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USSR Trip 7/26/91 [OA 8326] [3]
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USSR Trip 7/26/91 [OA 8326] [3]
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Speech Backup Chronological Files
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USSR Trip 7/26/91 [OA 8326] [3]
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26
21
5
5
OBERLIN
January 10, 1989
Ms. Peggy Dooley
Old Executive Office Building, Room 111
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Ms. Dooley:
This is the paper on Communications Technologies by S. Frederick
Starr which you requested. As I mentioned it is included as a
chapter in a book on Soviet Science and Technology soon to be
published by the Harvard University Press in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Mr. Starr suggested that I might also include two
of his more recent articles.
If I can be of any further help, please do not hesitate to ask.
Sincerely,
Betoy young
Betsy Young
Assistant to the President
OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT
COX ADMINISTRATION BUILDING 201, OBERLIN COLLEGE
OBERLIN, OHIO 44074-1090
216/775-8400
FAX: 216/775-2460
TELEX: 3734492 OBRLN
ing in initiative, etc." Such people, he said, are incapa-
Feeling low at the Higher School.
ble of participating in a democracy.
The chairman of the "Department of Scientific Com-
munism" added a devastating historical dimension.
Down to the 1917 revolution, he argued, the Bolsheviks
were an illegal conspiratorial group with no notion at all
POOPED PARTY
of true democracy. Lenin's task after 1917 was to trans-
form this band of professional revolutionaries into a
democratic party. But as this early perestroika failed,
Lenin turned not to democracy but to the Chekha, the
notorious secret police. How can this anti-democratic
By S. Frederick Starr
failed reformer continue in his traditional role as na-
tional icon?
he Higher Party School in Moscow is to the Com-
Looming over this grim party was the memory of un-
T
munist Party what the Pontifical Institute in
told numbers of monstrous crimes, the full extent of
Rome is to the Catholic Church. Since Lenin's
which are only now becoming known to the Soviet pub-
day it has been codifying the Communist faith
lic. Who bears responsibility for this barbarism? The
and passing it on to new generations of leaders. So when
professors at the Higher Party School heard their rector
the scholars of the Higher Party School assembled on
draw a comparison between the U.S.S.R. and Hitler's
September 5 to debate "The Party and Perestroika," it
Germany. He went on to quote Karl Jaspers in defense
was an event worth noting. The meeting was confiden-
of the proposition that only by assuming full "metaphys-
tial, but a stenographer was there to record the proceed-
ical responsibility" for Stalin's crimes can today's Party
ings. Several participants were stunned by what they
hope to take responsibility also for the fate of perestroika.
heard and slipped a typescript to interested persons.
The text reveals that in the course of a few brief hours
hese are hardly the views one would expect from a
the Higher Party School all but declared bankruptcy.
The professors gathered amid profound gloom. An
T
senior official of a political party facing possible
humiliation at the polls in a few weeks. But the
economist estimated that it will take the U.S.S.R.
savage candor continued, with a young docent ar-
300 years to catch up with the United States in manufac-
guing that "if the people refuse to trust us, we have obvi-
turing and 600 years in agriculture. Professor Kuleshov,
ously earned it." Lest there be any doubt that disaster lies
a department chairman, spoke of maternity hospitals
just around the corner, the vice rector, N.M. Blinov,
without showers and toilets, clinics without medicine,
brought forward a recent survey showing that no more
and shops without goods. "I believe a worker [who sees
than five percent of voters would support candidates
all this] will not want to play around with definitions of
backed by the Party bureaucracy (as opposed to party re-
'capitalism' and 'socialism,' he declared. "He wants to
formers), and that Communists stand to be thrown out of
live in a society where people live well, regardless of what
office in two-thirds of the large cities of the U.S.S.R.
it calls itself. [He wants] a high standard of living, a de-
But what about Article VI of the Soviet Constitution,
gree of social justice, democracy, and humane social re-
which guarantees the Communist Party's "leading role"
lations. I doubt there is even one person in this hall who
in Soviet society, come what may? The rector assured his
would be so bold as to claim these exist in our country."
audience that today no mere law can guarantee a role for
The mood of crisis was general, but it focused partic-
the Party. A professor of industrial organization noted:
ularly on the Communist Party itself. One scholar spoke
"The experience of other socialist countries shows that
of "ritualized elections," another railed against the Par-
if the Communist Party tries to preserve [its privileges] it
ty's "totalitarian structure," and still another de-
will lose its leading role entirely."
nounced Soviet communism as "a social mutant with
Speaker after speaker took the podium to lay out a
many absurd and illogical structures." Secretive in its
path by which the Party could draw back from the brink.
operations and closed to public scrutiny, the Party "is
All called for an overhaul of the system, so that it might
not, strictly speaking, a political organization at all,"
actually reflect the views of workers. In planning this
announced the school's rector, V.N. Shostakovsky.
overhaul, the professors seemed to be guided not by
Speaker after speaker zeroed in on the Party's adminis-
Marx and Lenin, but by Max Weber, Talcott Parsons,
trative apparatus. Rigid and inflexible, this vast bureau-
and Claude Lévi-Strauss, all of whom they cited by
cracy serves not the people but itself; any ties with
name. The rector himself clinched an argument in favor
society are purely one-directional, from the top down.
of diversity of opinion by invoking the authority of "the
Perhaps, it was suggested, this isn't surprising, given
American founding fathers."
what the Party has to work with. The rector observed,
In defending their proposals, several speakers con-
"If one speaks of the type of [person who becomes a]
jured up likely scenarios. V.I. Mitrokhin, secretary of
Communist, about the typical member of our organiza-
the Institute's Party Committee, saw five possibilities:
tion, then one must acknowledge that
most are
the breakup of the Soviet Union into several dozen fully
conformists
ill-disposed to independence or non-
independent states; a federal system granting each re-
conformity, disinclined to criticize the leadership, lack-
public much control over its own fate; a humane form of
20 THE NEW REPUBLIC DECEMBER 4, 1989
socialism that "out of political considerations" would
for the Communist Party, he asserted, is to become
not call itself either communist or socialist; capitalism;
"one of the bridges between civil society and the state."
or some combination of the above. Others posed the
So much for Lenin's heritage.
choice between driving the "radical" followers of
What bearing does this feast of iconoclasm have on
Andrei Sakharov and Boris Yeltsin out of the Party or
Gorbachev's reforms? Many speakers professed their
expelling the Party's traditionalist staff, the infamous
support for perestroika and Gorbachev. At the least, they
"apparat." No speaker accepted the radicals' seemingly
are willing to back him against the Party's own bureau-
unqualified embrace of individual interests as opposed
crats. However, the clear thrust of the entire exchange
to communal interests. Yet virtually all of them, includ-
at the Higher Party School was criticism of Gorbachev
ing several who submitted their statements in writing
on grounds that he lags behind the sentiments and
after the meeting, embraced the rest of the radical
needs of an increasingly democratic society.
program, including a multiparty system.
One speaker petulantly criticized Western writers for
But what about the middle ground, where Gorbachev
speaking of "Gorbachev's new thinking," when in fact
himself stands? As L. M. Ovrutsky, identified only as a
nearly all his ideas have been borrowed from others,
"publicist," put it: "The field of maneuver between the
and reluctantly at that. Dr. I. M. Kliamkin, a guest from
conservative apparat and the radicalizing masses of Party
a related institute, ripped into Gorbachev on more
members is shrinking." In other words, the U.S.S.R. may
fundamental grounds. Citing chapter and verse from
soon have to choose between radicals and conservatives.
Gorbachev's speeches, he attacked the leader's unwill-
Many speakers called for full democratization, which
ingness to disengage the Party fully from the economy;
led them to try to define just what that would mean. On
if full disengagement is a "false thesis," as Gorbachev
many points, there was a surprising amount of agree-
claims, then "all talk of democratization is empty
ment. "Bottom up" democracy requires protection of
words." Kliamkin also criticized Gorbachev's conten-
minority rights; after all, the rector reasoned, minority
tion that private property is "unacceptable" in the
views are often "the most constructive and bold." All
U.S.S.R.; if so, the country will never have efficient light
wanted to throw the apparat out of the Party. (Even
industries or a functioning service sector. Above all,
though, as Ovrutsky acknowledged, this could give rise
Kliamkin took aim at Gorbachev's opposition to a multi-
to a separate party of neo-Stalinists and anti-Semites.
party system, claiming that the president's position on
The platform for such a party "already exists," he
this was more appropriate to the 20th (i.e., Stalin's)
warned without elaborating.) Once emancipated from
century than to the 21st.
its own bureaucracy, the Communist Party will then be
free to pull back from day-to-day supervision of the
1 is hard to convey in a few lines the mood of
government and of the economy. The speakers argued
that it is the failure of the economy above all that is
I
desperation that emanates from the stenographic
report of this discussion. The rector set the tone at
driving workers away from communism, and this failure
the beginning when he noted that "we fear terms
can be traced directly to oafish meddling by Party bu-
like 'political pluralism,' 'private property,' and 'con-
reaucrats, who have killed competition and destroyed
federation,' but for some reason we don't fear the col-
the market mechanism.
lapse of the economy, crime waves, and moral erosion;
The importance and inevitability of political pluralism
nor do we fear the fact that everyone lives badly in our
was virtually taken for granted. Gorbachev has strug-
society except speculators and thieves." From this point
gled to confine the emerging pluralism to the Commu-
it was downhill all the way. N. I. Travkin, a deputy to the
nist Party, but, as several speakers agreed, this is no lon-
new congress, warned that "we are talking about the
ger possible. Other parties already exist, de facto if not
preservation in this country of a Communist Party as
de jure. A department head named I. A. Malmygin lame-
such. Will it justify itself or not?"
ly proposed that the Communist Party divide itself into
Toward the end of this solemn conclave of professors,
three new parties, red, orange, and green, and then
an elderly doorkeeper named Claudia Timofeeva asked
close up shop. Not one speaker held out hope that the
for the floor. She explained that she is a simple worker,
U.S.S.R. could remain a one-party system.
far from the world of learning. But she is loyal to the
Party, which she joined in 1942. She had listened with
his is precisely the point at which these solid
interest to all the talk of how the Party should evolve. But
T
members of the nomenklatura revealed their sym-
the plain truth, she asserted, is that "the Party today has
pathy for the radicalism of Yeltsin and Sakharov.
lost its authority. You hear this on every street corner."
As Shostakovsky put it, one-party rule con-
Presumably, the purpose of the meeting at the High-
demns the monopolist party to stagnation; the only way
er Party School was to reverse the erosion she de-
the Communist Party can now revitalize itself is through
scribed, to help the Party regain its authority. As news
the stimulation that comes from competition.
gets out on what was actually said, though, Party loyal-
Virtually every speaker understood that the U.S.S.R.
ists in Donetsk, Minsk, or Novosibirsk must surely feel
is groping toward becoming a "civil society" even
abandoned. But by then maybe no one will care.
though, as the rector acknowledged, the very idea of
civil society remains terra incognita for many Russians.
S. FREDERICK STARR is the president of Oberlin
The tempo of change is rising, however. The sole future
College.
December 4, 1989 THE NEW REPUBLIC 21
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL TUESDAY, DECEMBER 19, 1989
Gorbachev's Slipping Grip
By S. FREDERICK STARR
barely be restrained.
absolutely clear their intention of moving
Nor is the movement to disestablish the
toward full sovereignty. Armenia, too. has
One week ago Mikhail Gorbachev beat
Communist Party confined to the non-Rus-
moved fast in this direction. The Azerbai-
back a move in the Congress of Peoples
sian areas of the Soviet Union. The coal
jan Popular Front has also raised the ban-
Deputies to consider the abolition of Arti-
miners who went on strike last summer
ner of sovereignty, as have several groups
cle VI of the Soviet Constitution. the clause
may have been hungry but their first de-
within the republics of Georgia. Moldavia.
which protects the Communist Party's mo-
mand was not for consumer goods but a
Uzbekistan and the western part of the
nopoly in politics. Among the supporters of
multi-party system. A few weeks ago a
Ukraine. This unsettles Russian settlers in
the motion was Andrei Sakharov. who died
new "Russian People's Front" was
these regions. Many Russian and other Sla-
three days later. while drafting a further
launched in the ancient Russian city of
vic immigrants to Moslem Central Asia
speech on the same issue. Mr. Gorbachev's
Yaroslavl, where representatives of eighty
have begin moving back home. and up to a
victory. his Soviet and Western backers
local popular fronts gathered to decry the
third of the Russians living in the Baltic
claim. frees him to sort out the country's
communists' opposition to pluralism. On
republics are expected to repatriate them-
economic mess. Reformist experts and
Nov. 20 a new "USSR All-Union Student
selves in the next few years.
technocrats will now be able to work their
Forum" issued a similar call for political
Far from seeing the efforts of the non-
wonders without the messy intrusion of
pluralism. as well as true self-determina-
Russian peoples as part of a worldwide
democratic politics.
tion for all the peoples of the Soviet Union
movement towards self-determination and
Such a view is wishful thinking. Mr.
and the unrestricted right to travel abroad.
popular sovereignty, many of Mr. Gorba-
Gorbachev had to make crucial conces-
In the same spirit, the Russian head of Ko-
chev's admirers in the West view them as
sions. On many occasions before now he
mosomol, the party's feeder organization
an irksome threat to the orderly process of
has declared that-the Communist Party's
for youth, has pleaded for the abolition of
change being fostered from the Kremlin. If
monopoly of power is non-negotiable. The
his group's monopoly status, to slow the
only the hotheads in the non-Russian re-
Soviet Union can have all the pluralism it
mass resignations now occurring.
publics would understand Mr. Gorbachev's
needs. he has argued. merely by permit-
At one level. the entire debate over the
intentions, it is argued. they would moder-
ting greater diversity within the commu-
constitutional protection of the commu-
ate their demands. But these movements
nists' vast organization. Mr. Gorbachev
has now had to permit the decriminaliza-
tion of alternative parties at least to be dis-
As long as independent political movements were
cussed. if only "at some later date. His
ideological chief, Vadim Medvedev, has
a cheering section for his faction in the party, Mr. Gorba-
also acknowledged that the subject of polit-
ical pluralism is no longer "taboo."
chev egged them on. But he no longer trusts the public.
Only Three Votes
Had it not been for the large bloc of ex-
nists' monopoly of power is beside the
are not led by ethnic zealots-they are led.
officio members of party organizations in
point. De facto. other parties already exist
quite often. by communist reformers and
the Congress. Mr. Gorbachev would have
in every major city and republic of the So-
honest democrats who seek nothing more
viet Union. Some are devoted to environ-
than their own room in Mr. Gorbachev's
lost outright. A similar motion last month
mental issues. others focus on economic,
"common European home.'
in the Supreme Soviet. the Soviet legisla-
ture's upper house. failed by only three
cultural or religious goals. Sociologist Ta-
It is worth noting that the Lithuanian
votes. And that slim electoral margin ap-
tiana Zaslavskaya and other members of
parliament that denied the party its "lead-
pears doomed: Elections to local councils
Mr. Sakharov's "Inter-regional Group" in
ing force" role a week ago Thursday is
are impending. Article VI has become the
the Congress of Peoples Deputies still
still dominated by its Communist Party
great test issue everywhere. Numerous
claim it is premature to move toward es.
members. Their opposition to Article VI is
polls, including one reported to the party's
tablishing a separate party. Nonetheless.
eminently reasonable: If the Party insists
own Higher Party School. predict cataclys-
they are establishing newspapers, building
on retaining its legal monopoly of power in
mic defeat for old-line party candidates.
a funding base and setting up support or-
their republic it will lose everything. Only
Should this happen at the local level. it will
ganizations, indistinguishable from those
by agreeing to play on a level field with
be impossible to hold the line in Moscow.
of an independent political party.
other parties can the communists hope to
Given the surging numbers and growing
survive. Mr. Gorbachev offers no adequate
Only a few days ago Mr. Medvedev
boasted smugly that Kremlin leaders
power of unsanctioned political groups in
response to this argument from his fellow
"don't have to act under the pressure of
the Soviet Union, why is Mr. Gorbachev
communists and reformers.
emotional public gatherings." Strange
trying to hold back the tide? The answer is
Still less does he have a response to
words. When the Lithuanian parliament
that he no longer trusts the public. As long
those communists in the non-Russian re-
voted last week to remove Article VI from
as independent political movements were
publics who want to separate their parties
the constitution of that republic, the vote
simply a cheering section for his faction
from that of Moscow, for similar reasons
was preceded and followed by large and
within the party. Mr. Gorbachev gladly
of self-preservation. The Latvian commu-
emotional public gatherings. While Mr.
egged them on. Now that they have moved
nists have pointed out that communist par-
Gorbachev was meeting President Bush at
beyond him, he is trying to rein them in.
ties are more likely than any alternative
Malta, huge demonstrations against Arti-
Mr. Gorbachev champions change in order
party to retain links with Moscow, but that
cle VI took place in the Armenian capital
to save the Communist Party and its sys-
these non-Russian communists have no
of Erevan. The Armenian parliament
tem, not to destroy it.
chance of winning at the polls unless they
seized the opportunity to drop both "So-
are both independent from Moscow's direct
viet" and "Socialist" from the name of the
For several years Mr. Gorbachev wor-
control and freed from the taint of monop-
Armenian Republic. Not to be outdone. the
ried mainly about the Stalinist opposition
oly created by Article VI.
Azerbaijanis also demonstrated for the le-
within the Party. Sensing an alternative
power base in the elective organs, he
Since Lenin's day, the Soviet Union has
galization of their Popular Front as a polit-
flirted for a year with the Congress of Peo-
nominally been a federation, but one ruled
ical party, as did supporters of the fastest-
growing political organization in the
ples' Deputies and the newly elected Su-
by a monopolistic Communist Party. As a
Ukraine, "Rukh." Most of the public meet-
preme Soviet. Then. as he lost the political
former regional party chief, Mr. Gorba-
ings and vigils associated with these
initiative to an ever more radicalized pub-
chev despises the Moscow-based minis-
moves have been peaceful. But not all of
lic, he cooled to popular sovereignty.
tries, whose mismanagement of the econ-
omy he believes has brought the country to
them. When a large crowd of young Molda-
To make matters worse, Mr. Gorbachev
ruin. So bitterly does he dislike the central
vians demonstrated outside party and mili-
must bear Russia's fatal heritage of em-
ministries that he has assented to the
ization worked out in Estonia and now be-
ing applied to several other republics.
But what is acceptable for the economy
is not yet deemed appropriate for the polit-
ical system. In his simultaneous defense of
economic decentralization and continued
political centralization Mr. Gorbachev ap-
parently hopes to distinguish the political
"superstructure" from the economic base.
It is highly unlikely that this astonishingly
un-Marxist ploy will succeed. The decision
this week to create for the first time a sep-
arate Communist Party organization for
the Russian Republic indicates that the
same breezes are blowing in politics as in
economics, and among Russians as non-
Russians. The result. whatever Mr. Gorba-
chev may wish. will likely be either a
looser federation or a confederation of
fully independent states.
Tradition of Federation
Is this an impossible dream? Not really.
for despite the Russian chauvinism that
first appeared in the late nineteenth cen-
tury, Russia has far more of a tradition of
decentralization and even federalism than
many suspect. For more than a century
the czars permitted the entire Baltic area
virtual autonomy in legal and economic af-
fairs. Many Russian thinkers have also
been drawn toward true federalism as an
alternative to their unitary empire. Rus-
sia's first revolutionaries. the so-called
"Decembrists" of 1825. wanted to break up
the empire into thirteen states. modeled af-
ter the new American federation. So popu-
lar was the idea of decentralized federal-
ism at the time of the Bolshevik revolution
that Lenin had no choice but to adopt the
term into his program even as he sub-
verted its meaning.
Today. groupings of loosely confeder-
ated states are being planned in many
parts of the world. notably Western Eu-
rope. Most are built on the principle that
only those things which cannot readily be
accomplished by the local powers should
be assigned to the center. Totalitarian cen-
tralism is dying everywhere, but at the
same time modern communications and
trade are breaking down the idea that any
country can be an economic or political is-
land unto itself. Why should the Soviet Un-
ion be immune to these developments?
The Soviet radicals are right: the only
way the Communist Party can preserve a
significant role for itself is to compete
openly and actively with other legally con-
stituted parties. Once this happens, the
path will be open for whatever balance be-
tween autonomy and integration is desired
by the various peoples who now comprise
the Soviet Union. Mr. Gorbachev-and the
West as well-has more to lose if he at-
tempts to thwart this natural development
than if he permits it to take place. As
Marju Lauristin of the Estonian Popular
Front said on Tuesday, Article VI is "obso-
lete.' Its deletion from the Soviet constitu-
tion is the sine qua non to the success of
the social and economic emancipation un-
derway in the Soviet Union today.
Mr. Starr is the president of Oberlin
College and a specialist on Soviet affairs.
NEW COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES
AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN THE USSR
S. Frederick Starr
I. The Problem.
Few aspects of Soviet life today are untouched by change. Social
organization, administrative structures, basic principles governing the
economy, cultural values, and media of expression are all in the midst of
apparently fundamental transformations. The rapid pace at which all this is
occurring, combined with the participatory nature of the process, 1 suggests
that the very nature of change in Soviet life is changing.
Communications stand prominently among those areas undergoing
transformation in the USSR. Taking both the complex and simple technologies
into account, it is evident that in communications in general the USSR lags
far behind other advanced industrial societies, especially in computerization
but also, to a lesser extent, in telecommunications. 2 It is undeniable that
this lag holds great importance for the future. Yet to concentrate on it to
the neglect of other developments in communications, let alone of the
inevitability of eventual computerization in the USSR, is to severely
undervalue the changes that have occurred. Telephone, radio, television,
photocopiers, print journalism, audio and video cassette recordings,
automobile transport, international travel, and trans-border transmissions of
various sorts are among the many areas of Soviet communications in which rapid
development has occurred. The purpose of this essay is to identify those
changes and determine their likely impact on the political system.
A rich body of theoretical literature can be brought to bear on this
topic. As early as 1957 Karl W. Deutsch studied the process by which
communications stimulate the integration of societies. 3 Lucien W. Pye
subsequently presented a body of theoretical writings on Communications and
Political Development 4 Marshall McLuhan stimulated thought on the media as
such through "The Medium is the Massage, and literally hundreds of
writers have pondered the question, posed by Oswald H. and Gladys 6 Gantey, of
whether the tendency of the new media is To Inform or To Control?
Nearly all of these writers tend toward deterministic views on the impact
of communications on politics. However, few bother to analyze closely the
question of just how deterministic communications technologies might actually
be. 7 Daniel Lerner offered an important caution on
this point in his essay "Toward a Communications Theory":
The mass media, as a distinctive index of the participant
society, flourish only where the mass has sufficient skill in
literacy, sufficient motivation to share "borrowed experience,"
sufficient cash to consume the mediated product
1
Many forces besides communications are fostering political change in the
USSR. Indeed, the capacity of that country to assimilate and exploit new
conduits of information is arguably as much the effect as the cause of change
in other areas of the society. Undeniably, communications and overall social
change are closely bound up with one another. At the least, developments in
communications are a good index of social transformations.
We will therefore ask a range of questions, by no means all of which can
be answered conclusively. Is the Soviet communications system made up of
multiple simple systems, or is it moving toward fewer, more complex and
integrated systems? How interactive are Soviet communications? Are the new
technologies more readily controlled by the state than the old? Do they
protect or erode Soviet notions of national sovereignty? Above all, does the
evolution of communications foster vertical or horizontal human networks in
the USSR?
This last question, posed by Deutsch a generation ago, provides the
backbone of the following analysis. 9 It presupposes that autocratic and
authoritarian regimes one-sidedly develop vertical communication links
("transmission belts," in Lenin's phrase), while democratic societies require
elaborated horizontal networks, as well as vertical ones. These requirements
are not absolute, since all societies need multiple links in both directions,
and since both types of linkage are more fully developed in complex societies
than in simple ones. Our objective, then, must be to determine whether
vertical or horizontal integration is proceeding more rapidly in the USSR.
The evolution of communications in Western Europe and the United States
provide an inevitable context for such a study. Yet the level of development
in such countries is so far in advance of the USSR that comparisons minimize
the importance of incremental change on the Soviet side. To avoid this
problem, developments in the Soviet Union today will be presented in the
context of the earlier history of communications in Russia itself. The
initial section of this paper briefly characterizes that development over
several centuries. The proposed periodization lays great stress on the
exceptional character of the specifically Soviet phase of that process as it
has existed until recently. Against this background, it will be proposed that
in communications, as perhaps in other areas, current developments in the USSR
contribute principally to the strengthening of horizontal communication, and
hence foster the development of a civil society in that country.
2
II.
The Vertical Tradition of Tsarist Communications
Beginning in the eleventh century, written chronicles recorded and
standardized the deeds of Russia's church and state leaders. Because they were
maintained for centuries, chronicles systematized history over time; since
copies were made and preserved in various towns, the chronicles imparted
regularity to important data over geographical space as well. At the most
local level, village church bells provided a simple signal system, while in
the ancient Russian city of Novgorod birch bark "papyri" were employed to
document commercial transactions. The latter are particularly important as an
early example of non-governmental horizontal communication in society. The
fact that channels for such communication did not significantly expand until
the advent of modern technologies attests to the extent to which vertical
communication dominated in both Kievan Rus and Muscovy.
Movable type printing and hand-carved wood block broadsides (lubki), both
of which appeared in Russia in the sixteenth century, present an interesting
contrast of vertical and horizontal linkages. In Western Europe, as Marshall
McLuhan reminds us, moveable 10 type printing fostered for pluralism,
individuation, and autonomy.
The Muscovite state's exclusive patronage of
Ivan Fedorov, Russia's first printer, and its subsequent suppression of all
publishing outside of the central Printing Court (pechatnyi dvor) indicates
the very different function the same technology fulfilled in Russia. It is
revealing that one of the first uses to which moveable type printing was put
in Russia was not to publish locally edited Bibles for a literate public, as
occurred in Germany, but to issue authorized service books in great number so
that priests in the isolated parishes across the newly-conquered 11 Tatar areas
of the upper Volga basin would not fall into heresy.
Notwithstanding
this
effort, freshly edited scriptural texts issued in the seventeenth century by a
handful of independent presses in the Ukraine gave rise to a major schism in
the Orthodox church. However, by the end of Peter I's reign these presses,
too, were muzzled and print technology limited to the dissemination of acts of
state, official documents, scientific treatises, and Orthodox Christian
liturgical books in forms approved by the state-church.
Contrasting to the state's domination of the "high technology" of
moveable type printing, independent firms in Moscow and elsewhere dominated
the "low" technology of wood block printing. Technologically primitive, lubki
by the late seventeenth century were nonetheless established as an important
conduit of horizontal communication in Russian society, disseminating the
first printed satires, alphabet books, folk stories, popular religious tales,
and pornography. 12 Thanks to its technological simplicity and portability,
lubok technology was virtually uncontrollable and came eventually to flourish
in the very shadow of the Kremlin, at the Lubianka.
Postal service was established in the late-seventeenth century with the
help of Swedish and German experts. While postal messengers were able to
transmit letters between Moscow and Kiev or Arkhangelsk in something over 13 a
week, their services were used exclusively by the court and bureaucracy.
By
contrast, the development of roads and canals facilitated
autonomous economic and social intercourse. Following the French pattern, the
Russian government established a state engineering school to prepare
3
14
specialists in bridge, road, and canal construction.
The canal system
begun by Peter I linked the major European Russian waterways and was designed
according to the needs of commerce at the time. Roads, by contrast, were
designed first to meet the state's 15 military needs, and only secondarily to
enhance private communications.
Typically, the first macadamized road in
Russia was built in 1816 by Count Arakcheev as a purely military venture.
Military considerations also figured large in Nicholas I's decision to
engage American engineers to build the first railroad link between St.
16
Petersburg and Moscow.
The objective in this case was to move troops
quickly between the two capitals should further crises like the 1825
Decembrist revolt occur. To be sure, the first Russian railroad between St.
Petersburg and the Summer Palace had been privately constructed and the St.
Petersburg-Moscow line itself was built by foreign concessionaires.
Nonetheless, the state's deep suspicion of this new channel of communication -
- both Baron Toll, supervisor of the Directorate of Communication, and Count
Kankrin, the Minister of Finances, opposed railroads as "democratic" 17
assured that railroads would remain firmly under state control, if not
ownership. Military considerations figure large in the design of the rail
grid, even if the decision to use the broader American gauge 18 was made to
facilitate speed rather than security, as is often claimed.
The
slow
development of steamboat transport in Russia there were only 97 steam-
propelled crafts in 1850 19 can probably be traced to the disinterest of the
military in this technology and to the slow development of internal commerce.
No substantial and autonomous medium of communication developed in Russia
before the mid-nineteenth century. Pressed by a depleted treasury, 20 Catherine
II had opened the door to private publishing in the 1760s.
But even the
nominally independent entrepreneur who responded to her call used mainly
state-owned presses and was subjected to heavy censorship. Further progress
was slow. When private printing began to expand in the early nineteenth
century, censorship laws were extended in order to regulate it. Moreover,
publishing devoting to lateral communication, e.g. private printing, remained
technologically backward. Whereas in Great Britain the first steam press had
been introduced by the Times of London, it fell to the tsar's Ministry of
21
Internal Affairs to introduce that technology to Russia.
Thus, down to the mid-nineteenth century the Russian state provided the
main locus for technological innovation in communications. Naturally, its aim
was primarily to provide systems that met its own military and administrative
needs, and only secondarily to develop society locally or to link its
components horizontally. Suffice it to say that the Provincial News
(provintsialnye vedomosti) published by the government in each administrative
district were conduits 22 mainly for official information, much to the chagrin of
local society.
Only when urban society itself began to develop in the late-
nineteenth century did pluralism and horizontality in communications begin to
flourish.
4
III.
New Technologies and Horizontal Communication.
The communication technologies that dominated the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries continued to foster the increase of centralized
control but they also stimulated more decentralized initiatives. Postal
services, for example, had initially been designed to meet official needs.
The Russian postal system began selling stamps to the public for domestic mail
in 1857 and for foreign mail by 1864. The number of all letters mailed in
1854 had been only 23 34 million, but soared to just under two hundred million
per annum by 1878.
Since this increase far outstrips the growth of
governmental services, one can assume that private communications comprised
the bulk of the growth.
Aside from a few such successes, however, Russian communications lagged.
The Russian road network by mid-century was less than a fifth as long as that
24
in France or Germany.
Shipbuilding expanded fitfully, with only fifteen
percent of the tonnage passing through Russian ports being carried in Russian
25
bottoms.
Such instances of retardation can be traced to the slow development of
private commerce and, importantly, to the severe shortage of capital. Since
the government could not fund projects on a large scale, it had no choice but
to turn to private and foreign investors. This occurred even in the
militarily important area of railroads. The General Company of Russian
Railroads was established in 1857 in order to tap Dutch, British, and French
banks at a time when the tsar's finances were in disarray. The resulting
concessions brought about a twelve-fold increase in railroad mileage by 1880.
In that year the state, having recovered from earlier fiscal crises, began
repurchasing domestic and foreign concessions from their 26 owners. By 1912 only
a third of Russian railroad mileage was privately owned.
Even if ownership of this important channel of communication remained
largely in state hands, the actual movement of people and goods in Russia was
increasingly determined not by the state but by a myriad of private and
individual e.g. "horizontal" decisions. For example, the peopling of
western Siberia, while not discouraged by the government, occurred largely
because hungry peasants used the new rail network to escape famine and
27
communal control.
Publishing also felt the effects of public initiative, with the state-
owned sector decreasing steadily as a proportion of the whole after the 1860s.
Autonomous publishing houses strove to meet the interests of the public.
Revised censorship laws instituted in the 1860s defined the limits of
glasnost' (the term entered the Russian political vocabulary in the course of
these debates), yet they did not attempt to reinstitute the degree of vertical
28
control that formerly existed.
Independent forces rushed in to exploit the
situation. The great Moscow publisher Alexander Suvorin first introduced the
rotary press to Russia for his newspaper, Novoe vremia, while the entrepreneur
Ivan Sytin pioneered the exploitation of linotype and rotogravure presses in
Russia after 1900, enabling his newspaper, Russkoe slovo, to achieve the
5
29
largest circulation in Russia between 1900 and 1917.
The kinds of mass
entertainment literature that had earlier been produced only on broadsides now
spewed forth from presses in the form of penny newspapers 30 and fugitive
journals, with little or no effective state control.
Only when local self-
governing councils (zemstva) tried to link horizontally their separate
printing activities 31 did the government intervene harshly by imposing strict
censorship.
In much the same way "societal organizations" today frequently
enjoy extensive freedom to publish but have only recently gained limited
rights to disseminate their magazines and journals beyond the immediate
district in which they are licensed.
The telegraph and telephone are among the nineteenth century's most
sophisticated new communication technologies and Russians played a prominent
role in the development of both. 32 P.L. Schilling, a German from Russia's
Baltic provinces, invented electric telegraphy before Morse; B.S. Jacobi in
1839 invented the "writing telegraph"; E.Ia. Slonimskii was the first to send
two telegraphic messages over the same line, in 1858; S.M. Berdichevskii-
Apostolovyi invented the first automatic telephone switch in 1895; and
Alexander Pavlov constructed a working radio telegraph in 1895. Russians had
also established the longest optical telegraph line in 33 the world in the 1840s
and the longest telegraph line in the world, in 1871.
