The collapse of Communism.

THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM

It is fascinating, is it not, to witness the collapse of Communism. But is this, in fact, what we are witnessing? In one sense, the All-Union Conference of the Communist Party at the end of June was a gigantic funeral service: the burial of a doctrine and of the hopes and delusions built upon it. But Mikhail Gorbachev was presenting the occasion in different terms: as a time of hope and of rebuilding.

Before coming back to the General Secretary, let us glance elsewhere--at North Korea, for instance. One would have said that (leaving aside the very peculiar case of Albania) North Korea shared with Rumania the special distinction of being the most repressive totalist regime in the world. The aged dictator of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, "Marshal" Kim Il Sung (b. 1912), vied with Rumania's Nicolae Ceausescu for the most pervasive cult of personality since the death of Stalin. He still does: statues, shrines, generalized idolatry. And yet.

At Easter time, Kim sent a delegation to the Vatican for a meeting with Pope John Paul II. The North Koreans took part in a solemn Mass. What is more, after decades of standard atheistic repression, a Roman Catholic church is under construction in Pyongyang. It is due to be consecrated on August 15, a date chosen because it is that of the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin and marks the end of the Pope's Marian Year. In symbolic terms, these developments (although less spectacular) compete with the recent celebrations of the Christian millennium in Russia.

In Rumania--the other "worst case"--Ceausescu, said to be terminally ill, pursues his mission of destruction. Having razed the architectural heritage of Bucharest in pursuance of his dreams of immortal grandeur, he now proposes to level hundreds of villages, many of them in ethnically Hungarian areas, to the indignation of the neighboring "fraternal" republic.

But Rumania is now the solitary exception to the general rule of ferment or collapse. Hungary, as usual, leads the way, with sweeping changes at the top and a new freedom both in parliamentary debate and in street demonstrations. In Poland, too, the credibility of Communism is at or below extinction point; it is less than solid in Czechoslovakia, and shaky even in East Germany. Bulgaria (the unofficial extra republic of the USSR) will do as Russia does.

Indeed, in the end, all of this peripheral turmoil goes back to Mother Russia. Without Lenin, without Stalin, there would never have been Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Bela Kun shot his bolt in Hungary in 1919, and Communism was insignificant in that country until the Red Army moved in. When Stalin imposed Communism on Rumania, the Rumanian Communist Party numbered two hundred--all, if I am not mistaken, resident in the USSR. (Now it claims three million, whatever that might mean.)

It is important to understand what Gorbachev was really saying in his keynote address to the special Party conference. The leader of the all-powerful, all-pervasive CPSU was telling the five thousand delegates (and the world) that, seventy years after Lenin's Revolution, which was to mark a glorious new dawn for humanity, the dawn has simply failed to arrive. We are in a mess, comrades, he said, and we've got to do something about it.

Doing something about it means perestroika, and without glasnost there won't be any perestroika. The commentators have been talking their heads off about Gorbachev's amazing frankness, while overlooking the fact that he refrained from saying the one thing of fundamental importance: namely, that the whole idea of Communism, from the Marx-Engels Communist Manifesto of 1848 through the Program of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1924, to Gorbachev's Theses of 1988, is a nonsense, a grand delusion.

Don't forget, in Lenin's view Communism was supposed to bring universal abundance. It wasn't supposed to produce, seventy years after the event, years of actual economic decline in the country of its revolutionary birth. It wasn't supposed to mean a mere 4 per cent of GNP allocated to public health, hospitals without running water. Nor was it supposed to mean a rising percentage of GNP spent on military hardware, so that today, according to the best specialists, that percentage is probably running at 35 to forty.

Kremlinomics

Despite his frankness, Gorbachev didn't put it that way. On the contrary, he presented perestroika as a kind of last-ditch attempt to prove that Lenin was right after all. How is this for Thatcherism and Reaganomics: "And what is most intolerable is that enterprises are being compelled by means of state orders to manufacture goods that are not in demand, compelled for the simple reason that they want to attain the notorious `gross output' targets." He went on to talk of the vicious circle of "production for the sake of production" and "the plan for the sake of the plan."

What he did not say is that this is what "socialism" is really about. He hankers for a Leninist golden age that never existed. One searches his speech in vain for any reference to the fact that it was Lenin who established the "All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle against Counter-Revolution and Sabotage," soon known as the Cheka from two of the initial letters of its cumbersome title. The Cheka was the lineal ancestor of the present KGB.

One service Lenin did render to Soviet posterity and to Gorbachev in particular: he died in January 1924; which enables Gorbachev and his allies to claim (unconvincingly) that, had Lenin lived, he would have perpetuated the New Economic Policy, which restored the ravaged economy by means of limited private enterprise.

