Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World.

Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World

THE REMARKABLY gifted General Secretary of the Communist Party of

3 the Soviet Union comes close to spelling out his dilemma in this refreshing book. That is, he gives us all the clues, though he can't quite bring himself to put them together. But the clues are there, all right.

Early on, he starts a protracted lament 3 for the difficulties, deterioration, and unresolved problems that beset the Soviet Union during the latter half of the Seventies. The country was "losing momentum." There was stagnation at a time when the technological revolution had opened up "new prospects for economic and social progress."

His reference to stagnation, in context, is revealing. He refers to "stagnation and other phenomena alien to socialism" (my emphasis). And there we have it. Stagnation and declining growth are not alien to socialism, but inherent in it. Being an intelligent man, Gorbachev probably realizes that, but he can't say it. Or more precisely, he can't say it and hope to remain in power.

Indeed, he chides unnamed people in the West who say that socialism is to blame for the Soviet Union's economic and social problems, and who advise its leadership to "drift toward capitalism." He approximates to glasnost a few pages later, in a passage of some poignancy: "Just think: how can we agree that 1917 was a mistake and all the seventy years of our life, work, effort, and battles were also a complete mistake, that we were going in the 'wrong direction'?" It is possible to feel a twinge of sympathy for a Soviet leader who can manage to formulate so fundamental a question. But since the inescapable answer is unacceptable, indeed unthinkable, he goes on to thank socialism for all the achievements of the Soviet Union.

Still, having isolated the problem (decades of socialism, and we are stagnating), but being unable to tackle it at its roots, he had to come up with something, and that something was perestroika ("restructuring"). At this point, I have to say that, through a whole book on the subject, Gorbachev never quite clarifies what he means by perestroika. He has a lot to say about incentives and "cost accounting," and he indulges in a vast amount of euphoric rhetoric about pace, creative endeavor, organization, and efficiency. But he gives no very precise examples of how it is supposed to work in practice.

One thing he is insistent about: all this is going to be based on more socialism and more democracy. At this point, Comrade Mikhail moves, perhaps unconsciously, into the realm of inherent contradiction. For if socialism, after sevently years, has yielded stagnation, corruption, and a huge, monumentally inefficient bureaucracy (all of which he admits), how is "more socialism" going to cure those ills?

The General Secretary's answers are fascinatingly oblique. He spares bits of praise for Khrushchev (who attempted far more sweeping reforms than we have had so far from Gorbachev). He glosses over the long reign of Brezhnev (whose record he has publicly castigated), and has nothing to say about the short interregna of his mentor, KGB ex-chief Yuri Andropov, and the dullest of them all, Konstantin Chernenko. Indeed, there isn't much to say, if one is trying to impress foreign readers with the virtues of Soviet socialism.

No, one man and one man only has God-like status: the permanent inspirer, the patron saint who can do no wrong. There is something ever-lastingly comforting about Lenin, who died in January 1924, less than three years after launching his New Economic Policy, which partially restored private enterprise and was rapidly repairing an economy ravaged by war, revolution, and the first massive dose of socialist planning.

Lenin, being long dead, can't speak for himself, and the fact that he died when he did enables men on either side of the ideological chasm to appeal to his infallible authority. Gorbachev never quite gets round to saying that Lenin would have dropped socialist planning (which, again, would be unthinkable), but he comes close: "Gravely ill, Lenin was deeply concerned for the future of socialism. He perceived the lurking dangers of the new system. We, too, must understand this concern." That is the beauty of a dead and untouchable prophet. When Stalin took over, having exiled his rival, Trotsky (whom he later had murdered), he had no doubts about what Lenin would have done. The NEP had to go, and the long period of five-year plans began.

Stalin is the horrifying ghost from the Soviet Union's past. In his speech celebrating the seventieth anniversary of the Revolution last November, Gorbachev tackled the problem of Stalin's legacy with a caution bordering on timidity (a very pale reflection of Khrushchev's "secret" speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956). It is instructive to find the same evasive euphemism about the horrors of Stalin's collectivization of the land in Perestroika: ". . . it proceeded painfully, not without serious excesses and blunders" (my emphasis). For "not without excesses," read "14 million dead of a man-made famine, with the occasional massacre to help." (The tally of deaths is the estimate by Robert Conquest in his definitive study, Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, 1986.)

Why, in the face of such evasiveness, did I, in the first sentence of this review, describe Perestroika as a "refreshing book"? For the simple reason that in the long, dreary context of Marxist-Leninist writing, it is refreshingly readable, in just the same way that Mikhail Gorbachev is amazingly effective as his own PR man.

And that, alas, is the heart of the Gorbachev problem, from a WEstern standpoint. The man seems so honest, so transparent, so sincere. Can he really be the boss of an evil empire? That saying of the old Ronald Reagan certainly touched a raw nerve in Gorbachev's epidermis; in his introduction, he tells us he found that phrase hurtful and unfair.

I confess I should feel easier about the General Secretary if he practiced a bit of glasnost in his references to Lenin. But he doesn't. Perestroika, he tells us casually, means democratic centralism and self-management; but he omits to explain that "democratic centralism" (one of Lenin's main contributions to revolutionary practice) means decisions taken by the little clique at the top of the Party. Similarly, he refrains from quoting Lenin's definition of peace as the condition that will prevail "only when we have vanquished and completely destroyed the bourgeoisie throughout the world."

So, if I am allowed one final word to sum up, that word shall be: "Beware!"