Notwithstanding these achievements in research, the practical development
of both telegraphy and telephones was retarded in Russia. Governmental
offices in Moscow and St. Petersburg could not communicate with one another by
telegraph at the time of the Crimean War, and in 1863 there were fewer than
three hundred telegraph stations in the entire empire. 34 As late as 1900 the
Russian telegraph system was only half as long as Germany's and a third that
35
of England.
Again, the cause was a shortage of capital, which also accounts
for the decision to grant private telegraph concessions to the public.
Seeking to maintain control over what it did not actually own, the government
passed a telegraphic charter which imposed strict punishments against those
transmitting anything deemed threatening to life and health, and the death
sentence for telegraph agents who willfully violated the code. The
Directorate of Communications also hosted an international convention in 1875
which endorsed punishments against those transmitting across national borders
telegraphic messages "hostile to the interests of states, against the laws,
the social order, and morality. 36 By such means the state tried its best to
regulate strictly the individuating aspects of telegraphy, even when it did
not own the systems.
A similar process occurred with the telephone, but in the decades after
1880 in which that technology developed the state was willing to allow
37
concessionary firms to dominate the field.
It was widely held that
privatization sped the development and lowered the cost of telephone services.
Such arguments no doubt served to justify the fact that the entire local
systems in Odessa and other cities were privately owned.
38
Railroads, telegraphy, and telephones developed in chronological
sequence. Comparing them, one notes the nationalization of railroads before
1913, the steady but not increasing role of the state in telegraphy, and the
prominent role of private and concessionary ownership in telephones. Besides
6
the growing privatization of their ownership, all three technologies
increasingly served horizontal communication in society. Usage soared when
semi-constitutional rule was instituted after the Revolution of 1905. Between
1903 and 1913 the number of telegraph stations grew by almost as much as it
had in the entire forty years previous, while the 39 number of telegrams
transmitted increased by an even greater figure.
Between 1900 and 1910 the
number of inter-city telephone lines quintupled, with still larger growth in
the following half-decade. 40 The new technologies assumed a role in the new
politics. The reactionary politician Konstantin Pobedonotsev listed his phone
number in the St. Petersburg directory by 1900 as did the newly-formed
political parties a few years later; during the revolutions of both 1905 and
1917 the public at large used telegrams to communicate its demands to the
government.
41 Private publishing also grew phenomenally in these 42 years, the
number of titles nearly quadrupling between 1907 and 1913 alone.
A Yiddish proverb reminds us that "An example is not a proof."
Nonetheless, such instances, multiplied by hundreds, suggest the way in which
Russia's developing society seized upon new technologies to enhance both
horizontal communication among its members and vertical communication upward
from society to the state. The evidence does not permit us to ascribe the
rise of constitutional rule in Russia to a prior growth in horizontal
communications, nor does it prove the reverse. What is clear is that they
arose together before 1917 and that each fostered the other.
7
IV.
The Vertical Structure of Bolshevik Communications
Lenin, asked why bourgeois ideology prevailed whenever there existed an
open competition of ideas, responded that it "has at its disposal immeasurably
more means of dissemination. 1,43 Faced with this, Lenin, like other
authoritarian rulers in the twentieth century, siezed control of the vertical
conduits of communication and used them to transmit Bolshevik ideas to the
44
public.
In addition to this positive step, he also systematically
suppressed horizontal communication, thus isolating individuals and groups
from one another and atomizing the society as a whole. 45 All this left
individuals more readily subject to control from above.
This was the
easier due to the virtual collapse of electronic communications, printing, and
railroad transport after the Bolshevik Revolution. The number of telephones
in use in Russia shrank from 232,000 in 1917 to 127,000 by 1921. 46 The mass
evacuation of cities reduced drastically the number of people with access to
telegraph stations. The combination of Menshevik domination of the printers'
unions and plummeting paper production after 1914 led to drastic declines in
the publication of books and newspapers. 47 By the end of 1920, in the words
of a recent student of the subject, "even the smallest private printing shops
had disappeared, 48 while by 1923 three-quarters of all Russian bookstores and
daily newspapers existing in 1917 had closed. 49 Rail transport, too, was
severely disrupted, although surviving photographs showing hordes of people
clambering on those few trains still running indicate that public demand had,
if anything increased.
In its effort to reestablish the priority of vertical channels of
communication, the Soviet state pursued policies reminiscent of the tsarist
state in the seventeenth century, namely, to seize the channels of
communication, focus production of information in the capital, and regulate
closely its dissemination. In printing this meant, in addition to the
abolition of private printing and the establishment of the state press, the
concentration of printing facilities in a few readily controllable locales,
the elimination of autonomous distributors, and the nationalization of
50
existing inventories of books.
In telegraphy and telephones this meant the
creation of the state telegraph agency (ROSTA) as an instrument of top-down
communication and propaganda. Internal passports were eventually introduced
as a means of controlling access to railroad transport.
In addition to laying hold of existing channels of communication, the new
Bolshevik state suppressed the development of potentially individuating new
technologies. Private automobiles, which had been produced in small numbers
in the last years of tsarist rule, virtually ceased to exist in Russia at the
moment they were becoming ubiquitous in the West. International telephone
communication, first considered by the Soviet state in 1923, grew very slowly
and was limited to a few official calling points. Direct telephone lines
linking Moscow with Warsaw and Berlin were opened only in 1927, while the line
to Paris opened in 1930, was not direct. 51 All international telephone lines
from the USSR were subjected to close surveillance. In a burst of utopian
enthusiasm, free postage was established in 1919 but quickly discontinued.
52
As controls over mail were strengthened, the volume of mail began to fall.
8
The result of these various policies was to restrict severely all areas
of horizontal communication. It is worth noting that this process was well
advanced even before Stalin's Cultural Revolution completed the task. The
growth of urbanization required an absolute expansion of communication
facilities in the 1930s, but the USSR ended that decade relatively even
further behind the West than ten years before. During the post-War era the
decline became absolute as well as relative. The number of both letters and
packages sent by Soviet citizens in 1950 was less than in 1940, while the
slight increase in inter-city telephone calls can be traced to official rather
than private use. By contrast, since the content of books and newspapers
could readily be controlled, their production was allowed to increase.
Along with controlling existing technologies of communication, the Soviet
regime tried to exploit new technologies to enhance vertical top-down
communication. Loudspeakers, introduced in the late-1920s, were well-suited
to this purpose and were produced in quantity. Lenin had a keen appreciation
for the potential of film, but insisted that this technology, too, be closely
53
controlled from above. Private filmmaking collapsed during the Civil War,
to be replaced by the State Film Agency (Goskino later Sovkino).
The Bolshevik government also seized on radio technology. Introduced
first by the Imperial Navy to improve communications during the Russo-Japanese
War, radio remained a military monopoly down to the revolution, by which time
there were twenty stations in Russia, all under the navy's control. By the
end of the 1920s there were nearly sixty stations broadcasting in the USSR and
54
plans were afoot to build millions of receivers.
Authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century are said to lay special
importance on controlling and developing communications technology. This
certainly occurred in Hitler's Germany and in Mussolini's Italy. 55
Russia's
centralizing leaders, too, were determined to place the various new
technologies of communication in the service of their cause. Lenin and a host
of practitioners in various media developed an impressively detailed body of
theoretical writings to undergird their hopes. State control of existing
communications developed rapidly and steadily throughout the 1920s. New
technologies like radio, film, and loudspeakers were exploited to strengthen
the regime's ability to transmit messages downward to the populace. Such
potentially individuating technologies as private automobiles, international
telephones, and sound recordings were suppressed or limited. The result was a
thoroughly authoritarian and even totalitarian system of communications, in
which the state controlled both the conduits of information and the messages
carried by those conduits.
Acknowledging this, one cannot help but be struck by the relatively
primitive fashion in which the Soviet state developed and exploited
communications technologies. For all their monopoly in film, the regime's
filmmakers achieved far lower levels of public saturation than were achieved
by Hollywood or the leading studios of the major western nations. Not
surprisingly, Goskino was chronically under-funded and had to rely on receipts
from popular foreign films for its revenue. Moreover, there existed only 900
projectors 56 in the entire country in 1925, half of these being broken and hence
idle.
Only in the 1930s did the production and distribution of Soviet films
9
begin to meet public demand, and then only imperfectly.
Having gained a monopolistic position in radio, the regime again failed
to exploit its new position. Notwithstanding a 1932 plan to build fourteen
million receivers, only 3.5 million were in operation in 1937, or a mere
twenty-five receivers per thousand population. 57 A key retardant of radio
communications was the USSR's inability to produce vacuum tubes in the
quantities needed. As a result, production of popularly-priced models like
the EChS-4 (1934) and SUD-9 (1939) fell far short of targets. 58
This,
along with the desire to restrict access to the open airways, led to the
extraordinary development of cable ("wired") radios with fixed tuning to the
two official stations. As late as 1952 two out of three radio receivers in
the USSR were of this type, with fewer than six million wave radio receivers
59
available for the entire Soviet population.
Only in the technologically less innovative areas of book and newspaper
publishing did the regime achieve distinctively high levels of production.
Hence, Professor Peter Kenez did not exaggerate when he concluded that "Soviet
leaders had much to learn from Westerners in the field of mass communications
and almost nothing to teach them. 60
It is clear that state-dominated "top-down" communications were vastly
strengthened under Soviet rule, and at the expense of horizontal communication
in society. However, this was achieved as much through the vigorous
suppression of the latter as through the intensive development of the former.
It is striking that in the years between the Bolshevik Revolution and the
death of Stalin in 1953 Soviet citizens achieved no breakthroughs in
communication technology comparable to the earlier achievements of Jacobi,
Schilling, or Popov. Lacking them, a regime that placed great theoretical
emphasis upon communication became a consumer of other nations' technologies
rather than an innovator itself. This stands as clear evidence of the
relatively conservative record of the Soviet government in the field of
communications, its claims to the contrary notwithstanding.
It goes without saying that the content of messages transmitted over
the vertical media strongly supported the regime. However, two qualifications
must be introduced. First, a cursory review of the Soviet press and of Soviet
films of the 1930s and '40s suggests that while virtually nothing anti-Soviet
in character was transmitted, only a part of the production focused directly
on regime goals. Far from the relentless bombardment of propaganda
anticipated in Brave New World, much of the content was comprised of
ideologically bland and even unassimilable data. Second, at least as much
attention was devoted to what was not communicated as to what was. Stated
differently, Soviet communications policy under Stalin emphasized more the
suppression of data judged harmful than the effective dissemination of
positive messages. As in the communications system as a whole, far more
concern seems to have been devoted to the elimination of autonomous horizontal
channels than to the full exploitation of vertical channels. Closer
comparisons with fascist Germany would be instructive on this point.
10
For all the force Stalin devoted to suppressing horizontal
communications, he never managed to destroy the ideal of a more pluralistic
communications culture like that which had begun to appear on the eve of the
revolution. As soon as the harshest controls began to be relaxed in the 1950s,
horizontal channels of communication, both official and unofficial, came once
more to the fore.
11
V.
Toward a Horizontal Information Culture
The post-Stalin era has been the victim of hyperbole. Dubbed "The Thaw"
after the title of a novel written before any thaw had occurred, the early
years of dramatic change are said to have given way to torpor and
"stagnation," to use Mr. Gorbachev's self-serving term. In terms of social
change, however, the evolution was both more steady and more basic than either
supporters or critics admit. Collective farmers constituted almost half of
the population on the eve of World War II but had shrunk to a fifth by 1971, a
smaller percentage than that constituted by members of the white collar
61
intelligentsia.
The number of post-secondary students soared, from 6.2
million in 1957-58 to 25 million in 1964-65. 62 Corresponding changes occurred
in the rates of literacy and urbanization as the population grew younger and
geographically more concentrated. Such shifts, accompanied by the USSR's
steadily improving technological capacity, prepared the way for a fundamental
change in social communications. The fact that the law governing
communications was extensively revised as early as 1954 suggests that leaders
63
themselves understood change to be impending.
As will be seen, changes in communications occurred both through the
addition of new technologies and the expansion and alteration of older
technologies so as to make them capable of fulfilling new functions.
Together, these shifts brought about a transformation far more extensive than
is evident by examining only the separate parts. On the one hand, they
extended and strengthened vertical channels of communication in Soviet
society. However, they also rendered those channels more interactive than
formerly and gave them a stronger role in horizontal communications. More
important, they vastly expanded the ability of individuals and groups to
communicate directly with one another, unmediated by the state. All of these
changes presupposed a reduction, albeit partial, of the Stalinist controls on
horizontal communications. As soon as these controls were cut back somewhat
in the 1950s, Soviet society showed itself eager to exploit existing and new
technologies of communication, as indeed it has ever since.
We will consider the implications of these changes for the Soviet polity
in the concluding section of this essay. For now, let us review the elements
contributing to the new horizontality of Soviet communications.
A.
The Expansion and Alteration of 01d Technologies
The Soviet postal system provides a good example of the impact of social
change on communications. Between 1940 and 1974 the number of letters grew
from three to nine million per annum. 64 The number of packages quadrupled in
the same period. Most of this expansion was concentrated in the late 1950s
and early 1960s, coinciding with 65 a phase of rapid urbanization, increased
literacy, and greater openness.
Increased efficiency also stimulated public
use of the mails. Today, when sixty percent of Soviet mail is shipped by air,
the volume of letters has grown so 66 rapidly as to cause a shortage of postmen
and an increase in postal theft.
12
Communication by telephone has also soared. Twice the number of new
phones were installed between 1965 and 1974 as between 1940 and 1965, with the
number of urban telephones trebling in the period. 67 Nearly all the new urban
phones were automatic and thus increased privacy. Today there are 24 million
telephones in the USSR, half the total being in urban apartments
By
68
contrast, only two million private rural residences have phones.
The nearly
two billion intercity calls made annually today and the seven-fold increase of
international calls in the decades before 1974 attest to rapidly changing
69
public accèss to this medium.
As the USSR became less of an "information poor" society, the content of
communications grew less readily controllable. The sheer growth in the number
of phone calls makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the state to monitor
their contents, just as the quantity of private mail has rendered it
impossible for the KGB to maintain former levels of surveillance over that
medium. It is no surprise that persons in many fields as early as the 1970s
came to regularly use both domestic and international telephone lines for
unofficial and purely personal purposes. Among such users were those with
agendas different from the state's. As one student of the subject put it,
The international telephone, despite continued control that amounts to
persecution, has given Russia's dissidents the means for immediate
direct contact with the outside world, something quite unthinkable not
70
much more than twenty years ago.
The growth of mail and telephone usage facilitated horizontal
communication. The rapid growth of publishing and the press, by contrast,
benefitted both vertical and horizontal linkages. The number of periodicals
71
nearly doubled between 1958 and 1965,
with Pravda
going from a four-page format to six pages in 1970. The central press grew
with particular speed, with nearly all major Moscow newspapers being printed
simultaneously in thirty-five cities by 1966.
72
If such changes served uniformity and "top-down" communication, other
changes in traditional print media enhanced interaction. The much-heralded
rise of "letters to the editor" columns indicate that Soviet newspapers were
becoming vehicles for interactive communication from bottom to top, providing
feedback to the government in the process. Moreover, the appearance of job
ads, lonely hearts announcements, and other forms of personal notices in
various local newspapers reflect the public's growing interest in exploiting
traditional print technology to enhance horizontal linkages among individuals.
Radio, too, gradually became more interactive. Rare is the student of
Soviet affairs who cannot regale friends with a few "Radio Armenia" jokes.
Few pause to realize these have their origin in programs begun in the 1960s in
which listeners were invited to call in their questions. Such programs, aired
on most Soviet domestic stations, constituted the first sign of "bottom-up"
use of the vertical medium of radio, and provide the same kind of feedback to
the regime as letters columns in newspapers.
So much has been written about the USSR's failures in the mass
dissemination of personal computers that it is easy to forget the dramatic
13
increases that have been registered in many other electronic media of
communication, 73 particularly in the 1960s. Nowhere is this more striking than
in radio.
For all the emphasis on top-down communications in the Stalin
era, there were only 17.5 million radios in the entire USSR in the 75 year before
74
Stalin's death.
By 1968 this number had risen to 89.5 million.
While the
ratio of cable to wave radio in 1952 had been approximately 2:1, by 1968 the
ratio slightly favored wave sets.
The proliferation of wave radios in the population at large during the
1960s made it all but inevitable that the public should become interested in
receiving international as well as domestic broadcasts. Short wave
transmissions had greatly multiplied since the early 1950s, with stations in
the United States, Great Britain, West Germany, Sweden, Luxembourg, and Iran
beaming broadcasts to the USSR. Receivers capable of tuning in such
broadcasts were constructed in large numbers by amateurs, while others were
imported unofficially through diplomatic channels. Transistors enabled such
equipment to be miniaturized during the 1970s and made it readily importable
through informal channels. By the end of the 1960s Radio Liberty could claim 76
that 27 million radios in the USSR were capable of receiving its broadcast.
Even if this figure is exaggerated, as seems likely, the number was great
enough for the Soviet government to decide that it should itself manufacture
such equipment so at least to co-opt what it could not control. Selective
jamming limited access to certain foreign transmissions, but the manufacture
of short wave radios indicates the government's acceptance of trans-border
broadcasts as an unavoidable feature of modern communications.
B.
The USSR's Mixed Record in New Major Technologies of
Communication
No less important than the expansion and transformation of existing
channels of communication are the major new media introduced in the past
twenty years. Among these, television is the most prominent. Developed by a
government confident in its ability to control the social impact of the
medium, Soviet television burgeoned quickly, expanding from 2.5 million sets
in 1958 to 30 million sets a decade later. 77 By the end of the 1970s
television was all but universal in Soviet households. During the decade
ending in 1974 the number of transmitters trebled. 78 Cable television, by
contrast, has made very slow progress in the USSR, partly because it requires
such great investments but doubtless also because it introduces a greater
79
element of choice than the government is yet prepared to reckon with.
That
the latter consideration is significant is suggested by the fact that the USSR
did not shirk from the large investment required 80 to transmit its few channels
by satellite, which it has done since 1967.
In contrast to the Soviets' wholehearted acceptance of television, their
attitude towards the private automobile has been more ambiguous. On the one
hand, production grew from 64,000 cars in 1965 to over 1.3 million in 1982,
and would have grown still more had the Kama River Truck Works not gobbled up
more than half 81 the rubles designated for the motor vehicle industry in the
late 1970s.
On the other hand, retail prices were set extra-ordinarily
high, and were only reduced in 1985. 82 Frequent articles in the press have
14
warned of the negative social impact of private automobiles, leading to
charges that more than simple inefficiency lies behind the refusal of
ministries to provide the necessary infrastructure for private automobile
owners. Only in 1984 did the government announce plans to increase the number
of gas stations for private cars from 1200 to 3000. 83 However, this more
positive attitude has since spread rapidly, extending to the expansion of
partial credit programs for car-buyers, 84 reductions in the prices of certain
85
models,
and even to discussions of possible sports cars for Soviet
86
citizens.
Since the retarded growth of computerization in the USSR has been widely
discussed in the western press, it is not necessary to repeat the story here.
Suffice it to say that while microchip technologies have made substantial
progress in the military sphere and in certain areas of industrial planning,
they have made little headway at the crucial level of desktop personal
computers. With no modems, few printers, and inferior floppy disks, this
situation in the USSR will not change rapidly. 87 Networking of all sorts is
proceeding slowly at best, 88 even though a system linking institutes of the
Academy of Sciences in three cities is now in place.
The introduction of a single "gateway" for all computerized data entering
the USSR reflects the government's concern to control information transmitted
for use by this new medium eighty percent of all data bases, after all,
originated in the US. 89 Resistance to demand-based systems stems from a
similar concern to maintain at least some central control. However, the
adherence of the USSR to international architectural standards in computing,
the rapidly declining costs of transmitting data within the USSR, 90 along with
the great and positive publicity given to the interactive nature of the
Academy of Sciences' new network, suggests that an environment more hospitable
to the computer revolution is beginning to emerge, albeit slowly. Even the
ideal of a single "gateway" in Moscow for computerized data from abroad may
prove so clumsy or so difficult to enforce that it will eventually have to be
abandoned.
The record of the USSR in adopting the major communications technologies
of private automobile, television, and computing is mixed. Television, the
most vertical and hence controllable technology, has progressed most rapidly,
while the private automobile and personal computer have made only slow
advances, development of the former having been retarded by more than half a
century and the latter by at least a decade. Yet this is not to say that the
advance even of these technologies will be permanently thwarted. The Soviet
government has officially committed itself to rapid advances in both
automobile and computer production, which will have the effect of stimulating
public demand. In the concluding section of this paper it will be argued that
such demand is becoming increasingly difficult to resist.
C. The Inexorable Advance of New "Small" Technologies
No journalistic account of Soviet life today seems complete without tales
of VCRs, home movies, and black market audio and video tapes. Rarely, though,
do such accounts go beyond the level of anecdotes. Yet the "small
15
technologies" of the past generation are uniquely suited to foster horizontal
communications, just as film, radio, and loudspeakers represented new means of
facilitating vertical communications in the 1920s and 1930s. The history of
such "small technologies" dramatically highlights the fundamental changes
occurring in Soviet communications over the past decades.
The rise of such minor technologies as home photography, cassette
recording, ham radio, and video cassettes share certain common features. All
benefitted greatly from public demand, which in turn was stimulated by the
public's knowledge of how the given medium was being exploited abroad. All
gave rise to simple networks of officianados, and all became the object of
official efforts at co-optation. Eventually, all gained legitimate places in
Soviet society as a whole. To see these patterns in action, let us review
more closely the copying and transmission of static visual images;
reproduction of sound; and the replication of movie images.
Various stencil, xerography, and ditto systems existed in the USSR prior
to the 1960s. All were considered printing presses in law, however, and hence
could not be owned privately. In practice, access to stencils was widespread,
and materials as diverse as music and architectural drawings were being
unofficially reproduced for select private audiences as early as the mid-
1950s. As is well known, the USSR maintains strict controls over all xerox
machines, including the cumbersome domestically-produced models. However, in
the 1960s and 1970s a number of samizdat publishers in various fields gained
access to such machines, and used them extensively. The example of the
Voronezh engineer Iurii Vermenich is typical, in that he succeeded in
reproducing translations of several dozen books on jazz on primitive machines
91
owned by his institute.
Many voluntary (obshchestevnnye) organizations beginning in the late
1960s gained official permission to issue informal newsletters and magazines
for local distribution; most of these publications, such as the Leningrad
quarterly Kvadrat, were reproduced on photocopying machines. The independent
Ukrainian journal Ukrainsky visnik and the religious journal Vybor are both
reproduced in the same semi-legal fashion today.
Attempts to control access to xerox machines have failed to repress the
demand for horizontal print communication. Private photography was always
available to fill the gap. An article in the autonomous journal Svobodnaia
mys1 in 1971 presented detailed instructions on how inexpensive and widely
available 92 photographic equipment could be used as a surrogate printing
press.
Such techniques were made readily accessible by the excellent and
inexpensive single-lense reflex cameras manufactured in the USSR with
equipment taken from the Zeiss factories in Jena, the Zenit-E being the model
of choice for unofficial printing on account of its high close-up resolution.
Negatives were easily transmitted by mail and could be read with the help of a
lense for viewing filmstrips available in children's stores for 35 kopeks.
Countless manuscripts, reports, poems, lyrics and other documents were
independently transmitted throughout the USSR by this means.
The spread of radio stimulated interest in recording. Wire recorders
were manufactured in the USSR in the 1940s but were rarely available to
16
private citizens. Instead, amateurs constructed simple machines capable of
recording sound or the emulsion of discarded x-ray plates. Such recordings
were of poor quality and had a short life expectancy but had the double
advantage of being inexpensive and readily transmittable through the mails.
By the early 1950s this "Roentgenizdat" was widely exploited for recording
both music and voice, leading eventually to a 1958 law making it illegal "to
produce home-made records of the criminal trend. 93 Meanwhile, Soviet-made
open reel tape recorders appeared in the 1950s with the large E1 Fa-6 model,
which was followed before 1960 by the lumbering Dnepr-3 and Spalis models.
More compact foreign-made cassette machines entering the country in great
numbers in the early 1960s forced the authorities to choose between losing all
control over the technology or attempting to co-opt it by producing a home-
grown portable product. They chose the latter course. Sales of Yauza series 94
tape recorders reached half a million by 1965 and over one million by 1970.
The social impact was enormous. The late Anatolii Kuznetsov described the
situation:
Soviet ideological organs, busy in the field of radio production
completely failed to pay attention to such a seemingly innocent
technical branch as the production of tape recorders. A demand
existed and it was satisfied, and when at last ideological firemen
discovered the catastrophic breakthrough, it was too late. Now it is
a rare home without a tape recorder, 95 and an evening party or get-
together without one is unthinkable.
Cassette tape recordings, shipped through the domestic and international
mails, provided a channel of horizontal communication that was at once
inexpensive, legal, and virtually beyond control. Ham radio operators seized
upon another means of sound transmission that was equally efficient, equally
inexpensive, and nearly as difficult to control. 96 It is estimated that there
were up to twenty thousand licensed radio amateurs in the USSR in the late
1960s. According to Gayle Hollander, the number of illegal operators
increased dramatically in the 1960s, when a do-it-yourself handbook for
amateur radio operators was published. While details of this medium are
lacking, it is known that ham radio operators in the Ukraine warned of the
Soviet troop build-up on the eve of the Czech invasion of 1967, that hams in
the Ukraine spread lurid reports at the time of the Chernobyl disaster and
helped force the government to release authoritative information, that a ham
operator in Vilnius was given three years incarceration in the early 1970s,
and that 97 more than a thousand hams in the Donetsk region were detained in
1974.
Photography, tape recording, and ham radio were all exploited by Soviet
citizens to create more adequate horizontal conduits for information than
official media could provide. Much the same process is going forward today
with video cassette recorders. Great quantities of these inexpensive and
compact instruments were being unofficially imported into the Soviet Union by
the late 1970s. Crew members of a Soviet cruise ship that made frequent stops
in New Orleans were known to purchase several hundred VCRs at a time from
dealers in that city, to be resold on the Odessa and Leningrad black markets.
Dubbing machines, essential if the medium is to respond to market demands,
were bringing 1000 rubles at Riga commission stores visited by the author in
17
September, 1986.
What Izvestiia terms the "currently fashionable passion for videotapes"
led police in Riga to confiscate 415 imported and domestically-produced videos
depicting "cruelty, violence, mysticism, and superstition" that were being
shown by independent operators to paying audiences of local students. The
operators of this library were charged under an article of the Latvian civil
code that banned the distribution of videotapes "harmful to the state or to
98
public order, health, or morals
The analogous law in the Russian
Republic was invoked 99 to punish a Moscow piano teacher caught trading in video
tapes and equipment.
VCRs by 1986 had spread so far that it would have been impossible to
reign them in completely. Instead, the government limited its intervention 100 to
co-opting the medium and policing its most objectionable excesses.
The
worst danger lay in the seemingly uncontrolled nature of trans-border
communications. Dish receivers have until recently been all but nonexistent,
and any that might find their way into private hands could easily be
controlled. Video tapes, by contrast, are as disrespectful of national
borders as audio cassette tapes. Because they are so readily imported,
reproduced, and disseminated, they effectively destroy the state's autarkic
control over both television and film production.
101
Whether or not Soviet
citizens produce their own original videos, the exercise of independent choice
over what is imported and disseminated creates a kind of video samizdat. It
is for this reason that the Soviet government began producing its own
"Elektronika VM-12" VCR. Reportedly costing from twelve to fourteen hundred
rubles, the Soviet machines may be less expensive than imports but have the
overriding disadvantage of being unable to play standard western tapes without
modification. It is doubtful that more than 10 000 Elektronika VM-12 units
had been manufactured before the end of 1986.
102
A second attempt to preempt the video import boom was the decision in
1985 to produce large numbers of video cassettes in the USSR. Manufactured at
the same Elektronika plant in Voronezh which produced the VM-12, the Soviet
video cassette library consists mainly of mainstream popular music (Pugacheva,
Vysotskii, etc.) and old films, mainly Soviet. By the end of 1985 the library
included 450 titles which were distributed mainly at electronic stores in such
ports of entry as Riga, Moscow, Odessa, and Tallinn, where the black market in
foreign tapes was most active. Production remained low, however, because the
only source of tape was the Soviet film industry (Soiuzkinofond), which
jealously hoarded all videotape to meet its own needs.
103
Moreover, the Soviet
press candidly admitted that many customers were buying the local product
solely to re-record imported films and programs for their own use.
104
No
wonder that private video traders have concluded, as the official press
acknowledges, 105 "that, for the time being, there is no threat of
competition.
With the exception of audio tape recording, all of the "small
technologies" of communication that have appeared in the USSR remain by
western standards, fairly limited in their reach. Yet together the VCRs, ham
radio stations, audio cassettes, photographic labs, and xerographic machines
touch the lives of tens of millions of Soviet citizens. Responding to market
18
demand, these media have expanded rapidly in recent years and will doubtless
continue to do so. Inevitably, this produced a strong reaction in the form of
efforts to co-opt and control. None of these attempts have met with success,
however, for the "small" technologies are too decentralized for their use to
be more than marginally shaped from above.
D.
Toward an Information Revolution in the USSR
The USSR's stagnant economy, coupled with its stumbling approach to
personal computers, have caused observers there and in the West to conclude
that in the 1970s and 1980s it missed out on the information revolution. The
foregoing overview of the expansion and transformation of old technologies,
the emergence of major new large-scale conduits of information, and the rise
of small technologies suggests this generalization is overstated. However
stagnant the Soviet economy as a whole, the realm of communications has been
steadily, radically, and irreversibly changed those otherwise stagnant
decades.
To be sure, different groups and regions of the USSR have sharply
different levels of access to the transformed or new media. As has been
noted, urban families are three times more likely to have telephones than
rural families, 106 while major cities and international points of entry have
far greater access to new communications than secondary and interior cities.
Overall access to public media correlates closely with the differing level of
economic development among the republics.
Whatever their unevenness, the changes are profound and show every sign
of continuing. Repeated statements by Gorbachev from his arrival in office
heralded his hope of increasing investment in telecommunications and
computing. Moreover, there is ample evidence of a suppressed demand for
communications so great that it can scarcely be avoided. Twelve million
citizens were waiting for telephones to be installed in their homes in 1985,
107
with a quarter million more waiting to receive long distance service.
The
total of twenty-five million civilian phones in the Soviet Union compares with
170 million for the less populous United States, suggesting that even the
addition of twelve million more phones may eventually not be enough. 108
With
only thirty-two automobiles for every thousand Soviets, as compared with 471
for Americans and nearly the same ratio for West Germans, there is a clear
109
likelihood that demand in that area, too, will continue to rise.
Only in
computing has the Soviet state escaped market demand, and this is bound to
change as a core of civilian computer buffs is formed.
Together, these many changes are beginning to create a horizontal
information culture in the Soviet Union, supplementing but not replacing the
vertical structure inherited from the Stalin era. At the same time, that
vertical structure itself is being revived and altered as more messages flow
both downward and upward through it and as the number of interactive or
feedback elements increase. Indeed, one of the most important innovations
that can be traced directly to Mikhail Gorbachev is the infusion of new
vitality into the heretofore moribund sphere of vertical communications, both
downward and upward.
19
Needless to say, strengthening of horizontal communications has evoked
concern in some quarters. Mr. Chebrikov of the KGB denounced the exploitation
of Soviet citizens by foreign media conspirators, 110 while he and other Soviet
commentators have singled out as evidence of such manipulation the nationalist
demonstrations held in the Baltic republics in June, 1987, as well as the
111
larger protests in Armenia and the Baltic states in the first half of 1988.
To check such untoward occurrences, Stalinist traditionalists mounted efforts
to influence the drafting of new laws so as 112 to limit the right of assembly and
suppress independent publications as well.
Compared with the extraordinary tenacity and initiative shown by Soviet
citizens seeking greater access to modern communications, however, such
accusations and measures seem quite tame, mild rearguard actions rather than a
serious campaign of suppression. The failure of efforts to maintain the old
controls raises the question of whether horizontal communications could
actually have been suppressed in the late 1980s? Of course they could, but as
we will see, only at a very high price. For now, it is worth noting that the
Gorbachev government through 1988 took no drastic measures against any medium
deemed subversive, even though it moved against single publications in several
instances. Until the government makes such a counter-threat and until it
succeeds, it is reasonable to conclude, first, that a kind of communications
revolution is under way in the USSR; second, that that revolution is modifying
the received communication culture by stressing horizontality and interaction
among and across levels where "top-down" verticality once reigned
unchallenged; and, third, that the new communications order in the USSR
benefits from the government's acquiescence, if not approval.
20
VI.
TECHNOTRONIC GLASNOST" AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN THE USSR
The Soviet newspaper Literary Gazette in 1987 carried a long article on
"The American and the Computer," in which the author charged that Americans
want nothing better than for the USSR to wallow in the same "technotronic
openness" (glasnost') that exists in the United States. 113 Information,
he
admitted, is power. For the USSR to suspend all controls on information would
be to weaken the country for no better purpose than to satisfy the demands of
Americans. In spite of such grumbling, a kind of "technotronic glasnost"
already exists in the Soviet Union and will have profound implications for the
political culture of that country.
We have characterized this new information culture in terms of the rise
of horizontal links and systems. While acknowledging that vertical conduits
not only continue to exist but have been strengthened by new technologies and
the new leadership, we have stressed the relatively greater impact in the USSR
of the new horizontal communications in recent years. In many ways this
recalls the situation in late nineteenth century Russia, when fresh
technologies also stimulated horizontal communication within society. Today's
developments in horizontal communication outstrip those of the past both in
the diversity of new channels and in the number of people affected. It is
therefore important to evaluate the impact of these developments on political
life. This impact can be detected in at least six areas.
