Finally, on the eve of the plenum, the authorities gave tacit support to a mass demonstration in Moscow against the conservatives. It drew over 100,000 participants, and set a new watermark in mass mobilization in the Soviet capital. Despite the fact that the march was encouraged by the authorities, many of those who participated expressed at the very least a lack of confidence in the Soviet chief: "Gorbachev stop fooling the people," "Gorbachev, whose side are you on."
Moscow News stressed the breadth of the demonstration, mentioning many independent groups: "For the first time, we saw marching side by side representa6 tives of the Memorial Group, the Democratic Union, the anarcho-syndicalists and the Union of Democratic Youth, the soldiers union Shchit ("Shield"), the Sakha-
Movement, the Cadets (Constitutional Democrats) and the Democratic Communists, RUKH [the Ukrainian People's Front], the Democratic Platform of the CPSU, the Social Protest Movement and the People's Front of Georgia." RUKH supporters carrying the flag of the independent Ukrainian republic were reportedly quite prominent in the demonstration.
At the plenum itself, the demonstration was referred to both positively and negatively. In the debate on February 7, V. I. Mironenko, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol, said: "We have to understand finally that the hundreds of thousands of people on Manezhnaya Square were not a motley crowd, as someone said on the first day of our work, but the people. It was the people, who give power and take it away. It was the people who are demanding decisive measures to improve their situation."
### Leading conservatives forced to resign
The conservatives were apparently still on the defensive in the apparatus. In the days before the plenum, a series of unreconstructed local party bosses resigned (in Tiumen, Volgograd and Chernigov); the discredited Leningrad boss Soloviev was expelled, and Moscow News ventured to present a critical profile of the conservative leader Yegor Ligachev. Pravda published an article that denounced former Azerbaijani boss Ghaidar Aliev in the most violent terms.
The conservatives did not speak out against abandoning the constitutional guarantee of the "leading role" of the Communist Party, which was presented as a major advance for the reformers. But this had become something of an artificial issue. This provision was added to the new Soviet constitution adopted in 1977. It changed nothing in reality. The single-party system was established and maintained without it.
The provision had already been removed in the Baltic republics, as a result of the shattering of the single-party system in fact by the rise of the People's Fronts. However since then commentators in the Estonian and Latvian literary weeklies Reede and Literatura un Maksla, close to the People's Fronts, have argued that the local parties dropping this clause has gone hand hand in with an an antidemocratic offensive by other means
International Viewpoint #179 • February 26, 1990 and maneuvers, such as trying to prevent opposition groups from expressing themselves by cutting supplies of paper to "unreliable publications."
While the conservatives did not raise their voices against Gorbachev's reforms as such, they took the opportunity to raise the alarm about a slide into disaster. "The main danger to perestroika, a mortal danger I would say for perestroika, for the Soviet union, are the powerful forces of a nationalist, separatist, anti-Communist sort," Ligachev said. He also raised an alarm about the danger represented by German reunification.
The conservative chief said that the talk about a division between conservatives and liberals in the CP was intended to divert attention from this dangers. In particular, he denied a report in the liberal magazine Ogonyok that conservatives had been behind the massacre in Tbilisi on April 9, 1989: "I want to stress that...on April 7, the entire Politburo, with the participation of Gorbachev, Ryzhkov and...Shevardnadze and Yakovlev, unanimously approved the political recommendations having to do with the evolution of events in Tbilisi."
The primrose path of concessions to nationalism
Yakovlev, apparently a bête noir of the conservatives, found himself accused several times of being responsible for leading the Lithuanian CP leadership onto the primrose path of "concessions" to separatism, nationalism and so on.
Soviet ambassador to Poland, V. I Brovikov, delivered a prolonged peroration about the slide to ruin: "We keep trying to show that the people are for perestroika, but let me ask, what kind? Is it for the kind that in less than five years has plunged the country into an abyss of crisis, sent it to the devil, alongside whom we have come face to face with rampaging anarchy, with the degradation of the economy, with the grimace of general ruin and a collapse of morals." A number of speakers talked about the party's loss of authority and members.
V. K. Mesyats, the first secretary of the Moscow district committee, said:"Today, Communists are asking us: Why is the Central Committee of the CPSU taking a defensive position, why isn't it opposing the demagogues and falsifiers, why is it temporizing with those who carry party cards in their pocket and oppose the line of the party? In our opinion, the time has come to take a position and to say who is who! Who is really a supporter of perestroika and who is using glasnost to further their own group and political ambitions, for seizing power outright."
