in many cases have proved not ready for such a turn. . . . This relates also to the Central Committee of the party and to its Politburo.

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The historical event of which Gorbachev’s strategy is most reminiscent, however, is not Khrushchev’s accession, but the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in China, when Mao Zedong brought the students and workers into the streets against the other members of the Politburo. This, rather than any Western process of gradual reform, is the analogy to start from in understanding the dizzying transformations unfolding in the Soviet Union.

The spring elections were the biggest example of Gorbachev’s strategy. Gorbachev does not yet have enough control over the Politburo and Secretariat to determine many local appointments or to dismiss important party leaders who are not his followers, such as Zaikov in Moscow or Shcherbitskii in Kiev. But through somewhat freer elections, with more than one candidate in many districts, forces can be set in motion which will damage these leaders without Gorbachev’s direct intervention. A Politburo member who is defeated for the Congress of People’s Deputies, as Solovyev was in Leningrad, remains in the Politburo but becomes damaged goods. His power to restrain Gorbachev’s consolidation of authority is vastly diminished.

Glasnost, too, is a part of Gorbachev’s succession strategy. It has had the effect of discrediting every General Secretary since Lenin, every institutional power center (the apparatus of full-time party employees, the economic ministries, the army, to some extent the KGB), and every alternative leader in the present, except Gorbachev. The Moscow Trials of the 30’s discredited every living Old Bolshevik leader except Stalin. Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization accomplished something similar. But Gorbachev is doing this far more radically; the result, as Rush has suggested, is to discredit the system itself.

Discrediting the Soviet past also serves the function of distancing Gorbachev from practical problems and from the need to solve them. The bigger the problems, the more gigantic and noble Gorbachev’s task appears in addressing them, and the more time he has. If there is an absence of meat in the stores, it becomes harder and harder to explain after four years of Gorbachev’s stewardship why the problem has not been solved. But if the Soviet Union took the wrong course in 1928, it will require decades of upheaval to turn back to the right one. As Gorbachev has said, perestroika is a revolution.

Finally, there are the structural changes in party and state institutions that Gorbachev (like earlier Soviet leaders) has engineered. With the convening of the Congress of People’s Deputies and the smaller Supreme Soviet, Gorbachev is in the process of creating an essentially new policy-making structure with dubious competence to govern, but clear potential to weaken the party hierarchy that has dominated Soviet politics since the 20’s. Like other features of Gorbachev’s strategy, the structural changes are shattering old institutions without building up new ones to replace them effectively. The key to the new political system may lie in the election of Gorbachev to the new post of Chairman of the Supreme Soviet. This gives him a power base independent of the Politburo and the party apparatus—“practically boundless power,” as Andrei Sakharov has pointed out.

To recognize the degree to which Gorbachev’s strategy is Stalinist in form is not to deny that his agenda is Westernizing in content. But without such a strategy Gorbachev would be in the position of an American politician who had some ideas about public policy but no idea of how to become President. A Soviet politician is even more preoccupied with how to gain authority, because while the Soviet system craves strong leadership, no acknowledged point of decision, like an election, confers the right to it. Leadership must be seized.

Gorbachev is obviously very ambitious. Only in a culture as prudish about ambition as modern America could this important factor never be mentioned. It was ambition that drove this smart peasant boy to return from his fancy Moscow education to do party work amid the dreary farms of his native district, and it is ambition that is driving him to transform the Soviet system. Communist politics is always a potential hothouse of huge ambition, because its definition of political leadership comprises not only dictatorial power but the intent to transform nature, reforge consciousness, end the exploitation of man by man.

By the same token, established Communist systems always contain a potential seed of their own destruction: the possibility that the supreme leader will turn out to be the biggest revolutionary. This possibility has been actualized with Mao in one direction and in another with Gorbachev, who has had the imagination and the daring to touch off a revolutionary dynamic that increases dissatisfaction with the present and raises expectations for the future.