A.
Privatized Information Stimulates the Formation of Public
Opinion.
Far more information is available to the Soviet public than ever before.
The public's capacity to acquire, preserve, and transmit information has grown
sufficiently to enable one to speak of at least partial privatization in this
area. Stated differently, improved horizontal communications and advances in
education have almost certainly increased the percentage of all Soviet
information that is now generated outside the Party and state and circulating
freely in society.
This means that the regime must reckon with more numerous and more
diverse sources of inputs than formerly. At the least, this more pluralistic
situation places greater burdens on "the attention-giving, information
processing, and decision-making capabilities of administrators, political
elites, [and] legislatures. 114 No wonder that in 1988 the Gorbachev
government moved to establish two new institutes for the systematic study of
Soviet public opinion.
B.
Information in the Soviet Union is Increasingly
Internationalized.
Both high and "small" technologies foster communication across the
borders of the USSR. This is true of both unofficial and official channels.
At the level of popular culture, contraband songs by the emigres V. Tokarev
and A. Rozenbaum gained great popularity even during the late Brezhnev era
through tapes widely distributed at sanatoriums and vacation spas.
115
21
Similarly, nearly forty percent of all films showing in the provinces are
116
foreign-made, while the percentage of VCR films from abroad is even higher.
Telephone calls, letters, and trans-border radio all attest to this
internationalization of information.
A century-and-a-half ago, the notorious French traveller, the Marquis de
Custine, wrote that "the political system of Russia could not survive twenty
years' free communication with the west of Europe. 117 Clearly, de Custine's
observation overstates the case today. But if the regime has survived greater
trans-border communication, it has increasingly to respond to information from
abroad, the importation of which it can no longer control. No longer willing
to pay the price necessary fully to control international conduits, the state
attempts merely to minimize the negative impact of the information they
convey. Implicitly, it acknowledges that the internationalization of
information is inevitable.
C.
Communications Technology Induces Individuation and Turns
Subjects into Citizens.
Much has been written about the way cassette recorders, VCRs,
photography, and other "small" technologies not only privatize communications
but individuate the communicators. Such individuation is one of the strongest
currents in Soviet society today, and helps explain phenomena as diverse as
the rising prestige of careers in writing and the burgeoning fashion industry.
Existing "small technologies" in the USSR foster individuation because
they enable people to exercize choice of the oral and visual sources from
which they draw information. Desk top personal computers have the same impact,
since they enable people to choose and, if necessary, generate data pertinent
to their personal interests.
Individuation extends even to such "top-down" media as television.
Viewing a movie in a theater places limits on one's response. Viewing the
same movie at home frees the individual to react actively and independently.
While it is true that all three Soviet television stations still air the news
program Vremia (Time) at the same time, this practice has been attacked
118
publicly in the Soviet press on the grounds that it suppresses choice.
Similarly, the state controls nearly all newspapers and periodicals, but their
sheer proliferation enables readers to seek out what interests them, again
expanding the realm of choice.
The exercise of choice over information emancipates the individual from
his surroundings. A cassette tape of a foreign pop tune that finds its way
into the hands of some provincial teenager may conjure up the existence of an
alternative life, of some "other" world where freedom and eros are
untrammeled. Suddenly, his immediate environment becomes nothing more than
the drab setting from which the taped tune emancipates him.
Choosing among the welter of information carried over new technologies, a
subject is transformed into a citizen, eager to exercise broader choice over
all life decisions. Eventually, the political system must accommodate that
citizen and the individuated personality which is his essence.
22
D.
New Conduits Foster the Growth of Networks and Groups.
Amateur builders of outlandish home-made aircraft held a convention at an
airport outside Moscow in September, 1987. Convened at the urging of
scientists in the capital, these inventors and their craft attested to the
existence of a nation-wide network of Soviet Rube Goldbergs, most of them
known to one another and communicating through the mails, telephones, and
personal travel.
Such networks exist in hundreds of fields in the USSR. Those interested
in unusual sports, various forms of collecting, and virtually every marginal
field of culture have organized themselves into informal lateral networks with
little or no support from the state and often wholly independent of it.
Hundreds of groups are chartered as societal (obshchestvennye) organizations.
Others thrive without official recognition. While less institutionalized than
the major formal organizations, they have the advantage of being sustained by
the members' genuine enthusiasm. The proliferation of such organizations owes
much to social and educational change, but it could not have occurred without
119
vastly improved conduits of horizontal communication.
This mode of self-organization is ideally suited to those promoting
special interests. When Moscow's city planners Posokhin proposed to cut the
new Kutuzovskii Prospekt through the historic core of the city, opponents
organized the now-notorious Memory (Pamiat) group. Over the fifteen years of
its existence, Memory has gained branches in Leningrad and Novosibirsk and
maintained informal communication on issues pertaining to historic
120
preservation through inter-city telephones and open mails.
Similar groupings in the ecological field have existed for years, only
the best-known of which deal with the problems of Lake Baikal. In a typical
effort at co-optation, the Leningrad Komsomol organized the association BER,
which quickly aligned itself with a coalition of unofficial youth groups
publishing a samizdat journal and advocating, among other projects, a monument
to the victims of Stalin. The Moscow Perestroika Club made similar demands,
and in August, 1987, had the opportunity to express them at a convention of
similar self-initiated organizations held in 121 the capital under the patronage
of the Moscow branch of the Community Party.
Unlike the 19th-century zemstva, whose efforts to federate nationally
were easily thwarted, the new groupings can proliferate and federate easily,
albeit informally, simply by using the networking potential of the new
communications media. In their informality, their horizontality, their
openness to all supporters of a given cause, and in their participatory
character made possible by the telephone, such groups contrast sharply with
both the Communist Party and the organs of state. As such, they pose a
fundamental problem to the Soviet leadership. In the autumn of 1987 V.M.
Chebrikov, chairman of the KGB, delivered an astonishing and measured
assessment of these organizations:
A characteristic feature of our time is the marked increase in the
Soviet people's social activeness, clearly manifested, in particular,
23
in the creation of independent associations whose participants seek to
contribute to the development of this or that aspect of public life.
The CPSU regards the activity of such associations as a concrete
122
manifestation of socialist democratism.
The KGB chief then went on to decry the fact that "extremist elements" have
penetrated the leadership of certain of these associations, "taken to the
streets to make unwarranted protests in public, advanced provocative demands,
and fulminated against those who disagree." Yet while he charged that these
extremists were under the sway of "foreign subversive centers," the KGB head,
like the Leningrad Komsomol, seems to have accepted the inevitability of
autonomous organizations. Indeed, by mid-1988 Communist officials advocating
Gorbachev's reforms were themselves proposing the establishment of mass
organizations independent of the Party as a means of strengthening their
cause. Such entities were actually created in Latvia and elsewhere and
represent the Communist Party's acknowledgment of the existence of change in
the nation's political culture.
E.
Proliferating Communications Technologies Thwart
Surveillance.
Governmental surveillance of private communications was simple in a
society in which potentially significant communications were limited to a few
educated people using a limited number of public technologies. Now the
numbers of communicators has soared, and numerous private technologies serve
their individual and group needs.
Even before Chernobyl there was ample evidence that an autonomous and
internationally-linked communication culture had grown up among the Soviet
people. To be sure, this culture has not broken through a number of barriers
which in Poland were penetrated early by the Solidarity movement. It has not,
for example, created its autonomous radio beyond the level of ham operators;
it has not launched publishing efforts on the scale of Poland's NOWA
enterprise; it has not exploited videotape and film to the extent done by
Video NOWA; and it has not managed to establish an independent newspaper 123 on
the scale of Poland's Robotnik, with a national circulation of 20,000.
Nonetheless, the autonomous communications culture of the USSR has shown
sufficient strength for officials to deem it unwise to attempt to destroy it.
For such an effort to succeed, it would have to cut back much of the
officially-sanctioned communications system as well. Since jamming cannot
blot out all international broadcasts, legally acquired short-wave receivers
would have to be banned. The use of inter-city telephones and mails would
have to be severely restricted, and inter-city travel sharply reduced so as to
thwart the transmission of independently reproduced sound, video, and print
data. All this could be done, but it would require vast expenditures in money
and manpower to reach anything like the former level of surveillance. The
economic cost of this would be staggering, while the price the regime would
pay in terms of public support would be greater still, particularly if it
resorted to force, as would probably be necessary.
24
f.
New Communications Have Undermined the Party's Role as
Culture-Maker.
Such considerations suggest that the new communications culture is
largely irreversible, even if the Soviet regime would wish to abolish it. And
who would staff a Party or government that would undertake such an effort?
The same process of individuation and pluralization that has affected society
at large has been felt among those running official media. When the volunteer
civil defense organization DOSAAF recently ecried the erosion of Communist
values, it attacked not the independent "small" technology media but 124 the
entire television, film, and radio industries of the Soviet state.
In
effect, it acknowledged that the masters of these official conduits had come
to share the same individuated and pluralistic values that permeated the
broader culture. This being the case, there would appear to be too few
Bolshevik traditionalists "Stalinists," in the reformers' terminology to
staff the input end of Lenin's conveyor belts today.
No careful reader of the Soviet press in recent years would be surprised
by this assertion. As early as 1982 Soviet cultural leaders were publicly
debating "mass culture." It is clear, declared the staunchly Leninist head
of the Moscow Union of Writers, that mass culture is unrelated and even
hostile to Socialist culture and the Socialist way of life "it is it's
125
polar opposite.
Yet in the course of the 1982 debate it became clear that
mass culture was already a reality in the Soviet Union, and that this more
independent and market-related phenomenon represented a loss of the Party's
cultural leadership. 126 By no means everyone did considered this bad. One
writer saw the freer operation of market mechanisms in publishing as likely to
benefit good literature as much as bad, 127 since they provided an alternative to
the moribund bureaucracy in publishing.
Through such debates, Soviet commentators struggled toward accepting the
new reality of public opinion. Their conclusion can be easily summarized:
that "mass culture" is not controllable "from above"; that many, if not most
Soviet citizens are drawn to it; and that such attraction is the obverse of
the public's 129 alienation from those cultural values promoted by the Communist
Party.
This 1982 debate came increasingly to focus on the new technological
media as such. In the process, the position of the old intelligentsia came
very close to that of conservative Party leaders, for both feared the way
their status as shapers of public values was being eroded by television and
film. Both understood that the vanguard role which the Russian revolutionary
movement had assigned variously to the intelligentsia and the Party was being
eroded by the new technologies. Writer Andrei Bitov's fulminations against
mass culture thus paralleled those of Party apologists, although they began
from radically different 130 premises. Both look to the age of democratization
with deep skepticism.
This is not to deny that intellectuals, especially
those of the generation that reached maturity in the late 1950s, have played a
central role in Gorbachev's reform movement. But the very nature of the
changes they advocate will eventually broaden the degree of public
participation in political life and hence weaken their own role, as has in
25
fact occured in the younger generations in the USSR. This helps explain the
frequent attacks on the young by reformist intellectuals who realize that
popular culture is incompatible with their own role as an independent source
of values.
That the realm of culture and values has gradually gained independence
from Communist Party edicts in the Soviet Union is evident from recent
developments in virtually every field of expression. What remains to be seen
is the extent to which the Party will accept this reality by reducing its
expectations of control.
What if it fails to do so? It can attempt to reimpose Stalinist controls
on horizontal communication, which we have acknowledged to be possible but
only at an exceedingly high price. Alternatively, it can simply adapt
received institutions to deal with it. This, too, seems unlikely, for such a
policy, carried to its logical limit, would deeply undermine the position of
the Communist Party in Soviet society. Admittedly, this is the effect of
various proposals put forward by Gorbachev at the June, 1988 Party conference,
but he balanced them by calling for the strengthening of the central executive
power. Finally, it can choose to move neither backward or forward, in which
case state and society will remain at loggerheads, as was the case prior to
Gorbachev.
Given both the need for change and the strong opposition to it in some
quarters, some combination of the first two variants seems most likely, with a
strong movement towards accepting the new realities limited by the Party's
commitment to maintaining as much initiative and power as the changed
circumstances allow.
26
VII.
CONCLUSION
This overview of communications in Russian history suggests several
conclusions. At the least, it demonstrates the close relationship in Russia
between political development and the state of communications technology. In
most eras the two have been closely connected, with progress in one
inseparable from progress in the other. Many anomalies in Russian social
development -- the slow appearance of an urban elite in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries; the isolation of the peasantry from politics in the
nineteenth century; and the diminished role of the bourgeoisie from 1917 down
through the 1950s are reflected in, and amplified by, the communications
system. This history suggests an answer to the question of whether the Soviet
Union's large new technical and managerial class will develop communications
technologies capable of serving its own needs, as distinct from those of the
Communist Party. Against the background of earlier history, the burden of
proof would lie on the side of anyone claiming it would not.
Our overview of Russian and Soviet history from the standpoint of
communications technologies suggests the need to revise accepted notions of
several important eras in this century.
First, the march of communications technologies in the late imperial era
contrasts sharply with historians' arguments about the internal decay of the
social structure that supported semi-constitutional government in Russia.
There is no evidence that the emerging communications system of the period
1900-1917 was collapsing from within and ample evidence that it was
burgeoning. The present era appears as the lineal descendant of the late
imperial phase, after two missing generations.
Second, it is hard to view the era of the New Economic Policy as
representing something wholely separate from the Stalin era in the sphere of
communications, as is often claimed in the area of political philosophy. The
abolition of private printing, film, and record production, the cessation of
private automobile production and the thwarting of telecommunications at both
the inter-city and international levels all went forward as rapidly as the
Party could promote it, the process beginning under Lenin himself. The pace
at which the Party severed horizontal communications was defined less not by
philosophical or legal limits than by raw power. While a careful review of
Lenin's writings may reveal differences between his and Stalin's approach to
communications technologies, their actions differ more in degree than kind.
Third, the reconstruction of horizontal communications and development of
feedback systems and interactive media after 1953 proceeded steadily
throughout the Brezhnev era. Whatever stagnation might have occurred in the
broader economy, modern horizontal communications continued to develop rapidly
down to Brezhnev's death. Indeed, the pronounced breakdown of vertical
communications in the late Brezhnev era actually stimulated the development of
horizontal links within society and hastened the creation of the situation
existing today. What is taking place today can thus be seen as the
fulfillment of changes begun in the 1960s and 1970s, rather than their
refutation.
27
What, finally, is the essence of this fulfillment? The expansion of
communications technologies in the USSR has fostered both horizontal and
vertical links. In terms of social impact, however, the horizontal have
predominated, and are reinforced by the increasingly interactive nature of the
old vertical ties. This has created a kind of information pluralism in the
Soviet Union quite unlike anything existing since 1917. 01d monistic models
of Soviet politics seem less and less appropriate as new patterns of
communication deepen. Each network and group arising from the new pluralism
boasts its own body of information and each is therefore capable of providing
an independent input to the political process. Together, these changes are
creating what is recognizably a "civil society" in the USSR.
As has been noted, this "technotronic glasnost" still lags far behind
what exists in Poland, which in turn remains far removed from the style of
communications prevailing in the parliamentary democracies of Western Europe,
North America, and Japan. Nonetheless, it is far closer to these prototypes
than to anything existing in Russia since 1917 and may eventually lead to a
very different type of political order than has heretofore existed. Gorbachev
acknowledges as much when he speaks of democratization not as a goal but as a
fact. He also affirmed it when in the spring of 1988 he appealed to the
public to support his reforms in the face of opposition of many in the Party
and state. Under such a new order, society may remain partially controlled,
but it in turn exercises control of its own, thanks to the existence of
autonomous channels of communication. Such circumstances impose absolute
limits on absolute power. They limit the government's ability to shape
society and introduce the possibility of society shaping government.
This situation exists today only in embryo. However, even in its present
form it exhibits many characteristics commonly associated with the notion of
"civil society," e.g. the free flow of information within society; the ability
of individual groups to articulate their demands; a government subject to
control by the governed; and the existence of rights against the state as well
as duties to it. "Technotronic glasnost" does not itself create these
conditions, but it provides fertile soil in which they can grow, and therefore
represents a profoundly significant source of change in Soviet politics in the
waning twentieth century.
28
FOOTNOTES
1s. Frederick Starr, "The Changing Nature of Change in the USSR," in
Change in the Soviet Union and American Foreign Policy, Seweryn Bialer, ed.,
New York, 1988, Ch. 1.
2 "The USSR Confronts the Information Revolution," proceedings of a
conference held at Airlie House, Virginia, 12-13 November 1986, U.S.
Government, Directorate of Intelligence; "Communications and Control in the
USSR," research memorandum, 24 November 1986, United States Information
Agency; Alex Beam, "Atari Bolsheviks," The New Republic, March, 1986, pp. 28
ff.; Hans Heymann, Jr., "Commentary: A Note on the Critical
Telecommunications Lag," 27 April 1987, The Hudson Institute; Richard W. Judy,
et al., Soviet Informatics Project Phase I draft report, H.I. 3884-DP, 12
February, 1987, The Hudson Institute; Loren Graham, "The Computer Revolution
is Bypassing the Soviet Union," The Washington Post, 2 April 1984, pp. 24-25.
3 Karl W. Deutsch et al., Political Community in the North Atlantic Area,
Princeton, 1957, p. 54.
4
Lucien W. Pye, ed., Communications and Political Development, Princeton,
1963.
5
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York,
1964.
6
Oswald H. and Gladys Gantey, To Inform or To Control? The New
Communications Networks, New York, 1982.
7 Among exceptions are C.F. Margorie Ferguson, ed., New Communications
Technologies and the Public Interest, Beverly Hills and London, 1986, p. 53.
Cf. also Daniel Bell, "The Social Framework of the Information Society," The
Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View, M.L. Dertouzos and J. Moses, eds.,
Cambridge, 1979.
8 Daniel Lerner, "Toward a Communications Theory," Communications and
Political Development, p. 328.
9 Deutsch, Political Community. p.51.
10
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, New York, 1962, pp. 141, 220,
240, 246; also Walter J. Ong, S.J. The Presence of the Word, New Haven and
London, 1967, p. 64.
¹¹A. S. Zernova, Nachalo knigopechataniia V Moskve i na Ukraine, Moscow,
1946, Ch. I-III; M.N. Tikhomirov, Nachalo moskovskogo knigopechataniia,
Moscow, 1947, Ch. I-II.
12
Iurii Ovsiannikov, Lubok: russkie narodnye kartinki XVII-XVIII VV.,
Moscow, 1967, pp. 24 ff.
13 I. P. Kozlovskii, Pervye pochty i pochmeistery V Moskovskom
29
gosudarstve, 2 vols., Warsaw, 1913, I, Ch. 1-4.
14
Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk razvitiia i deiatelnosť vedomstva Putei
soobshcheniia za sto let ego sushchestvovaniia 1798-1898, St. Petersburg,
1898, pp. 13-30.
15
Ibid.
16 S. A. Urodkov, Peterburgo-moskovskaia zheleznaia doroga; istoriia
stroitelstva 1842-1851, Leningrad, 1951, pp. 34-35.
17
William L. Blackwell, The Beginnings of Industrialization, Princeton,
1968, pp. 273-74.
18 Ibid., p. 283, 294.
19 Ibid., p. 269.
20 D.D. Blagoi, Istoriia russkoi literatury XVIII veka, 3rd ed., Moscow,
1955, pp. 212 ff.
21
400 let knigopechataniia, A.A. Sidorov, ed., 2 vols, Moscow, 1964, I,
Ch. 4.
22s. Frederick Starr, Decentralization and Self-Government in Russia
1830-1870, Princeton, 1972, p. 333-34.
23
Michael T. Florinsky, Russia: A History and an Interpretation, 2
vols., New York, 1968, II, p. 937.
24 Ibid., II, p. 789.
25
Ibid., II, p. 937.
26
Ministervstvo vnutrennykh del za sto let, St. Petersburg, 1901.
27
Donald W. Treadgold, The Great Siberian Migration; Government and
Peasant in Resettlement From Emancipation to the First World War, Princeton,
1957.
28 M. Lemke, Epokha tsenzurnykh reform 1859-1865, St. Petersburg, 1904;
also Charles A. Ruud, The Russian Censorship, 1855-1865: A Study in the
Formation of Policy, Ph.D. dissertation, Berkeley, 1966.
29
Charles A. Ruud, "Russian Entrepreneur: The Publisher Ivan Sytin of
Moscow, 1851-1934," unpublished MS.
30
Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular
Literature, 1861-1917, Princeton, 1985.
31
Starr, Decentralization pp. 333-34. Franking privileges were
suspended in this situation as well.
30
32
On Russian investors of this era see V.S. Virginskii, Tvortsy novoi
tekhniki V krepostnoi Rossii, Moscow, 1962, pp. 298-317.
33
Bolshaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, vol. XVIII, 1974, p. 451.
34
Razvitie sviazi V SSSR, N.D. Psurtsev, ed., Moscow, 1967, p. 26.
35
A. Brokgauz, I.A. Efron, Entsiklopedicheskii slovar, St. Petersburg,
vol. XXXII, 1901, p. 793.
36
Brokgaus, Efron, vol. XXXII, p. 793.
37
Psurtsev, p. 31.
38
Brokgauz, Efron, vol. XXXII, PP. 814-15.
39
Psurtsev, p. 26.
40
Ibid., P. 33.
41
Marc Ferro, The Russian Revolution of February, 1917, J.L. Richards,
transl, Englewood Cliffs, 1972, pp. 87 ff.
42 V. V. Uchenova, Partiino-sovetskaia pechat; vosstanovitelnogo perioda,
Moscow, 1964, p. 5.
43
V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed., Moscow, 1967-70, vol
V, 39-41.
44 Cf. Richard R. Fagan, Politics in Communications, Boston, 1966, p. 34.
45
Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass
Mobilization 1917-1929, Cambridge, London, 1985, p. 254.
46
Psurtsev, p. 82. For a stimulating analysis of Russian telephones in
the 1920s see Steven L. Solnick, "Soviet Telephones, 1917-1927: An Early Case
Study in Modernization and Economic Reform," unpublished MS, SSRC Summer
Workshop on Soviet Domestic Politics, University of Toronto, 1988.
47
Jeffrey Brooks, "The Breakdown in Production and Distribution of
Printed Material 1917-1927," Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the
Russian Revolution, Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez, Richard Stites, eds.,
Bloomington, 1985, pp. 151 ff.
48
Kenez, p. 101.
49
Brooks, "The Breakdown
" pp. 155-66.
50
Kenez, p. 104.
51
Psurtsev, p. 178.
31
52
Ibid., p. 66.
53
Kenez, pp. 105 ff.
54
Psurtsev, pp. 38, 188.
55
Lilian-Dorette Rimmele, Der Rundfunk in Norddeutschland 1933-1945: Ein
Beitrag Zur Nationale Organizations-Personal-und Kultur-Politik, Hamburg,
1977; Franco Monteleone, La Radio Italiana Nel Periodo Fascista, Venice, 1976.
56
Purtsev, p. 221.
57
Ibid., pp. 222-27.
58
Ibid., pp. 222-23.
59
Narodnoe khoziaistvo V 1962 godu, Moscow, 1963, p. 422.
60
Kenez, p. 252.
61
Gayle Durham Hollander, "Political Communication and Dissent in the
Soviet Union," Dissent in the USSR: Politics, Ideology, and People, Rudolf L.
Tokes, ed., Baltimore and London, 1975, p. 251.
62
Ellen Proffer Mickiewicz, Soviet Political Schools: The Communist
Party Adult Instruction System, New Haven, 1967, pp. 8 ff.
63
Ustav sviaz SSSR, Moscow, 1954.
64
Bolshaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, vol. XXIII, 1976, p. 94.
65
Psurtsev, p. 269, table 26.
66
R. Volkova, Pravda, 18 March 1985, p. 7, in Current Digest of the
Soviet Press (CDSP), 1985, no. 11, p. 20.
67
Bolshaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, vol. 23, 1976, p. 93; also
Psurtsev, pp. 268 ff.
68
Sziaz sluzhit vsem," Pravda, 28 May 1984, p. 1.
69
International Telecommunications Union, Yearbook of Common Carrier
Telecommunications Statistics, cited in Heymann, p. 5.
60
Gerald Stanton Smith, Songs to Seven Strings; Russia's Guitar Poetry
and Soviet "Mass Song, Bloomington, 1984, p. 94.
71
Psurtsev, p. 269, table 26.
72
Ibid., p. 331.
73
Psurtsev, p. 273.
32
74
Narodnoe khozaistvo SSSR V 1962 godu, Moscow, 1963, p. 422.
75
Narodnoe khozaistvo SSSR V 1968 godu, Moscow, 1969, p. 506.
76
Lewis Feuer, "The Intelligentsia in Opposition," Problems of Communism,
vol. 19, no. 6.
77
Narodnoe khozaistvo SSSR V 1968 godu, Moscow, 1968, p. 506.
78
Psurtsev, p. 94 ff.
79
Aleksandr Petrov, Izvestiia, 3 September 1985, p. 2 (CDSP, XXXVII, no.
35, p. 27.)
80
Psurtsev, pp. 94 ff.
81
"Russian Cars," The Economist, 3 December 1983, P. 79.
82
Izvestiia, 10 January 1985, p. 2.
83
N. Tolstova, Izvestiia, 1 August 1984, p. 3 (CDSP, vol. XXXVI, no. 31,
P. 23.)
84
Reply to a letter to the editor, Sovetskaia Rossiia, 9 April 1985, p.
3.
85
Izvestiia, 10 January 1984, p. 2.
86
Photographs and accompanying captions, Sotsialisticheskaia industriia,
14 January 1985, p. 4.
87
S. E. Goodman and Alan Ross Stapleton, "Microcomputing in the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe," Abacus 3, 1985, no. 1, pp. 6-22.
88
Ivan Selin, "Trip Report," unpublished MS, 2 April 1984, p. 2; also
"Update," unpublished MS, 6 January 1986.
89
Ganley and Ganley, p. 85.
90
E. Jakubitis, 91 "Po puti tekhnicheskogo progressa," Trud, 21 June 1986,
p. 2.
S. Frederick Starr, Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet
Union, New York, 1983, pp. 263, 278.
92K. Glukhov, "Fotografiia kak sposob reproduksii
" Svobodnaia
mys1, 20 December 1971.
93
Quoted by Timothy Ryback, Rock Around the Bloc, New York, 1988, p. 00.
94
Narodnoe khoziaistvo, Moscow, 1970, p. 251.
95
"Talks by Anatole Kuznetsov," Radio Liberty, no. 17, March 10-11, 1973.
See also Gene Sosin, "Magnitizdat: Uncensored Songs of Dissent," Tokes, ch.
33
8.
96
The best accounts of this phenomenon are F. Gayle Durham, Amateur Radio
Operation in the Soviet Union, Center for International Studies, MIT,
Cambridge, 1965. See also Gayle Durham Hollander, "Political Communication
and Dissent," pp. 262-263.
97
Ibid. Also Smith, p. 95; and anon. "Radiozdat," Russkaia mys1, 6
February 1975, p. 5.
98
Iu. Kishchik and E. Vostrukhov," Izvestiia, 15 October 1986, P. 30.
(CDSP vol. XXXVII, no. 41, p. 25.)
99 D. Pilipenko, Komsomolskaia pravda, 20 September 1986, p. 4. (CDSP vol.
XXXVII, no. 4, p. 23.)
100
Radio Liberty, "Video in the Soviet Union: Trouble with a Capricious
Step-child," no. 129-86, 21 March 1986; Viktor Yasman, "The Collectivization
101
of Videos?," Radio Liberty, no. 335-86, 22 September 1986.
Cf. Chuck
Anderson, Video Power: Grass Roots Television, New York, 1975.
102
Communications and Control in the USSR," P. 3.
103
K. Abaiev, Izvestiia, 23 June 1985, p. 6 (CDSP vol. XXXVI, no 25,
1985, July).
104
Kishchik and Vostrukhov, p. 3.
105
Sovetskaia kultura, 10 June 1986, quoted by Yasman, p. 3.
106
Aleksandr 107 Petrov, "Medlennyi progress," Izvestiia, 3 September 1985,
p. 2.
Ibid., p. 2.
108
Yearbook of Common Carrier Telecommunications Statistics, quoted in
Heymann, p. 5.
109
Russian Cars," The Economist, 3 December 1983, p. 79.
110
V.M. Chebrikov address on the 110th anniversary of the birth of F. E.
Dzherzhinskii, Pravda, 11 September 1987, p. 3.
111
M. Vulfson, in Sovetskaia Latviia, 18 June 1987, p. 3. (CDSP, vol.
XXIX, no. 27).
112
Mark D'Anastasio, "Soviets are Preparing Measures to Stop Expansion of
Independent Publishers," The Wall Street Journal, 9 September 1987, p. 29.
113
Vladimir Simonov, "Amerikanets i kompiuter," Literaturnaia gazeta, 24
June 1987, p. 14.
114
Deutsch, p. 41.
34
115
E. Zlain, Komsomolskaia pravda, 18 October 1985, p. 4 (CDSP vol.
XXXVII, no. 44).
116
Liudmila Kazymova, Sovetskaia Rossiia, 18 July 1985, P. 2 (CDSP vol.
XXXVII, no. 4).
117
Marquis de Custine, Russia, New York, 1854, p. 83.
118
Vremia na ekrane," Pravda, 19 May 1986, p. 3.
119
Cf. Fagan, p. 39.
120
Bill Keller, "Soviet Political Clubs on Unofficial Stage," New York
Times, 9 October 1987, p. 4.
121
V.M. Chebrikov, p. 3; Also Jonathan Steele, "Moscow Opens the Door to
Reform Groups," The Guardian, 12 September 1987, p. 1.
122
V. M. Chebrikov, p. 3.
123
Reinventing Civil Society: Poland's Quiet Revolution, 1981-1986, The
US-Helsinki Watch Committee, New York, 1986, pp. 43, 53 ff., 71-78.
124
Dolg kazhdogo grazhdanina," Pravda, 14 September 1987, p. 1.
125
Feliks Kuznetsov, "Kultura: narodnost' i massovost', Literaturnain
gazeta, 5 January 1983, p. 3.
126
Vladimir Simonoy 127 "Khaiping i ego iznanki," Literaturnaia gazeta, 23
June 1982, p. 15.
Vladimir Soloukhin, "Skazki mogut i umeret,"
Literaturnaia gazeta, 22 September 1982, p. 3.
129
These views are conveniently summarized in Stanislav Kunyaev, "Ot
velikogo do smeshnogo," Literaturnaia gazeta, 9 June 1982, p. 3.
130
Andrei Bitov, "Net! Nikogda ia zavisti ne znal. Literaturnaia
gazeta, 7 July 1982, p. 3.
131
See Jerry F. Hough, The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory,
Cambridge, London, 1977, p. 234.
35
Peggy- Talkw/ Jennifert BOB+
1
CAROL to splet through
some how. Let's set some
induns on We it, need too info ASALMer
McG.
7/22/91
July 22, 1991
RESEARCH QUESTIONS FOR USSR TRIP:
Exchanges
status of US-Soviet exchange programs -- how much increase since
1985, 1988 to now? (students, professionals, artists/academics,
etc.)
American culture in the USSR
What American movies are playing in Moscow? Are there movie
houses specializing in American films?
What American TV shows appear on Soviet TV? Which is most
popular (Dallas??) ?
Which American magazines/newspapers are most popular? Where are
they most widely available?
Favorite American actors/actresses, bands, etc.
Evidence of American consumer culture -- McDonald's, Mickey
Mouse, etc. -- and Soviet reaction towards it
How many independent radio stations are there in Moscow (-- in
the Republic, in the USSR...)? Is Moscow Echo the best known??
Names of most popular independent news programs/newspapers --
trusted reporters, journalists
What is the biggest story in the Pop Culture there -- the
equivalent of making the cover of People Mag. here....?
Russian Proverbs, Sayings --
Related to:
-- journey/travels.
-- visitors/guests.
-- friends.
-- challenges/great tasks.
-- the future
McGroarty/Dooley
July 26, 1991
3:30 pm
[MOSCOW]
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS: INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
MOSCOW, U.S.S.R.
JULY 30, 1991
3:00 P.M.
[Introductory acknowledgements. ]
It is a privilege to meet with you at this critical moment
in the history of your nation -- at this time of great hope for
all the world. //
For four long decades, our two nations stood locked in
conflict, as the Cold War cast its shadow across an armed and
uneasy peace. This Summit marks a new beginning: the prospect
that we can put an end to a long era as adversaries, write a new
chapter in the history of our two nations -- forge a new
partnership and a sturdy peace. //
We have reason to hope. One by one, the cruel realities of
the Cold War are crumbling -- and a new world of opportunities
calls us forward. In Europe -- for four long decades the fault-
line of East-West conflict -- the nations of the East, like their
neighbors in the West, are finding a common home in democracy.
Far beyond the confines of this continent -- from Afghanistan to
the horn of Africa, from Angola to Central America -- regional
conflicts no longer threaten to become flashpoints for superpower
confrontation. Worldwide, the risk of war stands lower now than
at any point in the post-war era. //
2
The challenge we face at this summit -- the challenge you
face as present and future leaders of this great nation -- lies
in this: together, our two nations must overcome a half-century
of mistrust to seize this moment to build a lasting peace. //
Already, we've made progress. The easing of tensions
between our nations has created new opportunities for arms
control. Last fall, in Paris, we set in motion deep reductions
in conventional forces stationed in Europe. Tomorrow, in the
Kremlin, President Gorbachev and I will sign the historic START
Treaty that will cut our strategic arsenals by a full one-third.