Further on, he said that his district committee of course supported perestroika, "but a lot of what is going on today, comrades, looks very much like a rampage of unhealthy passions, anarchy, skillfully
whipped up by the leaders of all sorts of groups and unions of an anti-Communist orientation. All this is putting strong psychological pressure on people, arousing just anger and worry. I don't know, I might be mistaken, but this is not the democracy, the glasnost for which the April 1985 plenum voted. Our indecisiveness 1s being seen as weakness...Things have gone too far. Isn't this one of the main reasons we have not gotten the economic results expected?"
The second secretary of the Kazakhstan party, V. G. Anufriev, made a sharp attack on the the CPSU leadership: "The party congress has to be moved up. congress has to be moved up, because the present Central Committee and Politburo no longer have the authority to make crucial decisions. Some of their members should think of leaving. Who, comrades, is to answer for the breakdown of the unity of the party, for its ideological collapses, who is going to answer for the events in Eastern Europe that no one wants to discuss here? They have destroyed our buffer zone...But today already they are raising territorial and material claims, wrecking our consulates, defiling the graves of our soldiers and our shrines, humiliating a great country. And once again we are throwing away millions there, robbing our own people.
Leading official opposes foreign ald
"We offer hospitality to these Mazowieckis and other fellows. We don't need to feed foreign countries so that they will have a better life. We have to assure that things are better here than in their coun tries and then they will come here themselves and offer us their friendship. Who will tell us comrades, how much Angola, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Vietnam and Cuba cost us? Everything should be given to Soviet people, and that should be written in the program."
However, some top government figures talked as aggressively about the need for "order" as the conservatives. For example, the premier, N. I. Ryzhkov, said: "Hundreds of thousands of refugees have been deprived of their homes and accuse the government of being unable to defend their personal security and property. There are laws against stirring up interethnic conflict, but they are not being applied. There are laws for fighting crime, but their effectiveness has been reduced because the law enforcement agencies have literally been overwhelmed by a wave of unbridled criticism....
"It has to be said forthrightly that any attempts by the law-enforcement agencies to assure order, even in the framework of the existing laws is immediately described
USSR
VISU
VARU
PADOMEN g.
(Banner reads "All power to the Soviets") — from Literatura un Maksla as an attack on democracy, an attack on glasnost. At the same time, the people are rightly worried that the organs of power are not taking decisive action to stop growing manifestations of lawlessness."
Kriuchkov, the head of the KGB appointed by Gorbachev, said.
"In practice, we have gone into a period of political struggle, in which our many opponents do not shrink from any means. State and national education, work collectives, the youth and mass media are becoming an arena of struggle. We were not ready for this struggle.
Wide variety of forces accused of destructive activity
"Recently, the ideological face of various forces has become uncovered - from ultraleftists, to social democrats to open nationalistic anti-Communists and even monarchists. Many of them are generating destructive antisocialist activity. If formerly, they adopted pro-perestroika slogans, today as a rule they reject the policy of the CPSU and aim openly to seize power. Moral terror, threats, physical attacks are being unleashed against soviet and party workers, against those who do not agree with them.
"They seek to discredit the party, the organs of power, the armed forces, the peace-keeping forces. As a means of accomplishing their aims they have chosen to whip up nationalist passions, provocative mass actions, destabilizing the state power.....
"Perestroika, the idea of perestroika and the means for implementing it, is by no means an opening for disorder, irresponsibility and anarchy. It is not an opening for the expression of extremism, including political extremism. Otherwise, perestroika could turn into a tragedy for our country, whose consequences would be hard to foresee. Years would be necessary to repair the damage.
"We consider extremism unacceptable.
In any form it implies violence. Isn't it time to declare with all clarity and decisiveness what our attitude is to violence and the means of achieving political aims and ambition? "In the recent period, we have been confronted with violence in various regions of our country and in various spheres of public life. It is clear that you can't quell extremists with sermons. That only fires them up. All of us are for political methods of solving problems, even socially acute ones. But if these methods prove insufficient, then force has to be met with force."
