Annus MCMLXXXIX mirabilis -- and Australia

CHAPTER 13

Ten years ago, in 1980, the USSR had recently sent an army into Afghanistan to prop up an incompetent and unpopular communist government (the Brezhnev doctrine at work).  The USA had been humiliated by the Iranian hostage affair, and still more by the farcical failure of its rescue attempt.  The USSR seemed to have at least parity with the USA in nuclear weapon systems, and significant superiority in conventional forces.  The US-led boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games -- in protest at the invasion of Afghanistan -- was a failure.  It seemed quite possible that, country by country, Western Europe would become "Finlandised" -- independent, but under Soviet hegemony and with a Soviet veto on many aspects of policy and some appointments.  Concerned Australians were watching the Soviet Navy develop into a powerful blue-water force, able to project massive power into our region, especially with its access to the former American base at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam.

True, the USSR was seldom able to harvest enough to feed its own population despite its vast area of farmland, and it did not attempt to provide the range of consumer goods and the high living standards that Western, market, economies made possible for the large majority of their populations.  But it was widely felt in the West that the USSR's very low controlled prices for the necessities of life, the free education, guaranteed employment, cradle-to-grave health care and social security went a very long way to make up for this.  Oh yes, there were a few dissidents in labour camps or mental hospitals, but by and large the system worked, and in any case the Soviet Union, unhampered by public opinion and with the massive military power that the system certainly did produce, was too powerful for the West to do anything but placate as necessary.

Ten years later, the changes are enormous and their effects incalculable.  The process of change started slowly after the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev, although the need for it had been apparent before.  By late 1988, glasnost had reached a stage at which it was hard to imagine a return to the Brezhnev style ever being possible:  the myths or lies that had legitimised the communist regime had been owned up to, and a return to the old style could now only be achieved by naked repression, by open gangsterism rather than, as before, gangsterism veiled by the myth of progress towards true communism.  Glasnost also revealed to the Soviet peoples and the world that the economic situation was worse than any but a few, unpopular, Western experts had previously claimed.

In 1988 also, it became easier to envisage the process of "Finlandisation" as a partial liberation from Soviet control of central European countries, rather than as a partial subjugation of ones in the West.  The USSR -- pre-occupied with economic restructuring but still a formidable power -- would allow Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, perhaps one day even the Baltic Republics, gradually to open themselves to the West on condition they remained strictly neutral and on their best behaviour.  Presumably the USSR would demand guaranteed passage for Soviet troops and supplies to the front line in a Germany that would long remain divided and occupied by the wartime Allies.

The change was faster than anyone expected.  1989 will not soon be forgotten.  Early in the year, it was possible to speak of the Cold War as having been won, communism no longer posing a credible economic or political threat and having lost all its self-confidence.  A corollary of this was that the liberation of central Europe, the Baltic and the Balkans was only a matter of time (in the case of German reunification, quite a long time).  Francis Fukuyama wrote his famous essay on "the end of History", ⁽¹⁾ when the world would settle down into a dull but prosperous democratic capitalism.

But within months, by the beginning of 1900, the countries of central Europe had liberated themselves.  Once the Kremlin renounced the Brezhnev doctrine -- or at least its application outside the actual borders of the USSR -- every one of its client regimes in Europe crumbled.  (This is not to say that every one of the successor regimes is, still less will remain democratic:  Romania?  Bulgaria?)  Of the two non-client European communist countries, the decommunisation-cum-disintegration of Yugoslavia was speeded, and the archaic Albanian regime was shaken into introducing minor reforms that will almost certainly prove to be the first steps on its path to collapse.  Vietnamese liberalisation continued, if slowly, and the Mongolian and Nicaraguan regimes fell.  Only North Korea and, more defiantly if no more convincingly, Castro's Cuba kept up the rhetoric and rigidity of Sovietism as we knew it (and the Middle Kingdom went its own way as always).

Regarding the USSR itself, the question in 1989 ceased to "How would Gorbachev achieve perestroika?  The new questions were "Can the system restructure itself at all?", and "How long before the component parts of the USSR split up?"  The economic, social, political and environmental problems are appalling.  Giving a prestigious lecture at Glasgow University in July 1990, a professor of economics and Soviet academician -- an occasion and a person that a few years ago could have been trusted to produce the Party line -- summed up the situation like this:

There are two solutions to the crisis.  The realistic one is that little green men in spaceships will land and tell us what to do.  The fantastic one is that we will manage it for ourselves. ⁽²⁾

He was barely joking.  Not only has communism collapsed, but communist countries are near to collapse.  What are the implications for Australia of these world-shaking events?

They may be less than at first sight seems likely.  We should distinguish here between questions like "What can or should Australia do to help?" and ones like "What effect will the opening and eventual revival of central Europe have on the Australian economy?" or "What does the end of the Cold War imply for our defence and security interests?"

The answer to the first kind of question is basically "very little", and this absolves us from having to discuss in detail whether and on what terms we should help.  In the now free or nearly-free countries of the outer rim of the Soviet empire, the biggest problem is that of rebuilding shattered economies -- while simultaneously learning, on the job, about liberal society and democratic politics.  Within the USSR, the political situation still makes effective economic reform impossible, but sooner or later, and probably from a worse starting-point than today, economic reconstruction will be needed there too.  The scale of the task is comparable to that of rebuilding Western Europe after 1945:  a ten or fifteen year task even with immense injections of American capital and (except in some countries at the very beginning) functioning political systems.  This is an area in which Australia cannot make a significant contribution.  Thanks to our governments' past mismanagement of our own economy, we simply cannot afford to pour huge amounts of capital into projects in the decommunising countries.  (This is not to say that there should be no Australian investment there -- it is already happening -- just that it can only be a drop in the ocean.)

The actual economic task facing these countries is twofold:  to switch from a centrally-planned command economy to a decentralised, market-based economy, and to modernise a protected, uncompetitive industrial structure.

The switch from full central planning to markets has seldom been tried.  West Germany did it with resounding success -- except that it involved world war, total defeat, and a virtual economic collapse.  Although war-time Britain had as much of a command economy as Nazi Germany, its first (Labour) postwar government wanted not a return to the market, but a progression from the war economy to a planned, socialist peacetime economy, and its Conservative successors could not be described as "free-market" (and remember that rationing did not finally end until well into the 1950s).  Very much the same can be said of Australia.  There is nothing in the Australian experience that is of particular relevance to the problem.

Modernisation of an uncompetitive industrial structure (plant, management, skills, attitudes, industrial relations ...) is also not an area in which Australia is well placed to offer advice.  "Those who cannot do, teach" is not the appropriate attitude.  Again, this is not to say that no Australians have useful expertise, merely that as a nation we have nothing very useful to offer.

Nothing, that is, except perhaps our mistakes.  We can to some extent give the central Europeans the benefit of our hindsight.  (We're not the only ones:  the Swedish Association of Free Enterprise has circulated a study of that country's attempt to find a "third way" between capitalism and a command economy, hoping to discourage the new democracies from going down that superficially attractive blind alley.) ⁽³⁾  One way of doing this is of course to send delegations of Australian politicians, academics, unionists and businessmen on missions to central Europe;  a much better one would be to bring Europeans here, to let them watch liberal democracy and a semi-market economy at work (not a pretty sight, but better than the alternatives), pick Australian brains, and with luck go home to devise better constitutions and institutions than we have managed for ourselves.

Questions of the second kind referred to above are more important, because they relate to things that will affect us whether we like it or not.  For one thing, it will become harder for Australia to attract the foreign capital that we use to live beyond our means.  With the development of a global financial system, governments must increasingly compete to provide environments attractive to increasingly internationally-mobile business. ⁽⁴⁾  As central Europe opens up, this competition for investment will become stiffer, and Australia will have to match up to it.  The most important implication for Australia of the collapse of communism is that Australian economic reform is even more important and urgent than it was before.  This means further deregulation, especially of domestic and international transport;  much more flexible employment practices, and more effective education and training;  tax reform;  and lowering our import barriers. ⁽⁵⁾  The last of these -- buying more of their goods -- is also of course a genuine, direct way of helping decommunising countries, and developing countries too.

There is scope for large increases in agricultural production in central Europe, and enormous ones in the USSR, because of the extreme inefficiency of traditional communist collective farms and the very large losses in transport and storage.  To achieve them would at a minimum require:  returning the land to private ownership;  making the new owners confident that they had long-term, secure titles (which requires that they also have confidence in the stability of the new constitution and legal system);  and substantial amounts of capital;  no small order.  But if it can be brought off, the USSR could become a major exporter of agricultural commodities rather than an importer, and hence another major competitor for Australia on world markets -- which makes economic reform yet more urgent.

A second implication is that the Socialist Left in the Labor Party, and similarly-aligned groups outside it, will continue to decline.  The economic system they have so long trumpeted as fundamentally more efficient than ours has been pronounced a failure by the people who had spent their lives trying to make it work.  The political system they lauded as fairer and a better respecter of "true" human rights has been denounced, by the people who operated it, as based on lies, force, privilege, and more rigid societal barriers than any modern Western society.  The Left has no chance of reviving until it is happy with notions such as "market forces" and "competition".  Since the residual influence of the unregenerate Left is one of the biggest obstacles to economic reform in Australia, this is good news.

Except for its economic implications -- for a sound economy is an essential element of national security -- the opening of central Europe as such does not impinge directly on our defence and security interests.  But the end of the Cold War and turmoil and possible disintegration in the USSR do, although the effects are much harder to predict.  As Saddam Hussein of Iraq has shown, the end of the Cold War did not bring peace.  It seems clear -- this is of course a sentence that I may not survive to regret! -- that the chance of Australia being destroyed in a nuclear holocaust, which previously was very small, is now negligible (although it would not be surprising if nuclear weapons were used in a civil or nationalistic war in a disintegrating Soviet Union).  The chances of non-nuclear war in the Balkans, parts of the USSR and the Middle East have probably increased with the end of the cold war.  Of these, only conflict in the Middle East immediately threatens major Australian security interests, but all would have repercussions here through various ethnic communities, and most would also reduce demand for the commodities we export.