//
Lower tensions have also made it possible for our two
nations to normalize economic relations. / In May, the Supreme
Soviet removed the key impediment to increased trade: Soviet
restrictions on free emigration. The new Soviet emigration law
stands as a major step forward -- a victory for all who value
human rights. // As a consequence of this progress, I am
pleased to announce that when I return to Washington, I will
submit to Congress the U.S.-Soviet Trade Agreement we signed one
year ago. In addition, I will urge the Congress to remove
restrictions that impede trade -- and grant the Soviet Union Most
Favored Nation status. //
Beyond two-way trade, the U.S. is working to open doors to
Soviet entry into the global economy. // For more than forty
years, the Soviet Union stood apart from the world market --
stood aside as free market forces sparked an era of unprecedented
Pessy
Research requests
from Dan on all
July 22, 1991
researchers
RESEARCH QUESTIONS FOR USSR TRIP:
-JAG
Exchanges
status of US-Soviet exchange programs -- how much increase since
etc.) 1985, 1988 to now? (students, professionals, artists/academics,
American culture in the USSR
What American movies are playing in Moscow? Are there movie
houses specializing in American films?
What American TV shows appear on Soviet TV? Which is most
popular (Dallas??) ?
Which American magazines/newspapers are most popular? Where are
they most widely available?
Favorite American actors/actresses, bands, etc.
Evidence of American consumer culture -- McDonald's, Mickey
Mouse, etc. -- and Soviet reaction towards it
How many independent radio stations are there in Moscow (-- in
the Republic, in the USSR...)? Is Moscow Echo the best known??
Names of most popular independent news programs/newspapers --
trusted reporters, journalists
What is the biggest story in the Pop Culture there -- the
equivalent of making the cover of People Mag. here....?
Proverbs/folk legends, Sayings --
Related to:
-- journey/travels.
-- visitors/guests.
-- friends.
-- challenges/great tasks.
203/432-4733 1333 Martin 8/1
WWII
-- the future
Services of Mead Data Central, Inc.
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31
The New Republic (c) 1991 IAC
this time of turbulent change. For anyone interested in the vicissitudes of
perestroika and glasnost it is essential reading, bringing the personalities and
the forces alive with a clarity unmatched by any source I know.
This posthumous book also underscores the immense tragedy of Sakharov's
death. It came too soon, cruelly depriving the opposition of its one figure of
undoubted international stature. Allowing for the differences of detail,
Sakharov's position before his death was analogous to that of other prominent
former dissidents and human rights activists who have achieved power in
ex-Communist Europe: Walesa, Mazowiecki, Havel, Dienstbier, Goncz, Tudjman, and
Petrle. All these men were in the forefront of the ideological struggle against
communism during the 1970s and 1980s, all made the leap from dissident to
political leader, all progressed from wrestling with ethical, social, and human
issues to grappling with affairs of state and the temptations of power, and all
unexpectedly inherited the fruits of a lifetime of struggle, often against their
own desires.
Sakharov did not exercise direct political power himself. The democratic
revolution in the Soviet Union had made only partial gains by the time he died
in December 1989. It has since been put into reverse. It is difficult to know
exactly what Sakharov would have done when confronted with recent events in the
Baltics. My guess is that he would have brought Russians out of their houses in
the hundreds of thousands and challenged Gorbachev in the streets and the
squares of the large cities. For he had predicted this outcome to Gorbachev's
face, when he warned against his accumulation of power, and he would have fought
it with his usual directness and stubbornness.
But in his absence, and in the present reaction in Russia, there seems to
be no single figure with the moral authority and bravery to take his place.
What is left are these memoirs, and his example. And there are signs of a
Sakharov cult developing in the Soviet Union. In Yerevan, a street and a
university fellowship have already been named for him. In Moscow, the city
council has announced a competition for a public statue, and a Sakharov museum
is being planned. The Academy of Sciences, which treated him so badly while
he was alive, has announced plans for a Sakharov medal to be struck, and is also
setting up a scholarship fund in his name. (In Israel, at the urging of Soviet
Jewish immigrants, a public park has been named for him.)
These memorials are all richly deserved. And yet, as Pushkin noted more than
a century and a half ago, Russians have a penchant for honoring famous men after
their death, having spat upon them while they lived. There can be little doubt
that this noble, modest man would have abhorred a cult, and been indifferent to
empty invocations of his memory. The monument that Sakharov would have
preferred, as these memoirs show, is a democratic and peaceful Russia in a
democratic and peaceful world.
MICHAEL SCAMMELL is professor of Russian literature at Cornell University and
the author of Solzhenitsyn: A Biography (W. W. Norton).
GRAPHIC: portrait; Caption: Andrei Sakharov. portrait
TYPE:
review
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HEADLINE: The prophet and the wilderness: how the idea of human rights crippled
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BYLINE: Scammell, Michael
BODY:
The Prophet and the Wilderness
I.
Not nearly enough has been understood about the role of human rights
movements in promoting the recent political transformation of the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe. In the discussion of communism's downfall, a great deal has
been written about the overextension of empire, the failure of central planning,
the lack of industrial development, the weakness of agriculture, the evils of
bureaucracy, and the breakdon of the Party; and it would be foolish to deny the
importance of any of these factors in contributing to this epochal collapse.
Still, most of these shortcoming were present in the Communist system since at
least the Second World War, and many of them date back all the way to the
October Revolution. How is it that they assumed such importance in the
mid-1980s, and became decisive in 1989?
There was clearly a major failure of will at the top: the governing apparatus
grew fatigued, the Party sclerotic, the nomenklatura coccupted by its absolute
power. Still, someone was needed to notice the fatigue, to probe the sclerosis,
to contest the power, and finally to offer a viable alternative to the system,
thereby undermining its legitimacy and preparing its downfall. The Reaganites
and the neoconservatives would like us to believe that it was American resolve
that accomplished these things; and American intrasigence certainly played its
part in encouraging and hastening certain internal processes.
Yet the largest shareof the historical credit, it seems to me, should go to
the human rights activists throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, to
the "dissidents," as they came to be called. It was they who first perceived
the gravity of the crisis into which the Communist system had brought itself;
they who sacrificed their work, their careers, their families, and sometimes
their lives to challenge its hegemony; they who unfailingly drew attention to
the appalling mess caused by the disintegration of the system; and they who
prodded a quiescent population into supporting a plausible opposition. Many of
them have now reaped the reward, if reward it be, of replacing their former
oppressors in the highest reaches of government, or of leading the opposition in
the merging consitutional democracies.
The true magnitude of thei achievement, however, goes beyond the practical
and the pragmatic. What has been consistently overlooked, in the East and the
West, is the vital role the human rights has played as an ideological force.
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Throughout its history, and almost until the end of the Brezhnev period of
"stagnation," communism miraculously retained a moral edge. Somehow the
suspicion remained that it was ethically superior to the ideologies and the
systems that opposed it, especially to capitalism. It is not 50 very long since
even Brezhev's functionaries enjoyed that smug sense of ideological superiority
that came with being "on the side of history, which was Marxism-Lenism's great
gift, of course, the confidence that put so many of its opponents on the
defensive, even when reason told them otherwise. Nobody could have guessed,
when Brezhnev became First Secretary of the Party in 1964, that the still
inchoate, unsystematized, and wimpish doctrine of human rights, which was just
beginning to take shape in parts of Europe, would flourish and expand until it
challenged and then overthrew the invicible doctrine of clas struggle, economic
rights, and universal equality.
The strength of human rights as an idea and an ideal derived from the fact
that it was deeply rooted in notions of the dignity and the autonomy of the
individual, who could not be arbitrarily abused or persecuted in the name of any
group or collective. Thus, when Amnesty International was founded in London in
1962, its organizers anchored themselves to Article 19 of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights ("everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and
expression"), and them set about applying its principles to all individuals
everywhere, whatever their status, class, race, religion, or nationality, or the
political complexion of their governments. Amnesty also established a
miraculously simple mechanism whereby individuals in countires where these
principles were respected could intercede for those in places where they were
not. It became a grassroots organization of a new type, domestic and personal
in its day-to-day operations (individuals writing petitions for individuals),
global in its application.
Amnesty spawned a multitude of similar or more specialized groups and
galvanized existing organizations into fresh activism. By the mid-170s there
was a rapidly growing network of highly motivated and increasingly efficient
human rights bodies that united activists from the more or less democratic
countries into a powerful extraterritorial citizens' lobby. They would not have
had anything like the impact they ultimately achieved, however, had persecuted
minorities in other parts of the world not begun simultaneously to grope their
way toward a similar doctrine of individual rights, and to see in these ideas
the only possible platform on which to oppose abuses of overwhelming power.
This was especially true in two areas of the world that, according to the
political categories of the cold war, appeared to be ideological opposites:
Latin America, with its fascist-type military dictatorships of the right, and
the Soviet bloc, with its Communist dictatorships of the left. In the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe, the tasks of the opposition were very different from
those in Latin America. Civil society, as most of the world knows it, had been
destroyed and supplanted by a Communist Party whose organizations and
representatives penetrated every social organism, every street, and every
building. No group or organization was allowed to operate independently of the
Party or its control, not even the church (although the degree of control of the
different churches varied from faith to faith and country to country, Poland
being the freest in this respect). Every attempt to maintain an independent
point of view, or to create an independent organization of any kind, was ipso
facto subversive, counterrevolutionary ("he who is not with us is against us"),
the result of false consciousness and "bourgeois" thinking--in a word, treason.
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What the idea of human rights offered individuals confronted by this
crusingly monolithic system was a seemingly non-subversive ("non-ideological")
platform from which to oppose it. There was nothing obviously contradictory
between the rights of the individual to freedom of opinion, belief, assembly,
and so on, and the rights that were supposedly conferred by Communist ideology.
From Stalin onward, Communist Party leaders took great care to include these
rights in their written constitutions, even if they had invariably reserved to
themselves the crucial "righ" to determine how all those other rights should be
interpreted. And so, in the early 1960s, when a more universal idea of human
rights began to gain ground in Western countries, there seemed some hope that
the Communist interpretation of human rights might converge with it. Indeed,
the strategy of early Soviet dissidents like Alexander Esenin-Volpin and Valery
Chalidze was precisely to force the Soviet authorities to observe their own
laws, their own legal enshrinement of some of these rights.
After the invasion of Czecholsovakia in 1968, it became clear that
"convergence" was out of the question. It was then that other dissidents, not
only in the Soviet Union but also in Poland and (somewhat later) in Hungary
and Czechoslovakia, set out on the long march to create an ethical and social
alternative to communism, to establish an informal set of institutions parallel
to, and independent of, official structures in their countries-to create, in
other words, a civil society. In every case, their guide and their goal was the
protection of the human rights of the individual.
For these stirrings to take place, there had to be a long period or growth
and development, during which individuals and groups appeared who grasped the
essential principles of human rights, assimilated them, and began to apply them
in their own surroundings. Many of these individuals seemed to come out of
nowhere and achieved public notice for the first time as already fully fledged
"dissidents," usually as a result of being persecuted or put on trial or jailed.
But others came from established positions in all walks of life; their
transformation into opponents of the regime was a personal response to the
ethical dilemmas posed by their ways of living and working. They emerged
slowly, step by step. The moment of their transportation from "loyal citizen"
to "dissident" is impossible to determine. What is certain, however, is that
such people almost never turned back.
II.
Among these latter individuals, no example is more dramatic than that of
Andrei Sakharov. What makes Sakharov's career so absorbing and so emblematic,
as both volumes of these memoirs demonstrate, is not simply the fame that he won
at the end of his life as the Soviet Union's most eminent and powerful
"dissiden," or the enormous distance that he traveled from darling of the
establishment to persecuted pariah, but the really heroic grandeur of his
psychological and introspective theoretical physicist to a fearless public
defender of human rights.
There seemed to be little in sakharo's brilliant early career as a scientist
to indicate the crises that lay ahed. In 1948, at the age of 27, one year
before the Soviet Union exploded its first atom bomb, he was invited to join
the research team of Igor Tamm, which was already working to develop an even
more powerful weapon. For twenty years, in Moscow and at a secret research
center in Turkmenia in Central Asia, known by the Orwellian code name of the
Installation, Sakharov labored loyally in the service of this cause. Owing to
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the secrecy of the operation, he lived in virtual anonymity. But his role was
pivotal, and he came to be known as the "father" of the Soviety H-bomb.
He was loaded with honors. In 1953, when the first Soviety thermonuclear
device was exploded (trailing the Americans by about nine months), Sakharov was
rewarded with the title of Hero of Socialist Labor, a Stalin Prize worth half a
million rubles, an expensive dacha in an exclusive suburb of Moscow, and access
to luxury stores reserved for top members of the nomenklatura. That same year
he became the first person ever to be elected to the Soviety Academy of
Sciences by a unanimous vote. Two years later, in November 1955, Sakharov and
his fellow scientists successfully tested their first H-bomb, this time about a
year and a half behind the Americans. It was a stnning achievement for the
generally backward Soviety scientific estabishment, and it landed Sakharov a
second Hero of Socialist Labor medal and a Lenin Prize.
But it was then that Sakharov experienced his first twinges of doubt about
the morality of nuclear weapons. In 1958 he published a scholarly article on
the genetic effects of radioactive fallout from weapon testing, in which he
calculated that the nuclear bombs tested by both sides up to 1957 would probably
result in the untimely deaths of a half-million people. Sakharov also took
issue with Edward Teller's views on the efficacy of mutually assured deterrence,
and argued that "peacful coexistence, disarmament, and, above all, a halt to
nuclear testing" was the best route to "a better life for all of mankind" (the
latter phrase was taken from one of Teller's books). But his qualms were stated
in an article commissioned and disseminated by the Soviet government. It hardly
qualified as dissent.
Still, a seed had been planted. Three years later Sakharov experienced his
first real crisis, when Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union would break
a previously agreed-on moratorium with the West, which Sakharov wholeheartedly
supported, and resume nuclear testing unilaterally. In 1961, at a Kremlin
meeting between government leaders and nuclear scientists, Sakharov boldly sent
a note to Khrushchev suggesting that such a step might jeopardize the test ban
negotiations and the cause of disarmament and world peace. Khrushchev angrily
responded with a reprimand in front of the other guests:
Sakharov
has moved beyond science into politics. Here he's poking his
nose where it doesn't belong. You can be a good scientist without understanding
a thing about politics
Leave politics to us--we're the specialists. You
make your bombs and test them and we won't interfere with you, we'll help you.
Sakharov, well aware of his special status, was suitably chastened by
Khrushchev's remarks, and for the time being he chose to obey his political
masters, though not without misgivings. At a meeting the following month,
Khrushchev inquired whether Sakharov realized his error. "My opinion hasn't
changed," replied Sakharov, "but I do my work and carry out orders." The orders
this time were to test a device of record-breaking power nicknamed "Big Bomb.
Sakharov agreed to the test, on the condition that he could test a "clean"
version of the bomb, which would reduce its absolute power and also the amount
of radioactive fallout produced. The bomb was successfully exploded in 1961,
and a few months later Sakharov was awarded his third Hero of Socialist Labor
medal, which was personally pinned on by Khrushchev, with a Russian bearhug and
a kiss.
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In 1962, however, Sakharov experienced a more serious crisis. East and West
were testing again. The Soviets had set up two nuclear fission installations in
place of one, on the principle that competition between the two experiments
would accelerate progress, and they proposed to test their next device also in
two versions. Sakharov was appalled. He was prepared to accept a single test,
but he calculated that a second test would cause at least 100,0 unnecessary
deaths from the extra fallout. He fought the decision all the way up to the
Politburo, and even called Khrushchev to oppose it. But he failed, and his
memoir reveals that "it was a terrible defeat for me. A terrible crime was
about to be committed, and I could do nothing to prevent it. I was overcome by
my impotence, unbearable bitterness, shame, and humiliation. I put my face down
on my desk and wept."
All of this was, of course, far from the public eye. Sakharov was still
virtually unknown outside the Soviet scientific establishment, and the Moscow
Test Ban Treaty of 1963 allowed him to assuage his doubts and to maintain his
loyalty without doing further violence to his conscience. Apart from a brief
and fiery campaign to defeat the election of a Lysenko protege to the Academy
of Sciences, he retired into the shadows of anonymity again to devote himself
to studying the peaceful uses of nuclear explosions, and to exploring the
intricacies of "grand" cosmology. But he could not insulate himself entirely
from weapons development, nor could he ignore continuing Soviet discussions
throughout the 1960s about military strategy. He came to the conclusion that
thermonuclear war was being discussed as a real possibility, as a "fact of
life":
I could not stop thinking about this, and I came to realize that the
technical, military, and economic problems are secondary; the fundamental issues
are political and ethical. Gradually, subconsciously, I was approaching an
irrevocable step--a wide-ranging public statement on war and peace and other
global issues. I took that step in 1968.
The step in question was the publication of Reflections on Progress, Peaceful
Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, Sakharov's first and most celebrated
book. It made him a celebrity and a "dissident" overnight, although he and his
family and his friends were hardly aware of it at the time.
How did it come about that it was Sakharov who broke out of the charmed
circle of privilege and power and declared his public opposition to the
government's policies, rather than, say, his distinguished mentor Tamm, or any
of the other equally brilliant and skeptical colleagues described in these
pages? Few of them, according to Sakharov, had any genuine illusions about the
political masters they served, yet not one was prepared to push his dissent to
the point of public disagreement.
A recurring theme of Sakharov's memoirs is his singular apartness from the
mainstream of Soviet life. His background was typical enough for a member of
the Soviet intelligentsia. There were lawyers, priests, and teachers among his
forebears. Both his parents were teachers, and after the October Revolution the
family had been "compressed" into an overcrowded communal apartment, with
primitive services and very little space or comfort. Unlike most people in
their predicament who were forced to share with strangers, four branches of the
Sakharov family were able to live together, thus preserving a modicum of privacy
and intimacy. Andrei (who was born in 1921) and his younger brother Georgi grew
up in a cozy, protected environment that cushioned them from many of the
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rigors of life in postrevolutionary Moscow.
There was also the larger-than-life-size figure of his successful father.
Although he taught physics until almost the end of his life, Dmitri Sakharov was
best known as the author of popular scientific works such as The Struggle for
Light, and of textbooks such as Problems in Physics, which went through thirteen
editions and brought him considerable sums of money. The son adored the father,
whom he describes as gentle, wise, and compassionate, with a great sense of
humor and a capacity for enjoying life. He was fond of that most un-Russian
saying, "a sense of moderation is the greatest gift of the gods," which was to
have considerable influence on his son.
Dmitri was deeply devoted to his children, and determined to give them the
best education possible. Still, it comes as something of a shock to learn that
Sakharov received the first seven years of his education almost entirely from
private tutors, and continued to be tutored at home even after entering high
school in 1934. One of those tutors was his father, who took it for granted
that the son would study physics-which he did, graduating from high school as
one of only two honors students in his class and thus gaining entry to the
physics department of Moscow University. In 1942 he graduated from the
university with a brilliant record, completing a five-year course in four years
owing to the outbreak of the war.
Sakharov's sheltered background appears to have endowed him from the
beginning with a certain aloofness. He writes that he made "no friends and no
enemies" at high school, and no friends at the university until his last year
there. He hardly noticed when several of his classmates left to dig anti-tank
ditches, or when several failed to return. When called for enlistment himself,
he failed both the aptitude test for the air force and the medical test for
general military service, and was eventually assigned to a cartridge factory,
where he was 50 maladroit that he was sent out to chop trees. When he was
transferred to quality control in the blanking shop, he enraged his bosses by
refusing to turn a blind eye to rusty shell casings. Only when he made it into
the laboratory did he distinguish himself: he invented a device for testing the
hardness of armor-piercing shells, for which he received 3,000 rubles and a
patent for his design.
There is a curious paradox in this mild-mannered young physicist's attraction
to working with armaments. In wartime, this was perhaps inevitable, and
Sakharov spent the rest of the war perfecting shell designs. But after the war,
too, while working on relativity theory at the Physics Institute of the
Academy of Sciences, he kindled to news of the atom bomb, and dreamed of
improving upon existing devices. When nuclear fission research was introduced
into the Physics Institute, he did not hesitate to join, and threw himself with
zeal into the quest for a superbomb.
In his memoirs, he offers a variety of explanations for his single-minded
obsession of the time. One is summed up in Fermi's famous remark that research
on thermonuclear explosions was "great physics," or, as Sakharov puts it, "a
genuine theoretician's paradise." A second reason was the freshness of the
memory of the recent world war: it, too, was an "exercise in barbarity," so that
the inhuman nature of the bombs that he was trying to build seemed no worse than
what had gone before. And third, the Soviets shared American beliefs about
strategic parity and the value of deterrence--for their own side, of course.
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But ultimately something more intangible was involved:
Our initial zeal
was inspired more by emotion than by intellect. The
monstrous destructive force, the scale of our enterprise and the price paid for
it by our poor, hungry, war-torn country, the casualties resulting from the
neglect of safety standards and the use of forced labor in our mining and
manufacturing activities, all these things inflamed our sense of drama and
inspired us to make a maximum effort so that the sacrifices--which we accepted
as inevitable--would not be in vain. We were possessed by a true war
psychology, which became still more overpowering after our transfer to the
Installation.
So it was a matter of politics all along. The memoirist, to his credit, does
not skirt his own cold war attitudes, or his personal responsibility for
developing the bomb, and some of his most fascinating pages are devoted to the
morality of this issue, particularly when he comes to discuss the
Oppenheimer-Teller conflict.
Sakharov sympathizes with Oppenheimer in these pages. He is aware of the
resemblance of his own later behavior to Oppenheimer's. And yet he decides,
paradoxically, in favor of Teller, on the grounds that the Soviet government of
the time would never have honored an American-Soviet agreement to abandon
research on the H-bomb. "Any U.S. move toward abandoning or suspending work on
a thermonuclear weapon would have been perceived either as a cunning, deceitful
maneuver, or as evidence of stupidity or weakness." In Sakharov's view, it was
not the principle of Oppenheimer's dissent, but its timing, that was wrong:
I cannot help but feel deeply for and empathize with Oppenheimer, whose
personal tragedy has become a universal one. Some striking parallels between
his fate and mine arose in the 1960s, and later I was to go even further than
Oppenheimer had. But in the 1940s and 1950s my position was much closer to
Teller's, practically a mirror image
so that, in defending his actions,
I
am also defending what I and my colleagues did at the time.
The publication of Reflections in 1968 might be described as Sakharov's
abandonment of Teller's position for Oppenheimer's. It started him down the
path that was to take him "even further" than the latter's. And his timing, in
retrospect, was also not fortuitous. The "thaw" that had begun in all areas of
Soviet life after Stalin's death, and especially after Khrushchev's secret
speech of 1956, had ground to a halt by the early 1960s, and it was beginning to
be reversed even before Khrushchev's overthrow in 1964. The trial of the
writers Sinyavsky and Daniel in 1966 indicated a decisive turn by Brezhnev's
regime toward neo-Stalinism.
It also demonstrated, however, that a significant number of Soviet
intellectuals, including many form among the scientific elite, were not ready to
reverse themselves easily. It was the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial, together with a
series of connected trials of Ginzburg, Bukovsky, Litvinov, and others, that
radicalized the Soviet intelligentsia, and led to the formation of what was to
become a powerful and vocal dissident movement, with civil and human rights as
its battle cry. Sakharov was still remote from those circles, but he signed at
least a couple of the protest letters that began to circulate at that time
(including one on behalf of Sinyavsky and Daniel), and he wrote Reflections
under the immediate influence of the Prague Spring, on which so many Soviet
intellectuals had pinned their hopes for liberalization at home. When
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Czechoslovakia was brutally crushed, and Sakharov was dismissed from the
Installation on security grounds, he was brought face to face not only with his
own powerlessness, but also with the powerlessness of Soviet intellectuals
generally to influence the course of political and social events. And he
finally understood how devoid of rights, whether human or civil, the individual
in Soviet society was.
The subsequent speed of his transformation into a dissident and human rights
activist was breathtaking. In 1969 he still considered himself a part of the
establishment: "Although I had bluntly criticized many official actions and
offered advice concerning future polity, deep down I still felt that the
government I criticized was my government." In 1970 he was still expecting to be
able to get Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB, on the telephone. AS late as
1971 he had plans for a personal meeting with Brezhnev. With Reflections,
however, he had crossed A Rubicon.
In no time at all he was swiftly sought out by some of the most prominent
dissidents in the land. Solzhenitsyn, himself officially silenced by
censorship, sent Sakharov his criticism of Reflections and visited him to
discuss them. Valentin Turchin (the author of a work, similar to Sakharov's,
called The Inertia of Fear) enlisted Sakharov's support in writing an appeal to
Soviet leaders for democracy and intellectual freedom. roy Medvedev, whom
Sakharov had first met in 1966, and who also signed the Turchin appeal,
persuaded him to intervene on behalf of his twin brother, Zhores, who had just
been incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. And Valery Chalidze accompanied
Sakharov on his first trip to observe a political trial and later enrolled him,
somewhat against his will, in Chalidze's newly founded Committee on Human
Rights.
It was through Chalidze that Sakharov met Elena Bonner, the woman who was to
have a profound influence on his further development. It appears to have been
love at first sight. He was emotionally ripe for it: his first wife, Klava, had
died of cancer in March 1969. Although he is reticent on the subject, it would
appear that their marriage was less than happy; there are amply hints that
Sakharov's relations not only with her two children were not very close.
Sakharov himself had been remote emotionally and physically, having spent many
years closeted at the Installation in Central Asia, swallowed up by research and
professional duties. Perhaps he recalled the troubling last words of his
father, who died in 1961: "When you were at the university, you said that
uncovering the secrets of nature could make you happy. We don't choose our
fate, but I'm sorry that yours took a different turn; I imagine you could have
been happier." It was not clear whether his father was speaking of personal or
professional matters, but after the appearance of Reflections his Aunt Tusya
told Sakharov that his father would have been proud of him.
Bonner, a pediatrician, was the daughter of two distinguished Old Bolsheviks,
the Armenian revolutionary leader Gevork Alikhanov and Ruth Bonner, a descendant
of Siberian Jews. In 1937 her parents were arrested in one of Stalin's purges
and Alikhanov was killed in the camps (Ruth survived and died in 1987),
wrenching the 14-year-old Elena and her brother from their privileged home and
depositing them with their impoverished grandmother. Despite this tragic,
though typical, background, Elena was a loyal Soviet citizen; she had even
joined the Party in the mid-1960s. But the invasion of Czechoslovakia
radicalized her, too, and in 1970, when Sakharov met her, she had just involved
herself in the Leningrad hijacking trial, in which one of the principal
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defendants was her friend Edward Kuznetsov. The Kuznetsov and two others were
condemned to death, Bonner displayed incredible energy and ingenuity in
organizing their defense. Sakharov was drawn into it, and their joint efforts
in that passionate, humanitarian campaign seem to have cemented their love. In
January 1972, mainly at Sakharov's insistence, they were married.
Thereafter there was hardly a case or a cause in which Sakharov and Bonner
were not engaged: the incarceration of healthy people in insane asylums, the
expulsion of the Crimena Tatars, freedom of religion, freeedom to emigrate,
repression of the ethnic Germans, censorship, suppression of the samizdat
Chronicle of Current Events, the Borisov-Fainberg case, the Bukovsky case, the
Krasnov-Levitin trial, the Yakir-Krasin trial. From composing another closely
reasoned missive to the authorities on economic, social, and foreign policy (the
"Memorandum" of 1971), Sakharov progressed to writing statements on violations
of human rights, letters of protest, and appeals for persecuted individuals.
The culmination of this first burst of activity came in 1973 when Sakharov,
together with Solzhenitsyn, became the object of a virulent hate campaign in the
Soviet press, as well as the victim of numerous provocations. By now the two
giants of the dissident movement had become a factor in foreign policy. those
were the days of detente ("a polite form of the cold war," Sakharov called it),
when Nixon and Kissinger were cozying up to Brezhnev and moving toward a form of
condominium based on the superior force of the two superpowers. Brezhnev wanted
access to American credits and technology, but Congress and the American people
had their eyes on the Soviet government's treatment of its dissidents and its
suppression of human rights, and preferred to listen to Sakharov and
Solzhenitsyn, whose message was that that Soviet leadership was cruel,
unprincipled, and unreliable. how could one trust the foreign policy, they
argued, of a government that persecuted its own citizens? It didn't cut much
ice with the White House, but Congress passed the Jackson-Vanik amendment and
Brezhney's version of detente virtually collapsed.
Sakharov is exceedingly interesting on the subject of his relation with
Solzhenitsyn during this period. The two men respected one another, but
Solzhenitsyn was irritated by Sakharov's openness to all comers and by his
readiness to espouse all forms of protest, and Sakharov found Solzhenitsyn
unduly calculating in his campaigns. Sakharov reports that he was chilled, as
early as 1970, by Solzhenitsyn's response to a question about what to do on
behalf of two celebrated and harshly persecuted dissidents: "Nothing! They
attacked the enemy with a battering ram. They chose their own fate and can't be
saved. The attempt would only harm them and others." Later, in 1973, when both
men were under fire, Solzhenitsyn sent his second wife to remonstrate with
Sakharov over the jackson-Vanik amendment, saying that it was biased in favor of
the Jews and did nothing to solve Russia's other problems. At their last
meeting in the Soviet Union, a few months later, Solzhenitsyn reproached
Sakharov for his alleged willingness to emigrate, ignoring the fact that
Sakharov's plan to go abroad was motivated by a desire to save his stepchildren
from persecution. His intention, undoubtedly unrealistic, was to return to the
Soviet Union immediately.
The two men were vastly different in background, upbringing, temperament,
character, and personal convictions. It was inevitable that they would disagree
about almost everything, and they did. In 1973 Solzhenitsyn published his
Letter to the Soviet Leaders, which was in essence a reply to, and a polemic
with, Sakharov's Reflections. Sakharov responded with a criticism of the
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Letter, to which Solzhenitsyn replied again. The debate between the
conservative, traditionalist author and the liberal, democratic scientist
re-enated in many ways the old battle between Slavophiles and Westerners. It
continues to this day: Solzhenitsyn's latest recommendations for political
change, How Are We to Reorder Russia? , appeared in the Komsomolskaya Pravda in
November, while the anniversary of Sakharov's death last month brought admiring
recapitulations of his philosophy.
The personal fates of the two protagonists also diverged after 1973. In
January 1974 Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported to West Germany. Sakharov
remained to continue his personal crusade, and it is typical of his
single-mindedness that, having embraced the cause of human rights, he should
carry his campaign to its logical conclusions. It was not sufficient for him to
write articles and protests, telephone, lobby, talk to foreign journalists,
attent trials, even demonstrate in support of his goals, as someone of his
eminence might be expected to do. In Junu 1974, during President Nixon's visit
to Moscow, he decided on the extreme measure of a hunger strike. Had he been a
writer, one might have suspected him of seeking material--and it is not
difficult to understand some of Solzhenitsyn's exasperation with the seeming
naivete and pig-headedness of some of Sakharov's tactics. But as these memoirs
show, they were brilliantly of a piece with the man.
Sakhavov had thoroughly assimilated the principles that were painfully worked
out by the pioneers of the dissident movement in the 1960s and early 1970s. The
principles were these: that to oppose the Soviet regime successfully, one had to
be absolutely true to one's convictions, never compromise where moral values
were concerned, maintain complete openness in a society obsessed by secrecy, and
above all hold fast to one's inner freedom whatever the cost. Similar
principles were being worked out by dissidents in many of the other countries of
Eastern Europe, in a movement that would acquire an irresistible momentum in the
years to come. In the early 1970s, however, there was nothing inevitable about
that momentum.
These exacting principles were fiendishly difficult to live up to in daily
life. almost a saintly patience and devotion to the cause were requred, the
qualities that so many of hte dissidents displayed, at least in their finest
moments. In the event, the principles withstood the test of practice and fueled
all the leaders of the human rights movements throughout the Soviet bloc,
endowing them with amazing strength and durability. Sakharov was to become one
of the finest of those leaders, in the courage of his personal behavior and in
the clarity of his thinking. He quickly grasped that the dissidents were
engaged in a mortal struggle with a dying ideology, and that, although that
ideology would, in its death throes, continue to claim many victims, the idea of
human rights was intrinsically superior.
This was a truth that Jimmy Carter, drawing on the experience of the civil
rights movement in the United States, also intuited when he threw the weight of
the American government behind the drive for human rights and welcomed their
entrenchment as a natural and rightful extension of the ideas of American
democracy. sakharov immediately recognized the importance of this step when he
heard about Carter's inaugural address, with its statement that "our moral sense
dictates a clear-cut preference for those societies which share with us an
abiding respect for human rights." Though he did not approve of Carter's
inconsistency in his subsequent policies toward the Soviet Union, Sakharov
writes that "the fact remains striking that for the first time the head of a
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great power had announced an unambiguous commitment to the international defense
of human rights."
The Soviet leaders, too, had recently been forced to pay lip service to human
rights by agreeing to "basket three," the provision about respect for human
rights established by the signatory sattes of the Helsinki Final Act in the fall
of 1975-the same year that Sakharov published My country and the World and was
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for "his love of truth and strong belief in the
inviolability of the human being." The Soviets had done everything they could to
water down and to restrict the provisions of basket three, but they had not
foreseen that they would be faced with an American government (backed by Western
European leaders) that was serious about human rights for the first time since
the war. Basket three presented human rights groups throughout the Communist
bloc with an unexpected polical lever with which to pressure their repressive
governments.