Gorbachev's proposals for a strong presidential government fitted in with the view expressed in the various round tables of experts published in the Soviet press that a firm hand is needed to carry through the reform process. They are also in line with the general strategy of trying to create a parliamentary, constitutional façade for bureaucratic domination. Moreover, they correspond to the fact that the party as a machine of rule has been weakened by the reforms, and the contradictory pressures they generate. For example, the leaderships at various levels are being pushed to try win political support, and at the same time they risk the thunders and worse of the top if they make concessions to mass pressure. The sad fate of the majority of the Lithuanian CP is the latest example of this.
Strong presidential regime rejected
However, conservative Central Committee members who decried the lack of strong authority in the country opposed the proposals for a strong presidential regime. They do not in fact appear in the new party program published in the February 13 issue of Pravda. This issue could have much more concrete importance than the question of the constitutionally guaranteed "leading role" of the party. 7
A strong presidency in the hands of Gor-
February 26, 1990• #179 International Viewpoint the CPSU leadership: "The party "sovereian Latvia" there was no paper for non-Communist party publications.
On January 23, in "sovereign Latvia" there was no paper for non-Communist party publications.
USSR bachev would not only be a bonapartist dictatorship over the country; it would be a dictatorship over the party itself. That would not only be to the detriment of the factional interests of the conservatives, but would in fact undermine the party as an instrument of rule.
Furthermore, simply from the standpoint of political realism, the party bosses have good reason to doubt that Gorbachev now has the political authority to make such an institution work. One speaker, Yu. A. Gan'kovski, secretary of the party committee at the Nizhnevartovsk oil and gas combine, raised the question openly if Gorbachev did not already have too many responsibilities.
The leading radical reformer, Boris Yeltsin, took the opportunity of the plenum to put forward a whole program for reforming the party, the first point of which was abolishing democratic centralism, at least as it has been understood, and to replace it "with general democratic principles assuring genuine pluralism in the party, guarantees of rights for minorities, freedom of opinion for party members and citizens of the country and their right to defend their positions, political rights and individual freedom.'
Yeltsin presents ten-point program
He presented ten points. The second was "rejecting the apparatus as an instrument of power". The sixth was moving away from a vertical structure in the party toward horizontal groupings based on functional and territorial units. He also called for permitting tendencies and fac tions, as well as for putting the partycontrolled media directly under the authority of congresses... It is improper for the decision about whether an editor or TV director stays or goes to depend on the whim of party secretaries." The final point called for "moving from the unitary principle of building the state and the CP toward a voluntary union of peoples and a voluntary union of the Communist parties of the various republics."
Yeltsin cast the only vote against the new party program, reportedly because it did not go far enough in the direction of reform.
In fact, a number of speakers criticized it for vagueness; one even called it "weepy." The text published in the February 13 Pravda was largely a collection of glittering generalities.
The new program's promises of democracy were belied by the brutal treatment meted out to the Lithuanian CP. Following a harsh denunciation of the local party leadership by Gorbachev, the plenum voted to condemn the decisions of the Lithuanian CP's recent Twentieth Congress and to give support, in particular material support, to a breakaway group, the Lithuanian 8 Lithuanian CP leader Bransaste CP (on the Platform of the CPSU). The Lithuanian CP leader, Brausaskas, was either reduced to incoherence by the brutality of the attack, or his remarks were denatured in the official version, which quotes him time after time as stammering, "there is nothing I can say."
Y. V. Palackis, the secretary of the Central Committee, however, was quoted as arguing that the breakaway group were neo-Stalinists:
"When Vadim Andreevich Medvedev [Gorbachev's high priest for ideological questions] came to us before our Twentieth Congress, in a closed session...a squall of attacks were launched at our guest. And these attacks were not against Comrade Brausaskas and Berezov but on perestroika and the present leaders of our party...•
"Among our opponents, I think there are many who have no taste for the perestroika CPSU. The CPSU of Brezhnev, and further back than that, is more to their liking."
It does seem likely that only the most Stalinist elements of the Lithuanian party would have opted for a breakaway group totally isolated from the local population and completely dependent on Moscow. (One speaker felt a need to say, for instance, that the new party "has a social base"). Although Gorbachev backed this group, it is hardly likely that he is its favorite person.