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Gorbachev’s political strategy hit the Soviet Union like an earthquake. It encountered a stagnant society where people lived a very hard life. In addition to the endemic shortages, they were subjected to constant scolding by the rulers in the name of an ideology that by the time Gorbachev came along was worn out. But in recent decades the educational and social mobility achieved by the regime had produced a large middle class which was relatively sophisticated. The result was a demoralized populace, with a wide gap between expectations and fulfillment, heavy drinking, a low birth rate, and falling life expectancy. It was a populace filled with latent rage against authority.

This was the context in which Gorbachev began to unleash new political forces. His most drastic departure was the mobilization of intellectuals and journalists. He thereby brought the most anti-Communist element of the Soviet population into the political arena. This allowed him to present himself as a centrist, even though he is a radical; but it also activated those who hate the Westernized intellectuals. Thus, Nina Andreeva, in her famous attack on perestroika (which may have been edited by Gorbachev’s rival Yegor Ligachev), appeals against the intellectuals to the admirers of Stalin and to the anti-Semites, many of whom are also anti-Communists themselves.

In general, the result of the mobilizing factor in Gorbachev’s political strategy is that every dissatisfied element is now pouring into politics. The most powerful of these dissatisfied elements, up to this point, are the non-Russian nationalities. Although the upsurge at first took the form of pitting one nationality against another, it has emerged as a different phenomenon from local nationalism in Brittany or South Tyrol or Ulster. It has tended to turn against the Communist regime. This became clear in Azerbaidzhan, where until recently the Politburo in Moscow had taken the Azerbaidzhani side against the Armenians in the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh, not permitting that province to secede from the Azerbaidzhan republic. Nevertheless, the Russian troops sent to Azerbaidzhan to cope with the demonstrations were regarded as enemies by the people there. When five Russian soldiers were killed by a grenade in Kirovabad, and others hurt, the local hospitals refused to treat the wounded. Similarly, in the official newspaper of Estonia, a minor official has called the red of the Soviet flag, symbol of the regime, “the color of blood and revenge.”

With the recent elections, the mobilizing factor in Gorbachev’s political strategy has gone far beyond the intelligentsia. The elections showed that the working class is also dissatisfied with the status quo, and that the heretofore apolitical resentment of the entire Soviet public is becoming politicized. Thanks in part to Gorbachev’s strategy of discrediting Soviet institutions and leaders, the country is seething.

Moreover, by relaxing controls, Gorbachev has given long-repressed dreams and ambitions—both at home and in Eastern Europe—room to expand in. These soaring hopes coexist with the dissatisfaction due to the economic situation. There is a growing budget deficit, rising wages, no increase in labor productivity, and inflation. Gorbachev has admitted that “shortages are increasing and uneasiness is growing in society.” The combination of extensive hopes and bitter dissatisfaction is an explosive one. It was the combination, as Tocqueville notes, that produced the French Revolution.

Gorbachev’s cultural revolution is thus near to spinning out of control. In fact, the Soviet Union can no longer be assumed to be a stable country. For even if Gorbachev can consolidate his personal authority, he will come face to face with the disruptive forces he himself has created. In an analogous situation, other Soviet politicians have sometimes executed sudden changes of position, abandoning major elements of their earlier reform programs and adopting quite different policies. The classic instance is Khrushchev’s behavior in early 1956. After the death of Stalin, Khrushchev had pursued a political strategy that involved the symbolic reaffirmation of Stalinism. But within a period of a few days, challenged by the forces behind Mikoyan, Khrushchev switched from one extreme of the political spectrum to the opposite, from Stalinism to de-Stalinization.

Of course, Gorbachev has moved into a situation rather different from that of earlier General Secretaries. Because of the particular direction he has taken, he is more constrained by public opinion, and to change as abruptly as Khrushchev did would sacrifice most of his existing support.

Another possible outcome is that Gorbachev will be removed by his colleagues as General Secretary. After the April Central Committee meeting it appeared that the majority of Gorbachev’s colleagues were weary of him. One provincial party secretary pointedly said:

We are obliged to admit that in the years of perestroika also many errors and miscalculations were made . . . it is indispensable not only to tell the people the truth but also to name the specific ones guilty of miscalculations.

