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The New Soviet Challenge
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13123 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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11 / 1987 |
3,310 Words |
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Dimitri K. Simes
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On November 7, the Soviet Union will celebrate the 70th anniversary of the communist revolution. There will be self-congratulatory speeches, an impressive display of military hardware during a Red Square parade, and all over the country millions of officially directed demonstrators will profusely thank the party for all the wonderful things it has done for the Soviet people.
Yet, while Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his colleagues will undoubtedly use the occasion to emphasize their communist heritage, Soviet subjects are under no illusion that the experiment Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik associates started in November 1917 was a success story. Gorbachev himself admitted as much when, in an address to the June 1987 Central Committee plenum, he stated that the political situation in the USSR had "acquired essentially pre-crisis forms." That was a striking admission on the part of the general secretary on the eve of his regime's 70th anniversary. And Gorbachev presumably takes his dramatic denunciation of Soviet shortcomings seriously. Why otherwise would he regularly stress on behalf of the ruling Politburo that only a genuine "revolutionary transformation" of Soviet society as a whole would be capable of saving the communist system from a major disaster? Moreover, Gorbachev admits that his reformist crusade may be the last chance to reverse the Soviet decline. "History did not leave us much time for solving this issue," he acknowledged at the June 1987 plenum.
The general secretary would like to give the impression that his regime is radically different from anything we have seen in the Soviet Union in the past. To some extent he has a point. In many important respects the Soviet Union today does not resemble the state created as a result of the Bolshevik coup d'etat. When Lenin and his fellow revolutionaries came to power they were big on historical optimism and short on military and economic strength. Later, in 1920, Lenin said that during the first months after the Bolsheviks took over, they amounted to a "zero in a military sense." That was, incidentally, one reason they felt so strongly that there was no alternative to the immediate instigation of a world revolution. Without it, Lenin and his colleagues were convinced that sooner or later capitalist states would forget about their disagreements in the name of "class war" against the young communist entity. And the Bolsheviks had no doubt that the outcome of such a war could only be the destruction of their regime.
They were wrong about both the opportunities for world revolution and the Western ability to create a united front against the young and weak Marxist-Leninist state. The revolution, of course, failed to take place. Isolated communist rebellions in Central European countries were suppressed with relative ease. But the world revolution proved to be unnecessary for the survival of the communist system in Russia. The much-feared international "capitalist environment" never seriously attempted to strangle the first socialist state. The first real outside challenge to Soviet rule came, not from a unified "imperialist" coalition, but from Nazi Germany in June 1941. And the Soviet Union did not have to confront it alone but rather as part of a grand coalition, tremendously benefiting from the assistance of some key capitalist nations.
Moreover, the German invasion happened sufficiently late in the game to allow Lenin's heirs to consolidate their internal positions, to create a formidable heavy industry base, and - most
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