Political
crisis at
the top
GORBACHEV's reform lacks a solid social base either in the bureaucracy or among the workers. The only social stratum in which there is a Significant enthusiasm for it is the intelligentsia. It has benefited in its professional activity the most from the liberalization so far. Moreover, its relative material situation, which had declined since Stalin's death relative to that of the workers, is improving, albeit too slowly for many.! DAVID SEPPO
UT IT WOULD be an error to
Borical with of this arden.
overestimate the independent the intelligentsia alone is certainly no match for the bureaucracy. Moreover, a significant element of the intelligentsia has lived quite comfortably under the old system. Many others, despite their critical attitudes, fear too abrupt a change, which might, God forbid, draw the masses onto the political
The historian, Stanislav Tyutyukin, told Izvestiya that: "in historical science - and, most likely in science generally - the "fence-sitters" still predominate over the active champions of restructuring, although, of course, verbally everyone is for it....
"Some people have done a rather good job of adapting to the old conditions and they are frightened by the openness (the emperor might turn out to be naked), by the prospect of more intensive, demanding work...Others, and there are very, very many of them, are waiting for authoritative explanations and directives, as they are not used to independent thought and action. A third group feels that, for the time being, it is better "not to stick one's neck out' — they could turn out to be fools.
"There are also those dissatisfied with the, as of yet, comparatively modest material incentives for the new conditions of work, and who are offended (and, in certain cases, rightly so) by the outcome of the recertification conducted last year of scientific personnel."
Tyutyukin added that in history the restructuring has involved a great deal of demagoguery and some settling of personal accounts, and the effects have not always been beneficial. Conversations with artists indicate that the situation is not very different in the area of artistic creation. Opposition to perestroika is very strong
The medium-term perspective for the Soviet Union is, in all probability, one of political crisis, what Lenin called a "crisis of the top", that is, within the bureaucratic regime itself. For the opposition here to the perespresent the reformers have the upper hand and all bureaucrats declare themselves for the renewal, while in practice many are merely biding their time and passively sabotaging.
The crisis will ripen at the moment it becomes possible to paint the perestroika as a failure. And that moment will come, and this only partly because the economic reform, judging by past Soviet and East European experience, will lack coherence.
Although it is too early to judge, as it now appears the old "command system" will be weakened, but not dismantled, and the new one foisted onto it. Thus, for example, in closing the public discussion in the press of the draft "Law of the State Enterprise", Pravda
"only timidly opens the horizons on tomorrow; obscurely shows the path for the creation of genuinely efficient methods of management. Many of our readers justly noted that different authors of the draft had at times contradictory views: some rush boldly ahead, while others try to hang onto the old and familiar, even though outdated." 3
The Hungarian experience is relevant here. The current head of the Hungarian State Planning Commission spoke to a Soviet journalist of the nature of the crisis in his country a few years after the reform was first introduced:
"First of all the Czechoslovak events and the ideological campaign that followed caused some to fear accusations of wanting to take Hungary along the path proposed by Ota Sik.... Then jump in world prices caused us great harm. The reform's opponents exploit-
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Железнодорожник. ed the unfavourable situation and lifted up their heads....It is a human question when people lose power...[especially] those in the branch ministries and the party organs....
"Years of stagnation" in
Hungary
"The supporters of the reform also made mistakes....They considered that the old organs would begin working in a new way on their own. posed to the reform, or unable to understand it, were left at their posts. So when demagogic attacks began minimized the reform's successes and blew up the negative processes, the demagogues were not given a strong rebuff....Neither side could win and a sort of equilibrium that resulted in years of stagnation set in." 4
It is worth remembering, in comparing Hungary and the Soviet Union, that the Soviet bureaucracy is at the centre of the empire and has no one to fall back on. In addition, unlike the Hungarian bureaucracy, which suffered crushing blow in the 1956 revolution, its Soviet counterpart has known no similar defeats (at least since the purg es) and is so much older. Its potential opposition to reform is thus so much greater. 1. Interview with Zaslavskaya, Argumenty i fakty, March 2-7, 1987, pp.1-2. 2. "Uvazhenie k sobstvennoi istorii" (Respect for our own history), Izvestiya, May 3, 1987. 3. Izvestiya, February 8, 1987. 4. L.G. Pavel-Volin, "Chem privlekatelen i ot chego predosteregaet vergerskii opyt" (What is attractive in 25 the Hungarian experience and what does it forewam us about?), Literaturnaya gazeta, June 19, 1987.
October 26, 1987 • International Viewpoint
USSR
More immediately, however, practically impossible to carry out profound structural reform and at the same time attain high production targets. But this is what Gorbachev has promised.S His failure to deliver will be crucial ammunition for the opponents of the
The outcome of this crisis, and of the entire reform period, will depend in the last analysis on the working class. If Gorbachev is going to introduce significant, irreversible change in his country, he will have to conclude a genuine, sincere alliance with the workers. That establishment of popular control over economy, thoroughgoing democratization. Only if he does that can he hope to acquire a sufficiently powerful and loyal political base to oppose the forces of stagnation and re-
This was the experience of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The working class, initially suspicious and passive, came the most active and loyal defender of the renewal, once the reform was revised to give them real power. The working class actually turned out to be more loyal to the renewal than the regime itself, which quickly caved in to the Soviets after the invasion.
