What Is To Be Done? fficially, of course, ception into the new arena of public All eyes are now Lenin's historic question debate. The role of the party in the has already been modern state. The role of the state focused on . answered. The strategic under . The nature and even line for the Soviet future the legitimacy of Soviet leadership. The Gorbachev was agreed at the 27th Can democracy co-exist with Soviet party congress back in 1986. There is a socialism? The relative status of the revolution has entered consensus which runs through polit- elected Soviets and the party machine. buro, central committee, party and The need for the party to abandon its a new and tense stage. public alike that the Soviet system pretensions to economic management. needs a drastic economic reform, All are being discussed in the press. The 19th party which in turn will require (and will Nothing is sacred. One of the party impose) fundamental cultural and poli- academics preparing drafts for Gor- conference convenes tical transformations. bachev's big speech to open the party at the end of June. But that is like saying we all believe in conference on June 28 found himself, to Santa Claus. The Soviet elite now finds his increasingly delighted surprise, Martin Walker itself faced with the urgent and divi- writing that it was significant that sive questions of how much reform, Lenin had never been general secret- assesses the situation how fast, in what fields, and what price ary of the party, that the office from in social disruption and internal unrest which the nation is ruled should not from his vantage point will finally have to be paid. If the depend on the way Stalin hijacked the strategic question of the need for party bureaucracy 60 years ago. in Moscow reform is broadly settled, the argu- Then he opened that day's copy of ments on the tactics of bringing those Sovyetskaya Kultura and found letters reforms to life have become danger- suggesting that Gorbachev's continued ously bitter. leadership was too important to be left And so they should. These are the to the party, and even to its central most fundamental questions the Soviet committee. Its 307 members, the par- system has confronted since Stalin ty's ruling body, should have the power effectively abolished Soviet political only to propose that he be fired, with thought 50 years ago. In the last few the final decision to be taken by a weeks, Gorbachev and his supporters national referendum. have tossed every ideological precon- That same issue carried an unpre-

12 MARXISM TODAY JUNE 1988 cedented debate between two Soviet desperately worried that Gorbachev is rats who had gathered around intellectuals on Gorbachev's chances of faltering, and his perestroika is drib- Kirilenko. There were Andropov's own survival: 'Activists prepared to fight bling into the sand. For some of them, security men, like the current foreign for perestroika are still the minority of indeed for any one of the people quoted minister , who our people. This being so, the danger above, this could have unpleasant rose from the police to run , remains of a repetition of what hap- consequences. But most of them are and the career KGB man Geidar Aliev pened in 1964 (when Khruschev fell - patriotic or selfless enough to think of of . Andropov's faction was MW) and in the following years. His- the wider picture. As Gorbachev keeps an Adullam's Cave of Mr Cleans and tory shows that unsuccessful reforms arguing, there is no real alternative to anti-Brezhnevites, of puritans and eco- are invariably followed by a counter- perestroika. It is probably the Soviet nomic liberalisers, of cops and technoc- revolution'. Union's last chance. Without economic rats. transformation, the country will be ndropov seemed to have 'It is already To read the Soviet press these days is to unable to sustain its great power status. the knack of holding them plain that fall off your chair with shock, to rub Were it not for the financial damage the all together, partly be- Gorbachev is your eyes in disbelief three or four Reagan presidency has inflicted on the cause he did not have long determined times before breakfast. Just to take US through monstrous defence spend- Aenough in power for the fault lines in examples that fell to hand this week: ing and budget deficits, you might his coalition to show, before the kidney to break the 'Our right-wing extremists are trying almost say that the arms race is over disease took hold that was to kill him. grip of the to get hold of our Afghan war veterans, because the West has won. There is an There were, however, two other fac- entrenched making some kind of militant storm- uncomfortable kernel of truth in that tors. First, the threat of the Brezhnev bureaucracy troopers out of them. It is very useful to American jibe about the USSR being group helped keep Andropov's clan have in your ranks a well-disciplined "Upper Volta with rockets". If it can no together. The Brezhnev mafia proved in the party group, believers in the cult of strength, longer afford the rockets... still influential enough to put Cher- machine by converts to your ideology. There are Gorbachev himself put it bluntly at nenko into the Kremlin after Andro- reintroducing symptoms of that happening now'. the last plenum of the central commit- pov's death. Second, Andropov, as the Khruschev's Alexander Prokhanov, the best known tee in February: 'The economic de- former KGB chief, had a single buzz- of the Afghan war correspondents, in velopment rates were declining in our word around which his economic refor- old rule 25' Literaturnaya Rossiya. country and hit a critical point. But mers could unite - discipline. 