The Helsinki Final Act gave the West an ideological edge. the words "human
rights" began to appear with increasing frequency on the from pages of Pravda
and other Soviet newspapers, and no matter how they were twisted and turned
inside out to mean their opposite, or unfavorably contrasted with the "economic
rights" supposedly guaranteed by the Soviet citizens to read and to digest. As
Simon Leys recently noted about China, you know you have won the debate when
your opponent begins to use your ideas; and so it was in the Soviet case,
although few realized it at the time. The very readiness of the Soviet press to
argue the merits of human rights was a battle lost, even if the larger war was
to continue for another ten years. For this reason, if any American
administration deserves the historical credit for promoting the democratic
revolution in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, it is Carter's more than
Reagan's.
But ten years is a very long time. Sakharov was obliged to embark on many
more hunger strikes, to endure unspeakable privations before the goal was
reached. The middle section of his Memoirs reads like a Who's Who of the
dissident world, like an encyclopedia of Soviet trials and Soviet repression.
Sakharov was to see close friends imprisoned, exiled, sent abroad, or killed.
His children and step-children were victimized and forced to emigrate. His wife
had her near-blindness exploited and was herself humiliated before she could
obtain medical treatment. The culmination came with Sakharov's public
opposition to the invasion of Afghanistan, his exile to Gorky, and his six years
of dreadful persecution and blackmail, including hospitalization and brutal
force-feeding. Bonner has already written eloquently about the Gorky period in
Alone Together, her book on the same subject; Sakharov adds new details on those
harrowing events, but he does not change our understanding of them.
III.
The Memoirs end with Gorbachev's historic phone call to Sakharov in Gorky in
December 1986, informing him that the decree on his banishment had been
rescinded and that he and Elena Bonner could return to Moscow. The next (and
last) three years of Sakharov's life are described in Moscow and Beyond, which
Sakharov completed literally on the eve of his death. Moscow and Beyond is more
than a coda to the Memoirs. It is a dramatic eyewitness account of the birth of
the parliamentary process in the Soviet Union, and of Sakharov's
participation, first reluctant and then selflessly energetic, in that process as
the uncrowned leader of the opposition.
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By the time Sakharov returned to Moscow, Gorbachey's policies of glasnost and
perestroika were reasonably well advanced, and Gorbachev himself, in his
speeches and in his book Perestroika, was expressing many of the very ideas for
which Sakharov had been punished and sent into exile. Sakharov was skeptical at
first. But unlike many of his fellow dissidents, he did not console himself
with bitter jokes and personal recriminations against the Soviet leaders, nor
did he take a pessimistic view of the political processes under way in his
country. He concluded that Gorbachev meant business, that the reforms were
serious and genuine, that the dissidents had in effect won their initial battle
against the system. The important thing was to build on that victory, to
entrench the gains that had been made.
Some of Sakharov's dissident friends feared that he was badly informed and
gullible in his support for Gorbachev, but not for a moment did Sakharov lose
his head or allow himself to be co-opted. From Gorky he had mailed Gorbachev a
long list of political prisoners whose release he demanded as a sign of
Gorbachev's good intentions, and whom he referred to again in their telephone
conversation. Many were being set free, but Sakharov continued to pressure the
government for swifter action. Although his ill treatment in gorky and already
in his mid-60s, he was indefatigable in championing the rights of the uprooted
Crimean Tatars, the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh and Sumgait, the Georgians
slaughtered in the streets of Tbilisi, the Meskhetians in Uzbekistan, the
independence movements in the Baltic states, and countless individuals. He
traveled personally to Azerbaijan and Armenia as part of a fact-finding mission,
to Komi in Siberia in support of an imprisoned dissident. He became an active
member of the governing council of the Memorial Society, an unofficial
organization set up in early 1988 to commemorate the millions of political
prisoners who had died in the Soviet Union during Soviet rule. He supported
demands for full openness about the Chernobyl disaster, and he championed the
publication of The Gulag Archipelago.
Everyone wanted his views on every conceivable aspect of Soviet policy, and
his answers were treated with as much respect as if he had headed a party of
millions. Finally, in January 1989, he bowed to the inevitable and acceded to
multiple requests to stand for elections to the reorganized Congress of People's
Deputies. There were some near-farcical maneuverings at the Academy of
Sciences to deny him the nomination, but in May he was comfortably voted in
with a group of similarly liberal colleagues. Almost at once he became one of
five chairmen of the main parliamentary opposition, the Interregional Group of
Deputies. (Yeltsin was, and remains, another.)
By this time Sakharov had met Gorbachev face to face, once at a meeting of
the International Foundation for the Survival and Development of Humanity
he appeared intelligent, self-possessed, and quick-witted in discussion, and
the policies he was pursuing at the time impressed me as consistently liberal"),
and again at a meeting between Gorbachev and leading representatives of the
intelligentsia, where Sakharov angered the president by his spirited defense of
the Armenians. In the Soviet parliament, however, the two men clashed
repeatedly. It began on the very first day of the Congress, when Sakharov
opposed the automatic election of Gorbachev as president without a proper
debate, and demanded that the Congress be given increased powers for its work.
A testy Gorbachev responded by announcing that all speeches, including
Sakharov's, would be limited to five minutes, in effect cutting him off in
mid-flow. It was a pattern that was repeated at future sessions of the
Congress, culminating in the famous incident when Gorbachev switched off the
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loudspeakers while Sakharov was still speaking. (He had already switched off
the television cameras when challenged from the floor by a member of the
Interregional Group of
Deputies.)
Sakharov's account of the Congress fills the last chapter of Moscow and
Beyond and is a wonderful climax to the memoirs as a whole. In these last
pages, we observe Sakharov emerging as the undisputed leader of the Soviet
opposition, the only man in the Congress with the courage, the vision, the depth
of knowledge, and the breadth of understanding to go head to head with
Gorbachev. Gorbachev himself seems to have recognized the fact; when Sakharov
walked out during the voting for president, Gorbachev sought him out to ask why.
Sakharov was approached by Gorbachev's closest aides, Alexander Yakovlev and
Anatoly Lukyanov, to discuss contentious issues on the agenda, and finally, at
the beginning of the second week, Gorbachev acceded to Sakharov's request for a
personal meeting to discuss some of their main differences. The old dissident,
with his usual bluntness, went straight to the point:
Mikhail Sergeyevich
there's a crisis of trust in the leadership and
the Party. Your personal authority has dropped almost to zero
The
country, and you personally, are at a crossroads--either accelerate the process
of change to the maximum, or try to retain the administrative-command system in
all of its aspects. In the first case you will have to rely on the left and
you'll be able to count on the support of many brave and energetic people. In
the second case, you know yourself whose support you'll have, but they will
never forgive you for backing perestroika.
Gorbachev replied that he was tied to the policy of perestroika forever, but
that he was against "big leaps" and dramatic gestures, and he was convinced that
the people would understand him.
After some further discussion, Sakharov returned to his main point: "I'm very
concerned that the only political result of the Congress will be your
achievement of unlimited personal power-the 18th Brumaire in contemporary
dress. You got this power without elections, you weren't even on the slate of
candidates for the Supreme Soviet, and you became its chairman without even
being a member."
Gorbachev: "What's the matter, didn't you want me to be elected?"
Sakharov: "You know that's not the case, that in my opinion no alternative to
you exists. But I'm talking about principles, not personalities. And besides,
you're vulnerable to pressure, to blackmail by people who control the channels
of information. Even now they're saying that you took bribes in Stavropol,
160,000 rubles has been mentioned. A provocation? Then they'll find something
else. Only election by the people can protect you from attack."
Gorbachev: "I'm absolutely clean. And I'll never submit to blackmail--not
from the right, not from the left!"
The frankness of Sakharov's account of these meetings is extraordinary in the
context of official Soviet reticence and the half-truths that pass for political
memoirs in that country. One of the great virtues of his second volume is the
light it throws on the negotiations of the Soviet political establishment in
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this time of turbulent change. For anyone interested in the vicissitudes of
perestroika and glasnost it is essential reading, bringing the personalities and
the forces alive with a clarity unmatched by any source I know.
This posthumous book also underscores the immense tragedy of Sakharov's
death. It came too soon, cruelly depriving the opposition of its one figure of
undoubted international stature. Allowing for the differences of detail,
Sakharov's position before his death was analogous to that of other prominent
former dissidents and human rights activists who have achieved power in
ex-Communist Europe: Walesa, Mazowiecki, Havel, Dienstbier, Goncz, Tudjman, and
Petrle. All these men were in the forefront of the ideological struggle against
communism during the 1970s and 1980s, all made the leap from dissident to
political leader, all progressed from wrestling with ethical, social, and human
issues to grappling with affairs of state and the temptations of power, and all
unexpectedly inherited the fruits of a lifetime of struggle, often against their
own desires.
Sakharov did not exercise direct political power himself. The democratic
revolution in the Soviet Union had made only partial gains by the time he died
in December 1989. It has since been put into reverse. It is difficult to know
exactly what Sakharov would have done when confronted with recent events in the
Baltics. My guess is that he would have brought Russians out of their houses in
the hundreds of thousands and challenged Gorbachev in the streets and the
squares of the large cities. For he had predicted this outcome to Gorbachey's
face, when he warned against his accumulation of power, and he would have fought
it with his usual directness and stubbornness.
But in his absence, and in the present reaction in Russia, there seems to
be no single figure with the moral authority and bravery to take his place.
What is left are these memoirs, and his example. And there are signs of a
Sakharov cult developing in the Soviet Union. In Yerevan, a street and a
university fellowship have already been named for him. In Moscow, the city
council has announced a competition for a public statue, and a Sakharov museum
is being planned. The Academy of Sciences, which treated him 50 badly while
he was alive, has announced plans for a Sakharov medal to be struck, and is also
setting up a scholarship fund in his name. (In Israel, at the urging of Soviet
Jewish immigrants, a public park has been named for him.)
These memorials are all richly deserved. And yet, as Pushkin noted more than
a century and a half ago, Russians have a penchant for honoring famous men after
their death, having spat upon them while they lived. There can be little doubt
that this noble, modest man would have abhorred a cult, and been indifferent to
empty invocations of his memory. The monument that Sakharov would have
preferred, as these memoirs show, is a democratic and peaceful Russia in a
democratic and peaceful world.
MICHAEL SCAMMELL is professor of Russian literature at Cornell University and
the author of Solzhenitsyn: A Biography (W. W. Norton).
GRAPHIC: portrait; Caption: Andrei Sakharov. portrait
TYPE:
biography
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SUBJECT:
Human rights, Soviet Union; Social change, Soviet Union; Soviet Union,
Politics and government
GEOGRAPHIC:
Soviet Union
LOAD-DATE-MDC: April 01, 1991
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43RD STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
The New Republic Copyright (c) 1991 Information Access Company; The New Republic
Inc. 1991
January 21, 1991
SECTION: Vol. 204; No. 3; Pg. 29
LENGTH: 5320 words
HEADLINE: Czars and commiczars: what time is it in Soviet history
BYLINE: Tucker, Robert C.
BODY:
Western Sovietology and official Soviet thought have differed greatly in
their accounts of Soviet history. The standard Soviet texts-they are now under
reconsideration-tell a story of the rise of socialism," and then "developed
socialism," on the road to full "communism." The Western version, by contrast,
describes what arose under Lenin and Stalin as "Communist totalitarianism."
These opposing viewpoints share a premise. Both believe that the October
Revolution of 1917, in which Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks took power, marked
a fundamental rupture with earlier Russian history.
A longtime dissenter from that view, I believe that what took place after
1917 was a reversion to the Russian past. What emerged under Lenin and Stalin,
in fact, was a kind of neo-czarist order that called itself "socialist." This
means that certain earlier Russian historical patterns reappeared, albeit under
new names. The names are not easy to read, and the patterns are not easy to
decipher, for those who are not versed in Russian history, as very many
Soviet-educated people are not, as many Western Sovietologists are no t.
The view that a revival of old Russian patterns took place after 1917 is now
finding favor, however, among various knowledgeable contemporaries on the Soviet
side, who, thanks to glasnost, have been voicing in print their thoughts on the
relation between the Soviet period and the Russian past. Not surprisingly, this
re-evaluation of the past in the Soviet Union is not unanimous. There are
those who persist in seeing-now in an anti-Soviet light-a disjunction between
the Soviet period and what came before it in Russia. According to the painter
Ilya Glazunov, a "chasm" lies between old Russia, which was based on
Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, and the Soviet Union, which is based on
atheism, proletarian dictatorship, and internationalism. And the philosopher
Aleksandr Tsipko, writing in Moscow News, considers the Soviet period a kind of
hiatus in history:
We probably deceive ourselves in thinking
that we lived in the twentieth century. Maybe
history just performed an experiment on
us, freezing our brains, thoughts, and feelings,
compelling us to wander about the
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world asleep, committing a mass of idiocies,
murdering one another, doing no end of
atrocious things.
Hence the present task for Russia is to "return to the movement of
historical time." Some of Tsipko's fellow citizens carry placards that say:
"Seventy years on the road to nowhere!"
Still, a different view is widespread among many Soviet intellectuals. As
they see it, the seventy tragic years traversed roads previously taken in
Russian history. "Feudalism" is the term that some use to express the notion
that history in the Soviet period went forward in a backward way-that czarist
absolutism, and centralized bureaucratic statism, made a comeback in the
framework of the Communist party-state. According to Mikhail Gorbachey's close
colleague Aleksandr Yakovlev, "Socialism hasn't really been built in the
country. What we have is department feudalism." Fyodor Burlatsky, the editor of
Literaturnaya Gazeta, calls the Soviet system "feudal socialism." The theater
director Mark Zakharov calls it "our feudal-patriarchal way of life." And the
historian A. Mertsalov refers to the "feudal traditions" of the Soviet Academy
of Science, whose thoroughly bureaucratized historical division might be
called an "administrative echelon for affairs of historical science.'
The revival of old Russian patterns began at the outset of the Soviet period,
these thinkers tell us. The nationalization of the country's resources
transformed them into state property, which led to a rebirth of historic Russian
statism. The forcible retention by the new regime of the great bulk of the
minority-inhabited territories on the periphery of the Russian empire meant the
factual rebirth of empire under the title of = Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics. = And whatever was claimed for the establishment of "Soviet power"
by the October Revolution, what actually emerged was a new line of czars under
another name, starting with Lenin.
"Soviet power, from the very first days, showed its autocratic and absolutist
character, only under different slogans," rites Yuri Feofanov in Izvestia.
"Rejecting the division of three powers as a bourgeois principle, our state
authority took all of them unto itself." Elsewhere he cites the new mayor of
Leningrad, the former professor Anatoly Sobchak, as saying, "In Russia, both
in the Soviet period and through the centuries, it was not laws that ruled, but
persons.' So it was, says Feofanov, from Lenin through Stalin, Khrushchev and
Brezhnev, to Gorbachev. And this primacy of the "First Persons" over laws and
institutions extends back through "whole layers" of the history of Russia,
whose sixteenth- and seventeenth-century "assemblies of the land" (zemskie
sobory) had less resemblance to actual parliaments than to Soviet Party
congresses, which have simply "sanctified the sovereign's will." Thus it was not
the Party, or its apparatus, or even a small group of Party progressives that
inaugurated perestroika: it was a new First Person, named Gorbac hev.
The declared goal of perestroika has been to dismantle the
"administrative-command system" handed down from Stalin's time. The writer
Anatoly Ananiev argues that this system had a czarist predecessor, which
originated in the second half of the sixteenth century under the "terrible" czar
Ivan Grozny: "At the base of the administrative-command system lies a situation
in which the people were estranged from the state. It was Ivan Grozny who
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began this. =
The critic Yakov Gordin, writing in Literaturnaya Gazeta, finds in the Soviet
order historical patterns going back to the time of Peter I, in the early
eighteenth century, and to the "Iron Czar" Nicholas I (1825-55):
I do not share the widespread opinion that
1917 marked a great rupture in our history.
I daresay that what we call the Soviet period
has been, in basic features and significance,
a restoration of state principles that ruled
from Peter I through Nicholas 1, principles
that were pressed back after the Great Reforms
and reforms of 1905.
One such state principle was serfdom. It prevailed from the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries down to the Great Reforms of the 1860s, which began with
the emancipation of the serfs. In the system of serfdom, the serf rendered
compulsory service to the landowner either in the form of working time
(barshchina) or produce (obrok). This pattern arose again as a result of the
collectivization of the peasantry in 1929-33. According to K. Liubenchenko, the
vice chairman of the USSR Supreme Soviet's Committee on Legislation, "We
returned to what existed before 1861, that is, to serfdom, all the way to such a
detail as the attachment of the peasants to the land." Vladimir Tikhonov, an
agricultural specialist, writes of "serfdom" in the Soviet countryside and
describes the contemporary bosses and defenders of that system, such as V.
Starodubtsev of the self-styled Peasant Union, as self-owners (krepostniki) and
little czars (tsar'ki).
Cultural life was also enserfed. The literary scholar Yuri Burtin asserts
that "just as our collective-farm countryside, unlike the old serf countryside,
where there was either barshchina or obrok, has had to bear a double burden of
both at once, so our literature, unlike most others, has had to go through both
a multi-level preliminary censorship and then a punitive censorship afterward."
And the theater director Oleg Efremov observes that after the shock wave of
collectivization came
smaller-scale actions aimed at the complete
and total statification and enserfment of
the count 's spiritual life
They created
a state for officials and a theater for officials
We now stand on the threshold of
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the abolition of theatrical serfdom, which
developed in the depths of the Stalinist regime,
where the theatrical setup was part
and parcel of the whole system.
One pillar of the czarist administrative-command system that reappeared under
a Soviet name was the rank order of higher officialdom. In 1722 Czar Peter I
promulgated a Table of Ranks, which established a hierarchy of fourteen military
and corresponding civilian ranks, and made service to the autocratic state a
highroad to noble status. Starting on the bottom rung of the ladder, a military
officer or civil servant could obtain personal and eventually hereditary
nobility on reaching the requisite higher rungs classes one to four carried
hereditary nobility). The Table created an aristocracy of rank chin) and
organized the czarist ruling elite as a corps of uniformed holders of rank
(chinovniki). Vladen Sirotkin, a Soviet historian, finds that in essence this
system rose again in the Soviet period.
Its name was nomenklatura, and it differed from the czarist system in that it
was not made public in the czarist way. In numbers, it became many times larger
than the czarist structure. The nomenklatura, as is well known, comprises the
system of higher Party and Party-controlled governmental ranks and appointments.
Sirotkin tells us that Stalin's subordinates back in the 1920s even went to old
czarist official records for particulars on how to organize the nomenklatura,
whose predecessor was the higher rank-holding class comprising the top four
ranks, subject to appointment by the czar.
How history turned full circle, and the dark postwar Stalin years came to
resemble the repressive 1830s and '40s of Nicholas I, came home to some of us in
Moscow's foreign colony at the time. In 1948, in a secondhand book shop in
Moscow, I picked up an out-of-print Russian translation of Russia in 1839 by
the Marquis de Custine. It was published in 1930 by the Society of Former
Political Prisoners and Exiles, Which Stalin had disbanded in 1935. Custine, who
was no supporter of the French Revolution, came to Russia in 1839 as a sort of
monarchist fellow traveler, and was graciously received in the closed Petersburg
court society, much as the fellow-traveling Gide was received in Stalin's Moscow
of the later 1930s. As with Gide, even a visit of four months under close
surveillance showed Custine enough to disillusion him.
In his book, written in the form of letters home to France, Custine found
that Nicholas I's Russia was not the civilized monarchy he had imagined, but a
true tyranny, a serf state with a czar-cult upheld by officialdom. "The Russian
Empire," he wrote in a typical passage, "is an enormous theatrical hall where,
from all the boxes, people try to follow what is happening behind the scenes."
Of the czar: "There is no man on earth with such unlimited power." Of chin: "A
military regime applied to society as a whole." Of the mode of govern ment:
Absolute monarchy moderated by murder." The book went through many editions
in Western Europe, but czarist censorship prevented it from being published in
Russia. Some educated Russians, however, read it in French, and one of them, a
dissident£ of the day named Aleksandr Herzen, called it "the most entertaining
and intelligent book on Russia by a foreigner." Higher Russian circles were
indignant. By covert arrangement with Count Benckendorf, chief of the Third
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Department of His Majesty's Chancellery, the Russian secret police of that time,
a semi-official publicist named N. I. Grech wrote an anti-Custine tract in
French for circulation abroad.
Custine's Nicholaian Russia was so strikingly similar in some ways to the
Stalinist Russia that we foreigners observed in 1948 that the book seemed to
us to be A Journey for Our Time, the title given it in an English translation
made by Phyllis Kohler, wife of the U.S. deputy chief of mission in Moscow, Foy
Kohler, and published in America in 1953. Walter Bedell Smith, the U.S.
ambassador in Moscow between 1946 and 1949, wrote in a foreword to it: "I could
have taken many pages from his journal and, after substituting present-day names
and dates for those of a century ago, have sent them to the State Department as
my own official reports. =
The Soviet Nicholaian period extended from Stalin's final years through the
neo-Stalinist administration of Brezhnev. This comes through in a memoir
published in 1990 in Qganyok by the Soviet filmmaker EI'dar Riazanov. In 1978 he
and a colleague, Grigory Gorin, set out to make a film to which they gave the
title "Say a Word for a Poor Hussar." Their purpose was to say something by
means of hints and allusions about Stalin's terror-filled time, but to do it in
a film ostensibly about the time of the Iron Czar, when blue-uniformed gendarmes
from the Third Department spied on an oppressed Russian society and made life
very hard even for a great poet like Lermontov. Goskino, the Soviet cinema
ministry, rejected the script and treated the authors, in its customary way, as
serfs. But Gosteleradio, the ministry of television, decided to take up the
project as a way of making a bureaucratic move against Goskino.
It was then, writes Riazanov, that there began the process of polishing up by
censorship that "50 edits a branchy pine tree that it becomes a telegraph pole."
At one point he and Gorin were informed that their script paid too much
attention to the Third Department and portrayed it too negatively. Riazanov
comments:
Good Lord! Did Benckendorf ever think
that a hundred and some years later, his
honor would be upheld by Communists at
the head of Soviet television! Of course,
their solicitude for the Third Department
was understandable: they were terribly
afraid of distressing the department over
on Dzerzhinsky Square. They didn't seem
to realize that by equating the Third Department
with contemporary State Security
they were giving themselves away. In their
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thoughts they equated these two
organization and they were striving to stand up for
the KGB by whitewashing the Nicholaian
gendarmerie.
Later, the two filmmakers were forced to drop the idea of having a hero of
their film declaim, before his execution, Lermontov's classic quatrain:
"Farewell unwashed Russia, / land of slaves, land of masters, / and you in
those blue uniforms, and / you the people that obey them."
The higher chinovnik from Gosteleradio explained: "No verses needed. Not
those anyway." Riazanov broke in to say: "But that's Lermontov. That's a
classic. We learned those verses in third grade." "Nothing doing," replied the
chinovnik. "And you understand why." Such was the czarist Soviet Russia of
1980, a land from whose airways the Lermontov of "Farewell unwashed Russia,
land of slaves, land of masters" was banished. Riazanov says that the
emasculation of the original film was "an indictment of everything on which the
Russian social system rested and still rests. For we are the true and faithful
heirs of all that was worst in czarism."
Nicholas I was succeeded by Alexander II, whose Great Reforms, starting with
the abolition of serfdom, caused him to be remembered as the "czar-liberator."
But this reforming czar was also a tragic one. A5 he drove in his carriage to
the palace in 1881 to sign a draft of the first Russian Constitution, he was
blown to bits by a bomb hurled by revolutionary extremists from a group calling
itself the People's Will. Reaction set in under Alexander III. If the Soviet
Nicholaian period lasted through the early 1980s, what happened in 1985, as
various present-day Russians see it, was the accession of a new czar-liberator.
His name was Mikhail Gorbachev. For was it not, asks historian Yuri Korolev, the
earlier one, Alexander II, who in 1861, for the first time in Russia,
proclaimed glasnost?
All this may cast light on a notable phenomenon: the keen interest that
Russians are showing nowadays in czarism and czars. Nicholas II, who was
executed with members of his family in 1918, is mourned by many as a martyr.
Merezhkovsky's play Paul I, written in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1905,
is showing to full houses in Moscow and arouses some sympathy for this
non-reforming czar. Announced for the new season in Moscow's theaters are plays
about Ivan Grozny, Czar Fyodor, Boris Godunov, Peter I, Catherine II, and
Nicholas II. And Glinka's opera, revived under Stalin as Ivan Susanin, is now
playing in the Bolshoi Theater under its nineteenth-century title, A Life for
the Czar. What does all this mean? The drama critic Andrei Karaulov, in
commenting on a current play about a czar, suggests that "the audience is mainly
interested in the parallel with the current reforming czar, Go rbachev."
The new reforming czar soon proclaimed the need for perestroika, a
deep-seated reformation of the Soviet political culture. But he could not carry
through such a project by his own governing efforts alone. Success in
dismantling the administrative-command system and creating a new one depends on
the ability and the willingness of society to adopt new ways of thinking and
acting, and on the willingness of a still privileged and powerful governing
elite to foster such new ways, or at least not to resist them.
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Thus, what happened in the later 1980s, according to the historian Sirotkin,
bears comparison with what happened under the reforming czar Alexander II in the
1860s and 1870s. It was then that a schism opened up within the czarist
nomenklatura between reformers who supported Alexander II's perestroika and
conservatives who opposed it. Something similar, Sirotkin says, has happened
within the Soviet nomenklatura. Those earlier conservatives were opposed to all
talk of a constitution or parliament; the contemporary ones oppose all talk of
private property.
Now, in the sixth year of perestroika, the "serf-owners" still dominate the
countryside, and the remnants of Stalinist serfdom have yet to be abolished.
Izvestia, these days a reformist paper, evokes the later nineteenth century with
a resounding headline: "Give the peasant land and freedom." The writer Boris
Mikhailov bids the intelligentsia to "go to the people." New Westernizers fend
off attacks by new Slavophiles of various persuasions. One of the claimants to
Slavophile leadership, of course, is the Vermont-dwelling Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, who, in a huge homily printed in 26 million copies in the Soviet
press, tells Mother Russia how to put her crumbling house in order. And V.
Lakshin publishes a lengthy "inter-view" in Izvestia with the great
nineteenth-century Russian satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin, drawn exclusively from
the latter's critical writings about czarist Russia, on the manifold ills and
problems of contemporary Soviet life.
The neo-czarist Soviet order has almost ceased to function. Still, it has not
yet been displaced, or it has only begun to be displaced, by new political and
economic structures that work. The situation reminds one Soviet writer of
something that Herzen observed in the later nineteenth century about Russia
having shed an old skin but not yet having grown a new one. The Soviet era as we
have known it is ending, but a post-Soviet order has only started to appear. And
so WE arrive at the question: What time is it, now, in the Soviet cycle of
Russia's history?
Voices over there offer two answers, which are really two versions of one.
According to the first, Russia is entering a new Time of Troubles, or smuta,
comparable to the one that afflicted Muscovy between 1598 and 1613. After Ivan
Grozny died, the influential courtier Boris Godunov became de facto ruler during
the reign of Ivan's son Fyodor, and became czar in his own right in 1598. A
famine and a plague in 1601-02 were followed by Boris's death, political unrest,
a breakdown of the state order, a succession of pretenders to the throne, civil
war, and Polish intervention. Only with the election of Mikhail Romanov to the
throne in 1613 was a new dynasty established and stability restored.
Nowadays, as economic and political turmoil mounts and the empire
disintegrates, predictions of a new smuta, or the start of one, proliferate.
Ruslan Skrynnikov of Leningrad University, who recently gave a paper on the
first smuta at the World Congress of Soviet and East European Studies in
England, mentioned in discussion that his audiences at public lectures on this
subject in Leningrad have grown much larger of late. The people, he explained,
have a "premonition of smuta."
The writer Viacheslav Kostikov goes further. He writes that Russia has
experienced several times of troubles in its history. Their deeper cause, he
suggests, lies always in a state power that deadens society, represses glasnost,
and turns citizens into slaves who are easy to rule. Thus it was under Ivan
Grozny, and the reasonable leader who came afterward in the person of Boris
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Godunov (a Gorbachev of his time, the author hints) was unable to prevent the
collapse at the end of the seventeenth century. The tragedy of Russian history,
Kostikov concludes, lies in the fact that "the times of troubles arise after the
deaths of tyrants and dictators. So it was with Ivan Grozny, with Stalin."
There is another answer to our question. The Soviet Union, it is said, is
now in the early years of the twentieth century. Some proponents of this
position point to the time following Nicholas II's October Manifesto of 1905,
when the Duma came into being as a Russian parliament and legal political
parties emerged. So, now, a semi-elective parliament has appeared in the new
Congress of People's Deputies and its Supreme Soviet, and various small parties
are emerging, including Social Democrats, Constitutional Democrats, Russian
Democrats, anarcho-syndicalists, and monarchists.
Further, as Sirotkin observes, the democratic developments of then and now
are accompanied by another, ominous parallel: the rise of arch-nationalist,
anti-Semitic movements of the radical right. Then there was the "Union of the
Russian People," to which Nicholas II gave his blessing. Its slogan, "Beat the
Jews and save Russia, = was implemented by the thugs of the Black Hundreds, who
perpetrated pogroms against the Jews in 1905-07. Now the threat of pogroms by
the fascist Pamyat society, which has the support of prominent Russian
nationalist literary figures, is among the reasons that Soviet Jews are leaving
in large numbers.
Pyotr Stolypin, the czarist prime minister who inaugurated a land reform in
1906 that aimed to end communal land tenure and to establish peasants as
individual farmers, is now receiving favorable attention from Soviet advocates
of a similar land reform that could enable Soviet peasants to leave their
collectives and become individual farmers who own the land they till. G.
Bystrov, a Soviet law professor, considers the 1906 Stockholm congress of the
Russian Marxist party to be very topical. It was at that meeting that Lenin and
Plekhanov clashed over the land question. Lenin wanted the nationalization of
land to be a part of the party's program. Plekhanov opposed him, warning that it
would lead to centralization and bureaucratization. His plan was to give
peasants property rights to their land and to turn over the landlords' estates
to municipalities, which would rent them out to peasants. "Today, we know who
was right in that dispute," the professor observes, "and it's time to recognize
it honestly and not pay homage to that utopian project of nationalization." Out
goes Lenin.
The Soviet period has reached its 1917, according to some proponents of the
second answer to our question. The historian Pavel Volobuev finds the situation
in the fall of 1990 stunningly similar to "the time between February and
October." Now, as then, the country is in a condition of total crisis. Just as
that earlier systemic crisis was a result of centuries of czarist absolutism,
the present one is an outgrowth of an even more ferocious administrative-command
system. Now, as then, the country is in the midst of a stormy democratization,
with Petrograd and Moscow again in the lead. Mass-meeting democracy, with all
its heated passions, was and is again going full blast; all sorts of new parties
are again appearing; politicized social forces are polarizing, depriving the
reformists (now called "centrists") of hope for national conciliation.
In 1917, continues Volobuev, some politicized army generals were moving
toward the Kornilov revolt, which paved the way for revolutionary
extremists-that is, for the Bolsheviks-to take power. In 1990, however, it
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would be a good idea for generals to stay out of politics. In 1917, to the
dismay of conservative forces, the country was moving to the left. In 1990 it is
moving in that direction again, to the dismay of the main conservative force
again, which is the Communist Party. Never before 1917 was there such mass
responsiveness in Russia to astrologers, magicians, prophets, and faith
healers; and 50 there is again today.
The present situation also reminds the philosopher Nikolai Mikhailov of the
post-February situation in 1917. The February Revolution and the rise of the
Provisional Government, he says, were the perestroika of that time, or the start
of it. The parallel, he says, raises several questions. Can the post-February
democratic coalition, meaning those on the left today, forestall the loss of
their popularity? Can the new governing structures avoid the errors of the
Provisional Government? How real is the possibility, today or tomorrow, of an
attempted neo-Kornilov generals' revolt? And can a new October be avoided? Here
Mikhailov explains that the October 1917 coup was "the price paid for the
opportunism of the fathers of the February perestroika, for their inconsistency,
their shifting first to the left and then to the right, their fear of radical
reform and action."
By this analogy, Gorbachey's regime is the contemporary Provisional
Government, perestroika is the course toward an evolutionary, democratic
development of the country, and the danger is that this Provisional Government
will go the way of its predecessor-that it will fail to pursue, consistently and
firmly, a line toward radical systemic change. The threat that looms in 1990 is
either a new military putsch like the Kornilov rising in 1917, or a new October,
that is, a new takeover by today's Bolsheviks.
And who might today's Bolsbeviks be? They are, according to A. Uliukaev, the
ultraradicals, the extremists, the intolerant and the impatient ones, those
prepared to fight for human happiness to the last man, whose "genetic
Bolshevism" takes the form of a fanatical anti-Bolshevism. The "genetic
Bolsheviks," says Liudmilla Saraskina, have representatives in the extremist
"Democratic Union," whose organ, The Free Word, uses epithets like "political
prostitute" to refer to liberals or centrists-in the polemical style, she adds,
of that ultraleft Bolshevik Ulyanov-Lenin, who despised liberals.
