What policy should the democracies adopt toward the Communist world at this stage of its evolution? Toward what end should such a policy be directed?
Ever since Communism came upon the global scene, Western analysts have persisted in seeing change where there has been no real change. Popular uprisings, glimmerings of economic liberalization—all such developments have been hailed as practically synonymous with an achieved democratization. As soon as things begin to budge a little, voilà, the deed is considered as good as done, all we need do is applaud. In early May of this year, to take just the most recent example, virtually every major paper in the Western world proclaimed a “return of freedom” in China. In France, President François Mitterrand went so far as to compare the Chinese demonstrations of 1989 with the French uprising two hundred years earlier—that is to say, with an effective change of regime.
Yet theories of revolution borrowed from the history of other nations are of doubtful applicability to Communist societies. We have, in Communism, a hitherto unknown type, and to this day we have never observed it undergo a complete change of regime. A little prudence would therefore have been in order before democracy was declared triumphant in China. The bloody repression of June 4, ordered by the great “liberal” Deng Xiaoping himself (together with Prime Minister Li Peng), might then have come as less of a shock to Westerners already making arrangements to attend the inauguration of the first democratically elected Chinese president.
Nor was the June bloodbath merely a temporary spasm, the result of a passing fit of lunacy. It was followed by a return to massive terror in the purest tradition of Mao and Stalin: systematic manhunts, mass arrests, roundups of suspects, public humiliation of the “guilty,” mobilization of the media, especially television, to disseminate pictures of the accused, appeals to viewers to inform the police of their whereabouts, the blackmailing of families to denounce their own relatives, a mass campaign to inculcate the proper “lessons” of the events. And while, in the Eastern hemisphere, the Chinese were replaying the Great Terror circa 1937, in the Western hemisphere Fidel Castro was mounting a reprise of the Moscow trials. Behind an indictment for drug trafficking—a real enough enterprise of which, however, Castro himself is the principal “godfather” and true ringmaster—the Cuban leader condemned to death a number of his oldest and most faithful comrades. The courtroom proceedings, during which the accused “confessed” their crimes and begged for the “honor” of being executed in the name of the Revolution, replicated to the letter the Soviet judicial farces of the late 30’s.
All this—and especially the stunning setbacks in China—have again reminded us of the fallacy or, at best, the partiality of the judgment that Communism has passed out of its Stalinist phase and entered definitively the stage of “post-totalitarian” society. Some such judgment, to repeat, has been made again and again over the last seventy years, and has just as often been falsified by events. To be sure, it can be objected that thanks to glasnost, we have a lot more information at our disposal. That is true—but there was no lack of information earlier, either, even if it was not freely divulged by the parties immediately concerned. Yet we in the democracies—and not just Communists and their sympathizers, but statesmen and others nominally hostile to Communism—chose the path of self-deception. There are few grounds for thinking we have suddenly developed an immunity to that peculiar virus.
Indeed, one factor in the exceptional longevity of Communist systems has been, precisely, the credulity of the democracies, which seem to wake up each morning imagining these systems “cured” of totalitarianism. As a consequence, the Western nations obligingly assist them in getting around their difficulties and in withstanding the pressures that threaten them from within. According to normal criteria of political success, the Bolshevik regime, given the massive disasters it had brought about and its manifest incapacity to govern the country, or any country, should have foundered in 1921. That this emblem of failure has managed to drag itself along until nearly the end of the century says something not only about the resilience of Communism as a political system but also about the willingness, if not the desire, of the non-Communist and anti-Communist West to close its eyes to its own proper interests and values.
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But now Communism is undergoing, famously, a seizure of conscience, and this opens again the question I raised some months ago in these pages, “Is Communism Reversible?” (January 1989).
In totalitarian regimes the normal relation between government and governed is inverted. Instead of acting as a seismograph on which the tremors of society may register their varying degrees of intensity and duration, a totalitarian regime presets the instrument to its own preferred reading and expects the earth to adjust its movements accordingly; if, nevertheless, the earth persists in quaking, it may just have to be shot. In the immortal words of an official communiqué of the East German Communist party after the 1953 rebellion, “In light of what has occurred, the people have assuredly lost the confidence of the government.”