Instructive fate of Brazauskas leadership
The fate of the Brausaskas leadership is a good example of the dilemma of the reform line. He was put in as general secretary when the previous Lithuanian CP leadership failed to stop the rise of the national-democratic movement by repressive means. He succeeded in gaining enough political credibility to keep the local Supreme Soviet from adopting a sovereignty resolution modelled on the Estonian one.
But then the national democratic movement became disillusioned with him, and the CP was buried in the elections for the Congress of People's Deputies. Now, after being forced to make new concessions to regain credibility, his patrons in Moscow have cut off his branch, just before the decisive elections for the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet.
This case does not do much to lend credibility to Gorbachev's recent verbal concessions to the right of self-determination.
In fact, at the plenum also, Latvian party secretary Vagris complained about economic maneuvers designed to sabotage Latvian economic autonomy, which was supposed to go into effect from the first of this year.
In general, neither the plenum or the new program adopted offered any "political" solution to the problems raised, and overall it seems that despite the retreat of the conservatives, Gorbachev came out of it further weakened. *
International Viewpoint #179 • February 26, 1990
Explosion in Tadzhikistan HARDLY was the Soviet CP plenum over before Gorbachev faced a new explosion of national resentment in a Central Asian republic. This time it was in Dushanbe, the capital of Tadzhikistan. The spark was a rumor that Moscow was giving apartments to Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan, when the shortage of housing is acute. The anti-Armenian aspect became clearly anti-European. However, it should be remembered that large scale pogroms developed in Uzbekistan against the Meskhetian Turks, who were forcibily settled there by Stalin, despite the fact that they are a people of Muslim tradition, like the Uzbeks themselves.
While the blowup in Tadzhikistan, by all accounts, had a pogromist aspect at the start, it seems to have quickly taken on a general political character directed against the government. The demonstrators called for the resignation of the local CP leadership, a demand which they won; and raised something like a political platform - the closing of a polluting aluminum factory, street signs in Tadzhik, dissolution of the local repressive forces, as well as the opening of butcher shops conforming to Muslim religious laws. Anti-European feelings have been fueled by the fact that the standard of living is far lower than in the European republics, just as it is lower for the original population than for at least a very large part of the Russians living in the republic. Clearly the rebellion against national oppression has now become well established in the non-European republics, and it seems that it may spread like a prairie fire. *
USSR
Lithuania: perestroika faces test of free elections "THE PARTY and state leadership will not allow the Union to disintegrate" thundered Mikhail Gorbachev responding to the decision of the Lithuanian Communist Party at its 20th Congress on December 17, 1989 to become an "independent party with its own programme and statutes". Gorbachev also told the all-union CP Central Committee meeting over Christmas that this decision was illegal and that the independence movement was the work of "separatists and nationalists" as well as an "attack on my reform policies."
He proposed that the Supreme Soviet examine the "legitimacy of the existence in the country of organizations and political movements carrying out separatist activities and sowing natlonalist terror." Signalling the gravity of these developments, Gorbachev cancelled all meetings with foreign visitors; the Tokyo stock market shuddered. COLIN MEADE
Western newspapers, praising Gorbachev's statesmanship in confronting the Lithuanian issue head on. The Washington Post acclaimed his virtuoso performance in Lithuania and urges the Lithuanians to consider Gorbachev's arguments seriously (Guardian Weekly January 21). As US President George Bush commented on January 24, against a background of falling stock markets * ....it is in our interest that perestroika succeed and go forward."
A third manoeuvre against the Lithuanian independence movement is attempts to play on the fears of non-Lithuanians (see IV 173). At the meeting between Gorbachev and LCP activists on January 13 a delegate V. Pavlovich, describing himself as a "worker" insisted that there had been no workers at the LCP conference that had taken the decision to split from Moscow. People, he claimed, were being subjected to nationalist pressures and persecution, and there was an atmosphere similar to that in Germany in 1936-37. Furthermore, the LCP had been collaborating with anti-socialist groups.
Pavlovich was going to support a new breakaway party, whose creation flowed from the fact that 160 delegates (against 855) at the 20th LCP congress had voted against a wholly independent party and for "an independent party inside a renewed CPSU."
HESE THREATS were followed
T by a visit by Gorbachev and a high-level team to Lithuania in mid-January. The visit resulted in the Soviet leader offering an olivebranch: everything, even independence might be possible as long as it took place in the framework of the new legitimacy —
Gorbachev as president over an elected
Supreme Soviet — that the Soviet leader is trying to establish as the backbone of a new political order in the Soviet Union.