`Helping' Gorbachev

Where I part company with our liberal commentators, and even with Prime Minister Thatcher and President Reagan, is over the notion that we must all "hope" Gorbachev succeeds and "help" him so to do.

In practical terms, what does "help" mean? Does it mean, for instance: "Poor Mr. Gorbachev, he's having to keep his people poor and deny them the kind of affluence we take for granted in the West, so that he can maintain his ruinously expensive military establishment. Let's help him on the material side, with loans and industrial contracts. Then he can feel safe again"--and resume the threatening posture of the Soviet Union?

The "help" line is nevertheless beguiling. Mikhail Gorbachev is a new phenomenon, and some of his proposals undoubtedly break new ground. To "help" him, however, makes sense only on the assumption that he is about to sweep away the principles and aspirations of the Leninist state.

Of this, there is no sign. On the contrary, he keeps on repeating that he is a Leninist, that his ambition and hope are to make socialism work as it was meant to do, that if it has gone wrong (as he concedes), that has nothing to do with the doctrine or the idea, but only with the way the Leninist state was allowed to degenerate.

Let us look more closely at his specific proposals. Certainly they are sensational. He is proposing, basically, a decentralization of power, a return to the heady early days of the Revolution, when the local soviets ("councils") ran their own affairs, before the Leviathan of the Party's Central Committee and Politburo started deciding everything. He also called for a new-style president, to be elected by secret ballot, who would keep the key portfolios of foreign policy and security in his hands (much as in General de Gaulle's Fifth Republic), and for a new-style Supreme Soviet, no longer rubber-stamping the decisions of the Politburo but actully debating freely and enacting laws.

In Gorbachev's new world, economic reforms will be speeded up through a drastic trimming of Central Committee bodies. Human rights, he claimed on no observable evidence, were integral to socialism and must be respected. In short, the Gorbachevian utopia will be "a society of socialist self-government by the people, of profound and consistent democracy."

And what did Gorbachev not say? Apart from not mentioning Lenin's Cheka, he did not say that non-Communist parties would be allowed. He did not say that he would disband, or even considerably reduce, the KGB. He did not say that he would abandon Lenin's dream of extending Soviet-style Communism to "all countries of the world without exception."

He made no reference to the gigantic expenditure of Soviet resources on espionage, and particularly on subversion all over the world, on "active measures," on disinformation. He said nothing about dismantling the International Department, now run by the affable, Americanized Mr. Dobrynin. He made no mention of the systematic recruitment, training, and funding of international terrorist groups through the Lenin Institute and the Patrice Lumumba University, both in Moscow. (Although one might reasonably object that since these are secret matters, one could hardly expect Mr. Gorbachev to deal with them in an open assembly with the media in attendance.)

Nor did the General Secretary say that the constituent republics of the USSR could go their separate ways, exercising the principle of self-determination so beloved of President Wilson. On the contrary, he specifically praised the equality of the multitudinous ethnic groups as one of the great achievements of socialism, and told the Armenians, Tatars, and others to behave themselves. (It is worth recalling that Stalin's 1936 Constitution guaranteed the right of the republics freely to secede; the unstated condition being that they should never actually try to assert that "right.")

I looked in vain in the General Secretary's three-hour-plus oration for any hint, however small, of moving away from the state ideology of the USSR. Instead, I found this gem: "We need a genuine upturn in social sciences, on a Marxist-Leninist philosophical and methodological basis."

Back to basics.

It is possible to sympathize with Mikhail Gorbachev in his insoluble dilemma. Time and again, in his speech, one sensed the anxiety, even the desperation of a gifted man who realizes that the hour is terribly late, but who cannot admit the fundamental cause of the Soviet Union's problems because he knows that to do so would be to concede that he, in particular, the ex-KGB informer, has no business being where he is.

In truth, the task of dismantling the apparatus of terror and international subversion would be gigantic, even if that were his intention. Some revealing glimpses of the Soviet reality appeared the other day in a valedictory article by Christopher Walker in the (London) Times. The point is that despite glasnost, the correspondent clearly felt safe to write as he did only because he was being transferred from Moscow to Cairo.

According to Mr. Walker, to every one of the ten thousand foreigners resident in Moscow, 14 KGB personnel are assigned, making the stupendous total of 140,000 for this task alone. There is no reason at all to believe that this enormous instrument of repression is on its way out.

Nor do I see any reason why we should help Gorbachev to pretend that perestroika is working so that the Soviet Union, its health and strength restored, may reaffirm its world ambitions.

The idea of Communism has collapsed. Let the Communist state collapse as well.