But during the 80’s, first in Poland, China, and Yugoslavia, then in the USSR and more recently in Hungary, something seems to have happened to the longstanding capacity of the system to prevent a social or economic crisis from developing into a political threat. Political authority, pushed by a deepening economic crisis, has in turn begun to play the role of a more or less properly functioning seismograph, and to a greater extent than during previous periods of “thaw.” Moreover, in Poland the underlying principle of the system—namely, the monopoly of the Communist party—has been effectively challenged for the first time in any Communist country. In Hungary, and even the Soviet Union, elections have also taken place which, though they have practically nothing in common with fully democratic balloting, are a very far cry from previous such exercises. Finally, these elections have been preceded by, accompanied by, and followed by an avalanche of information and criticism, pitiless examinations of the past that have begun with the Stalinist terror and the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 and have proceeded all the way to attacks on the sources and guiding doctrines of the system itself. The mere fact that Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago is now being published in the Soviet Union is a tacit acknowledgment that the evil runs back to 1917 itself, the Bolshevik seizure of power.
To be sure, Mikhail Gorbachev continues to proclaim otherwise, to reaffirm ceaselessly that by his policy of perestroika he intends not the abandonment but the renewal of socialism. Nevertheless, the vices he condemns as the major obstacles to economic recovery, the maladies besetting the system, happen to conform perfectly with the principal characteristics of socialism. And as for the remedies which he would apply, they will, if followed faithfully, lead ineluctably to the dismantling of socialism.
Gorbachev thus finds himself trapped in essentially the same contradiction faced by the Chinese leaders, though it has hit him from a different angle. The contradiction is much more severe than that faced by countries like Hungary or Poland, where Communism was imposed from without and is therefore more derivative than organic. Such countries benefit from a “window of opportunity” provided by Gorbachev himself: given his present global policy, and especially his public-relations campaign aimed at the West, he would find it virtually impossible to halt the course of their evolution by means of force. But Hungary and Poland, important as they are to the future of Central Europe, represent a minuscule proportion of a vast Communist universe which, taken together—from Ethiopia to Cuba, from Rumania to North Korea, from Vietnam to Czechoslovakia—remains largely totalitarian. Now that China has, at least for the near term, abandoned the democratizing process in which it had rightly been seen as playing the role of a pioneer, the USSR, the motherland of Communism, has once again become the main laboratory and the critical center on which everything depends.
What Gorbachev has had to discover, in brief, is that Communism really is effectively irreversible as a political structure, in the sense that the system is admirably conceived and constructed so as to prohibit its own reform. Irreversibility, indeed, may be the only promise Communism has ever kept. To attempt to reform such a system is to attempt to destroy it. Gorbachev cannot propound such a solution. But it is the only solution.
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Up until now, in each of its successive economic crises, the Soviet Union has been able to recharge itself for a while thanks to a mix of half-hearted and fragmentary reforms, Western cash, imported grain, and stolen technology. Now the Soviet economy has plummeted too far, the breakdown is too general, the palliatives too unavailing. The entire system is moribund, and the leadership itself no longer conceals the fact. “Do not forget, gentlemen, that we are an underdeveloped country,” said the Soviet Minister of Industry to the heads of the major French chemical enterprises in June. Such statements have become legion.
Indeed, Gorbachev himself has confirmed the most extreme critiques of the system. Thus, in his May 15, 1989 report on Soviet agriculture to the Central Committee, he condemned the same policy of land collectivization which two years earlier, in his book Perestroika, he had defended as a “historical necessity” and a stage in the building of Communism. Today, Gorbachev stresses the failure of Soviet agricultural policy not only before but even during his own time, as when he declares, after having been in power four full years, “We are still behind the developed countries, small and large, and the gap is widening rather than narrowing.”