The two answers to our question, I suggest, are really one. The revolutionary
period, with the ending of the Romanov dynasty, the disintegration of the
empire, internal collapse, disorder, civil war, and foreign intervention, was a
new Time of Troubles. This is not the way that we in the West have generally
thought of it. We have been influenced, perhaps overinfluenced, by Crane
Brinton's The Anatomy of Revolution, which appeared in 1938, in which Russia's
twentieth-century revolution was analyzed along with England's revolution of the
seventeenth century and America's and France's revolution of the eighteenth as a
paradigmatically modern, hence modernizing, phenomenon. Some Russians who lived
through the revolutionary years, however, thought differently. For them, that
period was another Russian breakdown, another dynastic interregnum, another
smuta. That is how P. B. Struve characterized it in 1918 and how Iurii Got'e saw
it in his diary of 1917-22. (Terence Emmons has given the title Time of Troubles
to his English-language edition of Got'e's diary. And Lars Lih has likened the
revolutionary period to a smuta in his new book, Bread and
Authority in Russia, 1914-1921.)
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If we see the Revolution as a second Time of Troubles, and hence the rise of
the Soviet regime as the emergence of a new dynasty (the Bol'sheviki), it ceases
to seem strange that a new cycle of Russia's history has unfolded in our
century, and that a new smuta threatens now. Such a reading of the Soviet era
might have two strengths from a scholarly and political standpoint. By showing
that czarism rose again in what seemed, somewhat illusorily, an epoch of
modernization through urbanization and industrial development, this reading can
render the present systemic breakdown more comprehensible: it is a largely
archaic system that has nearly ceased to function. This way of thinking may help
us comprehend the tenacity of the elements of the old order that still exist.
For Russia, the system that we glibly call "Communism" has roots that go deep
into the centuries, and are not 50 easily pulled up.
Can Russia at long last escape from the cycle of administrative-command
systems followed by times of troubles? That, of course, is the most pressing
question. Our historically-minded contemporaries in the Soviet Union are
asking it in their own manner. One of them, A. Sabov, human rights editor for
Literaturnaya Gazeta, writes: "If you take a close look, all our Russian and
Soviet perestroikas came exclusively from above and were just as easily
withdrawn by the next oncoming authority. And the whole question is: Why? Why
have they never come from below in any other form than that of an all-destroying
tornado?" And here is the writer Viktor Erofeev's form ulation:
Can it be that this sixth part of the globe has
its own special relationship to time and social
development, so that stagnation and
misfortune are the constant elements not
only of the regimes of Brezhnev and Nicholas
I but of Russian national history in general,
a history that moves in circles? If so,
what historical swamp will eventually swallow
up perestroika and all the hopes connected
with it? How can we break out of the
vicious circle?
It is hard to answer, except to say that it will take much time and much
effort, no little good fortune, and maybe substantial assistance from the United
States, which came to the Soviet Union's aid with Lend-Lease in World War II,
and has as much reason to want Russia to emerge democratically victorious this
time as it had for wanting Russia to emerge militarily victorious last time.
If fortune smiles, this reforming czar will go down as the founder of a
presidency. This Provisional Government will stop wavering and seek systemic
change that can stabilize the national situation. This Duma will stand. The
incipient law-governed state will evolve further, and Benckendorf's agency
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will become a normal intelligence service. The imperial structure will be
replaced by that of a commonwealth of nations or confederation. Russian generals
will respect the supremacy of civil authority. Peasants will become proprietors
of the land they till if they wish, and the defenders of the collective-farm
system will go into retirement. A de-statified economy will emerge and with it a
modicum of prosperity for the people. Russian culture will prosper in freedom.
The government will continue cooperating with other governments to establish an
orderly world under international law, in which the demographic, technological,
economic, and cultural forces now making for human catastrophe can be checked
before it is too late.
If fortune frowns, however, we pretty well know from history what that will
mean. Another round of the cycle, after another full-scale Russian smuta
climaxed by civil war. When he was asked whether he thought the latter outcome
likely, the historian Ruslan Skrynnikow simply exclaimed, "May God forbid!"
SUBJECT:
Soviet Union, History; Social change, Soviet Union; Nationalism and
communism, Soviet Union
GEOGRAPHIC:
Soviet Union
LOAD-DATE-MDC: March 04, 1991
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48TH STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright (c) 1991 The Heritage Foundation;
Policy Review
1991 Winter
SECTION: No. 55, Pg. 60
LENGTH: 4302 words
HEADLINE: "POISONING OF THE SOUL";
New Leaders of Russia and Central Europe Talk About the Evil Empire
BYLINE: COMPILED BY KEVIN ACKER
BODY:
One of the unintended consequences of Bolshevism was the awe-inspiring
emergence of a literature of liberty. The works of Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak,
Mandelstam, Sakharov, Sharansky, and many others plumbed the depths of
totalitarian horror and gave testimony to the power of human reason and the
human soul in the face of tyranny. To their great works must now be added the
speeches and essays of the new leaders of Russia and what is rightly called
again Central Europe -- President Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia,
President-elect Lech Walesa of Poland, Mayors Anatoly Sobchak and Gavriil Popov
of Leningrad and Moscow, President Boris Yeltsin of Russia --- as well as some
of the reformist intellectuals of the Soviet "glasnost" movement, among them
Yuri Afanasyev, Alexander Yakovlev, and Tatyana Zasavskaya. Some of their more
eloquent statements about their totalitarian legacy and their dreams of the
future have been compiled by Kevin Acker, a senior at Dartmouth College.
"Our Conscience Is Sick"
[Prague Spring] was the first perestroika in the socialist countries, and we
crushed and slandered that perestroika. It was collective murder. How many
lives and fates have been destroyed, and how much disillusion, anger, and
grievance have accumulated over the years toward your own dogmatic, triumphant
Stalinists, and toward us, their sponsors and protectors.
Our conscience is sick: the Berlin Wall, the war in Afghanistan, Prague.
-- Daniil Granin, Soviet novelist, in open letter to Czechoslovaks, Moscow News,
November 19, 1989
In the 10 years of that [Afghanistan] war, we not only lost in some degree
the prestige that the Soviet Union and its Armed Forces enjoyed after the
victorious Great Patriotic War, but also in some degree inflicted terrible pain
on the families and friends, our own Soviet people. With hindsight, we are
obliged to offer apologies once again and regret that it happened.
-- Dmitir Yazov, Soviet Defense Minister, June 1, 1990
The decision to send Soviet troops into Afghanistan merits moral and
political condemnation
By this action we set ourselves against the
majority of the world community and against the norms of conduct, which should
be accepted and observed in international relations.
-- Alexander Dzasokhov, reporting the conclusions of the USSR Supreme Soviet
Committee on International Affairs, December 24, 1989
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Having embarked upon the path of dividing the loot with the [Nazi] predators,
Stalin began to speak with the neighboring, especially small, countries in the
language of ultimatums and threats. He did not consider it shameful to resort
to force. This happened in the argument with Finland. With great power
arrogance he brought Bessarabia back within the borders of the union, and
restored Soviet power in the Baltic republics. All this deformed Soviet policy
and state morality
The whole truth, even the bitterest, must be told
some time.
The [Hitler-Stalin] secret protocol of 23 August 1939 reflected precisely the
inner essence of Stalinism. This is not the only one, but one of the most
dangerous delayed-action mines from the minefield we have inherited, and which
we are now trying to clear with such difficulty and complexity. It is necessary
to do this. The public mines do not simply fade away on their own.
-- Alexander Yakovlev, member of Soviet Politburo, December 23, 1989
"The System Invites Lies"
When people are compelled to look only one way, when they are deprived of
information and the possibility to compare things, they stop thinking.
Well-informed people, ones who have access to versatile information, inevitably
begin to think.
The very system invites lies.
-- Oleg Kalugin, former KGB major-general and USSR People's Deputy, Moscow
News, July 1, 1990
In Afghanistan, I discovered for myself that what appeared in our newspapers
was the complete opposite of the truth. We really were fighting. thousands of
people were killed and injured on both sides. The contrast between what I saw
and what I read made me completely distrust our government. It was very
difficult to tell our soldiers what we were doing there, whom we were fighting,
what was right and what was wrong. Nothing made sense.
-- Valery Ryumin, major of Ryazan, a Russian provincial capital, Washington
Post, November 14, 1990
For the past 40 years on this day you have heard my predecessors utter
different variations on the same theme, about how our country is prospering, how
many more billion tons of steel we have produced, how happy we all are, how much
we trust our government, and what beautiful prospects lie ahead of us. I do not
think you appointed me to this office for me, of all people, to lie to you.
-- Vaclav Havel, president of Czechoslovakia, in New Year's address to nation,
January 1, 1990.
If you and all others whom we are burying today are without guilt, as we have
always known and professed, and as today the immediate inheritors of the power
of your executioners also admit that the accusations were fabricated, the
witnesses false, the trial conceptional, then those who sent you to the gallows
were nothing but murderers
Let their punishment be the contempt of the
nation, which has become one for the first time since 1956; let their punishment
be that they have lived to see, can see, and hear what is happening today; let
their punishment be that their illusions have disappeared and they can guess the
judgment of as yet unwritten history books of future generations will mete out
to them.
-- Tibor Meray, Hungarian writer (at the reburial of Imre Nagy and his
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associates), June 16, 1989
Sooner or later the truth will win out on God's earth and deception will be
unlocked. Without such moral cleansing the development of civilization is
inconceivable.
-- Alexander Yakovlev, member of Soviet Politburo, December 23, 1989
"Enormous Human Humiliation"
The Communist type of totalitarian system has left both our nations, Czechs
and Slovaks --- as it has all the nations of the Soviet Union and the other
countries the Soviet Union subjugated in its time -- a legacy of countless
dead, an infinite spectrum of human suffering, profound economic decline, and
above all enormous human humiliation. It has brought us horrors that
fortunately you have not known.
-- Vaclav Havel, president of Czechoslovakia, before the U.S. Congress, February
21, 1990
The totalitarian system has a special bacterial property. The system is
strong not only in its repressive police methods but, more, in fact that it
positions people's souls and demoralizes them.
-- Vaclav Havel, president of Czechoslovakia, Izvestia, February 23, 1990
Several German intellectuals and politicians had heard words for the fellow
citizens who flung themselves on the West German shops as soon as they could.
These could only be the words of people who have forgotten, or never knew,
the personal humiliation inflicted by the permanent lack of the most elementary
consumer goods: the humiliation of silent and hostile lines, the humiliation
inflicted upon you by salespeople who seem angry to see you standing there, the
humiliation of always having to buy what there is, not what you need. The
systematic penury of material goods strikes a blow at the moral dignity of the
individual.
-- Tzvetan Todorov, Bulgarian author, New Republic, June 25, 1990
We are living in a decade moral environment. We have become morally ill,
because we have become accustomed to saying one thing and thinking another. We
have learned not to believe in anything, not to have consideration for one
another, and only to look after ourselves. Notions such as love, friendship,
compassion, humility, and forgiveness have lost their depth and dimension, and
for many of us they merely represent some kind of psychological idiosyncracy, or
appear to be some kind of stray relic from times past, something rather comical
in an era of computers and space rockets.
The previous regime, armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology,
denigrated man into a production force and nature into a production tool. In
this way it attacked their very essence and the relationship between them. It
made talented people who were capable of managing their own affairs and making
an enterprise living in their own country into cogs in some kind of monstrous,
ramshackle, smelly machine whose purpose no one can understand. It can do
nothing more than slowly but surely wear itself down, and all the cogs in it.
-- Vaclay Havel, president of Czechoslovakia, in New Year's address to nation,
January 1, 1990
The primary reasons for the need for perestroika were not the sluggish
economy and the rate of technological development but an underlying mass
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alienation of working people from significant social goals and values. This
social alienation is rooted in the economic system formed in the 1930s, which
made state property, run by a vase bureaucratic apparatus, the dominant form of
ownership.
For 50 years it was said that this was public property and
belonged to everyone, but no way was ever found to make workers feel they were
the co-owners and masters of the factories, farms, and enterprises. They felt
themselves to be cogs in a gigantic machine.
-- Tatyana Zaslavskaya, Soviet sociologist, in Voices of Glasnost
In a totalitarian situation people conform outwardly to the prevailing morals
and isolate themselves in microsocieties where they live, work, and die. People
act according to moral double standards, an unwritten social contract that
everyone knows. Workers are allowed to idle and steal, as long as they come to
party meetings and applaud. Only a small mafia of the party bosses and
enterprise bosses took it seriously; the rest of the people cut themselves off.
-- Valtr Komarek, deputy prime minister of Czechoslovakia, NRC Handelsblad
(Rotterdam), February 6, 1990
A Civic Society
Our immediate aims are to form a civic society in which the law will
guarantee the individual a free choice of the forms of his social, political,
and economic existence
where there will be no monopoly of a single
ideology or worldview, but freedom of conscience will prevail.
-- Vyacheslav Shostakovsky, rector of the Moscow Higher Party School, at the
28th CPSU Congress, July 6, 1990
The task today is to learn democracy and feel deeply and recognize in
practice the entire distinctiveness and self-worth of each human life, each
personality. That is, to become a truly humane society -- in being and
consciousness and basis and superstructure, without the feverish, paranoid
thirst for the blood of one's neighbors.
-- Alexander Yakovlev, member of Soviet Politburo, Literaturnaya Gazeta,
February 14, 1990
The wall that was separating people from freedom has collapsed. And I hope
that the nations of the world will never let it be rebuilt.
--- Lech Walesa, Solidarity leader, addressing the U.S. Congress, November 15,
1989
Outdated Ideology
Marxism-Leninism as a state of ideology is outdate
The dictatorship
of the proletariat and social revolution as a transition from one state of
society to another is a vision of the world that is today not consonant with
reality, and accordingly Marxism-Leninism can invite us only into the 19th
century, while we need an invitation into the 21st century. And finally,
Marxism-Leninism is an aggregate of certain theories that have not been
confirmed by social practice.
The main thing is that Marxism-Leninism has
failed utterly to justify itself, namely, that capitalism as a system is coming
to an end and that it has no prospects for society, is completely outdated.
It turns out that new stages have appeared in capitalism, and the opportunity
for its self-development have turned out to be such that now no sensible person
would dare to predict the end of this social system in the foreseeable future.
-- Yuri Afanasyev, USSR People's Deputy and rector of the Moscow Historical
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Archival Institute, quoted in Sovietskaya Estoniya (Talinn, Estonia), January
18, 1990
We wanted to create a new man, with only unselfish thoughts. I am afraid it
is no possible.
-- Vaclav Klaus, finance minister of Czechoslovakia, before group of Wall Street
investors, March 1, 1990
If we seriously want to engage in perestroika then we cannot rely on methods
of an organization which has permeated every pore of our social organism and
which interferes -- at the Party's will -- in any affairs of state and social
life, the economy and culture, sport and religion. There is not one sphere of
life free from the KGB's hand or shadow.
-- 01eg Kalugin, former KGB major-general and USSR People's Deputy, June 20,
1990
The Essence of Stalinism Is Leninism
Force -- the use of force, violence -- is what our history is all about.
If our leader and founder [Lenin] created foundations for anything, it is the
elevation of the state policy of mass coercion and terror into principle. And
besides, he elevated lawlessness into a principle of state policy. This was
continued throughout the whole Stalinist period and created numerous victims;
this went through the Brezhnev period, when in a drunken stupor the national
wealth was squandered wholesale and retail.
-- Yuri Afanasyev, USSR People's Deputy and rector of the Moscow Historical
Archival Institute, before the Congress of People's Deputies, March 12, 1990
When you read Lenin, you can understand everything that has happened in this
country.
-- Valery Ruyumin, mayor of Ryazan, a Russian provincial capital, Washington
Post, November 14, 1990
We cannot talk about bad Stalin and good Lenin. It is more productive to
recognize the Leninist essence of Stalinism.
-- Yuri Afanasyev, USSR People's Deputy and rector of the Moscow Historical
Archival Institute, quoted in Sovietskaya Estoniya (Talinn, Estonia), January
18, 1990
Economic Liberty
We decided to build a market economy in Poland, not for doctrinal reasons ---
we have said goodbye to those forever, I hope -- but because no one has yet
invented a more efficient one.
-- Leszek Balcerowicz, finance minister of Poland, on Polish television, June 7,
1990
We are consciously limiting the role of the state in the economy. It is no
longer the supermanager of a superfactory, the main boss and the main
controller, the main storekeeper and the main distributor of goods and services.
Several dozen years of costly experience have shown that the state cannot do
this well, and, in particular, cannot inspire energy in people so that they may
work productively, efficiently, and economically.
-- Tadeusz Mazowiecki, prime minister of Poland, before the Sejm (Polish
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parliament), January 18, 1990
We categorically favor the concept of private initiative. The economic
foundation of totalitarianism has been the absolute power derived from the
monopoly on property. We shall never have political pluralism without economic
pluralism. But some of those who still have Communist leanings try to equate
private initiative with "exploitation" and maintain that the emergence of rich
entrepreneurs would be a catastrophe. In the same way they try to play on the
feelings of those who are lazy and would therefore envy the wealthy, and those
who -- having once enjoyed the privileges of the Communist system -- are afraid
of the effort of working.
-- Timisoara Declaration, Romania, March 11, 1990
We cannot talk of freedom unless we have private property.
-- Gavriil Popov, mayor of Moscow, Cato Institute/Soviet Academy of Sciences
conference, September 10, 1990
How can you say you have a motherland when you don't own a single square
meter of land which you can leave to your grandchildren?
-- Suyatoslav Fyodorov, Soviet laser scientist, New York Times, March 11, 1990
For decades in our country, we have fostered a beggar/consumer mentality: the
state will provide and decide everything for you -- poorly, perhaps, but provide
equally for everyone, give you all the basic necessities. And this parasitic
mentality is very widespread here. Yet a market economy, in order to function,
requires a very different type of mentality: enterprise, initiative,
responsibility, every person solving his own problems. The government does
nothing more than create the conditions in which one can employ one's initiative
and enterprise; the rest is up to the individual.
-- Anatoly Sobchak, mayor of Leningrad, Cato Institute/Soviet Academy of
Sciences conference, September 11, 1990
A most important task of the initial stage of the transition to the market
consists of the creation of the proper conditions for the development of the key
figure of market relations -- the entrepreneur. For many years enterprise was
not valued here but punished. Now it has to be acknowledged that the sole
resource on which we can count upon transition to the market is the potential of
human assertiveness based on people's aspirations to secure for themselves
normal living conditions.
--- "500 Day Play" for Soviet economic reform.
No Third Way
We don't want to try out a third way. We will leave it to the richer
countries to try out a third way and if they succeed maybe we will follow.
-- Leszek Balcerowicz, finance minister of Poland, Washington Post, November 30,
1989
To speak of any future for socialism in this country is nonsense
Our
goal now is to lead Bulgaria to a modern, democratic capitalism.
-- Zhelyo Zhelev, leader of the Union of Democratic Forces (and future
president), December 18, 1989
We want a market economy without any adjectives. Any compromises will only
fuzzy up the problems we have. To pursue a so-called third way is foolish.
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We had our experience with this in the 1960s when we looked for socialism with a
human face. It did not work, and we must be explicit when we say that we are
not aiming for a more efficient version of a system that has failed. the market
is indivisible; it cannot be an instrument in the hands of central planners.
-- Vaclav Klaus, finance minister of Czechoslovakia, Reason, June 1990
Learning from the West
It is a paradox that in the 20th century the ideas of socialism have not been
realized in the socialist countries, but in other countries, the capitalist
countries. In the countries which call themselves socialist, socialism has been
distorted to the degree where it causes disgust.
--- Yuri Afanasyev, USSR People's Deputy and rector of the Moscow Historical
Archival Institute, Dagens Nyheter (Stockholm), January 3, 1990
I have been to the West and have become convinced that we can use many things
from the Western democracies, including the attitude to property, the
parliamentary system, and much more. There is no reason to renounce all this
because it is capitalist. Why should we do that if it is rational and useful?
-- Boris Yeltsin, USSR People's Deputy (and future president of the Russian
Republic), Det Fri Aktuelt (Copenhagen), December 2, 1989
I was told that capitalism is in the process of rotting away. New York was
described as a pile of gravestones piled upon one on the other. That's not true
at all. Some of what are, in the United States, called "slums" would pass for
pretty decent housing in the Soviet Union.
-- Boris Yeltsin, USSR People's Deputy (and future president of the Russian
Republic), at Columbia University, September 11, 1989
The people of [America] are able to work with excellence and relax with good
taste. They are not obsessive, they are quite free, and they live without
looking back. On the streets, I met many polite, smiling people. Did I see any
of the social problems in America? That is not what I went there for -- I have
seen enough social problems at home to make me sick. I was not looking for the
speck of dust in someone else's eye.
-- Boris Yeltsin, USSR People's Deputy (and future president of the Russian
Republic), Sovietskaya Molodezh, January 4, 1990 (interviewed on November 25,
1989)
Spiritual Revival
I do not know what a miracle is. Nonetheless, I daresay at this moment I am
a party to a miracle: a man who only six months ago was taken prisoner as an
enemy of his own state is welcoming today, as president, the first Pope in the
history of the Catholic Church ever to set foot in this country. For many
decades the spirit
has been banished from our country. I have the honor
to be a witness to the moment when its soil is being kissed by the apostle of
spirituality.
-- Vaclav Havel, president of Czechoslovakia, welcoming Pope John Paul II, April
21, 1990
Freedom of conscience and religion is a basic human right,
a
prerequisite for renewing a political system
that reflects a pluralism of
ideas in society.
-- from the Hungarian "Law on Freedom of Conscience, Religion, and the
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Churches," passed January 24, 1990
Thank You, America
The world remembers the wonderful principle of the American democracy:
"government of the people, by the people, for the people."
The ideals which underline this glorious American republic and which
are still alive here are also living in faraway Poland.
-- Lech Walesa, Solidarity leader, addressing the U.S. Congress, November 15,
1989
Ladies and gentlemen, from this podium, I'm expressing words of gratitude to
the American people. It is they who supported us in the difficult days of
marital law and persecution. It is they who sent us aid, they who protested
against violence. Today, when I am able to freely address the whole world from
this elevated spot, I would like to thank them with special warmth.
It is thanks to them that the word "Solidarity" soared across boarders and
reached every corner of the world. Thanks to them the people of Solidarity were
never alone.
-- Lech Walesa, Solidarity leader, addressing the U.S. Congress, November 15,
1989
[Reagan] turned out not to be such a simpleton as we were led to believe.
-- Boris Yeltsin, future president of the Russian Republic, New York Times
Magazine, September 23, 1989
The Artificial Soviet Union
The USSR is not a country, nor is it a state. The Eurasian territory is
marked as such on maps is a world of worlds made of different cultures and
civilizations. It is a neighborhood of states and nations that are tired of
their colonial and colonizing past, that there have been tortured and humiliated
by Stalinist efforts at unification.
--- Yuri Afanasyev, USSR People's Deputy and rector of the Moscow Historical
Archival Institute, Time, March 12, 1990
We witnessed the artificial creation of a society, something like a gigantic
human machine in which 280 million people of different cultures and different
civilizations, geographics, and language were forcibly meshed together into one
huge conglomerate. And this gigantic human machine was based on mass violence,
on centralized control and planning.
Naturally, the colossus turned out to be standing on feet of clay. It is
doomed to destruction. Now this natural process of collapse is going on. it
looks as though it were planned, but no one was really aware of how it would
take place or when.
-- Yuri Afanasyev, USSR People's Deputy and rector of the Moscow Historical
Archival Institute, Washington Post, November 16, 1989
With regard to the natural desire of the Balts to distance themselves from
the center, the [reasons include] the thousands upon thousands of ruined lives
and the
outrageous method by which these peoples were made part of the
union.
Freedom and independence have been so suppressed that now people
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need to feel that they are in an independent state and sovereign as much as they
need air.
-- Yuri Afanasyev, USSR People's Deputy and rector of the Moscow Historical
Archival Institute, quoted in Sovietskaya Estoniya (Talinn, Estonia), January
18, 1990
Renouncing World Revolution
Less security for the United States compared to the Soviet Union would not
be in our interest, since it could lead to mistrust and produce instability.
--- Mikhail Gorbachev, USSR General Secretary, Time, May 23, 1988
We are not keen on the export of revolution as we must deal with the
monstrous deformations of socialism in our own country.
-- Stanislav Kondrashov, Soviet political commentator, Izvestia, May 12, 1989
It is no secret that many Third World recipients of Soviet aid are notorious
for their authoritarian or dictatorial methods of rule, the cults of their
leaders, a ruthless suppression of the opposition, and for corruption.
In mapping out future aid programs, there is a need to discard as soon as
possible the Cold War stereotypes, when any anti-American regime in the Third
World, declaring allegiance to Marxism-Leninism, could count on Soviet support.
-- Andrei Kortunov, Soviet intellectual and journalist, Moscow News, December
10, 1989
If a people strives for independence, you cannot restrain them by force. And
the more pressure the authorities exert, the stronger the people's resistance
will be. In our own Russia an analogous situation is taking shape with
certain autonomous republics. But we will operate not be means of pressure and
threats.
Let the republic itself decide within what limits it will really
be able to realize its independence.
-- Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Republic, Komsomolskaya Pravda,
August 8, 1990
Nothing written here is to be construed as necessarily reflecting the views
of The Heritage Foundation or as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any
bill before Congress.
GRAPHIC: Photo, no caption, AP/Wide World Photos; Picture, no caption,
Reurers/Bettmann
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11TH STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright (c) 1991 The Economist Newspaper Ltd.
June 1, 1991
SECTION: Business, finance and science; SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY; Pg. 81 (U.K.
Edition Pg. 97)
LENGTH: 1479 words
HEADLINE: The song of the Soviet scientist
DATELINE: MOSCOW
BODY:
THE Soviet Union, based as it is on Marx's science of society, has always
been keen on scientific progress and its technological fruits. It launched the
world's first satellite, and followed it with the first man into orbit. It
designs and builds nuclear bombs, space shuttles and superconductors. Its top
scientists have a long list of ambitious projects in mind, and a fair-sized
budget to pay for them (see chart). But has socialism really served science
well?
No. To listen to Soviet scientists is to hear that Soviet science is in
crisis. Scientists are leaving the country in droves. Equipment is out of
date. Organisation is shambolic. The money for research is so uncertain that
people running projects spend all their time wondering where their next rouble
is coming from. As Nikolai Slyunkov, once a politburo member in charge of
science, said at the end of 1990: "There is no tangible scientific progress. In
the five years since 1985
scientific and technical progress has not
worked."
The debate abut the quality of Soviet science centres on the Academy of
Sciences. This organisation is a little like Britain's Royal Society -- a
club for the country's top scientists. Its 300 full and 800 corresponding
members are the best in the land. They enjoy privilege and influence. Unlike
the Royal Society, though, the academy has power as well as influence. Most of
the Soviet Union's research goes on at the 250 institutes and laboratories it
controls. Soviet universities do not do research. They teach.
This arrangement gives rise to two problems. First, the separation of the
academy from the universities means that the best minds are siphoned off to pure
research, and second-raters are left to teach the next generation at the
university. The result has been a gradual decline in the quality of scientists
at lower levels. The apex of the pyramid is affected by the crumbling of the
base: there are now too few top-notch candidates to fill junior research posts
in the academy's institutes.
That replenishment is sorely needed. Poor teaching has made Soviet science
slow to recover from Stalin's influence, under which the most overriding
distinction was between "socialist" and "bourgeois" science (guess which was
better). Many of today's academicians -- especially senior ones -- are products
of those dark days. The cost of allowing the politically astute, rather than
the scientifically excellent, to get the lion's share of resources can be seen
in the small number of Nobel prizes for science won by Soviet citizens since
1960 -- only four, and two of those were for work done before the second world
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war. All were in physics, which is less amenable to ideological tampering than
biology. Stalin knew physicists made bombs, whereas biologists trifled in
agriculture and medicine.
The second problem is characteristic of most monopolies: bureaucracy. In the
West, choices about what fundamental research to do are always influenced by
scientists, and often left to them to make. In applied research, the decisions
are more likely to be taken by businesses or, less satisfactorily, by
governments. In Russia the decisions are all made by bureaucrats. They
dictate how much money the institutes receive and what it should be spent on.
They say who should be promoted. This means that a lot of money is spent on
administration and on applied science, which the bureaucrats' political bosses
approve of. The amount left for pure science is far from enough to suit the
scientists. The academy's deputy director, Vladimir Kudryatsev, says that
little more than one-sixth of its budget goes on pure science.
Pluto's Academy?
In response, some scientists have declared independence. In 1989 a group of
them set up their own Union of Scientists to provide research grants. They also
want to encourage a television-based extra-mural university, like Britain's Open
University, as a new source of further education. It would be supported by
members' dues, consultation fees and the sale of publications. Moreover, the
Physics Society of the USSR wants to finance projects rejected by the
government, and also campaigns for better education.
Reforms like these, though useful, are less valuable than attempts to change
the way the academy works. In the past the academy depended wholly on the
state's largesse. Institutes would draw up budgets, and the academy's general
assembly (consisting of its 300 full members) would pass them on to the
government. In return, the government was free to direct academicians down
whatever paths it chose.
In August 1990, however, a presidential decree made the academy independent.
It was given the equipment and resources used by its institutes, and allowed to
determine for itself what use it wanted to put them to. In return, it is
supposed to forgo the public purse and use its resources and revenues to pay for
its research.
This was something of a sham. An academy of sciences is not a money-making
concern, any more than an army is. Like defence, pure science is a public good
--- something that, while beneficial to the country as a whole, would not be
undertaken for profit by individual members. The implications of the decree
were that the academy must either turn itself into an industrial-research
consultancy, close down, or continue to be financed by the government. The
scientists recognised this. Last September the country was treated to the
unusual sight of top boffins staging a protest on the steps of the academy's
palatial headquarters in Moscow. They were demanding that the decree be
repealed.
In response to the decree and the opposition to it, some much-needed
restructuring is going on. This autumn will see the first meeting of a new
decision-making body (called the "second chamber"), composed of employees of the
institutes who do not have the right to attend sessions of the academy's general
assembly. It is intended to give a voice to younger scientists and offset the
power of the general assembly, which is dominated by conservative
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academicians. Perhaps a more powerful reform is the splitting up of the
over-large institutes, which were the creations of the bureaucrats. The
Institute of Physics recently broke up into five separate parts, in the belief
that smaller laboratories do better work.
It is too early to say how well these reforms will work, but they are
unquestionably steps in the right direction. Eventually, the academy's monopoly
over pure science must be broken. Universities that teach and foster research
are healthier and better institutions than those that merely turn out graduates.
Such grand concerns, though, can wait. The immediate problem is to make today's
tentative work, given uncertainties over money.
If the academy is independent, said last September's protesters, it will go
broke. Already, they said, scientists are leaving the country, with its poor
equipment, bureaucracy and low wages (see box). To an extent, the state is
responding. According to the director of research and development funding of
the USSR state committee for science and technology, investment in basic and
applied scientific research in 1990 was 765m roubles ($ 1.3 billion at the
official rate of exchange). That is 77% more than in 1989. The vice-president
of the academy says that this year spending will not be cut in real terms. In
addition to that, the science and technology committee, which oversees
central-government spending on science, has used 60m roubles to set up two new
funds. One of them -- the innovation fund - is supposed to concentrate
entirely on fundamental science. Compared with other countries, this is small
beer. America's Department of Energy wants to spend almost as much on
high-energy physics alone as the Soviet Union spends on all things scientific.
There is nothing so small, though, that it cannot be cut. It would be
foolish for any Soviet scientist not to worry about the future of scientific
spending. Scientific projects will be a prime target for economic reformers
when they get round to the critical task of balancing the budget. No scientific
work can withstand the impact of a huge and sudden cut in its money. If that
happens, then Soviet science is indeed likely to wither away. At the moment,
however, the main problem is not the absolute amount of money but the way it is
being used. This organisational weakness is at least being tackled, if not
solved. Moreover, science is still one of those rare areas in which the country
is at, or near, international standards. Most parliamentarians recognise this.
That is why Soviet investment in science has so far been protected from the
general chaos in the rest of the economy. Without reorganisation, Soviet
science cannot hope to keep its protection much longer.
GRAPHIC: Graph, Big ideas, Investment in basic and applied sciences, Source:
Tribuna; Pictures 1 and 2, no caption
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17TH STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright (c) 1991 The Economist Newspaper Ltd.
May 25, 1991
SECTION: Special; THINK-TANKS; Pg. 23 (U.K. Edition Pg. 23)
LENGTH: 3100 words
HEADLINE: The carousels of power
HIGHLIGHT:
"Those who desire to win the favour of princes generally endeavour to do so by
offering them those things which they themselves prize most, or such as they
observe the prince to delight in most." Niccolo Machiavelli
BODY:
WHEN Machiavelli sat down to write "The Prince", he was feeling anxious.
Unemployed after many years in government service, he wrote his handbook of
advice to new rulers in an attempt to win a job with the incoming Medici
administration.
The Machiavelli problem would be instantly recognisable to hordes of would-be
and once-were government officials in today's world: "policy intellectuals", as
Americans call them. They would not recognise his workplace. Displaced from
power, he had to toil in a humble farmhouse outside Florence. Today he would
sit in a think-tank, cosseted by secretaries and flattered by a stream of calls
from talk-show producers.
The "policy intellectuals" still strive to present their conclusions as
impartial expertise. But, like Machiavelli, they are forever tugging at the
sleeves of politicians. Think-tanks, sitting uneasily half-way between
government and universities, are institutions that embody this ambiguity.
Societies in which a broad consensus dominates political thinking such as
Germany and Japan today and the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s
-- tend to respect the think-tanks' claim of neutrality. But when consensus
breaks down, as it did in Britain and the United States in the late 1970s,
think-tanks become more avowedly ideological. The new role is to challenge
conventional wisdom. They can articulate the instincts of dissidents in the
language of the academy, and suggest ideas that bridge the gap between instinct
and policy.