'Under our centralised economic plan- even those rates, as has become clear Within days of coming to power, the ning system, shortages of goods are not now, were achieved largely on an police were scouring the Moscow bars the exception, but the rule, an inevit- unhealthy basis, due to temporary and public baths, checking documents. able component of the system' - Nikola factors. I refer to the trade in oil on the Heaven help the man without a good Shmelev in Znamya magazine. world market at the then prevailing explanation for taking time off. KGB 'There is no other country in the world high prices, and the totally unjustified fraud squads swooped on the more where history has been deliberately intensification of the sales of alcoholic openly corrupt sections of Soviet life, falsified to such a degree as here in the beverages. If we look at the economic like the police force and the foreign . First they falsified Soviet indicators of growth separately from currency stores and the traditionally history, then they had to falsify pre- these factors, we will see that over four Muslim republics of the deep south. revolutionary history ... Stalin's regime 5-year plan periods we knew no in- And the first few months of Mikhail did not need history as a science. He crease in the absolute growth of the Gorbachev's administration looked and needed it as a servant of propaganda, national income, and it even began felt remarkably similar. Once again, and to justify the crimes the regime declining in the early 80s. That is the the catch-word was discipline. There committed. We learned to give names real picture, comrades'. was the clamp-down on vodka sales, the to things that never belonged to them. nd that is a devastating policy pushed through by Yegor Totalitarianism was called democracy. admission. For the past 20 Ligachev, the teetotal puritan from Things not yet begun were called years, if you exclude the Siberia. His credentials as a genuine completed.' Professor Yuri Afanasy- state's revenues from vod- reformer are not in doubt. Ligachev's ev's speech at a party conference, cited Aka and exporting oil, there has been no first real achievement for the party in Sov-Kult. growth in the Soviet economy. was to help build Akademgorodok, the 'The view was deliberately inculcated Siberian science city outside Novosi- birsk, which became a kind of refor- that the general secretary is always There is one positive side to all this. right, that his statements are the final mist think-tank in exile in the Brezhnev Economic disaster created the consen- period. And every year, reform eco- word of truth, and therefore there is no sus within the Soviet elite on which the need to study or look into public affairs. nomists like Dr Abel Aganbegyan reform movement has been based. The would visit Ligachev's fief of Tomsk It is necessary only to quote the leader problem is that the consensus has little correctly'. Letter on front page of for informal seminars, and out of to do with Gorbachev. He inherited it friendship. Pravda by V Selivanov, a leading from , the former KGB official of Ministry of Aviation. chief who succeeded But for all Gorbachev's and There are two main reasons for this as Soviet leader in 1982. Andropov's Ligachev's intellectual commitment to flood of analytical, rather than sensa- time in the KGB had left him little economic reform, the stress in that tionalist glasnost. The first is that this opportunity to build a personal follow- first year of power was on discipline. has always been the way the Soviet ing, a private political mafia within the There was the new law against un- Union holds its debates in the weeks central committee apparat. Instead, in earned incomes, and the new anti- leading up to a major political event order to build a faction that could corruption drives. 30,000 clean young like the 19th party conference. In the balance and even challenge the famous men from the and the army days before the 27th party conference Dnepropetrovsk Mafia of Brezhnev were drafted into the police force in in February 1986, copies of Pravda and , Andropov that first summer of Gorbachev, to even sold out before dawn one morning had to stage a series of take-overs of replace the waves of dismissals. when the party daily printed a famous the political clans of others. Warned that his trial was imminent, letter complaining about the privileged In the group of convinced reformers former Interior Minister General Scho- and 'secret' shops and hospitals avail- which coalesced around Andropov at lokov shot himself in his dacha outside able to the party elite. 'The queues the beginning of the 1980s, there were the city. And the net was tightening would soon disappear if the high-ups members of the old Frol Kozlov faction around his deputy, Brezhnev's son-in- had to come and join us standing in that dated back to Khruschev's days. law, Yuri Churbanov - who is now in line', the letter asserted. There were economic liberalisers like Lefortovo prison. Suddenly, Musco- The second reason is that the chatter- Dr Aganbegyan who had backed Kosy- vites stopped carrying a 3-rouble note ing classes of the Soviet Union are gin. There were the Siberian technoc- inside their driving licence. The