The good news is that with the end of the Cold War has come the possibility of a new lease of life for the United Nations.  Now the superpowers are learning to cooperate, the UN may learn to play the peacekeeping role originally envisaged for it but denied it by Stalin and his successors and by third world despots.  At the time of writing, Saddam Hussein had set a stiff test for the organisation, which was performing much better than expected.  Australia has been a strong, often complacent, supporter of the United Nations during its 45 years -- not something that should be counted to our credit during most of that period -- and this fortuitously puts us in a position to push quite hard to reform the organisation now there is a chance of it becoming a genuine force for peace.

Finally, the response of Australians if not of Australia to the events of 1989 must be sheer happiness at seeing tyrants toppled, dictators deposed, secret policemen spurned, and some tens of millions of people newly able to enjoy the same freedoms and aspire to the same goodies that we take for granted.

---

EDNNOTES

1.  Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?", The National Interest, Summer 1989.

2.  The author's notes of A. Anikin, Stevenson Lecture, Glasgow University, 18 July 1990.

3.  Published in English as Littorin et al., "The rise and decline of the Swedish welfare state", Företagareforbundets Rapporter (Stockholm), May 1990;  also published in Swedish, German and Russian.  This study is valuable reading for anyone still tempted by the prescriptions for Australia contained in the ACTU's Australia Reconstructed.

4.  Cite Kasper.

5.  None of these prescriptions are exactly novel;  they are along the lines recommended in, inter alia, Kasper et al., Australia at the Crossroads (1980);  Nurick (ed.), Mandate to Govern (1987);  the Garnaut Report (1989);  Nurick & Ulyatt (eds) After the Election ... (1990).

Waiting for Yeltsin: Is Boris Good Enough?

CHAPTER 12

Everything's in disarray, and no one's there
To say, as cold sets in, that disarray
Is everywhere, and how sweet becomes the prayer:
Rossia, Lethe, Lorelei.

Osip Mandelshtam, "The Decembrists", 1917 ⁽¹⁾

With the death of Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov on 14 December 1989, the Soviet Union may have lost its only personified hope for national reconciliation.  Sakharov's disappearance from the Soviet political scene marked the point at which what had been known as the "Soviet crisis" entered the terminal stage:  national catastrophe.

History rarely produces figures who can both throw stones and gather them, who can destroy the old order and lay the foundation for a new one, who can trumpet discord and celebrate harmony.  George Washington was one.  Sakharov might have been another.

Sakharov left no heir, no stone gathered of national stature.  There is no one in today's Soviet Union who, like Sakharov, is admitted to and trusted by the three progressively distant and hostile camps that dominate the Soviet political landscape:  Gorbachev and the establishment reformers;  the pro-capitalist and pro-Western Moscow intelligentsia; ⁽²⁾  and the rapidly radicalising, and increasingly self-conscious and unified populist movements.  Instead, in a country rapidly polarising and depleted of trust -- the most essential ingredient of peaceful reform -- Sakharov left behind a slew of vocal, energetic, and wilful stone throwers.  Of these, Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin -- now president of the Republic of Russia -- is by far the most formidable.

Still, he is enigmatic, perhaps deliberately so.  From Yeltsin's past one can form a fairly good idea of how he might go about doing things, but not of what specific things he is likely to do.  This puzzle comes from the unique nature of Yeltsin's political base:  he is the only Soviet politician who enjoys both the ardent, often fanatical, devotion of the Soviet hoi pol-loi and the solid, albeit guarded and qualified, support of most of the intelligentsia.  As we shall see, keeping both constituencies happy is no easy matter.

Soviet totalitarianism can be divided into four stages:  the mature, when people were afraid to think (Stalin);  the aging, when they could think but were still afraid to talk (Khrushchev);  the decaying, when thinking and talking privately were usually safe but acting was not (Brezhnev);  and the dying, when, gradually, people have been allowed to act (Gorbachev).  Yeltsin himself has been instrumental to the arrival of this last stage;  he has also been symbolic of it.

Until the era of Gorbachev, however Yeltsin's reactions to the life around him were not atypical.  He did not think under Stalin (and, by his own admission, wept when the tyrant died);  he thought but did not talk under Khrushchev;  and he talked but did not act under Brezhnev.

In the pitch darkness of 1931, as Stalin celebrated his victory over the Russian village -- starved, arrested, uprooted, and murdered -- two peasant Russian boys were born who would do more than anyone else to undermine the very foundations of the house that Stalin built.  Boris Yeltsin arrived on 1 February, in a Ural village.  A month later, Misha Gorbachev was born in the southern Russian province of Stavropol.  They were to rise fast and in parallel;  ultimately their paths would intersect, travel closely together, and then diverge sharply and painfully.

Like Gorbachev's, Yeltsin's career was swift and stellar.  A graduate of the Department of Civil Engineering of the Ural Polytechnic Institute, he became chief engineer of the Construction Directorate in his mid-twenties and manager of a huge industrial complex at thirty-two.  Five years later, Yeltsin was appointed the construction section chief of the Sverdlovsk Regional Party Committee.  He then became a secretary, and a year later, at the tender Soviet political age of forty-five, first secretary.  This made him absolute master of the Sverdlovsk province, the Soviet Union's third largest industrial area.  In rushing to appoint Yeltsin, the Brezhnev Politburo had violated the rules;  not only had Yeltsin leapfrogged the obligatory tenure as the second secretary of the regional committee;  he was, in fact, promoted while the current second secretary, who ordinarily would have taken over the province, was still in office.

During his nine years as the Sverdlovsk ruler, Yeltsin gave a foretaste of things to come.  He permitted his subordinates to criticise him;  he fielded "provocative" questions at meetings with the "labouring masses";  he initiated call-in TV shows in which the leaders of the province were forced to appear.  During one such show a caller inquired angrily why Yeltsin's wife was driven to work in her husband's state car -- a practice considered a normal perk of the state and party nachal'niki.  Yeltsin promised that his wife would use his car no more.  He kept his word.

That such transgressions were tolerated by Moscow is a testimony to the apathy, emaciation, and rot of the waning years of Brezhnev's reign.  It helped that the "human face" of Yeltsin's rule lurked safely behind the Ural Mountains, thirteen hundred kilometers from Moscow:  nothing of the sort would have been allowed in Central Russia.

Then, too, Yeltsin knew when to put limits on his mild iconoclasm.  When Brezhnev's seventieth anniversary came around, Yeltsin obediently lent his voice to the chorus of tributes to the now much-vilified "architect of stagnation".  The missive from the Sverdlovsk Regional Party Committee, signed by Yeltsin, extolled Brezhnev's "wisdom, a giant organising talent, bubbling energy, [devoted to] the construction of communism".  Yeltsin's message to Brezhnev went on to say:

We who live in the Urals thank you ardently and from the bottom of our soul, Leonid Ilyich, for your constant care for the strengthening of the economic and military might of our Motherland, the raising of material and cultural level of people's life, for your titanic activity aimed at the establishment of solid peace in the whole world.

Again, following the Politburo's secret decision to demolish the Ipatiev House, in the basement of which Czar Nicholas II, his wife, and children were executed in 1918, Yeltsin sent in the bulldozers in the middle of the night.  By morning, only a patch of fresh asphalt marked the spot.

But undoubtedly the greater leniency accorded Yeltsin was also Moscow's tribute to his leadership.  He was bright, hard working, well-liked by the people, and did not take bribes -- a Soviet wonder.  These qualities prompted a new general secretary, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, five days after his election, to summon Yeltsin to Moscow to join the Central Committee apparatus.  Nine months later, Yeltsin became the first secretary of the Moscow City Committee, the most prestigious of all the local party posts and one traditionally given to the general secretary's most trusted ally.

Ryba portitsia s golovy, a Russian proverb claims -- "a fish begins to rot head first".  As Yeltsin took over in December 1985, Moscow was a thoroughly rotten head of the country.  From eight till two in the morning, Yeltsin fired and harangued, thundered and cajoled -- and still, as he put it, "could not get to the bottom of the filthy well".  One wholesale purge of the party bosses and trade officials followed another.  But still the Soviet capital -- whose worn-out transportation and theft-ridden stores could not cope with daily invasions of visitors (two million a month in winter, three million in summer) looking for something, indeed anything, to buy -- showed no sign of improvement.

As Yeltsin correctly claimed later, the only thing to improve during his short Moscow tenure was the "atmosphere".  After eighteen years of Victor Grishin -- Brezhnev's distant, corrupt, servile, and high-handed crony -- the new master, who began riding buses and metros instead of zooming down a special lane in a black limo, became an instant star.  Voluble and gregarious, he liberally dispensed his opinions on a multitude of subjects.  One of Yeltsin's cracks, which delighted Muscovites, traced marital discord in the Soviet capital to the size of Moscow kitchens -- kitchens totally incapable, according to Yeltsin, of accommodating mightily proportioned Russian women, and thus progenitors of ugly family feuds.

Yeltsin authorised the mass media in his domain to begin publishing and broadcasting the truth.  Thanks to a new line of publications of Moskovskaya pravda and Moskovskiy komsomoletz, Muscovites were the first Russian readers in the country to behold, astonished, words like prostitutka, narkoman (drug addict), and mafia -- used to describe Soviet, not "bourgeois" reality.

The new first secretary initiated a spate of entertainments, from dog shows to wind orchestra competitions.  But his most popular brain child was open-air trade fairs -- yarmarki.  Unable to break the trade mafia, Yeltsin decided to bypass it by having agricultural produce sold by farmers directly to Muscovites.  Yet exercises in free marketing yarmarki were not:  unlike the several "farmers' markets" in the city, the prices at yarmarki were kept lower by fiat.  Every now and then Yeltsin made surprise visits to fairs.  On one such visit, he harangued Azerbaijani farmers:  "Aren't you ashamed of yourself to squeeze the Muscovites like this?  They send you machinery, refrigerators. ... Come, come, you can take a ruble off your fruit, half a ruble off the vegies".  Such reproofs by a nonvoting member of the Politburo were not to be taken lightly;  the prices dropped as prescribed.  That night, recalls a witness, as the boss's words were repeated in Moscow kitchens, Yeltsin "became a legend".