Many American think-tanks, such as the Washington-based Institute for
International Economics, still cling to an aura of academic detachment. But an
increasing number, typified by the conservative Heritage Foundation, define
themselves above all by the fact that they hold a coherent body of ideas, and
want to spread them.
Think-tanks sprout in America to an extent undreamed of elsewhere. A recent
book "The Idea Brokers", by James Smith -- identifies over 1,000 private
ones, around 100 in Washington alone. They range from the Brookings
Institution, with its vast battleship of a building on Massachusetts Avenue, to
tiny lobbying outfits with offices the size of a doctor's waiting room.
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They thrive in America for two good reasons. First, a lot of rich
foundations are ready to pay good money to people to sit and think. Second, the
American system of government is peculiarly open to such chosen thinkers. Each
new administration in Washington appoints not only the heads of its departments,
or ministries, but also a lot of people further down the departmental ladder.
Groups like the Council of Economic Advisers and the State Department's Policy
Planning Staff -- government think-tanks, in effect -- absorb more outsiders.
The two houses of Congress employ a bureaucracy with a huge appetite for
independent research. Plenty of work here for thinkers who can catch the
political tide.
The revolving door between government and think-tanks is well-established.
Both Zbigniew Brzezinski, who headed the National Security Council under Jimmy
Carter, and Robert McFarlane, who did the same job for Ronald Reagan, joined the
Centre for Strategic and International Studies on leaving office. Brent
Scowcroft, now head of the NSC, once worked there.
When Ronald Reagan took office, no fewer than 20 of the research fellows at
the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) joined his
administration. Now that Mr Reagan has left power, many of his appointees, such
as Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Richard Perle, are working at AEI. Every American
think-tank director has a dream and a nightmare. The dream is to house the next
administration; the nightmare is to house the last one. AEI seems to have
managed both in the course of a decade.
The first lot of American research institutes, just before the first world
war, was more politically innocent. It was not until the 1960s, when
"think-tank" entered the popular vocabulary, that these bodies became a natural
bridge between universities and government. In those days think-tanks were
intoxicated by the new sophistication they could apply to their work by way of
computers, games theory and other novelties. The Rand Corporation, based in
Santa Monica in California, pioneered the application of "systems analysis".
Like the Urban Institute, founded in Washington in 1968 after racial riots
across America, it thrived not on private philanthropy but on research contracts
from the government.
The rise and fall of technocracy
With a sociologist, Daniel Bell, proclaiming "the end of ideology", technocrats
were in vogue. To President Kennedy the great issues related "not to basic
clashes of philosophy or ideology but to ways and means of reaching common goals
-- to research for sophisticated solutions to complex and obstinate issues." It
was up to the politicians to define the ends: an end to urban poverty, victory
in Vietnam. The think-tanks would provide the means.
Failure both in Vietnam and in the war on poverty discredited technocracy.
Conservatives, in particular, argued that the "liberal establishment" and the
think-tanks it favoured --- Brookings, the Rand Corporation, even the grand old
Council on Foreign Relations in New York -- embodies a stifling and wrong-headed
orthodoxy.
They set about building what Sidney Blumenthal, a journalist, calls a
"counter-establishment". Because the old think-tanks were dominated by
liberals, conservative alternatives were required. During the 1970s the AEI
expanded, and new organisations such as the Heritage Foundation and the
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research were founded. The latter was created
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by William Casey, who became Ronald Reagan's campaign director and then head of
the CIA. The conservative think-tanks set about the prevailing wisdom on
welfare policy at home, detente with Russia abroad. By 1981 much of the
intellectual spadework for the Reagan, presidency had been done.
Their apparent success prodded Democrats to start building a
counter-counter-establishment The Progressive Policy Institute was set up by
the Democratic Leadership Council, which is on the right wing of the Democratic
Party. The Economic Policy Institute, born in 1986, is a bit further left: like
the Heritage Foundation, but the other way round, it sees itself as a rebel
fighting conventional wisdom.
Britain's gadflies
The shift from an above-it-all "objectivity" to an open confession of
partisanship took place in Britain too, at around the same time. Thatcherism,
like Reaganism, drew heavily upon the work of bright neo-conservatives outraged
by the "years of stagnation" in the prime ministerships of Harold Wilson and
James Callaghan.
There were British think-tanks before Margaret Thatcher became prime
minister. But, with the notable exception of the free-market Institute of
Economic Affairs (widely regarded in the 1960s, by people who now wish they
hadn't, as a home for impractical crackpots), they were guardians of the chalice
of consensus. The big three -- the Royal Institute of International Affairs
(Chatham House), the Policy Studies Institute and the National Institute of
Economic and Social Research - still see themselves as purveyors to
well-researched common sense. The director of the Policy Studies Institute,
Bill Daniel, acknowledges a belief that consensus is attainable if you
"establish the facts and get people of good will together."
To Britain's neo-conservatives that was, at best, naive. Together with Sir
Keith Joseph, Mrs Thatcher founded the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) in 1974.
Its current director of studies, David Willets, says the CPS started by assuming
that "a lot of the research put out by established think-tanks had a basic bias
in favour of increased government spending and an essential belief in the
rationality of government."
With a tiny staff (currently seven, including secretaries), the CPS sponsored
pioneering work on many of the ideas that came to define Thatcherism --
privatisation, the "enterprise culture", a monetary explanation for inflation.
Its close links to the policy unit in the prime minister's office (staff members
swapped jobs between the two places) ensured that its arguments were heard.
As in America, the success of Britain's neo-conservative think-tanks prompted
imitation from the other side. In 1988 a group of left-wing luminaries, led by
Lady (Tessa) Blackstone, launched the Institute for Public Policy Research.
This is formally independent of the Labour Party, but has close links with its
leaders.
The fall of Mrs Thatcher seems to leave Britain's neo-conservative
think-tanks out on the end of a creaking branch. Bill Daniel sees them as
"gadflies who flourished while their princelings were in power", and foresees a
steep decline in their influence. The CPS, seeking to prove him wrong, has
installed Britain's new prime minister, John Major, as its patron. But sticking
with the Conservative establishment may mean that the CPS loses its claim to
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radicalism. The organisation's uncertainty is shown by its decision not to have
any particular points of view on the future of the European Community: a
decision that makes more jaws than Mrs Thatcher's drop.
Oddly, the think-tank that seems closest to catching the next intellectual
wave is the one whose collapse seemed most logical a year ago. The Social
Market Foundation was set up to serve David Owen's Social Democrats, a party
that no longer exists. But its name contains the latest buzz-word.
The Conservative Party's new chairman, Chris Patten, has told Marxism Today
of his interest in the German idea of a "social market", which believes it is
possible to unleash capitalism's efficiency but also to keep it under the
supervising eye of society: to combine the engine or individualism and a
communal conscience. Mr Patten even mused that the Conservative Party might set
up a think-tank on the lines of Germany's Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, the research
arm of the governing Christian Democrats.
If Germany is indeed to be the model, British think-tanks may soon be
scrambling back towards technocracy and the politics of boring old consensus.
No ideology please, we're German
At first sight, it is surprising that German think-tanks should be notable
for unideological pragmatism. The biggest institutes -- the publicly financed
research departments of the Konrad Adenauer foundation and its Social Democratic
equivalent, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation -- are, after all, the offspring of
political parties. Partisanship should be their middle name. In fact, their
relations with the parties they serve sharply restrict their ability to tackle
controversial topics. Conclusions, even subjects, embarrassing to the party are
unlikely to be pursued.
Immigration is a pressing and difficult issue. It would naturally commend
itself to an American think-tank. The party ones in Germany are reluctant to
consider so awkward a matter: almost anything you say is liable to embarrass the
particular group of politicians you have to worry about.
Asked about research into immigration quotas, Josef Tiessing of the Adenauer
foundation shifts uneasily on his leather sofa. "This is a political question,"
he says, "it is not a scientific question." Those tempted to wander over that
dividing line can be forcefully reminded of it. One research project, into who
would control Soviet nuclear weapons if the Soviet Union broke up, was
abruptly abandoned last year. Too political.
The distinction between "scientific" and "political" research is not just a
dodge to help the big German foundation avoid embarrassing their patrons. It is
observed, almost as carefully, by the think-tanks that are not dependent on
party money or approval. Something German is at work here. There is a tendency
to insist that a researcher's work should be "value-free". This reflects two
German habits: an old one, an academic tradition that takes the "science" bit in
social science very seriously; and a newer yearning for consensus, for believing
that all sensible people really agree with each other.
Since 1959, when the Social Democrats embraced capitalism, German politics
has been a large clustering around the centre, with only a few dissenters on the
margins. Meinhard Miegel, once a Christian Democratic politician, who heads
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the Institut fur Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Institute for Economics and
Society) in Bonn, could think of no influential German think-tank -- even the
one run by Greens -- that did not accept the basic tenets of the social market.
Mr Miegel set up his think-tank in 1977. He was not out to break the mould,
just to collect better data. He recalls thinking: "This is crazy, we are trying
to run a party without facts."
His institute works on issues ranging from demography to labour shortages.
Inevitably, given his background, its research has found its most appreciative
audience among Christian Democrats. But its deliberately non-partisan approach
is no pose: it helps to shape the institute's choice of research subjects, the
way its conclusions are presented, and so, indirectly, the whole tone of debate
in the country. In Germany interest groups like to present their views as the
product of exhaustive research rather than of a distinctive philosophy.
Will German think-tanks ever go the way of some of their English-speaking
counterparts, and plunge into the deep waters of ideology? Some see signs of a
tendency in that direction. They look in particular at the appointment in 1988
of Michael Sturmer, a conservative historian with a philosophical bent, as head
of the Stiftung fur Wissenschaft und Politik (Foundation for Science and
Politics) in Ebenhausen, near Munich. This institute, with over 150
researchers, does a lot of work for the federal government: it specialises in
data, not policy recommendations. The appointment of Mr Sturmer, a friend of
Chancellor Kohl and a man often seen on television, made some of the staff fear
they were going to be "politicised". So far, they seem to have feared wrongly:
Ebenhausen stays in the good, solid German tradition.
The Germans have not yet created what Americans and Britons would call a real
think-tank. That requires the revolving door. People with bright ideas must
not only carry their opinions out of politics and into the research
institutions, but must regularly move back the opposite way when the call comes.
In Germany, so far, the door separates two largely distinct worlds.
East is east but Moscow is west
If American think-tankers would find Germany odd, they would be floored by Japan
-- but would cock an interested eyebrow when they went to the Soviet Union.
In Japan, as in Germany, love of consensus and the absence of a revolving
door leave little room for unorthodox views peddled by independent institutes.
The main think-tanks are offshoots of big firms or finance houses: the Nomura
Research Institute, the Daiwa Research Institute, the Mitsubishi Research
Institute. These bodies produce voluminous reports crammed with data on
subjects that interest their sponsors. They are good at description, less so at
analysis, which might disagree with the boss's views. The research arms of
Japan's securities firms have been relentlessly bullish throughout a 48% decline
in the value of the Tokyo stockmarket.
The curious process of Japan's decision-making reverse the usual relationship
between government and "policy intellectuals". In America and Britain, even to
some extent in Germany, think-tanks set out to influence the government. In
Japan the government tends to see academics as a useful way of influencing
public opinion: how handy if they can be persuaded to open public discussion of
a policy change the politicians want to make.
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In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, there is no longer any pretence
that academics can be above the tumult of political conflict. If consensus
breeds academic complaisance, chaos does the opposite. Many members of the
Moscow research institutes have hurled themselves into politics, as advisers to
Mikhail Gorbachev or Boris Yeltsin or as politicians in their own right.
The big think-tanks are still the state-financed offshoots of the Soviet
Academy of Sciences. These include the Central Economic and Mathematical
Institute (TSEMI) and the Institute of the World Economy and International
Relations (IMEMO). But, since glasnost, they have lived in a different world.
Compare the role of TSEMI under Brezhnev and Mr Gorbachev.
In the mid-1960s the Kremlin, seeing that the economic system was not
working, briefly flirted with the idea of changing it. TSEMI was given the job
of producing an alternative to the ideas of the state planning agency, Gosplan.
But the Kosygin reforms, as they came to be known, were ditched. TSEMI
dutifully fell quiet. A quarter of a century later, when Mr Gorbachev was
feeling reform-minded, it was a head of department at TSEMI, Stanislav Shatalin,
who drafted the "500-day plan", a proposal for sweeping free-market reforms.
They eventually proved too sweeping for Mr Gorbachev. But this time the TSEMI
man kept on talking, and threw in his lot with Mr Yeltsin. Most of the Moscow
think-tanks have now aligned themselves with Mr Yeltsin.
The revolving door has begun to rotate. When Edward Shevardnadze resigned as
foreign minister, he at once set up the first privately financed think-tank in
the Soviet Union, the Foreign Policy Association. This is expected to be a
ginger group for "new thinking" in foreign policy.
The oddity is that, just when the Soviet Union is discovering the merit of
think-tanks engaged in ideological combat, the American scene has gone quiet.
It was Michael Dukakis who said that what matters is "not ideology, but
competence". Yet it is George Bush who seems to have adopted that numbing
proposition as a personal creed. In today's Washington, where ideology is a
murmur of distant guns but technocrats have not quite recovered their old
authority, the think-tanks seem at a loss; many of them are cutting the size of
their staffs.
The dog-days will not last. The United States of the 1990s has a manifest
need for independent thought. The great issues of domestic policy -- the
budget, the proper handling of welfare, education, race relations - stay
unsolved. That grand-sounding "new world order" is still a phrase in search of
a meaning. Modern Machiavellis have plenty to think about.
GRAPHIC: Picture 1, no caption; Picture 2, Callaghan watches consensus collapse;
Picture 3, Now Shevardnadze think-tanks while Gorbachev sinks
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23RD STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright (c) 1991 McGraw-Hill, Inc.;
Byte
April, 1991
SECTION: SPECIAL REPORT; Vol. 16, No. 4; Pg. 120
LENGTH: 3502 words
HEADLINE: Computing in the U.S.S.R.
BYLINE: IGOR AGAMIRZIAN ; Igor Agamirzian received his undergraduate and
doctoral degrees at Leningrad University. He is currently a senior research
fellow at the Leningrad Institute of Informatics of the Soviet Academy of
Sciences, as well as an assistant professor for the computer science
department at the Electrical Engineering Institute, Leningrad. You can reach him
on BIX c/o ''editors.'
HIGHLIGHT:
Soviet ''informatics,''' suffering from years of official policy that has
hindered hardware and software development, looks toward the future
BODY:
On December 7, 1988, the academician Andrei Petrovich Ershov died in a Moscow
hospital at the age of 57. His death went unnoticed in a country concerned with
the tragic consequences of the Armenian earthquake. However, for specialists
routinely dealing with computer science in their work, the event signified the
end of an era.
This article is not an obituary of Ershov. It may, however, be the obituary
of Soviet computer science, a demise that threatens to become the straw that
breaks the back of our collapsing economy. In the Beginning The first
computers appeared in the late 1940s and early 1950s in the U.S., Great Britain,
and the U.S.S.R. The cold war between the East and West caused an avalanche in
the development of military equipment, and the creation of new arms required
ever-increasing calculations. Thus, the first generation of computers was
intended to solve the problems of ballistics and nuclear physics.
In the 1950s, however, the U.S. began using computers to solve business
problems. Work began to automate programming and create high-level languages;
programming in machine codes had become too time- and money-consuming. The first
valve-operated monsters were replaced with solid-state devices. Backing, main,
and internal storage volumes grew significantly. Performance became thousands of
times faster.
Progress in the development of high-level programming languages and their
compilers predetermined the look of programming. In the 1960s, ALGOL occupied
the leading role in the U.S.S.R. Classical Soviet developments of compilers
were associated then with ALGOL.
A series of computers called BASM (the Russian abbreviation for large
electronic computing machines) was created under the guidance of S. A. Lebedev.
In the mid-1960s, this led to the construction of the first line of Soviet
program-compatible computers, called the M-20. The family included the M-20,
BASM-3M, BASM-4, M-220, and M-222. The first compilers engineered for these
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computers were called Alpha, TA-1, and TA-2. Ershov, S. S. Lavrov, and M. R.
Shoura-Boura headed teams of programmers that created the first Soviet ALGOL
compilers for the family of M-20 computers.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the U.S.S.R. established centers for the
development of informatics and computer science. (Informatics deals with
information processing, including mass media, publishing, and intelligence
activities. Here, however, I use the term to mean a sphere of problems
associated with data processing involving the use of technical aids.)
In the U.S., the motivation for developments in computer science shifted from
military applications to the search for methods of increasing labor
productivity. Advances in microelectronics led to the creation of ICs, which
permitted the development of a third generation of computers. Software became
more complicated, and operating systems replaced the second-generation
master-control programs.
At the same time, informatics and computer science in the U.S.S.R. again
came under the influence of politics. (The golden age of Soviet informatics fell
within the years of Khrushchev's thaw -- you cannot imagine cosmonautics without
computer science, and the attention Khrushchev paid to cosmonautics is well
known.) Conservative forces that came to power were interested only in
preserving the status quo and unavoidably contributed conservatism to policies
regarding technology. Developments were curtailed all over the country. The
American IBM Model 360 (1965) was suddenly adopted as the Unified Computer
System by the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), or Eastern European
countries.
The era of developments ended in 1968 with the appearance of the last
computer in the BASM family, the BASM-6. After that, there was nothing. Millions
of rubles were invested in the development of computer science to no end. The
country once again took the fruitless road of copying Western models and assumed
that by copying another technical innovation it would save so much that the
products would surpass those of competitors. (Edsger Dijkstra, a classic
software engineer who visited the U.S.S.R. in the late 1970s, said in a public
speech delivered in the Grand Hall of the Academy of Sciences in Leningrad
that he regarded the fact that the U.S.S.R. produced IBM computers as the
biggest U.S. victory in the cold war.)
You might think that the history of informatics in the U.S.S.R. after 1965
is that of a thoroughly planned strategy against the Soviet people. But this
strategy was planned not by bad Americans but by good and experienced Soviet
leaders trying to improve the public welfare. The cause was indifference,
selfishness, apathy toward tomorrow's problems, an absence of responsibility to
the people -- everything associated with what we now call the administrative
system.
That system failed not only in informatics and computer science but in
agriculture, industry, transportation, and communications. One example: Why did
the shuttle Buran take off so late? Undoubtedly, one reason was the absence of
the computers required to simulate its aerodynamics. Americans made calculations
for their shuttle on computers of the 1970s, which surpassed Soviet computers of
the 1980s. The Soviet Seventies In the early 1970s, the most popular computers
in the U.S.S.R. were the M-222 and the Minsk-32. Scientists at the Nuclear
Physics Institute in Dubna created one of the first Soviet FORTRAN compilers,
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and FORTRAN for the M-20 appeared. A new line of Soviet computers was announced
-- the Elbrus -- whose design was suspiciously similar to that of systems from
the American company Burroughs. Everyone looked forward to the appearance of ES
Unified System'') computers, which were to be compatible with the IBM Model
360.
I first saw an ES computer when I was studying informatics and computer
science at the faculty of mathematics and mechanics at Leningrad University. My
fellow students and I were proud of Soviet software engineering, convinced that
there were positive aspects in our dated computer hardware: It was a training
factor that enabled us to engineer applications that were better than American
programs. Americans, we thought, did not care about efficiency, but we had to,
50 we were better programmers. (It was true, to a certain degree. At least, the
West always treated Soviet programming schools with respect, and a Soviet
programmer emigrating to the West could find a job with ease.)
At that time, programming was becoming a mass specialty in our country, and
the need for automatic-control equipment for thousands of plants required new
software. ÀS the ES computers were put into use, more users preferred FORTRAN
and PL/I, and the ALGOL traditions in the U.S.S.R. faded away. System
programming became devalued, as Soviet clones of foreign computers and
'borrowed'' copyright software became available.
Few people realized that further progress in informatics was impossible
without system developments. We naively hoped that small groups of highly
qualified software engineers scattered all over the country would be able to
withstand the powerful stream of copyrighted software. We did not understand
that the creation of successful software is another science, for which
understanding optimum translation algorithms is insufficient.
The late 1970s saw the development of CM computers, a family of small
computers, bringing a CMEA program for the creation of computers modeled after
the most successful American minicomputer, the PDP-11 from DEC. As the system's
mass production was organized, the country soon filled with new Western
software. There followed a period of conversion (i.e., the adjustment of Western
software to Soviet computers, involving the translation of program messages into
Russian.)
Soon, WE forgot our own system development traditions. It was much more
convenient and profitable to steal than to create something of your own. A whole
generation of programmers was unable to create its own programs but could
readily understand and improve other programs.
How could borrowing (or more honestly, stealing) foreign intellectual efforts
become almost a state policy for informatics and computer science? The reason
lies in the deepest contempt for intellectual creative work. In developed
countries, copyright laws protect the humanitarian as well as scientific and
technological spheres. In the U.S.S.R. , the product of intellectual work does
not belong to its author; it does not even belong to the organization within
which it is developed.
Unfortunately, this is one of the main reasons for our decline in these
disciplines. Why should we invest in products if we can obtain everything free?
At first glance, it might seem more profitable to use stolen programs. Most
Soviet software is only produced in a few copies, and some programs are used
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only by their authors or programming organizations. A special fund of algorithms
and programs, state and regional, has existed for many years in the U.S.S.R.
Programmers are well aware of the complications they must overcome to
incorporate software into this fund.
Some readers may object to my thesis that the cause of all mishaps in Soviet
informatics and computer science lies in copying. What about the international
tendency toward unification of computer architectures and software? Clones of
the Intel 8086 chip are produced not only in the Soviet Union (the KM1810BM86)
but also in Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. IBM PCcompatible computers are
produced not only in the Soviet Union (where they are called Iskra-1030 and
ES-1840) but by hundreds of companies in dozens of other countries.
But there are differences: Unlike companies in the U.S.S.R., other
countries' companies buy licenses and technologies. Buying technologies gives
them a lead in time (Southeast Asia begins to copy new American products within
several months, while the U.S.S.R. waits several years) and quality (the
reliability of Taiwan-made microcircuits surpasses that of masterpieces produced
by the Soviet Ministry of Electronic Industry).
Long ago the U.S.S.R. brought itself into information dependence on the
U.S. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was little support for the rare attempts at
independent hardware and software development. The absence of competition led to
the loss of objective quality criteria and the attempt to improve the product.
There is a saying among Soviet programmers: Programs may be bad, good, or
working. We like good programs very much. Americans prefer working programs.
Because the working programs and hardware are useful, the Soviet dependence on
American information technologies grew, and that dependence became marked when
personal computers appeared on the scene. Bypassed by the Personal Computer
Revolution With the advent of personal computers, a revolution broke out in the
world, but it bypassed the U.S.S.R. Its leaders noticed nothing. Soviet
industries, infamous for their immobility and habit of copying foreign models,
failed to produce decent computers. Even substandard computers were manufactured
in such small lots that you could not speak seriously about the computerization
of the country.
Alarm was raised. Many famous specialists expressed apprehension and offered
constructive steps. Legislative acts were issued, new departments were formed,
production plans were set up and failed. Ershov, who was well aware of the
danger of further decline in informatics and computer science, put forward a
slogan: 'Programming is the second literacy.'
That slogan did the trick: It drew attention to the problems of
computerization and education in informatics. A vast educational program was
started, and informatics became an obligatory school subject. However, the
pioneers of this process assumed that industry would provide schools with the
necessary equipment within two to three years. Industry failed, and in most
schools, the subject is taught on paper only. Students are lucky if they are
able just to look at a computer two or three times a year. Thus, the students
become indifferent, or they do not like the subject. In many cases, the teachers
set the tone: Informatics and computer science are usually presented by teachers
of physics or mathematics who often have only vague knowledge of the subject.
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In a paper published in an American magazine several years ago, comparative
figures were given on computerization in the U.S., Japan, Great Britain, and
other countries. The author was disturbed that the U.S. did not occupy the
leading position in the computerization of education. ''We are lagging behind,
which may lead to a tragic end, the author concluded -- a funny and sad
conclusion for the Soviet reader. The U.S.S.R. is not just lagging behind; it
is facing the risk that a generation of Soviet citizens will be unable to
understand citizens of all but the least developed countries. We Soviets risk
separating ourselves with a new curtain -- not an iron curtain this time, but a
steel curtain of ignorance. We risk finding ourselves alone, because even our
CMEA partners are ahead of us by more than two or three years (computerization
in Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria -- although they do have certain problems - is
decent enough and is improving much faster than the U.S.S.R. '5). A Few Hopeful
Signs In recent years, some positive tendencies appeared. Unfortunately, all
processes are too slow, and we lack time. Solutions to certain problems are not
efficient and often hinder, rather than accelerate, resolution of the problem.
However, fine efforts exist, such as the temporary science and technology team,
Start, set up in 1985 to design a new generation of hardware and software. The
result of this effort is a working model of an original and very promising
multiprocessor computer and accompanying original software. Unfortunately, the
project ended in spring 1988, and our industries seem to be uninterested in the
results of this development.
Nor has there been much interest in the Soviet Academy of Sciences' project
Shkola (School), headed by E. P. Velikhov. Shkola was a serious attempt to solve
the problems of computerization. Regrettably, no progress has been made. That
cannot happen until the national economy is restructured.
But most Soviet enterprises, even in modern spheres like microelectronics,
are not interested in developing and improving their production capability.
Unfortunately, developments in informatics and computer science require powerful
material, information, and technological bases; and it is useless to hope that
new Soviet computers may -- even if the developers enjoy the most favorable
conditions -- be created in university laboratories or institutes of the
Academy of Sciences.
When a successful model is made, there arises a need for large-scale ICs,
whose design requires equipment the U.S.S.R. doesn't have. We cannot obtain
CAD systems as our foreign counterparts do because we do not have adequate
technical resources -- that is, computers and peripherals (e.g., high-resolution
displays). These systems belong to enterprises that are uninterested in the
introduction of new products. The vicious circle is closed. It may be opened
again only as a result of deep restructuring of the economy.
The beginnings of economic self-regulation (a socialist market) is the only
chance to catch up in informatics. However, the market mechanism cannot correct
the decline. Given the existing (or more accurately, nonexisting) copyright
laws, it is more profitable for enterprises to copy products or to buy licenses
for production from abroad, primarily from the U.S.
Therefore, together with economic changes (here, let me be a little naive and
expect that the ruble will be convertible in two to three years), we urgently
need state stimulation of promising areas of science and technology. The state
should create economic conditions under which the use of domestic products would
be more profitable than the use of foreign products. This may be achieved by a
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combination of actions, including judicial, financial, and tax measures. It
should be done as quickly as possible; in fact, it should have been done
yesterday.
While the creation of hardware requires considerable resources, personal
computers greatly reduce such requirements for software. Unfortunately, the
U.S.S.R. suffers from a deficit of equipment, and its prices are 150 times
higher than those of the U.S. (neglecting the symbolic exchange rate and
considering real wages, the state price for a professional personal computer is
about 40,000 to 50,000 rubles, while a qualified programmer earns about 300
rubles a month).
This was why programming and mediator cooperatives and Centers of Scientific
and Technological Creative Work of the Youth were created for the development of
software products. It is curious that mediator organizations, although charging
up to 50 percent of the contract cost for establishing relations between a
customer and a developer, found themselves in very favorable conditions.
Currently in the economy, such mediators are necessary. However, in the
future, programming should be recognized as a free, creative trade, and the
organizations should be able to conclude direct contracts with the programmers.
(This is possible today, but the job is paid from the organization's wage fund,
and this is highly unprofitable for the organization.) A Soviet ACM In the U.S.,
public organizations like the Association of Computer Machinery have had a great
effect on computer science. The absence of such an organization in the
U.S.S.R. has hurt the development of informatics and computer science. The
functions of such an organization were often borne by state working groups and
committees of the Academy of Sciences, especially the Commission for System
and Mathematical Software for Computers (the so-called Ershov's commission,
headed by Andrei Ershov). Such organizations could deal with scientific and
technical problems, but not with the social and judicial aspects of informatics
development. Until recently, the creation of a public organization that could
deal with all the existing problems was impossible, because such an organization
could threaten the departments' monopolies.
On February 17, 1989, the All Union Society of Informatics and Computer
Science was convened. About 200 voting delegates and 700 guests gathered for the
inaugural congress and were handed the new society's draft charter (anonymous,
as usual). Unfortunately, its authors thought traditionally; the charter did not
address problems like the protection of authors' rights, public examinations,
the organization of an information exchange, and so on. The only new idea was
the creation of self-supporting Centers of Scientific and Technical Services run
by the society; that is, another group of mediator organizations. The society
was to be a consultative body of the State Committee for Informatics and
Computer Science of the U.S.S.R., the same body that had initiated the
formation of the society. The state committee had decided to create a society in
its pocket, and the draft charter left departmental interests associated with
informatics and computer science intact.
The absence of openness and democracy at the congress resulted in an
organization that was composed of delegates who had no idea how or when they
were elected to their positions. I. N. Bukreev, a deputy chairman of the state
committee, who is now the chairman of the presidium of the society, told one of
the congress delegates, ''You were elected by voting secret from you!'' What
resulted was a congress made up of delegates representing the leadership of
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large enterprises, institutions, or ministerial departments, while the areas of
science and technology were poorly represented. Some of the leading scientists
in informatics and computer science were not invited, while, as the report of
the credentials committee stated, there were 14 delegates without higher
education.
Time will show the vitality and usefulness of the All-Union Society for
Informatics and Computer Science. I will be glad if it improves informatics and
computer science in the U.S.S.R. For now, it seems that users groups -- which
in the 1970s played a significant role in spreading information, forming public
opinion, and evaluating new software products -- might be more useful. Perhaps
they should take on another form, but public initiative is necessary to ensure
consolidation of forces at the upper level. Some timid, positive attempts have
been made, such as the creation of clubs of professional programmers in
Leningrad and other cities, which may be the basis for uniting efforts by the
leading qualified developers.
This article contains words of sorrow. The current state of Soviet
informatics is not happy, and there are no promising perspectives for tomorrow.
Those involved in informatics and computer science can only look to the future
for some hope. -
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35TH STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
The New Republic Copyright (c) 1991 Information Access Company; The New Republic
Inc. 1991
February 25, 1991
SECTION: Vol. 204; No. 8; Pg. 29
LENGTH: 8265 words
HEADLINE: Moscow and Beyond: 1986 to 1989; Book reviews
BYLINE: Scammell, Michael
BODY:
Moscow and Beyond: 1986 to 1989
I.
Not nearly enough has been understood about the role of human rights
movements in promoting the recent political transformation of the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe. In the discussion of communism's downfall, a great deal has
been written about the overextension of empire, the failure of central planning,
the lack of industrial development, the weakness of agriculture, the evils of
bureaucracy, and the breakdon of the Party; and it would be foolish to deny the
importance of any of these factors in contributing to this epochal collapse.
Still, most of these shortcoming were present in the Communist system since at
least the Second World War, and many of them date back all the way to the
October Revolution. How is it that they assumed such importance in the
mid-1980s, and became decisive in 1989?
There was clearly a major failure of will at the top: the governing apparatus
grew fatigued, the Party sclerotic, the nomenklatura coccupted by its absolute
power. Still, someone was needed to notice the fatigue, to probe the sclerosis,
to contest the power, and finally to offer a viable alternative to the system,
thereby undermining its legitimacy and preparing its downfall. The Reaganites
and the neoconservatives would like us to believe that it was American resolve
that accomplished these things; and American intrasigence certainly played its
part in encouraging and hastening certain internal processes.
Yet the largest shareof the historical credit, it seems to me, should go to
the human rights activists throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, to
the "dissidents," as they came to be called. It was they who first perceived
the gravity of the crisis into which the Communist system had brought itself;
they who sacrificed their work, their careers, their families, and sometimes
their lives to challenge its hegemony; they who unfailingly drew attention to
the appalling mess caused by the disintegration of the system; and they who
prodded a quiescent population into supporting a plausible opposition. Many of
them have now reaped the reward, if reward it be, of replacing their former
oppressors in the highest reaches of government, or of leading the opposition in
the merging consitutional democracies.
The true magnitude of thei achievement, however, goes beyond the practical
and the pragmatic. What has been consistently overlooked, in the East and the
West, is the vital role the human rights has played as an ideological force.
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Throughout its history, and almost until the end of the Brezhnev period of
"stagnation," communism miraculously retained a moral edge. Somehow the
suspicion remained that it was ethically superior to the ideologies and the
systems that opposed it, especially to capitalism. It is not 50 very long since
even Brezhev's functionaries enjoyed that smug sense of ideological superiority
that came with being "on the side of history, which was Marxism-Lenism's great
gift, of course, the confidence that put 50 many of its opponents on the
defensive, even when reason told them otherwise. Nobody could have guessed,
when Brezhnev became First Secretary of the Party in 1964, that the still
inchoate, unsystematized, and wimpish doctrine of human rights, which was just
beginning to take shape in parts of Europe, would flourish and expand until it
challenged and then overthrew the invicible doctrine of clas struggle, economic
rights, and universal equality.
The strength of human rights as an idea and an ideal derived from the fact
that it was deeply rooted in notions of the dignity and the autonomy of the
individual, who could not be arbitrarily abused or persecuted in the name of any
group or collective. Thus, when Amnesty International was founded in London in
1962, its organizers anchored themselves to Article 19 of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights ("everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and
expression"), and them set about applying its principles to all individuals
everywhere, whatever their status, class, race, religion, or nationality, or the
political complexion of their governments. Amnesty also established a
miraculously simple mechanism whereby individuals in countires where these
principles were respected could intercede for those in places where they were
not. It became a grassroots organization of a new type, domestic and personal
in its day-to-day operations (individuals writing petitions for individuals),
global in its application.
