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 Moscow. answered. The strategic under perestroika. 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 Eduard Shevardnadze, who our people. This being so, the danger above, this could have unpleasant rose from the police to run Georgia, 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 Azerbaijan. 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 Soviet Union. 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 Yuri Andropov, the former KGB official of Ministry of Aviation. chief who succeeded Leonid Brezhnev 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.