Rather than relying on direct repression,
Gorbachev hoped, and continues to hope,
MkHail's
HEY, MACK!-
CAN YOUS
IT UP. BAK
THERE!
SHEESH! *
MAYET SHOULD
QUIT THIS
LOUSY JOB....
that economic pressures, combined with the full conservative weight of the dominant forces on the world scene, most of whom who fear "chaos" in the Soviet bloc and elsewhere as the postwar order crumble, will create a climate in which
"emotional" nationalist hotheads will see
"reason".
•
The economic line of attack - Lithuania is economically integrated into the
USSR; independence would be disastrous - was constantly used by Gorbachev and his team during the visit. While
Western Europe was uniting, Lithuania was planning to secede from the
USSR against the
HOW ABOUT grain of history,
WHERE'S
TE they argued.
!!!
BEEF?!
Meanwhile
YOU HAVE the flagship of
ANY KETCHUP the Soviet liber-
BACK TENE?"
als, Argumenty i Fakry, (No
3,1990) emphasized the Lithuanians' international isolation by devoting its front page to a series of from excerpts editorials 1 from authoritative renewea CrsU.
Stalin's role in introducing
"socialism"
A representative of this new provisional anti-independence LCP, M. Burokyavicus, speaking at the February plenum of the CPSU Central Comittee reiterated Pavlovich's arguments, stressing in particular his positive assessment of the role of Stalin's Soviet Union in establishing the "socialist system" in Lithuania.
It is unlikely, however, that any of this will stem the nationalist tide in Lithuania. The decision of the LCP to declare its independence from the CPSU was a result of its crushing defeat by the nationalist Sajudis movement in elections for the Congress of People's Deputies in March 1989 (IV 161). As LCP leader Algirdas Brazauskas explained to Gorbachev at the January 13 meeting, only an independent party could regain the confidence of the people and avoid disaster in the elections to the Republic's Supreme Soviet elections on February 24.
He also insisted that independence was án unavoidable aspect of democratization in a situation where national self-determination had been violated by the forcible incorporation of the Baltic States into the Soviet Union as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939.
At the same meeting, the head of the Lithuanian government's nationalities programme, a Karaite Jew, countered suggestions that Lithuania was in the grip of 9 unreasoning nationalist hysteria by citing
CHON-
I DONTH E
USSR the achievements in the government since
1987 in providing cultural facilities for
Gorbachev redefines perestroika A LONG ARTICLE by Mikhail Gorbachev was published in the November 26 Issue of Pravda, entitled "The socialist idea and perestroika." It represented a considerable effort by the Soviet leader to give some theoretical coherence to his reform projects. This article is quite likely more important than his book, which appeared in 1987. And in fact, the article introduces significant corrections and innovations with respect to the book. This is understandable - Gorbachev wrote his article after the extraordinary events of the past year. LIVIO MAITAN
196/ in providing cultural lacilities for minorities. An effort was being made to assist in the reconstruction of the rich Jewish cultural institutions that had existed in the capital Vilnius before the Second World War. Further support to the Lithuanian cause came from a Russian delegate, Z. Valtsevich who appealed to the Republic's non-Lithuanians not to let themselves be manipulated and opposed attempts to split the LCP. At the Feburary CPSU plenum, Brazauskas tried once more to explain to the delegates that, by identifying with the nationalist demands, the LCP had reestablished itself and "overcome its crisis" But even this appeal to the basic interests of the assembled nomenklatura fell on deaf ears: the CC gave its formal support to the anti-independence LCP which, the CC resolution states, upholds the principles of internationalism. It seems that confrontation cannot be avoided despite Brazauskas' evident desire for compromise and whatever the result of the elections. As Brazauskas explained, for a majority of his republic's inhabitants, sovereignty "means, above all, a politically independent government for the Republic," a concept fundamentally at variance with any proposal that reserves power over Lithuania's fate in the hands of central Soviet institutions. The elections will be the first multiparty elections to take place in the Soviet Union and respect for their outcome will show not only the attitude of the reformist CPSU leadership to the national question, but also to any expression of the popular will that falls outside a certain framework. It seems likely that the new legitimacy will turn out to be, not the embodiment of the principle of self10 determination, tewarting ion* but a new means o
G ORBACHEV has to face a very difficult situation within the USSR. He is under attack from opposite directions -from the conservatives, who have not laid down their arms; and from those who reproach him for not adopting more boldly and more rapidly the measures necessary for transition to a market economy on a large scale. At the same time, the Communist parties of Eastern Europe are proving one after another incapable of mastering the crisis situations in their countries and of offering, to say nothing of coming up with any long-range, medium or even short-term perspectives. All this forced Gorbachev to reformulate his own ideology to establish at least a few firm points to hold on to. There Is no alternative says