On the other hand, if Gorbachev refuses this alliance, that he will be forced to abandon his reforms or he will be dismissed.
Waste and anarchy in the
But even if that happens, one can still expect a worker mobilization against the retrograde bureaucratic regime that, as always, will try to make the workers bear the costs of its crimi-
Even if Soviet as their "golden (because it was easy to find common language with management), they have been able to accustom selves to the waste, the anarchy and them each day in the factories and that demoralizes and sickens them. This situation, moreover, will have become all the more intolerable, as it is presently the object of systematic public denunthe regime itself, which has promised "revolutionary reforms"
But is there really a basis to expect a mobilization of a working class whose passivity, especially when compared to the workers of Eastern Europe, back to the end of the Civil War? There are a number of factors that should be
One of these is the sociological sta26 during the 1960s and 1970s.? Youss bilization ot the Soviet working International Viewpoint • October 26, 1987 workers today were born in the city, not the village, and are themselves children of workers. They have deep roots in the urban working class culture and social milieu. They are better educated than their elders and have known neither the terror, the war, nor the severe material deprivation that were the lot of preceding generations. at eliminating the basis for between workers and management that has had such a corrupting influence on class consciousness. (In this connection, one should also mention the relative success of the campaign against the consumption of alcohol, another corrupting influence.) There are already some signs of the emergence of a clearer class definition and separation. According to Ivanov of the Sociological Research Institute:
"One cannot close one's eyes to the contradiction beginning to emerge between administrators and those who execute the work. This problem became increasingly clear with each new surwe did. The rigid division between "we" and "they" has serious conse-
"It is interesting that many of the administrators that we surveyed in the factories of Moscow's Sevastopol discomplain of the workers' sloth and lack of initiative; while the rank-and-file workers speak of the administrators' idle talk, indifference and waitand-see attitude to the restructuring.
This was also the impression of a Soviet emigre recently returned from a visit to the Soviet Union:
"Another thing that did not exist before, at least so it seems to me: a clear division between "them" and "us". Of course, it did exist before, but not in a form so absolutely bitter, reaching the point of impotent mobilization will also be favoured by the space created by the "crisis at the top", which threatens to be more severe than anything since the opening has allowed the emergence of a new stratum of democratic activists (partly in the club movement), for the time being mostly socially marginal
Unlike the dissidents of the Brezhnev era, these people do not only not fear the "masses" but they actively seek to forge ties with them. If the workers rejected the dissidents, it was not because they could not understand, or had no sympathy for, the dissidents' cisms of bureaucratic rule. Rather, they were put off by the latter's often condescending and disdaintul ward the common people and by the fact that they chose the Western media as their interlocutor. This was seen as
"washing our dirty linen in public" and, therefore, unpatriotic.1
Thus, in a political crisis of the top, there will exist for the first time a stratum of experienced activists, one with ties to the working class and therefore capable of helping it to organize and to clarify its goals. These goals can only be popular control of the economy, socialist democracy. These have been the spontaneous aims of every worker mobilization in the so-call socialist countries to date. "An advanced economy with the broadest democracy"
Gorbachev concluded his speech at the January plenum with the following
"We want to make our country into a highly-developed society with the most advanced economy, with the broadest democracy; the most human and moral society, where the working person will feel himself master, where he will be able to enjoy all the material and spiritual advantages, where the future of his children will be assured, where he will have at his disposal all that is necessary for a complete and rich life....So that even the sceptics will be forced to say: Yes, socialism is a system that serves the well-being of people, their interests, their spiritual development." II
This vision contrasts profoundly with Brezhnevian discourse, which characterized the Soviet Union as "actually existing socialism", to warn people not to expect qualitative changes, since what already existed was the only possible socialism.
But qualitative and permanent changes are concevable in the Soviet Union only through an independent mobilization of society, 5. M-A. Crosnier, "Le New Deal de Gorbatchev", Le Courrier des Pays de l'Est, March 1985, p.6. 6. The Czechoslovak reform movement, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge), 1971, pp.280-3; and J. Rupnik, "La classe ouvrière en Tchécoslovaquie, Notes et études documentaires 4511/12, pp.180-1. 7. See D. Mandel, "La crise du 'socialisme réellement existant'", Etudes internationales (Quebec), Vol. 12, 8. "Real'nost' nadezhd", Izvestiya, May 5, 1987. 9. A. Sytcheva in Russkaya mysl' 3645, October 1986. "Labour unrest in the Soviet Union", Problems of Communism, Vol. 31, November/December 1982, pp.37-8. Yurii Orlov, the Soviet physicist and human rights activist recently allowed to emigrate, said in an interview in October 1986 that the human rights "dissident" stage was more or less over. "The next stage will be that of activity within the working class, among the ordinary people." He referred to a movement analogous to the nineteenth century populist movement "to the people". (Russkaya mysl', Paris, October 31, 1986 — abridged version in JV 116, 23 March, 1987.) See also the interview with A. Severoukhine, Inprecor 240, April 13, 1987, pp.5-10.