To what specific person does this most apply?

The promised local elections, if they ever take place, will force serious decisions on Gorbachev’s enemies. This time, if they lose, as thirty of them did in the national elections in March, they will probably be ousted. They will therefore be tempted to launch a preemptive strike against Gorbachev. On the other hand, to remove him would be to lose the impetus toward reforming the system and to face the disruptive forces he has unleashed.

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Whether Gorbachev stays or goes, however, the question for us is whether the changes that have occurred since 1985 are reversible or irreversible.

In the area of foreign policy, the area most important to us, the answer is clear: the “new thinking” in foreign policy is totally reversible. The basic reason is that this “new thinking” has not created any realities that would block a swing away. There are a few exceptions—in Afghanistan, the exit of the Soviet army has decreased total Soviet leverage on the situation. And it is important to note that for a few years, until the economic reforms have either begun succeeding or have obviously failed, the Soviet leadership will have a strong motive not to make its system bear the demands of confrontation with the West.

Nevertheless, to assert that “the cold war is over” is to project our wishes onto a set of conditions that have not yet materialized. For there are serious reasons to suspect that the same oscillations which we have seen since 1917 between “Right” and “Left” tactics, between détente and confrontation, will go on. In the short term, the present “peace offensive” has inherent limitations. If it does not actually achieve its ultimate goals of splitting the United States off from Europe, maintaining Soviet military superiority at lower (and hence less expensive) levels, while also producing economic and technological help from the West, Gorbachev’s peace offensive will run the risk of giving away too much. There will then be a temptation once again to supplement hopes with threats.

In any case, whether perestroika succeeds or fails, it ironically bodes ill for visions of an end to the cold war. If it succeeds, it will restore Soviet power and confidence, and hence Soviet imperial ambition. But if it fails, a recoil from détente will also seem the easiest way to rally the country and overcome the stale taste of defeated dreams. We should not forget the West’s experience with Khrushchev, in which the political style of the domestic reformer became the political style that secretly sent nuclear missiles to Cuba. And Gorbachev is a much more reckless man than Khrushchev.

The situation with domestic change is different and more complicated. The biggest single factor in producing the new climate internally is Soviet journalism. But since every story published (or broadcast) still passes through multiple stages of official approval and is printed on scarce state paper by state presses, glasnost could disappear like the morning dew. By contrast, the broader phenomena of informal group activities, public involvement in politics, and popular hopes are realities that block any return to the Soviet Union as it was before 1985.

An attempt to put the forces Gorbachev has liberated back in the box would be very hard. At best, such an attempt would create the strongest domestic opposition movement since the White armies were defeated in 1920, and would allow that movement to claim Communist legitimacy. Simply to reverse the domestic changes thus becomes an unattractive option for Gorbachev or any successor to him. The more attractive course would be to capture people’s hopes for a different reform agenda. Here it ought to be recalled that anti-Semitism has always been an easy option for Eastern European authoritarian regimes that wish to make a populist appeal.

All in all, it is probably as misleading to argue that “fundamental changes are not likely” on the Soviet domestic scene as it is to say in foreign policy that “the cold war is over.”

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What seems most likely, if not yet certain, is that, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has argued, we are entering the “terminal crisis” of Communism. With the Soviet elections, the demonstrations in Beijing, and an attempted coup in Ethiopia, the gathering sense of the failure of Communist regimes suddenly seems to have jelled. This does not mean, as commentators suggested when the Chinese students were demonstrating in Tiananmen Square and the government seemed to be yielding, that Communism will just fade away. We are not discussing the end of an administration like that of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, but of an entire social system, a civilization. The collapse of Communism, if it happens, will be an event like the decline of the Roman empire, or the Manchu state in China, or the Abbasid and Fatimid caliphates, or the empire of the Spanish Bourbons, or the Old Regime in France, or the Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian empires.