In the meantime, the Moscow party apparat, whose undying hatred Yeltsin earned almost instantaneously, ran for cover under the wings of the guardian angel of party professionals, Yegor Kuzmich Ligachev, at that time the "second" secretary of the party and Gorbachev's deputy.  A fellow Siberian and a former party boss of the Tomsk province, Ligachev -- ironically, in light of his future relationship with Yeltsin -- was the Politburo member who pushed the hardest for Yeltsin's transfer to Moscow.

A series of clashes between the two men followed.  Yeltsin saw his initiatives stifled, his designs overruled, his proposals dismissed.  Frustrated in his efforts to bring what he considered a true perestroika to the capital, Yeltsin sent Gorbachev a letter of resignation.  Gorbachev pocketed the letter and kept postponing the decision.  Yeltsin grew more and more anxious.  His rendezvous with Russian history was set.

There is a verse in Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate, one of the greatest novels about communist totalitarianism:

"What's your shell made of, my dear?"
Once I asked a turtle.  And was told:
"It's of fear.  Stored and hardened fear.
There is nothing stronger in the world."

Yeltsin's decision to crack his own shell of fear -- a very personal and painful step, the agony of which nearly cost him his life -- turned out to be more than one man's liberation.  It ushered in a new, terminal era of Soviet communism.  What happened on 21 October 1987 remains the pinnacle of Yeltsin's political life.  Regardless of what follows, the events of that morning alone assure his place in history.

At the closing of a largely ritualistic Central Committee meeting on that day, Yeltsin requested the floor and delivered a speech in which he deplored the absence of "revolutionary change" in the party appparat;  warned about popular disappointment with perestroika because of the lack of results;  noted Gorbachev's budding cult of personality, and, finally, complaining of the lack of support from the Politburo, asked to be released from the post of the first secretary of the Moscow City Committee.

As he walked back through a stunned silence ("heart pounding and ready to burst through the rib cage", he wrote in his memoirs) Yeltsin prepared himself for an "organised" and "methodical" slaughter. ⁽³⁾  And that is precisely what happened.  Following Gorbachev's cue, one Central Committee member after another got up to denounce Yeltsin.  Three weeks later, the ritual slaughter was repeated at a plenum of the Moscow City Committee, to which Yeltsin, in hospital with a nervous and physical breakdown and pumped with tranquilisers, was summoned by Gorbachev.

Three months later, Gorbachev called again, this time offering Yeltsin a Council-of-Ministers-rank position in charge of construction.  The offer was a curious one.  Why did Gorbachev not deliver a coup de grace, by making Yeltsin ambassador to Mongolia, as Khrushchev did with Molotov?  The answer is most likely to be found in the role that Gorbachev, the master tactician, must have assigned to Yeltsin from the beginning.  Yeltsin is to Gorbachev what Medusa's head was to Perseus:  when Gorbachev reaches inside the bag and produces Yeltsin, the "conservatives" freeze in fear.  By comparison, Gorbachev looks supremely moderate, reasonable, and well worthy of support.  Gorbachev needed Yeltsin in Moscow, handy, within reach.  As Yeltsin perceptively commented on numerous occasions:  "If I did not exist, Gorbachev would have to invent me".

At the same time, the destination of Yeltsin's institutional exile was not, as the Soviet papers in the pre-glasnost days used to say, accidental.  Alongside food, medical care, finance, and crime, housing is the most explosive issue in grass roots politics:  over one hundred million Soviet citizens (every third one!) have less living space per person than even the miserable Soviet "sanitary norm" allows -- nine square metres per person.  In Moscow, as Izvestia has acknowledged, 344,800 families are on the waiting list for housing (12 per cent of all families in the Soviet capital);  282,900 families in Leningrad (20 per cent);  208,000 in Kiev (26 per cent).

Gorbachev knew Yeltsin better than Yeltsin knew himself.  The general secretary was convinced that Yeltsin would re-emerge, no matter how crushing the blow was, and Perseus would recover Medusa's head.  And Gorbachev was right:  only a few months after his political demise, Yeltsin began campaigning for a seat at the 1988 Extraordinary Party Conference.  Thus, at the age of fifty-six, Yeltsin became the first politician in sixty-four years (since the time of Lenin's death), who openly took on the Big Boss, lost, and rose again.  A new era of Soviet political history began.  A year later, in the elections to the Congress of People's Deputies, Yeltsin triumphed over his apparat-supported opponent, polling close to 90 per cent of the Moscow vote.

"There is one story and one story only/That will prove worth your telling," Robert Graves advised budding poets.  Yeltsin the budding politician did discover his own story, and it has proved remarkably well worth his telling.  It is a story of extramonetary remuneration of the Soviet bureaucrats -- the "social justice" issue, to use the currently accepted euphemism.  No feeling is more widely and more passionately shared in today's Soviet Union than hatred of the political elite's privileges:  all those special drug, book, and department stores, special box offices, special hospitals, special food rations, special food processing plants, even special farms where this food is produced. ⁽⁴⁾

Setting an example, and earning enormous political capital, Yeltsin gave up all his ministerial-rank privileges -- including, in May of last year, the holy of holies of the Russian perks, a dacha.  After thirty years of apparat privileges, he told Moscow News, it is not easy to cope:  "It is hard when your wife queues for hours to buy food", Yeltsin complained, "or when something is not available in the store, or when drugstores have no medicine and your grandson's temperature is over 40 Centigrade".

Yeltsin's constituency of the reform-oriented democratic "progressives" and hoi polloi -- united by hatred of the stupidity, rapacity, and privileges of the party and government bureaucrats -- may prove only temporary.  And small surprise if it does:  progress and populism are rarely compatible:  "Our political life", writes Nikolai Shmeliov, perhaps the most authoritative of the Soviet radical economists, "has one sad feature:  the most pronounced are levelling trends, born out of the ideology of equality of all in poverty".  Along with meat, clean towels, 800 grams of soap a month, refrigerators, and shoes, the closing of kooperativy (small private enterprises) was at the top of the list of demands of striking miners last July.  A huge segment of Yeltsin's constituency are social Luddites -- scared of the havoc, the uncertainty, the need for initiative and self-reliance that radical economic reform will bring.  Undoubtedly there are Yeltsin supporters among those who burn private farms and vandalise cooperative shops and restaurants.

Most important of all, Yeltsin's populism appeals to those who hate the neighbour who does better than they, no matter how hard he or she works.  Yet earnings-based inequality is both the key condition and the assured outcome of any radical economic reform.  As Gavriil Popov, a leading Soviet economist who in April was elected the mayor of Moscow, has put it in Literaturnaya gazeta:  "The increase in wealth for some will become the basis for raising the standard of living for all."  Yet it is precisely the increased "social layering based on property" that bothers Yeltsin the leveller.  What Popov rightly sees as the "key problem" of perestroika -- "the contradiction between the democracy that we need and the growth of economic inequality" -- is bound, sooner or later, to split the Yeltsin constituency.  And contributing to the rift between the pro-reform progressives and the populists is the age-long bitter mistrust between the liberal Russian intelligentsia and the narod, the people, on whose behalf the intelligentsia is supposedly labouring.

Because of his constituency, Yeltsin is uncharacteristically reticent on the key subject of property.  Philosopher Igor Kliamkin, who is among the most perceptive observers of Soviet politics today, notes that Yeltsin talks about the market "through clenched teeth".  Thus Yeltsin tells the New York Times that he is for "something close to" private ownership of farmland.  In his memoirs, he states that the issue of property divides "the so-called left and right" but does not indicate where he stands on the issue.  The Financial Times reports Yeltsin supporting "private ownership of the production means and land" -- but only in general and with a proviso that "positive aspects of socialism" are incorporated.

The other pillar of Yeltsin's political strategy, meanwhile, is safe from cracks and grows stronger by the day.  These days, to attack Gorbachev is almost as advantageous as attacking the party itself.  And as Gorbachev's popularity declines, Yeltsin's critique of the general secretary grows progressively sharper and more personal.  Perestroika has "failed", Yeltsin told the Financial Times, because "the leadership" failed.  Moreover, "five years should be enough for a president to prove his worth.  He hasn't fulfilled his obligation to the pledges to the people".  Yeltsin's memoirs cast Gorbachev as "inconsistent" and "timid", a man who "loves" half-measures and "semi-decisions".

Yeltsin seems to regard the political mileage to be gotten out of the "social justice" issue as far from exhausted.  The single longest topical passage in his book is eleven pages devoted to the privileges of the top party leadership.  Toward the end of the passage, Yeltsin lurches for Gorbachev's political jugular:  "Why has Gorbachev been unable to change this?  "I believe the fault lies in the basic cast of his character.  He likes to live well, in comfort and luxury."  And -- a twist of the knife -- "what about [Raisa Gorbachev's] ZIL limo?  My daughter, at her workplace, is given one small cake of soap per month.  My wife ... has to spend two or three hours a day in shopping lines. ..."  Was the entire book written for this paragraph?  If so, it is probably worth it:  when Yeltsin's autobiography is published in the Soviet Union, the paragraph will do more to boost his popularity and sink that of Gorbachev than anything else in the book.

In the meantime, Gorbachev continued his cat-and-mouse game:  now letting Yeltsin roam loose and even protecting him, now throwing him high in the air.  When the "conservative" majority of the First Congress of People's Deputies last May failed to elect Yeltsin to the permanent legislature (the Supreme Soviet), Gorbachev acceded to -- possibly arranged -- a resignation of one of the elected deputies in order that Yeltsin take his seat.  That summer Gorbachev authorised a televised address by Yeltsin to striking miners.  When last fall Pravda reprinted an Italian newspaper article that accused Yeltsin of drinking non-stop during his US tour and spending honoraria on jeans and VCRs instead of charities, Gorbachev sacked Editor-in-Chief Viktor Afanasiev.

