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Glasnost: Genuine or Illusory?
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12632 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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6 / 1987 |
2,317 Words |
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Vladimir Bukovsky
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How long will the so-called changes of Mikhail Gorbachev continue? Policies instituted now might be irreversible if they lasted for five years.
Glasnost represents a big advantage to the Soviet leaders. In allowing Andrei Sakharov to speak, Gorbachev appears to be a liberator. But if Sakharov is still speaking freely five years from now, he would create a tremendous problem for the Soviets. A network of contacts and connections would have organized around him, as happened in the 1960s and 1970s when his human rights campaign started. A network around Sakharov would be an alternative structure, something the Soviet Union would not tolerate.
The Soviet system is so absolutely unmovable and unchangeable that the smallest deviation from it is considered radical and revolutionary. For instance, if Gorbachev liberalizes the election rules within the Communist Party, the people of the Soviet Union will have something in common with the black people in South Africa, with 7 percent of the Soviet population (Communist Party members) voting for themselves. But if that liberalization continued for more than five or 10 years, it could lead to a split in the ruling party.
The current campaign is not calculated to continue very long, and the Soviet rulers know it. Glasnost is simply a short and very intensive effort to get through the current crisis.
Kremlinologists in the West are confused about how to define this new Soviet leadership. Some experts call them Stalinists. Others tag them liberal and pragmatic. Frankly, I don't see much of a contradiction in these assessments. Stalin could be pragmatic and liberal when it was required. When he wanted nuclear weapons for the Soviet Union, he allowed the scientific community much more freedom than anybody else enjoyed. When the Germans were advancing on Moscow during World War II, the pragmatic and liberal Stalin addressed his nation as brothers and sisters, not as comrades. Through the duration of the war, he never mentioned socialism or communism but appealed to the Russian tradition. After the war, some old émigrés in Paris returned to the Soviet Union believing that the system had changed simply because Stalin had opened the churches; they found themselves jailed very quickly.
We are dealing with revolutionaries and pragmatists. Even Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, the original KGB, became pragmatic when Lenin appointed him to run Soviet industry while remaining the head of the secret police. Those who worked with Dzerzhinsky say he was incredibly liberal with scientists and engineers in Soviet industry. While he remained in charge of Soviet industry, none of them was arrested or harassed by the secret police. He was so liberal they exchanged anti-Soviet jokes in his presence. Dzerzhinsky ignored them. He was even embarrassed when people rose as he came into a room. When he left, he begged them not to rise. At the same time, as head of the secret police, he was killing and torturing virtually millions of people.
If the Soviets need to kill millions of people in order to reach their goals, they will do it. It they need to become liberal and pragmatic, they will do that. The current Soviet leaders are direct descendants of Lenin - they are his students. The proportion of KGB agents in the Politburo right now is probably higher than at any other time in Soviet
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