From these analogies we can draw three conclusions. First, the decline of such systems takes a long time. Second, their terminal crises are complex and eventful. Episodes of conservative restoration alternate with periods of ever more rapid change and growing outside influence, as the deeply split society tries in vain to find a solution.

The third characteristic of such terminal crises is that they are dangerous. The brutal end in Tiananmen Square is only the most recent example. Thus, the collapse of the Old Regime in France led quickly to the conquest of Europe by revolutionary armies. The long decline of Austria-Hungary was marked by civil war; by regional wars in which the decaying power inflicted sharp defeats (Lissa and Custozza in 1866, Caporetto in 1917) on the Piedmontese-Italian state which represented the rising principles of nationalism and liberalism; by the emergence of new ideological solutions (Hitler was a product of Linz and Vienna); and finally by the abrupt decision to check the growing threats to the system’s existence, at the last minute, through the ultimatum to Serbia in July 1914. World War I, from which the West has never fully recovered, was set in motion by the decline of Austria-Hungary and of the Ottoman empire.

The terminal crisis of the Soviet system will similarly expose us to great dangers: the USSR still possesses 12,000 strategic-nuclear warheads. But the crisis also offers historic opportunities. Totalitarianism has been the greatest problem man has faced in the 20th century. In World War II we narrowly defeated the then most dangerous variant of totalitarianism, but at the cost of strengthening the other variant. Now the last great bastion of totalitarian politics may be crumbling.

Better yet, the Soviet system is entering its terminal crisis at the same time as the entire world is experiencing a discovery or rediscovery of democracy and entrepreneurial activity. Accordingly, the trends inside and outside the Soviet Union reinforce each other. Inside the Soviet Union the fact that democratization seems to be on the agenda of the contemporary world makes things harder for Leninism. Outside the Soviet Union, glasnost has substantially discredited Soviet Communism as a model for changing Third World societies. Democracy is emerging as the only coherent and vigorous alternative.

To be sure, Gorbachev’s political strategy does not aim at democratization in our sense. But by discrediting the system and weakening the party apparatus, Gorbachev is creating a void that democracy may eventually fill. He has also immensely enlarged what the West has an acknowledged right to demand of the Soviet Union. Not long ago international good manners seemed to require that we proclaim Brezhnev a man who (in the words of Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance) “shares our dreams and aspirations.” Now it is Gorbachev who for reasons of his own feels it necessary to proclaim that he does indeed share our beliefs: in free elections, in the individual’s right to work for himself and enjoy the fruits of his labor, in self-determination for Eastern Europe. It is Gorbachev who for all practical purposes declares that the Soviet imperial system is a failure.

The upshot is that our efforts to cooperate peacefully in the dismantling of that system need not be controversial to the degree that they once were. Especially in Eastern Europe, the opportunities to expand freedom are enormous.

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The other side of our current situation is the ongoing dynamic that the British Sovietologist Leo Labedz has labeled “competitive decadence”: Soviet Communism is decaying, but Western resolve may evaporate faster. The Politburo, with tactical brilliance, has realized that the pause enforced by its internal crisis can be exploited in a peace offensive to weaken the West and lighten the pressures exerted by the international trend toward democracy. Lulled, we could well dismantle our military forces and allow NATO to fall apart, thereby renouncing our ability to influence a complex and dangerous transition.

But the will to resist this peace offensive cannot be called forth by mere caution. It can only be inspired by a sense of how high the stakes are. We are probably entering a period as pregnant with possibilities, both frightening and captivating, as the years just after World War II. In those years statesmen such as Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze saw the possibilities of a new diplomatic structure that would contain the dangers and develop the opportunities inherent in the historical situation.

The decades that followed were different, less fluid, offering more threats than opportunities. For most of that time, the qualities needed in us have been primarily those of resistance. Now, it seems, we are entering another period of fluidity, of collapse and rebuilding. If so, the qualities it will ask of us will be not only those of firmness but also—and even more—those of energy and imagination.

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