Yet on October 16, just a few weeks later, Gorbachev, in his capacity as the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, humiliated Yeltsin during a nationally televised session.  He had the minister for internal affairs report on a bizarre incident:  Yeltsin, the minister alleged, appeared late at night and soaking wet at a police station in the exclusive country house retreat of the Moscow elite, stating that he had been kidnapped and thrown off the bridge by unknown assassins.

Yeltsin said later that he himself had concealed the episode for fear of provoking protest strikes and riots by his supporters.  At the time, though, his response in the Supreme Soviet was suspiciously confused:  he said that nobody had tried to harm him and that the whole episode was "his private life".  (A rumour began circulating in Moscow, meanwhile, that he was visiting his mistress who threw a bucketful of water over him.)

Yeltsin's detractors are not confined solely to the apparat.  Some in the Moscow intelligentsia are sceptical, even alarmed.  According to Novy mir, they see in Yeltsin a "neo-Bolshevik", the "central point" of whose program -- redistribution of goods and services accumulated by the ruling class -- was "the leitmotif of all Bolsheviks, both before and after the [1917] revolution".  His program, the article reports, is seen by some as a "collection of primitive quasi-solutions".

The Moscow intelligentsia is heavily overrepresented among the sources of Western correspondents in the Soviet Union, so its weariness of Yeltsin permeates Western media.  Nonetheless, the intelligentsia's attitudes are themselves somewhat suspect.

Perhaps nowhere in the world does there exist a more snobbish intelligentsia than in Moscow.  A wrong accent, a gesture that is not comme il faut, or (God forbid) grammatic deficiency are all valid reasons for excommunication.  (Although Gorbachev speaks better Russian than any Soviet leader since Lenin, without the heavy Georgian accent of Stalin or the Ukrainian of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, he too has taken his lumps.  His fall from grace began at the televised proceedings of the First Congress of People's Deputies last summer, when he several times used the incorrect third person plural form of the verb klast', to put down, saying lozhut, instead of kladut.)

A son of a Siberian peasant, Yeltsin can hardly count on acceptance by Moscow intellectuals.  In his book, Yeltsin notes that Muscovites "make no attempt" to hide their "snobbery and arrogance" towards provincials and that, prior to his move to Moscow, his rare encounters with the inhabitants of the capital left "a nasty taste" in his mouth.

Another, more powerful, source of the intelligentsia's resentment is deeper and perhaps subconscious.  For generations, it cast itself as fighters and martyrs for the narod.  But, with a few notable exceptions, the intellectuals know nothing of the narod.  They do not know how "the people" live, do not share their habits, and (except in books) do not speak "the people's" language.  Yeltsin, on the other hand, is a voice of the tired, hungry, huddled masses of that second-rate Third World nation called the Soviet Union.  To the intelligentsia, Yeltsin is the epitome of mass democracy -- something for which the intellectuals ostensibly struggle, but whose arrival threatens their exalted status.  At stake for the intelligentsia is its place behind the throne, its right and duty to advise the state on matters of culture, its ruling the arts by virtue of government's mandate -- all privileges that many of their Western counterparts can, and do, only dream about.

For better or worse, however, these detractors of Yeltsin cannot stop him, not now.  He began this year as one of the five chairmen of the Inter-regional Group of Deputies, an increasingly disloyal and numerically growing "left" opposition to Gorbachev in the Congress of People's Deputies.  In May he won a narrow victory to become president of the Russian republic, thus securing a powerful political base.  This year may be the one he has prepared for all his life.

The central, most fateful aspect of Soviet political life today is a desperate race between two parallel processes:  the disintegration of the Soviet economy (and the concomitant delegitimation and demise of the current political regime);  and the emergence of new political structures enjoying popular support and consent.  If the former outpaces the latter -- if the economy collapses before a legitimate central government is installed -- then this giant land, this military "superpower" in possession of over 12,000 nuclear charges, is likely to plunge into violent political chaos, a Lebanon-like war of all against all.

It is no longer possible to talk about the Soviet "national" economy.  Shortages and inflation make the ruble less and less fit to serve as a medium of exchange.  Moscow now leaves local party and state leaders to fend for themselves if -- or, rather, when -- food riots break out.  Regions more and more often refuse to surrender their produce to central ministries;  they export goods only when barter offerings of other regions look attractive -- or when hard currency is paid.  In March, for the first time in my memory, a Soviet economist writing in Kommunist, an official Soviet publication (and a theoretical journal of the Central Committee at that), used the term "dollarisation" to describe the process. ⁽⁵⁾

Perhaps the most troubling consequence of economic Lebanisation of the Soviet Union is a steady decline of grain deliveries for all-Union distribution.  Thus, while last year's overall grain harvest was 16 million tons higher than in 1988, the amount of grain sold to the state was lower than in 1988.  And this in a country where every third loaf of bread, as A. Sizov acknowledged in Kommunist, is already made from imported grain.

In a country which is already seventy-seventh in the world in terms of personal consumption, these economic abstractions have translated into another turn of a downward spiral -- this time perilously close to the bottom.  Of 211 essential food products, Vassily Selunin reports in Glasnost, only 23 were available at state stores as of last summer -- and perhaps even fewer now.  In order to buy children's soap in a department store in the ancient city of Kostroma, one must show a stamp in one's internal passport to prove that one has children under three years old.

The Soviet Union's only chance to win the deadly race against total economic collapse and violent political anarchy is a government vested with authority and having enough legitimacy to administer the very bitter pill of radical economic reform.  The creation of such a government is the central and most urgent issue of Soviet politics today.  Gorbachev's much touted "grab" for the "emergency powers" of the presidency is thus irrelevant.  Back in March 1985, as the newly elected chief of the country's sole and dictatorial political party, Gorbachev had immeasurably more real power than any presidency could procure him.  Today, his "emergency" power may best be compared to that of the captain of the Titanic.

Neither the Congress of People's Deputies -- a third of whose delegates were appointed by the party-controlled "social organisations" -- nor Gorbachev himself has the required legitimacy.  The pace of economic disintegration is such that it may be too late now even for "roundtable" negotiations of the Polish type.  The only means of creating a legitimate government is for Gorbachev to dissolve the Congress, resign the presidency, and proceed with direct multi-party national elections of a new parliament and a new president.  And Gorbachev may well be reasonably assured of gaining the presidency -- if Yeltsin, already installed as the president of the Republic of Russia, decides not to challenge him.  In that case, Yeltsin could savour the exquisite revenge of watching his nemesis struggling as the head of a disintegrating Soviet Union.

If such elections do not materialise by the end of 1990, three other scenarios suggest themselves.  The first is a democratic, pro-capitalist revolution that would finish what Gorbachev started but took too long to complete.  The second is an authoritarian, anticapitalist, anti-Western, "neo-Bolshevik" revolution.  And third:  a KGB-military junta of "national salvation".  While Yeltsin's role in the third case is hard to imagine, except as that of a victim, he is well-positioned to occupy a prominent, perhaps even central, place in the other two.

In public opinion polls, Yeltsin is second only to Gorbachev in popularity, while his "negatives" are even slightly lower than those of the president.  He has little-advertised but strong and growing ties to the military -- another source of the intelligentsia's concern.  During his campaign for nomination to the Congress of People's Deputies, Yeltsin was ferreted about the country in military planes.  He is a key organiser of the Democratic Front, one of whose institutional members is Shchit (Shield), a union of radical "left" officers.  A Russian "Red Carnations" revolution led by the junior military, à la the 25 April 1975 revolution in Portugal, is a very plausible subscenario of a democratic revolution.

But would Yeltsin lead a populist revolt?  His critics say he very well might.  They point out, for example, his flirtation with Pamyat, the nationalist, neo-Bolshevik organisation whose representative he met during his tenure in Moscow.  (Yeltsin claims that he met with the Pamyat demonstrators, who occupied Red Square, only because he wished to defuse a tense situation and prevent police crackdown.)  A more serious, and persuasive, argument in favour of Yeltsin-the-authoritarian stems from the ill-defined nature of his objectives.  What does he want beyond the elimination of privileges, the dissolution of the apparat, and the effective abolition ol the party monopoly on power?  The character of his constituency and its mood give rise to gloomy predictions, like those of Andronik Migranian in Novy mir:

The past is shameful, the present is monstrous, and the future cannot be defined, cannot be predicted.  In such a psychological state the masses are ready to accept any leader who will say:  "I know what to do and how to do it".  And ... the Yeltsin phenomenon ... is explained by this psychological condition of the people. ... The popular mood that has made Yeltsin the populist leader is very dangerous. ... Further deterioration of the general situation in the country will further widen the circle of the "decisive" people ready to support any leader offering simple, quick and effective decision in the name of social justice.  [But] the course on redistribution of the present goods is a course into the blind alley of a new slavery.  Soon there will be nothing left to redistribute.  And terror will follow.

But whichever of the two scenarios Yeltsin would prefer, he is ready for battle.  The strapping six-footer, a former national champsionship volleyball player, was at the time of writing fully recovered from his post-plenum breakdown.  He gets up at five, reads till seven, does his calisthenics, takes a cold shower, and works until one in the morning.  (On his US tour in the autumn of 1989, Yeltsin challenged President Bush to a tennis match.)

In speeches and interviews in the United States in September 1989, Yeltsin repeated over and over again that Gorbachev had at most a year to improve the economic situation -- or vacate the space at the top for a more successful politician.  "If not, then what happens?" asked Jim Lehrer.  "A revolution from below will begin", answered Yeltsin.