As the French Sovietologist Françoise Thorn has shown in her new book, The Gorbachev Moment, perestroika has passed in the course of its brief history through two distinct phases; it is now entering a third. The first phase saw an intensification of the treatment initiated by Yuri Andropov: enforcing discipline and efficiency in the workplace, combating alcoholism, rooting out “parasites,” mafias, corrupt party cadres. The Andropov method was based on the idea that it would suffice to concentrate on the “human factor,” to oblige everyone to do his job, and the system, such as it was, would in the end respond.
The method flopped. So, starting in July 1987, Gorbachev launched the second phase. A number of audacious ideas were floated: autonomous, self-financing enterprises, profitability, accountability of management and workforce alike, a loosening of state monopolies, facilitation of foreign trade, encouragement of small private enterprises (christened “cooperatives”), the leasing of land to farmers, reinstatement of the open sale of vodka.
Vodka aside, the second stage was a second flop. Why? Because the business enterprises were not really allowed to function autonomously but were forced to rely on the state for primary materials and machinery, for pricing schedules determined in the old, arbitrary manner, and for permission, controlled as ever by bureaucrats, to trade abroad. Because the cooperatives were no sooner legalized than they were slapped with prohibitive taxes. Because you cannot reconstitute a peasant class by decree (“It is improbable to expect to make farmers out of millions of people who no longer believe in anything, who drink, and who have lost their natural talent for farming”—thus, no less authoritative a source than Literaturnaya Gazeta). Because you cannot bring back to life that which has been done to death—and certainly not by means of state management.
All the evidence converges on the same point. Food shortages are worse today than in 1985, when Andropov died. At the Congress of People’s Deputies on June 8, the economist Nikolai Shmelev predicted imminent catastrophe in the countryside and a return to total rationing and a Stalin-type “administered economy” unless land ownership were completely privatized, farmers were paid in hard currency, and subsidies to Cuba and Nicaragua were halted. For good measure, Shmelev asserted that the proletariat was more exploited in a socialist regime than under capitalism. According to the latest official forecast, titled, significantly, “Perestroika in Trouble,” economic recovery now will require “two to three years for reestablishing the large macroeconomic equilibrium and then three to four years to put in place the appropriate conditions for relaunching the reforms,” the latter of which would thus not come into play until the second half of the 90’s.
Hence perestroika‘s third phase: adjournment. For all practical purposes, perestroika has been indefinitely postponed, dispatched to that distant “glorious future” that used to be the official destiny of Communism itself.
What then can Gorbachev do? He can save the economy only by grasping the true cause of the problems, namely, the political system. But can he, would he, do away with something when it means, effectively, doing away with himself, the principal holder of political power? No. Instead, like Communist governments everywhere and in every time, he has turned for help to the capitalist countries. And here, to match the failure of perestroika at home, he has scored a triumph of diplomacy abroad. The aim of that diplomacy has been to transform the democracies into partners in Gorbachev’s own crisis, to render them co-responsible for the Soviet future, whether that future should issue in a totalitarian reaction or in an explosion of anarchy. To put it crudely, Gorbachev aims to stick the democracies with the bill for the Bolshevik Revolution.
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Take the unsolicited letter sent by Gorbachev to the Group of Seven industrial nations meeting in Paris in mid-July, notifying them that the USSR intends henceforth to be included in such international economic deliberations as a fully participating member, and calling on them to cancel the debts of the Third World.
Now, by virtue neither of its economic achievement nor of its economic nature is the USSR entitled to join the club of developed capitalist democracies; it is light years away from such status. As for Third World debt—money owed not to the USSR, which has never been in a position to lend substantially to the Third World, but to those same capitalist countries—it is impudent demagoguery to propose that these debts be annulled, a piece of grandstanding aimed at the Third World itself and at the expense of the very “club” to which Gorbachev has applied for membership. Yet this statement of his, displaying all the polarizing characteristics of a cold-war maneuver, was interpreted by certain participants at the European summit as a “concession” or even a “surrender” on Gorbachev’s part, an acknowledgement that the Soviet Union had “lost the cold war.”