Gorbachev The primary argument he puts forward in defense of perestroika is that it is the only possible solution. There are not, according to him, any "alternative conceptions." At most, one can talk about "two points of view that stand out today most clearly." The first is that of the defenders of the "commandadministrative system." The second is that of those economists and intellectuals who "start from the supposition that the past has totally discredited the option of October and propose "the capitalization of the society." Both "points of view" are unacceptable to Gorbachev and all those who reject the perspective of capitalist restoration - which would end the domination of the bureaucracy as a privileged caste — but who at the same time realize that any retreat or new "stagnation" could only aggravate the crisis further and finally provoke real social and political explosions. 1
In the second place, Gorbachev tries to play down the present crisis by placing it in a broader historic perspective. After all, he writes, "the seven decades since the revolution are a historically short time for the formation of a full-fledged new society." Perestroika itself has to be seen "as a long stretch on the historic road of socialism," and "the renewal of socialism underway is a process that will last more than decades and extend into the twenty-first century." Overcoming structural contradictions, such as the division between town and country and the "class differences" between workers and peasants, can only be conceived of as a long-term objective.
The authority of the Marxist classics Thirdly, appealing to the authority of the classics, Gorbachev responds to the criticisms that he has not sufficiently clarified his economic conceptions and more generally his project for society. "The founders of Marxism never troubled themselves to invent the concrete forms and mechanisms for building the new society," he writes. They limited themselves to putting forward "a general theoretical model of the tendencies of social development."
In a positive form, Gorbachev relaunches the conceptions already expressed in his book, while including, as I said, some new elements. He now rejects as "unacceptable" the definition of perestroika as a "revolution from above." This definition would imply a division of society into a
International Viewpoint #179 • February 26, 1990
"summit" that decides and a "base that applies the ideas, directives and orders of the summit." But the aim of perestroika is to build a "truly democratic and self-managed" society, in which bureaucratic centralism would be replaced by democratic centralism, that is, "formal centralism" would be replaced by "real and effective centralism."
Such a society would give value to the freedoms traditionally presented as "formal," that is, the democratic gains that form part of the "values of human society," and combine the potentialities of "direct democracy" with the mechanisms of representative democracy.
### Economic competition between systems
Regarding economics, the article explains that it is necessary to change the conception of the nature of the economic competition between capitalism and socialism held by his predecessors. "What takes on a decisive importance is not the qualitative growth of production or the amount of products per capita (although in some sectors, agriculture for example, such an objective is not removed from the agenda) but an economy of resources, the technological level, a guarantee of information."
Gorbachev goes on to stress again the need to set new priorities. In particular, he reaffirms the choice of reconverting defense plants and "increasing the percentage of consumer goods in overall production." Still more significant, he explains that it is necessary - and not only for the USSR — to leave behind "the old model of industrialization that absorbs enormous natural resources and consumes
PERESTRO
USSR constantly growing quantities of raw materials and energy. "
It is above all in the historical analysis of Soviet society that Gorbachev has something new in store for us. In his 1987 book, he still justified to a considerable extent the decisions made over the six decades, and notably made only a very partial criticism of forced collectivization and the type of industrialization imposed in the Stalin era. He begins his recent article by saying:
"At the outset, we thought that the problem was essentially and only to correct certain deformations of the social organism, to perfect the system created in the previous decades, which overall had held up. Today, we start out from the need to radically overhaul our social structure, from the economic foundations to the superstructure."
Historical continuity of bureaucratic system
This has led him to denounce, in his own way of course, the historical continuity of the bureaucratic system. While he still accords an "enormous value" to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in 1956, he immediately adds that despite the corrections made in that era, the "mechanism" remained "fundamentally unchanged." It changed still less in the Brezhnev era. In fact, the article puts in question the euphemism for this period that he himself invented, "the era of stagnation."