Half a year later, Yeltsin told the Associated Press:

The time of compromises and half-measures is past.  We are sitting on top of a volcano, and very soon neither Gorbachev, nor anyone else will be able to control the events.  The people will take their fate in their own hands, as it happened in Eastern Europe.  If we are lucky, everything will happen orderly, as in GDR, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria.  But what happens if the situation develops in the Rumanian pattern?  Bloodshed?  Tragedy?

"Would you like to be President of the Soviet Union some day?" Jim Lehrer pressed him.  "It's a possibility", Yeltsin answered, "if I am not too old and have strength."

Dr Johnson is said to have remarked about Lord Chesterfield:  "This man, I thought, had been a Lord among wits, but, I find, he is only a wit among Lords".  Only time will tell whether Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin is a democrat among the populists or only an authoritarian populist among the democrats.  Now we may not have to wait long to find out.

---

ENDNOTES

1.  All Russian translations in the text are the author's own.

2.  In the confusing Soviet political parlance, to be precapitalist and pro-Western is to be thought of as one of "the Left*.  The proponents of hard-line communist orthodoxy are labelled "the Right" and "the conservatives".  For authenticity's sake, these denominations are preserved in the text, but for clarity's sake, they are enclosed in quotation marks.

3.  Against the Grain (New York:  Summit Books, 1990), page 102.

4.  A "commission on privileges", created by the Supreme Soviet, confirmed the existence of privileges in the following areas:  "health care, leisure, trade, transportation, housing, culture, pensions and services" (Izvestia, 29 September 1989).

5.  Egor Gaidar, "Trudny vibor" ("The hard choice"), Kommunist (January 1990), page 25.

Poland, Totalitarianism's Playground: An Exemplar

CHAPTER 11

Columbuses, go to Poland?

-- Lech Walesa ⁽¹⁾

I accepted Lech Walesa's open invitation to visit Poland and found that Adam Michnik's story about the revolt of the central heating was absolutely right.  After fifty years of totalitarian rule imposed upon it with the complicity of the West, Poland is a shambles.

Thirsting after fifty years of neglect for paint, plaster and rebricking, the buildings are literally crumbling before one's eyes.  Streets, footpaths, hospitals, schools, blocks of flats and other public amenities are all decrepit, physically hurtful to the eyes and offensive to the spirit.

The economy was pillaged by the Soviet Union and burdened with debt to keep prices down as a substitute for the generation of internal capital and wealth which were viewed by the regime as political threats to its power.  That this was done deliberately, as Soviet policy, has been confirmed by the publication of a secret KGB document, which listed 45 means to be employed by the Polish Communist Party in conjunction with the Soviet-controlled Ministry of the Interior and the KGB to achieve the complete destruction of all Polish institutions and the nation's complete subordination to (and if necessary its incorporation into) the USSR. ⁽²⁾  Just as the Nazis chose Poland as their killing field, the Soviet totalitarians chose it as the demonstration model, the exemplar, of what happens to a nation that vigorously resisted the imposition of Soviet power.  As Stalin so succinctly put it:  "To turn Poles into socialists is an impossible task.  It is like putting saddles on cows."  Thus Poland had to be destroyed.  The strength of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising had convinced Stalin that there was no other alternative.  And so Poland for a second time became totalitarianism's playground.

THE RADIATORS REVOLT I have a theory ... which represents my own contribution to Marxist-Leninist thought.  And I've called it the radiator revolution theory. Eighteen months ago a friend was getting married.  Warsaw's heating system wasn't working, and I'd been sitting at home, wearing all my coats, freezing.  The wedding party was attended by the ex-wife of a top state official, who lives in Aleja Roza.  This is the smartest address for members of the "red bourgeoisie".  But much to my surprise, she said that her own house was also freezing.  And even her ex-husband was sitting at home shivering, in a fur cap given to him by former Soviet Premier [Alexei] Kosygin. This set me thinking.  The radiators were refusing to obey the communist authorities.  When people revolt, I thought to myself, Jaruzelski sends in the militia and army.  But what happens when the radiators revolt? Jaruzelski calls a Central Committee meeting.  And a resolution asserts that the radiators must produce heat.  But the radiators refuse to accept the "leading role" of the party, and it's still cold.  So he calls the interior minister, General Kiszczak:  "General, the radiator strike must be broken by force!"  The ZOMO riot police move in, beating the radiators with their truncheons.  But the radiators still refuse to produce heat.  So troops and tanks are sent in too.  But the radiators still refuse to be intimidated.  And so it ends.  Unable to cope with the radiators, the communists announce a program of perestroika. It's a joke, of course.  But this is precisely what has happened.  Everything ... is in revolt:  the telephones are not ringing;  the trains are not running on time;  the houses are falling down;  the bridges are collapsing.  And in this situation, what can the government and security apparatus do?" Adam Michnik (interview with John Luxmoore, National Catholic Registrar, 8 January 1989)

Poland was transformed into an economic wasteland:  the eighteenth century with electricity, hot-water pipes and telephones, and even they -- the only easily visible signs of modernity -- are none too reliable.  Things that broke stayed broken.  The only exceptions to this general rule of decay (which unquestionably represents the fulfilment of the communisl promise of equality for all) are the spick-and-span, white edifices which housed the Polish United Workers' Party (the communist party) and the Ministry of Interior (which controlled the secret police).

From 1945 until 1989, Poland was ruled by satraps of the Soviet Union who were granted a licence to exploit the land and its people to their hearts' content in return for keeping control.  How they did it was their business and certainly not the people's.  Thus between them, the Party and the secret police -- in local parlance "the Mafia" -- controlled just about everything and everybody.  They were tax-collectors and enforcers of the Soviet "Khanate", ruling concentric circles of powerful fiefdoms.

By the nature of the system, the worst types came to the top -- and once there, had to be "canonised".  Perhaps nothing better symbolises this process -- and now the dismantling of totalitarian power -- than the huge statue of Felix Dzierzynski in central Warsaw, and its demolition in January 1990.  Hailing from the Polish gentry, "Iron Felix" was the first head of the Cheka, the original Soviet secret police and the ancestor of the KGB, set up by Lenin only weeks after the October revolution to destroy all opposition to the Bolshevik takeover.  Dzierzynski's methods were adopted and developed by Stalin, Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria, Ceaucescu, and Pol Pot (even Hitler learnt a thing or two from Soviet terror).  With Lenin he had a symbiotic relationship, the one indispensable to the other.  Together, they built up and operated the Bolshevik terror machine that was indispensable in consolidating Communist Party control and in holding the USSR together, and was later extended to eastern and central Europe.

Dzierzynski boasted that as one of the "new breed" he had transcended morality and, free from guilt, could commit those acts that his more "squeamish" comrades were incapable of performing (that is, murder and torture on a massive scale).  He was, he said, the successful Raskolnikov ⁽³⁾ -- and a true philanthropist who built orphanages for the children of the "enemies of the people" who had suffered "revolutionary annihilation" on his orders.  After personally executing an "enemy of the people", Dzierzynski boasted to an eyewitness he had personally requested to witness his philanthropy, "My only pleasure is in that now.  I know how to shoot so that everyone dies before my eyes in torture.  I know the most painful places to hit, and I can kill whom I please without giving any account or having any questions asked. ... Revenge is the delight of the gods, and here I am a god. ..."

Such was his stature that on his death in 1926 his body was, in the words of an unofficial biographer, "laid in the throne-room of the Czars, as though he himself had been a Czar".  He was held up -- both figuratively and literally in statues and street names -- as a paragon to be emulated by all "progressive" people.  Lenin described him as "a true knight of the proletariat", an appraisal that still enjoys official endorsement in Moscow, for repudiation of Dzierzynski would amount to repudiation of Lenin.  In Poland, as late as February 1990, the "Ethical and Moral Guidelines for Workers in the Security Service and People's Militia of the Polish People's Republic" -- still officially in use owing to the communist General Kiszczak's retention of the interior ministry -- described him as "a paragon of the ardent communist fighting for socialist ideals".

That a self-confessed, guilt-free mass murderer and sadist who refined and passed on to his successors "scientific", conveyor-belt methods of torture and murder -- the victims of which can be counted by the million -- should be ranked in the communist pantheon speaks volumes about the myths and realities of communism.  Under such a rubric of rule and such a measure of "virtue", ordinary moral and ethical values and people who lived by them became the greatest threats to the "new men" of the "new order".  The individual was reduced to "homo patheticus", a parody of the officially celebrated "homo sovieticus" of universal communist mythology.

When the Soviet "Khanate" finally withdrew its mandate, the regime, like the buildings and the economy, crumbled.  Deprived of Soviet support, the Party split into three factions, although it is still sniping from the sidelines and fighting rearguard political battles at the local level.  Hence the nationwide local government elections in May 1990 were a vital exercise in prising the Mafia from their last refuges in local administrations.  True to Pavlovian form, when the last First Party Secretary of the Polish United Workers' (i.e. Communist) Party, Rakowski, announced at its last congress in February 1990 that the majority of delegates had voted to dissolve "the Party" there was a a standing ovation.

Nonetheless, the Party's legacy of destruction is mammoth and so is the task of reconstruction bequeathed to its hapless successors.  There is nothing positive -- absolutely nothing -- that can be said about the achievements of communism in Poland, or elsewhere.  "Respublica" was totally suppressed, everything being reduced to "res privata"!  What is required is reconstruction both of the economy and of civil society, the two being mutually reinforcing.  The tragedy of Poland is described by Adam Zamoyski: ⁽⁴⁾

The Poles are the nation who really lost the Second World War.  They fought continuously from the first day to the bitter end and beyond.  They put more effort into the struggle than any other society;  they lost over half a million fighting men and women, and six million civilians;  they were left with one million war orphans and over half a million invalids.  According to the Bureau of War Reparations, the country had lost 38 per cent of its national assets, compared to the 1.5 per cent and 0.8 per cent lost by France and Britain respectively.  They lost vast tracts of their country and their two great cultural centres of Wilno and Lvov.  They also saw the greater part of their heritage destroyed.  Although they were faithful members of the victorious alliance, they were treated as a vanquished enemy:  they were robbed of much of their territory and of their freedom.