13 MARXISM TODAY JUNE 1988 assumption was that you could no the KGB chief , and such a way that the Soviet poor, which longer automatically bribe your way probably reckons he has the sym- means the pensioners, the unskilled, out of a traffic ticket. pathies, if not the votes, of the rem- the single parents, students and the But discipline was not enough. The nants of the old guard. This means that disabled, will not suffer. He says also more the new administration studied the two groups in the middle, the that the 16m industrial redundancies the figures, the more they realised they technocrats and the old guard, hold the that automation and modernisation will had inherited a disaster. It is not clear balance between the radicals and the bring by the year 2000 will not lead to whether Gorbachev changed his mind conservatives. And so far, these central unemployment. We shall see. Personal- in that first year in office, or whether groups have gone along, sometimes ly, I believe him. But then, I am not a (as I believe) he had been a closet reluctantly, with Gorbachev. worried Soviet worker facing a three- democrat during all those years climb- t would be unwise to focus too hour queue for a bottle of vodka with a ing the sclerotic party apparat of the 'At least in strongly on the personalities, or hole in my pay packet, an empty larder, Brezhnev era. But increasingly, Gor- these early the head-counting. Nobody wants and the prospect of being redeployed to bachev began to argue that economic stages of matters brought to a head, to a another and possibly worse job. reform would depend on political re- decisivI e vote that could lead to appeals In the meantime, the folk doing well perestroika, form, or as he told the central commit- to the 307 members of the central out of Gorbachev's perestroika are the tee in January 1987: 'A house can only there is an committee, as Nikita Khruschev chattering classes, never terribly popu- be put into order by someone who feels unfortunate appealed to them in 1957 when he fell lar with the lads on the shopfloor. All that he owns the place. Our perestroika whiff of victim to a putsch in the politburo. this glasnost is exciting and fulfilling is possible only through and with Nobody wants politics to become that for the intellectuals, the media, the democracy. It is only this way that it Thatcherism open, nor the confrontation to become film-makers and novelists and play- becomes possible to give scope to about the way that deadly. And the Soviet system has wrights and rock musicians. The cur- socialism's most powerful creative the reforms an enormous inbuilt capacity for com- rent phase of economic reform is also force - free labour and free thought in are working promise, thanks partly to a country so very popular with black marketeers a free country'. big that many provinces can exercise and get-rich-quick co-op entrep- on the something close to autonomy over their reneurs. We have our Soviet yuppies It was at this point that the old Andropov ground' affairs. swopping video cassettes and IBM- coalition began to break down. It But the argument has now got out of compatible computer programmes on became clear that Gorbachev's vision hand, for three reasons. The first is that the street outside the Shabolovskaya of perestroika went far beyond a pure for Ligachev and Chebrikov, for many electronics store. economic reform, which would trans- senior army officers and for a large form the efficiency of Soviet shops and swathe of public opinion across the Third, we now have the battlefield looming farms and factories, but leave every- country, perestroika has already gone very close ahead. On June 28, the 19th thing else unchanged. too far. Witness the Crimean Tartars party conference, the first such gather- Over the past year, the basic distinc- demonstrating in Red Square, the ing for 47 years, opens in Moscow. tion between Gorbachev's reformers nationalist rumblings and demos in the Gorbachev wants to use this event to and Ligachev's conservatives has be- Baltic states, the mass protests in democratise the internal structure of come cruelly plain. The Ligachevs want Armenia, the pogrom in Sumgait, and the party, to get rid of 20% of the economic reform in order that the the recent unrest in Poland's Nova central committee and ensure himself a Soviet system and the party can remain Huta steelworks and the Gdansk ship- majority on that body, and to make his pretty much the same. The Gor- yards. perestroika irreversible. bachev's know that unless Soviet socie- Second, we are probably closer now to e is being urged by his ty and politics are themselves trans- a genuine proletarian revolution than at radical supporters in the formed, there is little chance of econo- any time since 1917. At least in these Moscow think-tanks to de- mic revival. early stages of perestroika, there is an liver a speech that will stun ut how many Gorbachevs unfortunate whiff of Thatcherism ab- the world. They have presented him are there? Of the full, or out the way the reforms are working on with drafts which call for the removal voting members of the polit- the ground. Most people in the country of the party from economic administra- buro, I count three commit- are on a similar level of basic pay, tion, the retreat of the party to the ted supporters; propaganda chief Alex- between 120 and 200 roubles a month. pursuit of ideology, and the setting of ander Yakovlev, foreign minister Teachers, doctors, and office-workers grand strategic targets for society. Eduard Shevardnadze, and agriculture have to be content with that. Factory Their drafts echo Lenin's call of 'All chief Viktor Nikonov. workers, blue collar or managerial, Power To The Soviets', on the grounds Prime Minister , lead- have traditionally had a bonus of that as publicly elected bodies, the er of the Russian Federation Vitaly 30-60% for fulfilling the production Soviets should properly outweigh the Vorotnikov, and the former Belorus- plan. But in most factories, the man various committees of the party sian party chief Nikolai Slyunkov form from Gospriomka, Gorbachev's tough machine. a technocratic group somewhere in the new state quality control board, is Gorbachev is a wily enough politician middle, but tending for the moment to rejecting products as they come off the to know how far he can go, and whether the Gorbachev side. Bear in mind, as assembly line. So the plan is not that speech would be over the top. But these men will, that they are the fulfilled. So the workers are not getting it is already plain that he is