True, the letter implicitly admitted economic debacle, and made an appeal for help. But instead of asking under what conditions it might be feasible to consider admitting the Soviet Union into the club, the Western powers meeting in Paris allowed Gorbachev to define the terms and set his own conditions. Simply on the level of public relations, he succeeded in turning himself into the main subject of conversation among the Seven, thereby bestowing a most welcome gift on the 7,000 or so seriously underoccupied journalists gathered in the French capital. Western public opinion, in the form of newspaper editorials and op-ed pieces, duly registered that the Soviet president had once again shown his desire for “dialogue,” for “openness,” for cooperation, and duly expressed impatience at the reluctance of Western governments to rise to the challenge.
In general, as in this particular instance, a strange inhibition renders the democracies incapable even of playing the cards they actually hold, or induces resentment when some among them make so bold as to urge the pressing of an advantage. In Paris, the United States was chastised for thinking that we were “now present at the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet empire, and that the objective of our policy toward the East should be to accelerate that process,” specifically by conditioning economic aid on political concessions (Le Monde, July 18). Of course there is room for doubt as to whether Washington does indeed see things in this way, but one would think from Le Monde that it was somehow immoral to want to replace brain-dead Communist systems with open economies and democratic politics, or that the whole art of negotiation consisted in gift-giving.
Then, during his visit to France in early July, Gorbachev inveighed against those “who think of East-West rapprochement only as a means of bringing about the end of Communism,” and shortly thereafter, as if to signal its concurrence, the French government announced that it was “very unfavorably impressed” with President Bush’s reference, while in Poland, “to the necessity for removing Soviet troops from that country.” Yet Poland is still an occupied country, pure and simple. Why should France, a country opposed to Communism, have adopted the Soviet point of view, which it finds hateful, instead of exploiting the weakness of Moscow’s position on the Polish question? What do the democracies need governments for, if all they are to do is sit by passively while others bleed to advance their common cause? If, as Gorbachev demands, we are to be partners in Perestroika, must we also be silent partners?
Actually, even silence would be preferable to the clamor emanating from some of Gorbachev’s Western admirers. For example, the day after his December 8, 1988 UN speech, the lead editorial in the New York Times enthused: “Perhaps not since Woodrow Wilson presented his Fourteen Points in 1918 or since Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill promulgated the Atlantic Charter in 1941 has a world figure demonstrated the vision Mikhail Gorbachev displayed yesterday at the United Nations.” This, of a speech that amounted to a tissue of grandiloquent banalities, hectoring of the Western democracies, flattery of the Third World, and the customary unilateral proposals for troop reductions which so impress elite opinion but which, in the context of the global correlation of forces, do nothing to affect the Soviet superiority in real numbers. It must take a terminal case of perestroikitis to see a likeness between two of the most generous and courageous conceptions ever formulated by Western democrats, at moments of utmost peril to the cause of liberty, and the clever but empty publicity ploy of a hard-pressed despot.
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For the Communist states the ideal solution, obviously, is to undertake partial reforms while trying to maintain their systems by means of artificial respiration administered by the capitalist nations. This tricky balancing act is what every Communist country at the edge of the abyss has periodically had to manage, not only the Soviet Union and China but Vietnam, Angola, Benin, Madagascar. . . . And the West has time and again come to the rescue. But the oxygen it has periodically supplied has enabled the system to rise from its sickbed only to stumble anew. For Communism is not reparable, and repairing it is not a feasible objective. The only feasible objective is an escape from Communism.
The people most directly affected lean toward just this solution. After the visit of President Bush to Hungary in July, Western visitors were surprised to hear Hungarians saying they were happy that the American President had promised so little aid to their country. What good would credits do in the current mess, so long as the Communist party, however diminished in capacity, remained in power? The party, thoroughly demoralized, had nothing to offer. Aid would be squandered. The less the government was subsidized, the quicker one could expect radical change.