Even worse than the physical wrongs done to them were the humiliations to which they were subjected.  Men and women who had risked their lives for six years plotting and fighting against the German order in unspeakable conditions were dragged into jail by their Soviet masters, tortured and accused of collaborating with the Nazis.  In the West, their efforts and sacrifices were belittled and ignored.  Their continuing martyrdom aroused no sympathy, and their appeals only irritation.  They had not only been consigned to Hell;  they were supposed to enjoy it.

In Poland, one would have had to be born no later than about 1920 to have any real practical experience of an independent civic culture and a market economy.  Under totalitarianism, doing anything, from posting a letter to buying a loaf of bread, was made difficult as a matter of policy.  Even today, shopping is an extremely arduous task in the mainly single-purpose state shops (which still constitute the vast majority of retail outlets).  Individual purchases are written out laboriously by hand on archaic stock-lists, a somewhat useless exercise since officials of the old regime pilfered at will and cooked the books to suit themselves.  Modern banking and accounting methods remain practically unused.  Consequently, the psychic and physical energies of the people were sapped and enervated, being channelled by the regime into the necessities and exigencies of daily subsistence.

The Poles are now coming up for air after a half century of totalitarian rule that all but suffocated everybody and everything.  There was no grandeur to the tyranny.  It was totally petty.  Ideology cannot explain it.  Psychopathology can.

Throughout the country, town squares are disfigured by Stalinesque monuments to Soviet overlordship and the "liberators" of the Red Army.  The monuments -- which do not mention the way the liberators waited outside Warsaw while the Nazis put down the Warsaw Uprising at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Polish lives -- are now being outrivalled by newly constructed monuments to the Warsaw Uprising (which were banned under the communists as an insult to the Soviet Union).

So it is fitting that in Warsaw the free market which operates from the boots of cars and the backs of trucks hustles and bustles in the shadow of the infamous "Palace of Culture", Stalin's unwelcome gift to the Polish people and the symbol of Soviet imperialism and the destruction of ethical trade and cultural freedom.  Such free markets are everywhere in Poland, and are helping to lower prices in a country where the average daily wage was in February 1990 worth approximately $A1.25 at the market exchange rate and a school teacher of seven years' experience earned little more than $A25 a month.  Compare this with official prices such as approximately $A3 a kilo for a reasonably good cut of meat and you get some idea of Polish penury.

Poland is now a free country.  Intellectual and cultural discussion and debate is in fact freer than in Australia, where intellectual recidivists control much of the "knowledge industry";  and the quality of the newly-liberated Polish press and electronic media puts the standards of our privately and publicly owned media to shame.

However, while man cannot live by bread alone, he cannot live satisfactorily without sufficient quantities of it.  Once a great trading nation, the food-bowl to much of Europe and a leading manufacturer and exporter of bricks, Poland is stone, motherless broke.  There is little capital in Poland.  What existed had been ripped off by the "mafia" as they attempted to maintain their ascendancy, though now as capitalists rather than officials, by buying up the state enterprises that they had formerly controlled.  The new government was forced to pass legislation to prevent this.  Because the mafia periodically froze bank accounts and interest payments, people stopped banking and spent the precious little they had left after meeting the demands of necessity on small treasures that brought some sparkle into their miserable prison-cell-like flats heaped together in ugly piles all over the country.

With over ninety per cent of all industry, manufacturing and public services and utilities state-owned-and-run, the work of privatisation in a capital-starved nation is enormous but essential to Poland's future.

Teachers are heartbroken.  Textbooks are poor quality and contain few illustrations, and are in any case hard to afford.  Photocopiers, stringently restricted by the old regime, are still rare.  Modern teaching aids are almost nonexistent.

Knowledge and learning were despised by the mafia as threats to both their egos and their power.  They did everything possible, including splitting up the universities, to destroy genuine learning and inquiry, and to replace them with a know-nothing, poverty-stricken philosophy of power.

Yet, thanks to a Church thoroughly committed to the people and to democratic values, learning as well as morality were preserved.  Thus the Polish Church was both materially and spiritually the saviour of the Polish people, a fact to which even Polish atheists have paid homage.

The deprivation was all too real at the micro level.  Hospitals, schools, kindergartens, swimming pools, community centres and the like, proudly proclaimed by local mafias as first priorities decades ago remain either promises or little more than holes in the ground.  The mafia's consistent failure to deliver such promises made them the laughing stock of the people but the mirth was not appreciated or reciprocated by the regime, which, instead, treated it as an act of sabotage.

Precious manpower and capital were squandered on recording the lives of those who did not offer them sufficient respect.  In the weeks before the self-liquidation of the Party, the countryside was alight with small fires adding to the chronic pollution.  Party and Interior Ministry officials were burning embarrassing or incriminating files.  Fortunately for both justice and posterity, many of these records were retrieved by alert citizens, particularly children who acted as fire-spotters.

Despite everything, the Polish people defeated the odds by retaining their dignity and magnificently so.  Throughout history the myth perpetuated by Poland's partitioners and their supporters is that the Poles are a wild, passionate and irrational people in need of a firm hand to keep them in check.  That myth was perpetuated in the West to justify the Potsdam and Yalta betrayals of Poland.  The preposterousness of the myth matched the preposterousness of the deed.

There is much that one could register about the civility and reasonableness of the Polish people, but I fear that it would be interpreted in our country as sentimentality and "Catholic prejudice".  I have already been informed by one radio interviewer that this is the case.  The civility and the rationality of the Poles is therefore perhaps best illustrated through that brilliant stroke of diplomatic and political genius -- supported by virtually the whole nation -- which made the liberation of not just Poland but also of the rest of Eastern Europe -- and even the USSR itself -- possible.  However, a little background is first necessary.

In contemporary Poland Joseph Pilsudski and Ronald Reagan are honoured as national liberators.  Both, albeit in different ways, defeated Soviet power through the use of arms:  Pilsudski in war;  Reagan in peace.  Reagan was determined to undo the evil that Roosevelt had helped do at Yalta and Potsdam.  Knowing that the Soviet economy was a busted flush he forced the Soviets to adopt a more rational position, enabling the rise to power of Gorbachev.  Thus Reagan is the godfather to Gorbachev, glasnost and perestroika.

Within this context, the Poles seized the opportunity to break out of their Soviet-tied straitjacket.  According to Solidarity's former chief spokesman and current representative of the Przemysl region in the Polish parliament, Janusz Onyszkiewicz, ⁽⁵⁾ Solidarity succeeded in convincing Gorbachev that communist rule in central Europe was not in the interests of the Soviet Union.  If perestroika was to be successfully pursued, the argument went, the USSR needed stability on its borders.  But ever since seizing power, the communist regimes had created instability by continually defying the wishes of their peoples.  The solution was to permit the people's choice to rule.  In Poland this meant Solidarity, a pluralist movement which had the broad support of almost the whole nation.

According to Onyszkiewicz, Gorbachev accepted the argument but wanted to know how Soviet interests in the region could be guaranteed (at that time, with regard to Poland this meant guaranteed lines of support to Soviet troops in East Germany).  This led to the "Polish compromise", or "Polish way", by which for an interim period power would be shared between Solidarity and the local communists (in particular, Jaruzelski as President and General Kiszczak at the Interior Ministry).  These arrangements will come up for review with a nation-wide free election about to be held for the office of President in the wake of Jaruzelski's recent resignation from the post.  Next year, wholly democratic elections for the national parliament will be held following the proclamation of the new constitution on the 200th anniversary of Poland's first democratic constitution.

The Poles honoured their contract.  Following this dramatic and historic development other Soviet-dominated nations in the area demanded from their respective leaderships adoption of the "Polish way".  Local communist bosses immediately trotted off to Moscow to seek assurances of continued Soviet endorsement.  Moscow refused to suport the old guard.  On their return home, every one of them was soon thrown out of power.  Not even Moscow's carefully-orchestrated plans to replace them with Gorbachev-style reformists succeeded in saving communism from the people, proving what those who understood the nature of communist rule in Europe had said all along:  namely, that but for Soviet power there would have been no communist governments in the region.

Thus it was Polish rationality that triggered off the spell-binding events of 1989 which has brought a virtual end to communist rule in the outer rim of the Soviet empire and is now having profound effects within the inner empire.

Moreover, with regard to past violations of their human rights by their former rulers, the Poles are seeking justice and not revenge -- again the hallmark of a civilised people.  Instead of putting the worst of the old guard in the dock, they initially put them on television, giving them the opportunity to justify themselves publicly before some of those whom they violated.  Though there were mounting popular calls for trials the government for the time being resisted them, for the rational reason of not encouraging reactionary forces in the USSR.  It is only now, in a calmer atmosphere and after painstaking investigations that criminal charges are being laid against those such as the unpunished killers of the heroic and saintly Father Jerzy Popieluszko, Solidarity's chaplain until his murder in October 1984.

In a peculiar twist of fate, the Poles have turned the tables against those who for so long oppressed them by linking their fate to the continuation of the Polish way to liberation and its exportation to eastern and central Europe, the Balkans and the USSR itself.

Though the world does not owe Poland a living the Poles owed their oppression at least in part to Western complicity.  Though the Poles have forgiven us, we should not forget that.  Therefore, our sympathy and aid should be directed predominantly Poland's (and the rest of central Europe's) democratic way and not, as it presently is, predominantly in favour of Mr Gorbachev's reformist but nonetheless autocratic way.  In brief, what Mr Gorbachev (and the world) needs is further encouragement along the path of real, not "guided", democracy.

---

ENDNOTES

1.  Lech Walesa, address to Radio Liberty/Radio Europe, Washington DC, 15 November 1989:

2.  San, December 1989

3.  The character in Dostoievsky's Crime and Punishment who commits a gratuitous murder in an (unsuccessful) attempt to prove himself free from conscience.

