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Present and Future Dangers
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10845 |
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BOOK WORLD
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7 / 1986 |
2,364 Words |
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Martin Dewhirst
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This is just the right time for a new one-volume history of the USSR. Most of the illusions of the naive Western commentator and lay people about the intentions and prerogatives of the new Soviet leader appear to have evaporated, and it is beginning to look to more and more observers that "young Mike Gorbachev" may occupy the top seat in the Soviet Union not only for even longer than Brezhnev did but also with equally little impact on the fundamentals of the country's political and social system, which have changed astonishingly little over the last half-century. And yet, and yet…is it really possible that things can go on in almost the same way for another twenty years? Surely there will be some important changes to the Soviet regime between now and the beginning of the next millennium? This is the sort of question that I think any new history of the USSR should address, at least implicitly, and attempt to give the reader some fresh food for thought, some new facts, ideas, and concepts to grapple with. And who could do this better than authors like the present specialists, former Soviet citizens now living in the West who know what life is really like in the USSR as well as what both Western and Soviet colleagues have said and written on this vast subject? Naturally, Heller and Nekrich are far too professional and intelligent to try to predict the future with any precision. I have a strong feeling after reading their work that they feel we in the West would all be well-advised to live and act on the assumption that in most-perhaps in all-of its essentials the Soviet regime will be with us for several, probably many, decades yet.
This, incidentally, is the key message of another recent émigré from the Soviet Union, Aleksandr Zinoviev, and I am surprised that he is not mentioned more frequently in the book under review, especially as it periodically uses the term homo sovieticus, a phrase recently given wider circulation as the title of one of Zinoviev's most brilliant works. One of the main points of Zinoviev's novel is that more than a few recent émigrés, and even some defectors, from the USSR, however "anti-Soviet" many of their views, are in most respects incorrigibly "Soviet" in their character (not least their dogmatism and amorality) and in the framework within which they perceive and evaluate the Western world. Zinoviev, who both loathes the Soviet system and appears to be very ill-at ease living in the West, is much franker than Heller and Nekrich about the tremendous advantages and attractions of the Soviet system for many, possibly most, members of Soviet society, for all those people who would never be able to adjust to a more competitive system, to a civilization that in principle (if not always in practice) puts the 'I' before and above the 'We'. As I understand them, Zinoviev, Solzhenitsyn, and Sakharov, for all the differences between their respective positions, are united in believing that the USSR will continually present an extremely powerful and dangerous threat--not only, and perhaps not even mainly, in a military sense--to Western values. Heller and Nekrich would appear to agree with this assessment, and it is in my view a pity that they do not spell out the philosophical differences at the heart of the East-West discord that make the conflict so dangerous and so difficult to resolve.
One of the ways in which this history of the Soviet Union differs from almost all its rivals is that it uses Russian belles lettres to shed light on particular aspects of situations and developments that might otherwise remain obscure for Western (as well as younger Soviet) readers. In what follows I shall give a few examples of the apt references to Russian writers which
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