Amnesty spawned a multitude of similar or more specialized groups and
galvanized existing organizations into fresh activism. By the mid-170s there
was a rapidly growing network of highly motivated and increasingly efficient
human rights bodies that united activists from the more or less democratic
countries into a powerful extraterritorial citizens' lobby. They would not have
had anything like the impact they ultimately achieved, however, had persecuted
minorities in other parts of the world not begun simultaneously to grope their
way toward a similar doctrine of individual rights, and to see in these ideas
the only possible platform on which to oppose abuses of overwhelming power.
This was especially true in two areas of the world that, according to the
political categories of the cold war, appeared to be ideological opposites:
Latin America, with its fascist-type military dictatorships of the right, and
the Soviet bloc, with its Communist dictatorships of the left. In the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe, the tasks of the opposition were very different from
those in Latin America. Civil society, as most of the world knows it, had been
destroyed and supplanted by a Communist Party whose organizations and
representatives penetrated every social organism, every street, and every
building. No group or organization was allowed to operate independently of the
Party or its control, not even the church (although the degree of control of the
different churches varied from faith to faith and country to country, Poland
being the freest in this respect). Every attempt to maintain an independent
point of view, or to create an independent organization of any kind, was ipso
facto subversive, counterrevolutionary ("he who is not with us is against us"),
the result of false consciousness and "bourgeois" thinking--in a word, treason.
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What the idea of human rights offered individuals confronted by this
crusingly monolithic system was a seemingly non-subversive ("non-ideological")
platform from which to oppose it. There was nothing obviously contradictory
between the rights of the individual to freedom of opinion, belief, assembly,
and so on, and the rights that were supposedly conferred by Communist ideology.
From Stalin onward, Communist Party leaders took great care to include these
rights in their written constitutions, even if they had invariably reserved to
themselves the crucial "righ" to determine how all those other rights should be
interpreted. And so, in the early 1960s, when a more universal idea of human
rights began to gain ground in Western countries, there seemed some hope that
the Communist interpretation of human rights might converge with it. Indeed,
the strategy of early Soviet dissidents like Alexander Esenin-Volpin and Valery
Chalidze was precisely to force the Soviet authorities to observe their own
laws, their own legal enshrinement of some of these rights.
After the invasion of Czecholsovakia in 1968, it became clear that
"convergence" was out of the question. It was then that other dissidents, not
only in the Soviet Union but also in Poland and (somewhat later) in Hungary
and Czechoslovakia, set out on the long march to create an ethical and social
alternative to communism, to establish an informal set of institutions parallel
to, and independent of, official structures in their countries--to create, in
other words, a civil society. In every case, their guide and their goal was the
protection of the human rights of the individual.
For these stirrings to take place, there had to be a long period or growth
and development, during which individuals and groups appeared who grasped the
essential principles of human rights, assimilated them, and began to apply them
in their own surroundings. Many of these individuals seemed to come out of
nowhere and achieved public notice for the first time as already fully fledged
"dissidents," usually as a result of being persecuted or put on trial or jailed.
But others came from established positions in all walks of life; their
transformation into opponents of the regime was a personal response to the
ethical dilemmas posed by their ways of living and working. They emerged
slowly, step by step. The moment of their transportation from "loyal citizen"
to "dissident" is impossible to determine. What is certain, however, is that
such people almost never turned back.
II.
Among these latter individuals, no example is more dramatic than that of
Andrei Sakharov. What makes Sakharov's career 50 absorbing and 50 emblematic,
as both volumes of these memoirs demonstrate, is not simply the fame that he won
at the end of his life as the Soviet Union's most eminent and powerful
"dissiden," or the enormous distance that he traveled from darling of the
establishment to persecuted pariah, but the really heroic grandeur of his
psychological and introspective theoretical physicist to a fearless public
defender of human rights.
There seemed to be little in sakharo's brilliant early career as a scientist
to indicate the crises that lay ahed. In 1948, at the age of 27, one year
before the Soviet Union exploded its first atom bomb, he was invited to join
the research team of Igor Tamm, which was already working to develop an even
more powerful weapon. For twenty years, in Moscow and at a secret research
center in Turkmenia in Central Asia, known by the Orwellian code name of the
Installation, Sakharov labored loyally in the service of this cause. Owing to
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the secrecy of the operation, he lived in virtual anonymity. But his role was
pivotal, and he came to be known as the "father" of the Soviety H-bomb.
He was loaded with honors. In 1953, when the first Soviety thermonuclear
device was exploded (trailing the Americans by about nine months), Sakharov was
rewarded with the title of Hero of Socialist Labor, a Stalin Prize worth half a
million rubles, an expensive dacha in an exclusive suburb of Moscow, and access
to luxury stores reserved for top members of the nomenklatura. That same year
he became the first person ever to be elected to the Soviety Academy of
Sciences by a unanimous vote. Two years later, in November 1955, Sakharov and
his fellow scientists successfully tested their first H-bomb, this time about a
year and a half behind the Americans. It was a stnning achievement for the
generally backward Soviety scientific estabishment, and it landed Sakharov a
second Hero of Socialist Labor medal and a Lenin Prize.
But it was then that Sakharov experienced his first twinges of doubt about
the morality of nuclear weapons. In 1958 he published a scholarly article on
the genetic effects of radioactive fallout from weapon testing, in which he
calculated that the nuclear bombs tested by both sides up to 1957 would probably
result in the untimely deaths of a half-million people. Sakharov also took
issue with Edward Teller's views on the efficacy of mutually assured deterrence,
and argued that "peacful coexistence, disarmament, and, above all, a halt to
nuclear testing" was the best route to "a better life for all of mankind" (the
latter phrase was taken from one of Teller's books). But his qualms were stated
in an article commissioned and disseminated by the Soviet government. It hardly
qualified as dissent.
Still, a seed had been planted. Three years later Sakharov experienced his
first real crisis, when Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union would break
a previously agreed-on moratorium with the West, which Sakharov wholeheartedly
supported, and resume nuclear testing unilaterally. In 1961, at a Kremlin
meeting between government leaders and nuclear scientists, Sakharov boldly sent
a note to Khrushchev suggesting that such a step might jeopardize the test ban
negotiations and the cause of disarmament and world peace. Khrushchev angrily
responded with a reprimand in front of the other guests:
Sakharov
has moved beyond science into politics. Here he's poking his
nose where it doesn't belong. You can be a good scientist without understanding
a thing about politics
Leave politics to us--we're the specialists. You
make your bombs and test them and we won't interfere with you, we'll help you.
Sakharov, well aware of his special status, was suitably chastened by
Khrushchev's remarks, and for the time being he chose to obey his political
masters, though not without misgivings. At a meeting the following month,
Khrushchev inquired whether Sakharov realized his error. "My opinion hasn't
changed," replied Sakharov, "but I do my work and carry out orders." The orders
this time were to test a device of record-breaking power nicknamed "Big Bomb."
Sakharov agreed to the test, on the condition that he could test a "clean"
version of the bomb, which would reduce its absolute power and also the amount
of radioactive fallout produced. The bomb was successfully exploded in 1961,
and a few months later Sakharov was awarded his third Hero of Socialist Labor
medal, which was personally pinned on by Khrushchev, with a Russian bearhug and
a kiss.
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In 1962, however, Sakharov experienced a more serious crisis. East and West
were testing again. The Soviets had set up two nuclear fission installations in
place of one, on the principle that competition between the two experiments
would accelerate progress, and they proposed to test their next device also in
two versions. Sakharov was appalled. He was prepared to accept a single test,
but he calculated that a second test would cause at least 100, unnecessary
deaths from the extra fallout. He fought the decision all the way up to the
Politburo, and even called Khrushchev to oppose it. But he failed, and his
memoir reveals that "it was a terrible defeat for me. A terrible crime was
about to be committed, and I could do nothing to prevent it. I was overcome by
my impotence, unbearable bitterness, shame, and humiliation. I put my face down
on my desk and wept."
All of this was, of course, far from the public eye. Sakharov was still
virtually unknown outside the Soviet scientific establishment, and the Moscow
Test Ban Treaty of 1963 allowed him to assuage his doubts and to maintain his
loyalty without doing further violence to his conscience. Apart from a brief
and fiery campaign to defeat the election of a Lysenko protege to the Academy
of Sciences, he retired into the shadows of anonymity again to devote himself
to studying the peaceful uses of nuclear explosions, and to exploring the
intricacies of "grand" cosmology. But he could not insulate himself entirely
from weapons development, nor could he ignore continuing Soviet discussions
throughout the 1960s about military strategy. He came to the conclusion that
thermonuclear war was being discussed as a real possibility, as a "fact of
life":
I could not stop thinking about this, and I came to realize that the
technical, military, and economic problems are secondary; the fundamental issues
are political and ethical. Gradually, subconsciously, I was approaching an
irrevocable step--a wide-ranging public statement on war and peace and other
global issues. I took that step in 1968.
The step in question was the publication of Reflections on Progress, Peaceful
Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, Sakharov's first and most celebrated
book. It made him a celebrity and a "dissident" overnight, although he and his
family and his friends were hardly aware of it at the time.
How did it come about that it was Sakharov who broke out of the charmed
circle of privilege and power and declared his public opposition to the
government's policies, rather than, say, his distinguished mentor Tamm, or any
of the other equally brilliant and skeptical colleagues described in these
pages? Few of them, according to Sakharov, had any genuine illusions about the
political masters they served, yet not one was prepared to push his dissent to
the point of public disagreement.
A recurring theme of Sakharov's memoirs is his singular apartness from the
mainstream of Soviet life. His background was typical enough for a member of
the Soviet intelligentsia. There were lawyers, priests, and teachers among his
forebears. Both his parents were teachers, and after the October Revolution the
family had been "compressed" into an overcrowded communal apartment, with
primitive services and very little space or comfort. Unlike most people in
their predicament who were forced to share with strangers, four branches of the
Sakharov family were able to live together, thus preserving a modicum of privacy
and intimacy. Andrei (who was born in 1921) and his younger brother Georgi grew
up in a cozy, protected environment that cushioned them from many of the
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rigors of life in postrevolutionary Moscow.
There was also the larger-than-life-size figure of his successful father.
Although he taught physics until almost the end of his life, Dmitri Sakharov was
best known as the author of popular scientific works such as The Struggle for
Light, and of textbooks such as Problems in Physics, which went through thirteen
editions and brought him considerable sums of money. The son adored the father,
whom he describes as gentle, wise, and compassionate, with a great sense of
humor and a capacity for enjoying life. He was fond of that most un-Russian
saying, "a sense of moderation is the greatest gift of the gods," which was to
have considerable influence on his son.
Dmitri was deeply devoted to his children, and determined to give them the
best education possible. Still, it comes as something of a shock to learn that
Sakharov received the first seven years of his education almost entirely from
private tutors, and continued to be tutored at home even after entering high
school in 1934. One of those tutors was his father, who took it for granted
that the son would study physics-which he did, graduating from high school as
one of only two honors students in his class and thus gaining entry to the
physics department of Moscow University. In 1942 he graduated from the
university with a brilliant record, completing a five-year course in four years
owing to the outbreak of the war.
Sakharov's sheltered background appears to have endowed him from the
beginning with a certain aloofness. He writes that he made "no friends and no
enemies" at high school, and no friends at the university until his last year
there. He hardly noticed when several of his classmates left to dig anti-tank
ditches, or when several failed to return. When called for enlistment himself,
he failed both the aptitude test for the air force and the medical test for
general military service, and was eventually assigned to a cartridge factory,
where he was so maladroit that he was sent out to chop trees. When he was
transferred to quality control in the blanking shop, he enraged his bosses by
refusing to turn a blind eye to rusty shell casings. Only when he made it into
the laboratory did he distinguish himself: he invented a device for testing the
hardness of armor-piercing shells, for which he received 3,000 rubles and a
patent for his design.
There is a curious paradox in this mild-mannered young physicist's attraction
to working with armaments. In wartime, this was perhaps inevitable, and
Sakharov spent the rest of the war perfecting shell designs. But after the war,
too, while working on relativity theory at the Physics Institute of the
Academy of Sciences, he kindled to news of the atom bomb, and dreamed of
improving upon existing devices. When nuclear fission research was introduced
into the Physics Institute, he did not hesitate to join, and threw himself with
zeal into the quest for a superbomb.
In his memoirs, he offers a variety of explanations for his single-minded
obsession of the time. One is summed up in Fermi's famous remark that research
on thermonuclear explosions was "great physics," or, as Sakharov puts it, "a
genuine theoretician's paradise. A second reason was the freshness of the
memory of the recent world war: it, too, was an "exercise in barbarity," so that
the inhuman nature of the bombs that he was trying to build seemed no worse than
what had gone before. And third, the Soviets shared American beliefs about
strategic parity and the value of deterrence--for their own side, of course.
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But ultimately something more intangible was involved:
Our initial zeal
was inspired more by emotion than by intellect. The
monstrous destructive force, the scale of our enterprise and the price paid for
it by our poor, hungry, war-torn country, the casualties resulting from the
neglect of safety standards and the use of forced labor in our mining and
manufacturing activities, all these things inflamed our sense of drama and
inspired us to make a maximum effort so that the sacrifices--which we accepted
as inevitable--would not be in vain. We were possessed by a true war
psychology, which became still more overpowering after our transfer to the
Installation.
So it was a matter of politics all along. The memoirist, to his credit, does
not skirt his own cold war attitudes, or his personal responsibility for
developing the bomb, and some of his most fascinating pages are devoted to the
morality of this issue, particularly when he comes to discuss the
Oppenheimer-Teller conflict.
Sakharov sympathizes with Oppenheimer in these pages. He is aware of the
resemblance of his own later behavior to Oppenheimer's. And yet he decides,
paradoxically, in favor of Teller, on the grounds that the Soviet government of
the time would never have honored an American-Soviet agreement to abandon
research on the H-bomb. "Any U.S. move toward abandoning or suspending work on
a thermonuclear weapon would have been perceived either as a cunning, deceitful
maneuver, or as evidence of stupidity or weakness." In Sakharov's view, it was
not the principle of Oppenheimer's dissent, but its timing, that was wrong:
I cannot help but feel deeply for and empathize with Oppenheimer, whose
personal tragedy has become a universal one. Some striking parallels between
his fate and mine arose in the 1960s, and later I was to go even further than
Oppenheimer had. But in the 1940s and 1950s my position was much closer to
Teller's, practically a mirror image
so that, in defending his actions, I
am also defending what I and my colleagues did at the time.
The publication of Reflections in 1968 might be described as Sakharov's
abandonment of Teller's position for Oppenheimer's. It started him down the
path that was to take him "even further" than the latter's. And his timing, in
retrospect, was also not fortuitous. The "thaw" that had begun in all areas of
Soviet life after Stalin's death, and especially after Khrushchev's secret
speech of 1956, had ground to a halt by the early 1960s, and it was beginning to
be reversed even before Khrushchev's overthrow in 1964. The trial of the
writers Sinyavsky and Daniel in 1966 indicated a decisive turn by Brezhnev's
regime toward neo-Stalinism.
It also demonstrated, however, that a significant number of Soviet
intellectuals, including many form among the scientific elite, were not ready to
reverse themselves easily. It was the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial, together with a
series of connected trials of Ginzburg, Bukovsky, Litvinov, and others, that
radicalized the Soviet intelligentsia, and led to the formation of what was to
become a powerful and vocal dissident movement, with civil and human rights as
its battle cry. Sakharov was still remote from those circles, but he signed at
least a couple of the protest letters that began to circulate at that time
(including one on behalf of Sinyavsky and Daniel), and he wrote Reflections
under the immediate influence of the Prague Spring, on which 50 many Soviet
intellectuals had pinned their hopes for liberalization at home. When
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Czechoslovakia was brutally crushed, and Sakharov was dismissed from the
Installation on security grounds, he was brought face to face not only with his
own powerlessness, but also with the powerlessness of Soviet intellectuals
generally to influence the course of political and social events. And he
finally understood how devoid of rights, whether human or civil, the individual
in Soviet society was.
The subsequent speed of his transformation into a dissident and human rights
activist was breathtaking. In 1969 he still considered himself a part of the
establishment: "Although I had bluntly criticized many official actions and
offered advice concerning future polity, deep down I still felt that the
government I criticized was my government." In 1970 he was still expecting to be
able to get Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB, on the telephone. As late as
1971 he had plans for a personal meeting with Brezhnev. With Reflections,
however, he had crossed A Rubicon.
In no time at all he was swiftly sought out by some of the most prominent
dissidents in the land. Solzhenitsyn, himself officially silenced by
censorship, sent Sakharov his criticism of Reflections and visited him to
discuss them. Valentin Turchin (the author of a work, similar to Sakharov's,
called The Inertia of Fear) enlisted Sakharov's support in writing an appeal to
Soviet leaders for democracy and intellectual freedom. roy Medvedev, whom
Sakharov had first met in 1966, and who also signed the Turchin appeal,
persuaded him to intervene on behalf of his twin brother, Zhores, who had just
been incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. And Valery Chalidze accompanied
Sakharov on his first trip to observe a political trial and later enrolled him,
somewhat against his will, in Chalidze's newly founded Committee on Human
Rights.
It was through Chalidze that Sakharov met Elena Bonner, the woman who was to
have a profound influence on his further development. It appears to have been
love at first sight. He was emotionally ripe for it: his first wife, Klava, had
died of cancer in March 1969. Although he is reticent on the subject, it would
appear that their marriage was less than happy; there are amply hints that
Sakharov's relations not only with her two children were not very close.
Sakharov himself had been remote emotionally and physically, having spent many
years closeted at the Installation in Central Asia, swallowed up by research and
professional duties. Perhaps he recalled the troubling last words of his
father, who died in 1961: "When you were at the university, you said that
uncovering the secrets of nature could make you happy. We don't choose our
fate, but I'm sorry that yours took a different turn; I imagine you could have
been happier." It was not clear whether his father was speaking of personal or
professional matters, but after the appearance of Reflections his Aunt Tusya
told Sakharov that his father would have been proud of him.
Bonner, a pediatrician, was the daughter of two distinguished Old Bolsheviks,
the Armenian revolutionary leader Gevork Alikhanov and Ruth Bonner, a descendant
of Siberian Jews. In 1937 her parents were arrested in one of Stalin's purges
and Alikhanov was killed in the camps (Ruth survived and died in 1987),
wrenching the 14-year-old Elena and her brother from their privileged home and
depositing them with their impoverished grandmother. Despite this tragic,
though typical, background, Elena was a loyal Soviet citizen; she had even
joined the Party in the mid-1960s. But the invasion of Czechoslovakia
radicalized her, too, and in 1970, when Sakharov met her, she had just involved
herself in the Leningrad hijacking trial, in which one of the principal
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defendants was her friend Edward Kuznetsov. The Kuznetsov and two others were
condemned to death, Bonner displayed incredible energy and ingenuity in
organizing their defense. Sakharov was drawn into it, and their joint efforts
in that passionate, humanitarian campaign seem to have cemented their love. In
January 1972, mainly at Sakharov's insistence, they were married.
Thereafter there was hardly a case or a cause in which Sakharov and Bonner
were not engaged: the incarceration of healthy people in insane asylums, the
expulsion of the Crimena Tatars, freedom of religion, freeedom to emigrate,
repression of the ethnic Germans, censorship, suppression of the samizdat
Chronicle of Current Events, the Borisov-Fainberg case, the Bukovsky case, the
Krasnov-Levitin trial, the Yakir-Krasin trial. From composing another closely
reasoned missive to the authorities on economic, social, and foreign policy (the
"Memorandum" of 1971), Sakharov progressed to writing statements on violations
of human rights, letters of protest, and appeals for persecuted individuals.
The culmination of this first burst of activity came in 1973 when Sakharov,
together with Solzhenitsyn, became the object of a virulent hate campaign in the
Soviet press, as well as the victim of numerous provocations. By now the two
giants of the dissident movement had become a factor in foreign policy. those
were the days of detente ("a polite form of the cold war," Sakharov called it),
when Nixon and Kissinger were cozying up to Brezhnev and moving toward a form of
condominium based on the superior force of the two superpowers. Brezhnev wanted
access to American credits and technology, but Congress and the American people
had their eyes on the Soviet government's treatment of its dissidents and its
suppression of human rights, and preferred to listen to Sakharov and
Solzhenitsyn, whose message was that that Soviet leadership was cruel,
unprincipled, and unreliable. how could one trust the foreign policy, they
argued, of a government that persecuted its own citizens? It didn't cut much
ice with the White House, but Congress passed the Jackson-Vanik amendment and
Brezhnev's version of detente virtually collapsed.
Sakharov is exceedingly interesting on the subject of his relation with
Solzhenitsyn during this period. The two men respected one another, but
Solzhenitsyn was irritated by Sakharov's openness to all comers and by his
readiness to espouse all forms of protest, and Sakharov found Solzhenitsyn
unduly calculating in his campaigns. Sakharov reports that he was chilled, as
early as 1970, by Solzhenitsyn's response to a question about what to do on
behalf of two celebrated and harshly persecuted dissidents: "Nothing! They
attacked the enemy with a battering ram. They chose their own fate and can't be
saved. The attempt would only harm them and others." Later, in 1973, when both
men were under fire, Solzhenitsyn sent his second wife to remonstrate with
Sakharov over the jackson-Vanik amendment, saying that it was biased in favor of
the Jews and did nothing to solve Russia's other problems. At their last
meeting in the Soviet Union, a few months later, Solzhenitsyn reproached
Sakharov for his alleged willingness to emigrate, ignoring the fact that
Sakharov's plan to go abroad was motivated by a desire to save his stepchildren
from persecution. His intention, undoubtedly unrealistic, was to return to the
Soviet Union immediately.
The two men were vastly different in background, upbringing, temperament,
character, and personal convictions. It was inevitable that they would disagree
about almost everything, and they did. In 1973 Solzhenitsyn published his
Letter to the Soviet Leaders, which was in essence a reply to, and a polemic
with, Sakharov's Reflections. Sakharov responded with a criticism of the
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Letter, to which Solzhenitsyn replied again. The debate between the
conservative, traditionalist author and the liberal, democratic scientist
re-enated in many ways the old battle between Slavophiles and Westerners. It
continues to this day: Solzhenitsyn's latest recommendations for political
change, How Are We to Reorder Russia? appeared in the Komsomolskaya Pravda in
November, while the anniversary of Sakharov's death last month brought admiring
recapitulations of his philosophy.
The personal fates of the two protagonists also diverged after 1973. In
January 1974 Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported to West Germany. Sakharov
remained to continue his personal crusade, and it is typical of his
single-mindedness that, having embraced the cause of human rights, he should
carry his campaign to its logical conclusions. It was not sufficient for him to
write articles and protests, telephone, lobby, talk to foreign journalists,
attent trials, even demonstrate in support of his goals, as someone of his
eminence might be expected to do. In Junu 1974, during President Nixon's visit
to Moscow, he decided on the extreme measure of a hunger strike. Had he been a
writer, one might have suspected him of seeking material--and it is not
difficult to understand some of Solzhenitsyn's exasperation with the seeming
naivete and pig-headedness of some of Sakharov's tactics. But as these memoirs
show, they were brilliantly of a piece with the man.
Sakhavov had thoroughly assimilated the principles that were painfully worked
out by the pioneers of the dissident movement in the 1960s and early 1970s. The
principles were these: that to oppose the Soviet regime successfully, one had to
be absolutely true to one's convictions, never compromise where moral values
were concerned, maintain complete openness in a society obsessed by secrecy, and
above all hold fast to one's inner freedom whatever the cost. Similar
principles were being worked out by dissidents in many of the other countries of
Eastern Europe, in a movement that would acquire an irresistible momentum in the
years to come. In the early 1970s, however, there was nothing inevitable about
that momentum.
These exacting principles were fiendishly difficult to live up to in daily
life. almost a saintly patience and devotion to the cause were requred, the
qualities that so many of hte dissidents displayed, at least in their finest
moments. In the event, the principles withstood the test of practice and fueled
all the leaders of the human rights movements throughout the Soviet bloc,
endowing them with amazing strength and durability. Sakharov was to become one
of the finest of those leaders, in the courage of his personal behavior and in
the clarity of his thinking. He quickly grasped that the dissidents were
engaged in a mortal struggle with a dying ideology, and that, although that
ideology would, in its death throes, continue to claim many victims, the idea of
human rights was intrinsically superior.
This was a truth that Jimmy Carter, drawing on the experience of the civil
rights movement in the United States, also intuited when he threw the weight of
the American government behind the drive for human rights and welcomed their
entrenchment as a natural and rightful extension of the ideas of American
democracy. sakharov immediately recognized the importance of this step when he
heard about Carter's inaugural address, with its statement that "our moral sense
dictates a clear-cut preference for those societies which share with us an
abiding respect for human rights." Though he did not approve of Carter's
inconsistency in his subsequent policies toward the Soviet Union, Sakharov
writes that "the fact remains striking that for the first time the head of a
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great power had announced an unambiguous commitment to the international defense
of human rights."
The Soviet leaders, too, had recently been forced to pay lip service to human
rights by agreeing to "basket three," the provision about respect for human
rights established by the signatory sattes of the Helsinki Final Act in the fall
of 1975-the same year that Sakharov published My country and the World and was
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for "his love of truth and strong belief in the
inviolability of the human being." The Soviets had done everything they could to
water down and to restrict the provisions of basket three, but they had not
foreseen that they would be faced with an American government (backed by Western
European leaders) that was serious about human rights for the first time since
the war. Basket three presented human rights groups throughout the Communist
bloc with an unexpected polical lever with which to pressure their repressive
governments.
The Helsinki Final Act gave the West an ideological edge. the words "human
rights" began to appear with increasing frequency on the fron pages of Pravda
and other Soviet newspapers, and no matter how they were twisted and turned
inside out to mean their opposite, or unfavorably contrasted with the "economic
rights" supposedly guaranteed by the Soviet citizens to read and to digest. As
Simon Leys recently noted about China, you know you have won the debate when
your opponent begins to use your ideas; and so it was in the Soviet case,
although few realized it at the time. The very readiness of the Soviet press to
argue the merits of human rights was a battle lost, even if the larger war was
to continue for another ten years. For this reason, if any American
administration deserves the historical credit for promoting the democratic
revolution in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, it is Carter's more than
Reagan's.
But ten years is a very long time. Sakharov was obliged to embark on many
more hunger strikes, to endure unspeakable privations before the goal was
reached. The middle section of his Memoirs reads like a Who's Who of the
dissident world, like an encyclopedia of Soviet trials and Soviet repression.
Sakharov was to see close friends imprisoned, exiled, sent abroad, or killed.
His children and step-children were victimized and forced to emigrate. His wife
had her near-blindness exploited and was herself humiliated before she could
obtain medical treatment. The culmination came with Sakharov's public
opposition to the invasion of Afghanistan, his exile to Gorky, and his six years
of dreadful persecution and blackmail, including hospitalization and brutal
force-feeding. Bonner has already written eloquently about the Gorky period in
Alone Together, her book on the same subject; Sakharov adds new details on those
harrowing events, but he does not change our understanding of them.
III.
The Memoirs end with Gorbachev's historic phone call to Sakharov in Gorky in
December 1986, informing him that the decree on his banishment had been
rescinded and that he and Elena Bonner could return to Moscow. The next (and
last) three years of Sakharov's life are described in Moscow and Beyond, which
Sakharov completed literally on the eve of his death. Moscow and Beyond is more
than a coda to the Memoirs. It is a dramatic eyewitness account of the birth of
the parliamentary process in the Soviet Union, and of Sakharov's
participation, first reluctant and then selflessly energetic, in that process as
the uncrowned leader of the opposition.
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By the time Sakharov returned to Moscow, Gorbachey's policies of glasnost and
perestroika were reasonably well advanced, and Gorbachev himself, in his
speeches and in his book Perestroika, was expressing many of the very ideas for
which Sakharov had been punished and sent into exile. Sakharov was skeptical at
first. But unlike many of his fellow dissidents, he did not console himself
with bitter jokes and personal recriminations against the Soviet leaders, nor
did he take a pessimistic view of the political processes under way in his
country. He concluded that Gorbachev meant business, that the reforms were
serious and genuine, that the dissidents had in effect won their initial battle
against the system. The important thing was to build on that victory, to
entrench the gains that had been made.
Some of Sakharov's dissident friends feared that he was badly informed and
gullible in his support for Gorbachev, but not for a moment did Sakharov lose
his head or allow himself to be co-opted. From Gorky he had mailed Gorbachev a
long list of political prisoners whose release he demanded as a sign of
Gorbachev's good intentions, and whom he referred to again in their telephone
conversation. Many were being set free, but Sakharov continued to pressure the
government for swifter action. Although his ill treatment in gorky and already
in his mid-60s, he was indefatigable in championing the rights of the uprooted
Crimean Tatars, the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh and Sumgait, the Georgians
slaughtered in the streets of Tbilisi, the Meskhetians in Uzbekistan, the
independence movements in the Baltic states, and countless individuals. He
traveled personally to Azerbaijan and Armenia as part of a fact-finding mission,
to Komi in Siberia in support of an imprisoned dissident. He became an active
member of the governing council of the Memorial Society, an unofficial
organization set up in early 1988 to commemorate the millions of political
prisoners who had died in the Soviet Union during Soviet rule. He supported
demands for full openness about the Chernobyl disaster, and he championed the
publication of The Gulag Archipelago.
Everyone wanted his views on every conceivable aspect of Soviet policy, and
his answers were treated with as much respect as if he had headed a party of
millions. Finally, in January 1989, he bowed to the inevitable and acceded to
multiple requests to stand for elections to the reorganized Congress of People's
Deputies. There were some near-farcical maneuverings at the Academy of
Sciences to deny him the nomination, but in May he was comfortably voted in
with a group of similarly liberal colleagues. Almost at once he became one of
five chairmen of the main parliamentary opposition, the Interregional Group of
Deputies. (Yeltsin was, and remains, another.)
By this time Sakharov had met Gorbachev face to face, once at a meeting of
the International Foundation for the Survival and Development of Humanity ("
he appeared intelligent, self-possessed, and quick-witted in discussion, and
the policies he was pursuing at the time impressed me as consistently liberal"),
and again at a meeting between Gorbachev and leading representatives of the
intelligentsia, where Sakharov angered the president by his spirited defense of
the Armenians. In the Soviet parliament, however, the two men clashed
repeatedly. It began on the very first day of the Congress, when Sakharov
opposed the automatic election of Gorbachev as president without a proper
debate, and demanded that the Congress be given increased powers for its work.
A testy Gorbachev responded by announcing that all speeches, including
Sakharov's, would be limited to five minutes, in effect cutting him off in
mid-flow. It was a pattern that was repeated at future sessions of the
Congress, culminating in the famous incident when Gorbachev switched off the
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loudspeakers while Sakharov was still speaking. (He had already switched off
the television cameras when challenged from the floor by a member of the
Interregional Group of
Deputies.)
Sakharov's account of the Congress fills the last chapter of Moscow and
Beyond and is a wonderful climax to the memoirs as a whole. In these last
pages, we observe Sakharov emerging as the undisputed leader of the Soviet
opposition, the only man in the Congress with the courage, the vision, the depth
of knowledge, and the breadth of understanding to go head to head with
Gorbachev. Gorbachev himself seems to have recognized the fact; when Sakharov
walked out during the voting for president, Gorbachev sought him out to ask why.
Sakharov was approached by Gorbachev's closest aides, Alexander Yakovlev and
Anatoly Lukyanov, to discuss contentious issues on the agenda, and finally, at
the beginning of the second week, Gorbachev acceded to Sakharov's request for a
personal meeting to discuss some of their main differences. The old dissident,
with his usual bluntness, went straight to the point:
Mikhail Sergeyevich
there's a crisis of trust in the leadership and
the Party. Your personal authority has dropped almost to zero
The
country, and you personally, are at a crossroads--either accelerate the process
of change to the maximum, or try to retain the administrative-command system in
all of its aspects. In the first case you will have to rely on the left and
you'll be able to count on the support of many brave and energetic people. In
the second case, you know yourself whose support you'll have, but they will
never forgive you for backing perestroika.
Gorbachev replied that he was tied to the policy of perestroika forever, but
that he was against "big leaps" and dramatic gestures, and he was convinced that
the people would understand him.
After some further discussion, Sakharov returned to his main point: "I'm very
concerned that the only political result of the Congress will be your
achievement of unlimited personal power-the 18th Brumaire in contemporary
dress. You got this power without elections, you weren't even on the slate of
candidates for the Supreme Soviet, and you became its chairman without even
being a member."
Gorbachev: "What's the matter, didn't you want me to be elected?"
Sakharov: "You know that's not the case, that in my opinion no alternative to
you exists. But I'm talking about principles, not personalities. And besides,
you're vulnerable to pressure, to blackmail by people who control the channels
of information. Even now they're saying that you took bribes in Stavropol,
160,000 rubles has been mentioned. A provocation? Then they'll find something
else. Only election by the people can protect you from attack."
Gorbachev: "I'm absolutely clean. And I'll never submit to blackmail--not
from the right, not from the left!"
The frankness of Sakharov's account of these meetings is extraordinary in the
context of official Soviet reticence and the half-truths that pass for political
memoirs in that country. One of the great virtues of his second volume is the
light it throws on the negotiations of the Soviet political establishment in
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