4.  The Polish Way, Londonm, 1987, 371.

5.  Recorded interview with the writer, Warsaw, February 1990.

What Glasnost Has Destroyed

CHAPTER 10

Soviet society is in a state of spiritual turmoil for which there is no precedent in its entire history.  A comparison with the Khrushchev years is valid but insufficient:  the passion, the bluntness, the consistency, and, most importantly, the depth and the scope of the upheaval under Mikhail Gorbachev go far beyond anything that happened between 1956 and 1964.  For the diagnoses being made today no longer centre on "individual distortions" and "shortcomings" (no matter how repugnant) but are directed instead at virtually the entire moral universe in which Soviet society functions and from which it derives its legitimacy.  Indeed, this assault far exceeds anything said or even thought by those who for decades have been branded by Soviet propaganda as "mad anti-Communists".  It is a mood strikingly similar to the one that swept the Russian intelligentsia at the turn of this century:  bitter disillusion, anger, radical nihilism, and dense fire aimed at the twin pillars of the ancien regime -- Orthodoxy and absolutism -- and it could well have a revolutionary outcome of its own.

What is "Soviet humanism"? asks one of the most popular Soviet film directors, Eldar Ryzaanov, and answers:  "Soviet humanism" inspired Pavlik Morozov to inform on his father;  "Soviet humanism" sent Soviet prisoners of war from Nazi camps directly to the gulag;  "Soviet humanism" locked artists in lunatic asylums or threw them out of the country for "dissidence".

The historian Yuri Afanasiev goes still further.  In the pages of the Communist party paper, Pravda, itself, he declares, "I do not consider our society socialist, even 'deformed' socialist, [because] these 'deformations' touch upon the very foundations, the political system, the system of the relations of production, and most certainly everything else".  His vision of Soviet history is "millions of zeks" (political prisoners);  "enslaved, robbed, hapless peasants";  the long-suffering Soviet people who undertook a "great revolution" only to be "deceived" and "humiliated", only to be drowned in "sixty years of nihilism, spiritual void, and decay", only to get a "socialism without freedom and without bread and butter".

Yet it is not just the utterly unprecedented scope of these no-holds-barred philippics that sets the current muck-raking apart from any similar campaign in the past.  Its most original and most dangerous feature is the precision with which the heavy artillery is targeted, and the depth of shell penetration.  In Gorbachev's Soviet Union, almost every major legitimising myth is being shattered.

Take, to begin with, the myth of "social protection" (sotzialnaya zash-ishennosi).  According to this idea, the Soviet state, while occasionally inferior to the capitalist West in the quantity and quality of consumer goods, shields its citizens from the ills of capitalism:  hunger, poverty, disease, unemployment, crime, prostitution, and, following the latest Western trends, drugs and homelessness.

The debunking of this myth began early in the glasnost era with the simple acknowledgment that all these evils plague Soviet society as well.  Then the formerly classified data started to pour forth -- even as Soviet spokesmen, including Gorbachev himself, continued to tout "social protection" in front of Western audiences.  (He did so with passion, for example, in his interview with NBC before the 1987 Washington summit and repeatedly during the summit.)

Of these formerly "capitalist" evils, the newly disclosed scale and depth of Soviet poverty, food shortages, inadequate medical care, and the housing crisis have been especially shocking.  With the official poverty level set at 75 rubles per person per month (approximately $A1750 a year at the official rate of exchange and $A120 at the market rate), the Soviet people have been told that 43 million of their compatriots are under the poverty level and fully 40 per cent of Soviet families (about 100 million people) live on less than 100 rubles a month.  Pensioners are especially hard-pressed:  every third urban senior citizen and eight out of ten villagers -- over fifteen million people altogether -- receive less than 60 rubles a month.  (In case the Soviet reader needed help in understanding what living on 60 rubles a month means, the central government newspaper Izvestia published a letter from an unusually affluent pensioner who complained that she and her husband were unable to spend less than 150 rubles a month on food.)  The handicapped are worse off still:  an invalid woman with a child was reported to be living on 31 rubles 48 kopecks a month.  Contrary to the widespread belief that "in the Soviet Union no one goes hungry", the consumption of meat and dairy products by the Soviet poor has declined by 30 per cent since 1970.

But hunger in the Soviet Union results not just from poverty alone.  Another, peculiarly Soviet, cause of it is rationing, a detailed description of which has also been supplied.  In the Kirov region of the Russian Northwest the ration cards allot 500 grams (slightly over a pound) of cooked sausage per person per month and 400 grams (less than a pound) of butter.

Perhaps the greatest damage to the myth of "social protection" has been done by the gradually revealed enormity of the health-care disaster.  A total of 1,200,000 beds are in hospitals with no running water at all;  30 per cent of Soviet hospitals do not have indoor toilets.  According to Soviet experts, the USSR spends on medical care five times less than the United States:  22 billion rubles as compared with US$174.8 billion.  (Undoubtedly, the perspicacious Soviet reader was quick to make a calculation based on the real market -- 10 to 1 -- and not the ridiculous official rate -- 1 to 1.57 -- and found that the Soviet Union spends 79 times less on public health care than the great capitalist demon the United States.) ⁽¹⁾

The health-care broadside ricocheted into another constituent myth of the "social protection" cluster -- the "golden childhood" of Soviet children. ⁽²⁾  The very same children whom millions of posters all over the Soviet Union proudly declare to be "our future" turn out to be attending schools half of which have no central heating, running water, or sewage systems.  Children as young as ten work twelve-hour days harvesting potatoes and cotton on collective farms.  In 1986 there were 35,000 labour accidents among working children under fourteen;  "hundreds" of schoolchildren die in such accidents every year and "thousands" are crippled.

Not waiting for the Soviet public to recuperate from the disclosure of the infant-mortality rates -- five times higher than Japan, 2.5 times higher than the US, 50th place in the world after Barbados and the United Arab Emirates -- the muck-rakers provided supporting details:  "poverty" in funding for obstetrics;  total absence of ultrasound diagnostic equipment ("Not a single Soviet-made machine in thirty years", wrote the leading Soviet authority on obstetrics and pediatrics, "in the entire era of space exploration!");  unavailability of single-use paper gowns.

The last nail in the coffin of the myth of "golden childhood" was a short poem called "In the Maternity Ward" by the leading Soviet poet, Andrei Voznesensky.  Grim even by the decidedly cheerless standards of mythocide.  it is about a rat attacking an infant:

We ourselves are rats, blubbering
about things lofty ...

We save people on drifting icebergs
Send projects to Mars
A rat in a maternity ward
ate through a baby's cheek.

Finally, prostitution and organised crime -- which together with unemployment have for seventy years been identified with capitalism in the official mythology -- succumbed to the revisionist onslaught.  Fifteen-year-old prostitutes in apartment-bordellos, extortion, hired guns (it costs from 30,000 to 100,000 rubles in today's Soviet Union to have somebody killed), street battles between rival gangs -- a Pravda article went so far as to call organised crime "a state within a state".  Lacking, after decades of enforced silence, a vocabulary in Russian to describe the newly acknowledged vices, Soviet reporters have adapted words from the American scene like kidnapping and raket, and such concepts as money-laundering (otmyvanie deneg) and godfather (krestniy otetz).

Nothing binds the rulers and the ruled, Communists and non-Communists alike, so tightly as the tragic, heroic myths of World War II, the Great Patriotic War.  For over forty years, the official catechism has been simple and dependable:  the Soviet Union, confronted with the prospect of an imminent Nazi invasion and betrayed by the West, which was conniving to deflect Hitler eastward, artfully bought time in 1939 by concluding a non-aggression pact with Germany.  The Soviet scheme worked:  the Nazi onslaught was postponed by two years, during which time the Soviet state strengthened its defences, trained the army, and stockpiled material.  Then, after initial setbacks caused by the surprise timing of the German invasion, the Soviet army vanquished the Nazi barbarians and liberated the world from the "brown plague".  What is more, the Soviet Union did it all alone, with virtually no assistance from its allies;  it succeeded because of the military genius of its marshals and the skill of its rank-and-file soldiers.  (As Yevgeni Yevtushenko declared in his famous poem, "Do the Russians want War?":  "Yes, we know how to fight!")

Every element of this myth is under attack today in mainstream Soviet periodicals.  The non-aggression pact has been labelled "one of the most tragic and shameful pages in our history" -- no clever manoeuvre but, as far as the Soviet Union was concerned, a genuine and inexcusable treaty of friendship.  A military historian reveals how, in the spirit of this friendship, the Soviets turned over German Communist refugees to the Gestapo.  And for the first time in almost fifty years the Soviet people have been reminded of the statement made by Stalin's Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov a week after the signing of the pact:  "It is not only senseless but even criminal to wage a war to "destroy Hitlerism" under the false banner of a struggle for 'democracy'."

While the very existence of secret protocols contained in the non-aggression pact was officially denied by the Soviet Union until August 1989, for over a year the mythslayers had been pointing to actions taken in the wake of the pact which confirmed Western accounts of those protocols -- most notably the division of Poland between the Soviet and Nazi occupation forces.  As for the adroitness of the "manoeuvre" itself, it is now said to have allowed Germany to concentrate all its forces in the West, to defeat France, and then to throw against the Soviet Union not only its entire military might but the newly acquired resources of a conquered Europe.  Furthermore, the Soviet press has now disclosed that Soviet deliveries of "military-strategic" materials to Germany in accordance with the terms of the non-aggression pact played "a not insignificant role" in strengthening the Nazi military-industrial potential.

Soviet military strategy in World War II is undergoing a thorough critique as well.  As if in answer to Yevtushenko, another popular Soviel writer, Viktor Astafiev, who, unlike Yevtushenko, is a World War II veteran, has said, "We did not know how to fight.  We ended the war not knowing how to fight.  We drowned the enemy in our blood, we buried him under our corpses."