Thus, there has been an evolution in Gorbachev's analysis and criticism of Stalinism. They are taking on broader dimensions. It is possible that future changes will lead him to make further IKAPITALISM readjustments. But it should be noted, in Podiuments Rut it should be noted. in any case, that he has not evolved substantally on two fundamental points. First of all, as regards the party, the article stresses the new tasks that his must accomplish and the necessary seperation between its functions and those of the state. But despite everything that has happened in the other East European countries and in the USSR itself, he maintains the idea of a "single-party system." [Subsequently he made further concessions on this, notably at the February 1990 CPSU plenum - see р. б]
Secondly, the article puts forward an absolutely correct criterion — which we have always thought to be self-evident -that "we cannot do without a genuine analysis of the realities of life, of the present state of the society, of its driving forces and its contradictions." But he does not draw any conclusions from this in his assessment of the bureaucracy, which is still not analyzed and exposed as a social layer deriving privileges from its monopoly of political power. The definition of perestroika as a "revolution" remains, therefore, a metaphor, without any real content.
As a corollary of this "lack," which in reality is an indicator of the nature of the Gorbachev leading group itself, the crucial phase in the rise of Stalinism continues to be presented in a fundamentally false way.
### Revolution in advanced countries
Gorbachev notes that Lenin and the Bolsheviks relied on a victory of the revolution in countries more advanced than the USSR, and he says correctly that, even if such revolutions did not take place, power could not be relinquished.
However, he does not make the slightest allusion to the debate over socialism in one country and its real content. He gives a false explanation when he says that "Stalinism adroitly took advantage of the revolutionary impatience of the masses, of the utopian and leveling tendencies characteristic of any mass movement, of the vanguard's aspiration to achieve the desired aim as soon as possible." In fact, it was the weariness engendered by the vicissitudes of the civil war and the defeats in Europe that favored the rise of Stalin and his bureaucracy (who, moreover, far from advocating leveling, condemned "petty-bourgeois egalitarianism"). More generally, the struggle waged by Trotsky and the Left Opposition is completely ignored.
In reality, Gorbachev seems to endorse, if only implicitly, an interpretation that is not new, and which now has many cham1. In opposition to those who question the historical value of the October revolution, Gorbachev correctly puts forward the argument that "the concrete altemative was not a bourgeois democratic republic, but an anarchic uprising and a bloody dictatorship of the militarist forces, the establish of a reactionary and antipop- 11 ular regime."
USSR pions. The alternative to the choices imposed by Stalin, according to this view, was prolonging the NEP (in which the free market played a big role indefinitely, on the basis of the suggestions sketched by Lenin in his January 1923 notes on cooperatives. A serious debate on this question would no doubt be interesting. Both those who defend this idea seem to forget that after a certain time the NEP underwent an extremely grave crisis that threatened the very bases of post-revolutionary society. Trotsky's analysis of this cannot simply be wiped off the ledger. Those who do not agree with it should take the trouble to offer the most concrete arguments possible. But as a general rule they make no effort whatever to do so.
NEP experience has little relevance today
In the second place, whatever judgment should be made of the situation in the 1920s, the USSR today is structurally different, and any reference to the problems of the NEP years would have very little relevance. Similar considerations apply to Lenin's celebrated notes, which however do furnish some very valuable indications as regards the approach to the peasant question. It should not be forgotten, moreover, that Lenin advocated cooperatives not as a form of privatization but rather as a form of peasant self-management. In the context of maintaining state (or collective ownership), they were to counterbalance what had become the excessive weight of the private sector.
Coming to another important subject, Gorbachev develops further his analysis on the situation of capitalism and his definition of an overall strategic perspective. Here some quotations are necessary. Gorbachev explains first that "Marx underestimated the capacities for selfdevelopment of capitalism, which managed to absorb the gains of the technological and scientific revolution and to set up economic and social structures able to assure its vitality and build a relatively high level of welfare for the majority of the population in the developed capitalist countries."
Capitalism is even supposed to have succeeded in playing a leading role in the "cultural perestroika" that he has carried out "on the basis of advanced technologies and economy of raw materials and energy." Finally, as a result of the internationalization of production and the transnationalization of the economy, its structure has changed markedly, just as "the nature of capitalist ownership has profoundly changed."