Such statements echoed those of Andrei Sakharov in a dire and pessimistic speech in London last June, when he warned Western powers against increasing their economic and technological aid to the Soviet Union: “In the absence of radical reforms of the Soviet system, such assistance could serve only to prop up an ailing system and delay the advent of democracy. It would be like pouring water into the sand.”
Indeed, even in Poland, where the Communist party has been demoted to a junior partnership in a government led by Solidarity, Western help will be of little avail until that government really begins making good on Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki’s promise to return Poland “to the market economy, and to a role of the state similar to that in economically developed countries.”
Gorbachev, while conducting an energetic and effective foreign policy, while succeeding, despite military and economic defeat, in maintaining Communists in power in Afghanistan, in Cambodia, in Angola, in Nicaragua, while continuing patiently with efforts to create disorder and disharmony in the Atlantic alliance, while negotiating “disarmament” agreements that always work to his advantage, while perfecting Soviet espionage activities—while, in sum, pursuing the cold war by every means at his disposal—has also managed to produce an effect of inhibition and even intimidation in the democracies. One cannot blame him: he looks after his own interests as he is legitimately entitled to do. Our mistake is to believe that he holds himself responsible for our interests as well.
In those interests, as well as in the interests of the people living under Communism, Western policy should be directed at accelerating the dissolution of that system, at rendering its disappearance the more rapid, so as to shorten, insofar as possible, the inevitable period of ensuing anarchy. Let us remember, once more, what the alternative is—namely, some sort of resumption of the détente of the 70’s. And let us remember what Gorbachev himself has told us about the effects of détente: not the dynamism and modernization promised by its Western promoters, accompanied by a moderation of foreign aggression, but, to the contrary, “stagnation” and even coma in the domestic economy, accompanied by military expansionism, a huge arms build-up, disastrous foreign adventures. Communist leaders may have no desire or incentive to learn from our errors; but can we?
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Once it was considered bad form to criticize the Soviet Union for its faults, since doing so could only serve to delay the advent of that impossible dream, the perfect society promised by Communist ideology. Today it is considered bad form to criticize perestroika, since doing so can only delay the advent of that other impossible dream, the reform of Communism. But perestroika is effectively dead, and we cannot resuscitate it. If the objective is the provisional repair of a socialist economy by means of a number of capitalist-style prosthetic devices, and especially by means of Western credit, the democracies should absolutely refrain from lending a hand. What sense does it make for us to keep alive regimes that are permanent sources of misery in the world, from famine in Ethiopia to the flotillas of Vietnamese boat people whom no one wants to receive, not to mention the Cuban drug traffic and other fine specimens of Communism at work?
These systems will always be adversary to our own, no matter what services we render them. Instead of worrying over the metaphysical question of whether or not the cold war has ended, we would do better to address any number of concrete issues—Central America; European disarmament; strategic bases in the Philippines and Vietnam; Soviet penetration into the South Pacific; Soviet diplomacy toward post-Khomeini Iran and in Afghanistan after the departure of the Red Army; the bloody Chinese occupation of Tibet; the future of Hong Kong; etc., etc.—and to try and resolve these issues in accordance with our own values and principles, not in accordance with those imposed on us by Moscow, Beijing, Hanoi, or Havana. We have, in fact, but one duty: improving the prospects of democracy and peace in the world. Both the one and the other are incompatible with the very structures of Communist society. The anti-Communist revolution must therefore proceed to its appointed end, and we must hasten it toward that end.
When one believes oneself lacking in political means, usually one has not defined one’s political ends. If we do not clearly set our policy, we will not have one: Gorbachev, or whoever, will impose on us his own. We, meanwhile, will vacillate between smiling fondly at those who genuinely want to escape from Communism, like the Poles and the Hungarians, and arranging blood transfusions for the moribund incurables of the Bolshevik heartland. How to liberate 300 million human beings in the Soviet Union, and many millions of others elsewhere, from the total impasse into which Communism has thrust them—it is in such terms that we must articulate the problem, and its solution. Then we can devote ourselves to mobilizing the means.
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