Finally, in perhaps the single most dramatic achievement of glasnost to date, the publication of Vasily Grossman's great novel Life and Fate has struck at the very foundations of the war mythology by explicitly, and repeatedly, bringing up the parallels between the two savage tyrannies, Hitler's and Stalin's, and by depicting the heroic, betrayed, and martyred Soviet people as being ground between these two giant, bloodstained millstones.  Said a shell-shocked participant in a readers' discussion of Grossman's book:

We used to portray the war [as] "there are Nazis and here are we.  Darkness is there, goodness is here."  Grossman changed the proportion, portraying the two systems not only in their collision but also in their eerie historical similarity.

But more than anything else, what sets glasnost apart from all previous "thaws" is the willingness, and the ability, of the new iconoclasts to tackle the cluster of myths surrounding the Founding Fathers of the Soviel Union.  Within two years, the wave of iconoclasm reached and passed the highest points of Khrushchev's destalinisation, to engulf even the previously sacrosanct Lenin himself.

Unlike their counterparts in Khrushchev's time, for the current generation of myth-hunters, brought up on samizdat copies of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, the issue is not the "rehabilitation" of the Bolshevik leaders killed by Stalin -- Kamenev, Zinoviev, Radek, Bukharin.  While welcoming such "rehabilitation", the crusading Soviet scholars and journalists of today are in no hurry to make these old Bolsheviks into new icons.  They are asking, instead, "How was Stalinism born, on what soil, and why?"  And they are finding complicity in Stalinism on the part of the Founding Fathers, including those who opposed Stalin on this or that point.  Thus Soviet readers are already being reminded that Nikolai Bukharin, perhaps the most celebrated "oppositionist", was not just, in Lenin's famous characterisation, the "darling of the party" (as he is the darling of revisionist historians in the West like Stephen Cohen).  In the 1920s, Bukharin was also one of the most influential members of the dreaded Collegium of the OGPU (the KGB's predecessor);  he called executions by firing squads "a method of making Communist humankind out of human material of the capitalist epoch";  and he demanded that the kulaks (the well-to-do peasants) be talked to in the "language of lead" -- a demand that Stalin later fulfilled by murdering millions of them.

In general, as one of the most daring of the mythslayers has written:

It is precisely the old guard that created the political mechanism, the tool for absolute power which Stalin subsequently used for his egotistical purposes. ... In the final account, it was precisely the old guard ... that voluntarily and by itself surrendered into Stalin's hands the infinite power created by the revolution.  Later, after 1924, it was precisely the old guard with its leftist impatience that urged the country to take leaps which turned into national tragedy.

Like Khrushchev before him, Gorbachev has discovered his own Lenin -- this time, a "late", post-civil war and post-Kronstadt Lenin, a "democratic" Lenin, a Lenin of the New Economic Policy (NEP), the foe of the bloated state bureaucracy, the defender of the private entrepreneur and peasant.  But unlike Khrushchev, Gorbachev is unable (unwilling?) to prevent public exploration of alternative images of the great Founding Father.  The water is swirling perilously close to Lenin's pedestal and is rising higher and higher every day.

Significantly, neither Gorbachev nor Aleksandr Yakovlev, the Politburo member closest to Gorbachev, has been publicly committed to Lenin's defence -- most likely because neither wanted to fight a losing battle.  Instead they have let Vadim Medvedev, the Politburo member in charge of ideology, to hold the fort.  Yet the myth-hunters, seeing Medvedev for what he is -- a hack with no real power -- have proceeded to ignore his injunction against breaking the Lenin taboo.

The attack on the shrine commenced with Vasiliy Selunin's masterpiece Istoki ("The sources"), an essay portraying Lenin as the creator of concentration camps, a doctrinaire fanatic whose "education" before 1921 cost millions of lives, untold suffering, and brought the country to the verge of an economic abyss.  Four months after the publication of this work, Medvedev reacted by condemning attempts to "trace to Lenin the beginning of the command-and-administer system".  But the iconoclasts, having crossed the threshold of the temple, had begun moving inexorably toward the sanctum sanctorum -- the October Revolution and Leninist morality.

The 1917 Bolshevik coup is beginning to be portrayed precisely as that -- a coup.  Replacing the glorious "Great October Socialist Revolution" there is now seen to be a gang of conspirators, "taken seriously by very few people", who "did not know how to solve the complicated problems of society but offered instead a set of very simple, primitive, understandable quasi-solutions".

The myth of the October Revolution was dealt another blow by the reprinting, for the first time since 1918, of Maxim Gorky's Untimely Thoughts, a classic denunciation of the horrors the Revolution had already then visited upon Russia.  Although the passages directly attacking Lenin were censored out, the picture that emerges is one of "thousands, yes, thousands of people -- workers and peasants -- starving in prisons" and of "violence which is unworthy of democracy".

As the veil of lies is lifted from the crushing of the nascent Russian democratic state by the Bolsheviks, the Constituent Assembly of 1918 is beginning to receive sympathetic coverage as Russia's last hope for a parliamentary democracy.  With increasing frequency, the dissolution of the Assembly after one session on 18 January 1918 is cited today as a precedent for a crackdown that could end the current "thaw" as well.

But what is potentially most damaging to the mythology of the Founding Fathers is the attack on the old moral justification of the Bolshevik terror.  This justification was supplied by Lenin himself in a passage that generations of Soviet schoolchildren have had to memorise:  "Our morality is completely subordinate to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat. ... In the foundation of Communist morality lies the struggle for the strengthening and completion of Communism".

An oblique yet unambiguous repudiation of this doctrine was published recently by the party's main theoretical journal Kommunist, which compared Lenin's "class morality" to the murderous "Catechism of the Revolutionary" of the 19th-century Russian terrorist Nechaev ("Everything is moral that expedites the triumph of the revolution").  Going even further, Kommunist also declared:  "Once everything is evaluated from the point of view of some class, then there is no moral trial and no personal ethical responsibility".

To be sure, there are still limits.  When, this past April, in a now-famous TV interview, the theatre director Mark Zakharov suggested that Lenin's embalmed body be removed from the mausoleum and Red Square and buried, the director of the State Committee for Television and Radio was fired and the late-night program which aired the interview was "temporarily" taken off the air for "renovation of the sets".  Yet despite this rearguard action, the debunking of the Lenin myth will soon reach a double crescendo.  First has come the publication in Oktyabr of Vasily Grossman's Forever Flowing, a loosely-jointed narrative from which Lenin emerges both as a theoretician of totalitarianism and as its first practitioner.  As a labour-camp inmate in the book puts it:  "Lenin began the business of strangling Russian democracy, Stalin finished it".  Then there is Novy mir's serialisation of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, the first chapter of whose second volume lays the creation of concentration camps squarely at Lenin's door.

The vengeful filling-in of the "blank spaces" in Soviet history, combined with the loss or outright denial of any moral justification for what is now revealed to have happened, has produced a predictable result:  people now question the legitimacy not just of parts of the Soviet record but of the Soviet regime itself.  Incredibly, the rector of the Moscow State Institute of History and Archives now feels safe in stating that the Soviet regime "was brought into being through bloodshed, with the aid of mass murder and crimes against humanity" and that "one must admit Soviet history as a whole is not fit to serve as a legal basis for Soviet power".

The fall of the Founding Fathers may mark the final destination of the Soviet crusaders, beyond which lies a gaping void.  Of course, the crusaders themselves are trying to fill the void with new icons, including genuinely religious ones.  Thus, in a meeting with Lithuanian intellectuals last August, Aleksandr Yakovlev, the godfather of glasnost, several times invoked the term "repentance", while Maya Ganina, a columnist for Literaturnaya gazeta, has called for "kindness and charity for Christ's sake" and the playwright Edvard Rodinskiy has bemoaned the loss of the Bible, "the greatest book in the world", as a weapon to combat "the deficit of morality and culture".  Among political models, the czarist Prime Minister Petr Stolypin (1862-1911) is currently much in vogue for his attempt to free the Russian peasant from the shackles of the commune and make him into a private farmer;  the cult of Stolypin is likely to be given a powerful boost when Solzhenitsyn's August 1914, of which he is a hero, is published in the Soviet Union.  And following Stolypin, it is safe to predict, will be Alexander II (1855-81), the czar who abolished serfdom and introduced political reforms that set Russia on the road to capitalism and constitutional monarchy.

As for the orthodox, they are fighting desperate rearguard battles to salvage whatever is left of the legitimising mythology.  Their spokesman, the Politburo member Yegor Ligachev, declares that "the facts of unjustified [sic] repressions" must not "overshadow the feat of the people who created the powerful socialist state".  After all, Ligachev points out, in the 1930s the country became second in the world in overall industrial output, while in the much maligned 1970s "national income" increased four times and "military-strategic parity" was achieved with the US.

Yet all such attempts to restock the Soviet pantheon with old gods are likely to fail:  once declared naked, idols are even less usable than kings.  Of all the much-commented-upon contradictions embedded in Gorbachev's reforms, this is without doubt the deadliest:  having set out to create a reformed one-party state socialism "with a human face", Gorbachev has unleashed forces that are methodically destroying the legitimacy of any such future arrangement.  No economic reform, no amount of Western good will, even if concretised with massive transfusions of capital and technology, and no brilliant foreign-policy stratagems can hope to fill this spiritual vacuum.

And so the question is:  what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Moscow to be born?

---

ENDNOTES

1.  As of today, the Soviet Union reports only 80 AIDS cases and only one acknowledged death from AIDS.  But there is a potential here for an immense catastrophe.  A country the size of the Soviet Union needs at least a billion disposable syringes a year.  The plan for 1988 was 100 million, the actual production:  4.5 million.  The shortage is so severe that it is a common practice to use the same needle to draw blood from several patients.  Often, sterilization procedures are observed imperfectly or ignored altogether.  As a result, 3.8 per cent of the Soviet population -- over ten million people -- suffer from hepatitis B, the disease that is transmitted exactly the same way as AIDS.

2.  A song in the required repertoire of the Soviet grade school contains the stanza:  "Our golden childhood/ Grows brighter every day./ Under a lucky star,/ We are born in the motherland."