It is understandable that after decades of stereotyped descriptions of capitalism that corresponded very little to reality, Gorbachev feels the need to draw a more realistic picture. But, to use a well-known 12 expether direction. He forgets, for exam expression, he bends the stick too far in International Viewpoint #179 • February 26, ple, that the "internationalization of the economy" reflects a tendency of capitalism that Marx analyzed perfectly well, and that all the changes that have occurred in the forms of ownership have in no way diminished the fundamental reality of private ownership of the means of production or the mechanisms of the profit drive.
When Gorbachev speaks of the "selfdevelopment of capitalism," he uses a euphemism that enables him, among other things, to slide over the fact that in the 1930s capitalism went through a crisis that it managed to get out of only thanks to the Second World War and to say nothing about the concrete preconditions of the prolonged boom of the 1950s and 1960s.
Moreover, the Soviet chief is at least a little offhand in talking about the relatively high level of welfare of the majority of the population of the industrialized countries, when over the last decade they have been experiencing a prolonged stagnation, which has involved mass unemployment, impoverishment of large sections of the working class and other poor strata, and a constant erosion of the social gains of the previous decades, as well as attacks on democratic institutions.
What is more, in alluding to the worsening of "world problems," Gorbachev does not say a single word about the tragedy of the underdeveloped countries, which in fact is the result of the "selfdevelopment" of capitalism and its inherent mechanisms. The fact that such a problem is barely taken up in an essay that pretends to be a broad overview speaks volumes about the seriousness of Gorbachev's approach.
Abandonment of
Khrushchev's conceptions
In fact, he is much less interested in developing a rigorous analysis than in justifying his political projects. These consist, at bottom, of abandoning definitively even Khrushchev's conception of coexistence and economic competition. In his view, it is necessary to reject any "head-on opposition of the two contemporary social systems, which is totally metaphysical" and to adopt "an orientation designed to achieve a more organic integration in the worldwide process of economic development." It has to be understood that what is needed is "not to 'oppose others' but to try to solve the economic problems together with them."
We certainly are not going to defend the traditional Stalinist or post-Stalinism conception of the conflict between capitalism and Socialism, a "campist" view that replaces the contention of social forces with one of states or blocs of states. We are convinced that "the two systems" cannot function entirely independently of each other, and that there is an inevitable interaction, if only through the world mar1990 ket. This, by the way, is why we reject the utopia of "Socialism in one country."
However, the conclusion that Trotsky drew from this during the famous debate of the 1920s and that revolutionary Marxists draw from it today is that overthrowing capitalism as a worldwide system is the essential precondition for building a real socialist society. To the contrary, Gorbachev thinks that the "two systems" must become more and more integrated and together achieve "the common objectives of all humanity." It goes without saying that such a perspective cannot be put forward without obfuscating the nature of capitalism itself. That is what explains Gorbachev's approach.
Finally, the article comes back to the idea that "socialism takes many forms, like life itself." This is an almost banal notion, which as such could not be challenged by anyone. But once again, you have to see what conclusions are drawn from this. For Gorbachev, this is an opportunity to relaunch his opening to the social democracy:
"From this standpoint [that is, from the standpoint of the manifold forms of socialism], we also take up the experience of the social democracy. We consider and judge appropriately its contribution to developing the values of socialism, to carrying through partial reforms that have favored increasing the welfare and social guarantees of working people in many capitalist countries of the West. We are examining with interest the rich, but not unequivocal experience accumulated by the social democracy, and we are trying to use what suits the conditions of our society."
Social democratic parties achieve Important gains
It is of course indisputable that the social democratic parties have helped to achieve important gains for the working class. But it is hard to claim that their experience, and in particular their political practice, in recent decades can offer useful indications for taking up the problems of a post-capitalist transitional phase. In fact, the social democratic parties do not even pose such questions, for the very simple reason that their outlook is to manage the capitalist system in a reformist way. They do not advocate overthrowing it, even in their programmatic documents that make projections into the far future.? Gorbachev seems to have forgotten all this. It is a lapse of memory that confirms that an anticapitalist strategy, including in the industrialized countries, is hardly within his range of concerns. * 2. This is the case, for example, of the new programmatic document adopted by the Socialist Intemational at its last congress. (Analysis of this document will appear in the spring 1990 issue of International Marxist Review.)
COMMUNISM