determined obvious scapegoats if the economy their bonuses. to break the grip of the entrenched stubbornly refuses to respond. At the same time, inflation is taking bureaucracy on the party machine by Some observers include among the off, and goods are in ever shorter reintroducing Khruschev's old rule 25. technocrats the Leningrader Lev supply. We even have meat shortages This was the rule which said party Zaikov, former head of the military- these days in the hard currency shops. officials could hold a post for a industrial complex and now Boris Sugar is rationed. Butter is rare. Prices maximum of two terms, the rule that Yeltsin's replacement as Moscow party in the new co-op stores are two and broke the lifetime job guarantee of the chief. But by temperament he seems to three times higher than the subsidised party careerist. It was also the rule be gravitating more to the elder prices in state shops. The new co-op which in 1964 led and statesman, the three survivors of the restaurants have few ordinary custom- Leonid Brezhnev to conspire together Brezhnev era, former foreign minister ers when the average bill is over R10 a to topple Khruschev in the name of the , party chief head. And Gorbachev has given warn- party cadres. Vladimir Scherbitsky, and the old ing that the state subsidies of R60,000m Can Gorbachev do it? That depends on heavy industry man Mikhail a year on meat and milk and bread are the votes of the 5,000 delegates to the Solomentsev. going to be phased out. party conference. And the current Ligachev can count on the support of He promises that this will be done in battle is over the procedure under

14 MARXISM TODAY JUNE 1988 which those delegates are chosen. The but that the Minister of Defence will be some kind of compromise fear is that if selected by the traditional General Yazov refused to release the reached before or during the party method of 'election' at plenums of aircraft. There is gossip of Gorbachev conference, that Gorbachev will tone regional party committees, the old forcing a vote of confidence on the down or perhaps delay his reforms, and party machine politicians will be able politburo, and Ligachev and the KGB's the conservatives will remember the to ensure a pretty conservative list of Chebrikov abstaining. I do not know the combination of hope and disgust that delegates. This is what Ligachev is truth. But I do know that tales like brought them into the original Andro- fighting for within the central commit- these, repeated to me by respectable pov coalition in the first place. tee apparat. Soviet journalists, by East European he compromise after all, has orbachev and his allies are diplomats and Soviet think-tank staf- held together during the three fighting for a radical list of fers, testify to a bizarre and dangerous years of perestroika. Gor- delegates, by secret ballot 'The political mood of political crisis. bachev is not the kind of man and open election within the suspense in Twho thinks democracy can be imposed Gprimary organisations of the party if This is not a simple matter of the good by totalitarian methods. And Gor- Moscow these they can, but by straightforward selec- guys versus the bad guys. Ligachev and bachev would not have been elected tion and nomination if they must. As I days is the conservatives are genuine refor- general secretary, and would not have write, the battle goes on, and it will tangible. The mers, and they are not Stalinists. They got so far with his perestroika, without probably need to be resolved at a city is full of honestly fear that Gorbachev is in Ligachev's open support. By their very central committee plenum meeting late rumour and danger of throwing the baby out with presence on the politburo, Ligachev in May, just before the arrival of the bathwater, that the party machine and Chebrikov have legitimised the President Reagan for his Moscow gossip' has to remain intact and loyal if the reforms so far, and have reassured the summit. country is to be hauled out of the worried party barons in the regions. Gorbachev is now in the tricky economic mess. The problem is that by But that phase is over. The Andropov position of depending on the American the cruel laws of politics, they may be coalition is now at breaking point. President. His foreign policy successes forced to depend on the support of the But as we gnaw at our fingernails and and his image in the West are among real nasties, the Russian nationalists, wonder whether Gorbachev can once Gorbachev's chief political assets. The the anti-semites, the Stalinists, the again pull through, it is worth raising a central committee is unlikely to risk a militarists - which is what happened to cheer for the phenomenal progress he Gorbachev resignation, far less a dis- Brezhnev after 1964. has made so far. It is not just the missal, on the very eve of the Reagan And against that, Gorbachev is offer- glasnost and the cultural thaw and the summit. Gorbachev is gambling that he ing the insubstantial and still inchoate INF treaty and the retreat from the can get his way. vision of a Soviet democracy, while the Afghan war. It is the mood of suspense, The political suspense in Moscow economy still staggers and limps to- of nobody knowing what comes next, of these days is tangible. The city is full of wards reform, and the workers and people taking up public positions and rumour and gossip. There are outland- their families look at the prices and holding real debates. The unpredict- ish claims that Ligachev tried to queues and pitifully-stocked shops and able has returned to public life. Real convene an emergency plenum on April worry what will become of them. politics have revived in the Soviet 8, when Gorbachev was in Tashkent, I guess, or perhaps I hope, that there Union. The effect is exhilarating. •

15 MARXISM TODAY JUNE 1988