Let me start with a quotation, withholding the source for a moment:
“There is no country in the world in which there is actually so much widespread public criticism of the government, and such incessant revelation of its shortcomings, as in the USSR. Nearly every issue of the newspaper contains details of breakdowns and failures; of the scandalous behavior of officials whose names are given; of cases of neglect and oppression; and of the need for this or that alteration or improvement of government policy or administration. The ‘wall newspaper,’ in which, in every factory and office, the staff publicly criticize, and even lampoon, their superiors, is a universal institution all over the USSR. No such public criticism by the wage-earner of his employer, or of his foreman, is allowed in capitalist countries. The Soviet government approves of all this publicity as ‘self-criticism,’ even if it is criticism of itself as employer; and it is itself not backward in contributing to it. Hardly a speech is made by . . . a leader which does not include some exposure of departmental failure, and a more or less sharp denunciation of erring officials.”
It is at this point that the inevitable caveat appears:
“It is only the calling in question of the fundamental principles of communism, or some aggressive criticism of theoretic ‘Marxism’--and, of course, any incitement to political ‘faction’--that is barred as ‘counter-revolutionary.’"
The reader would be forgiven for assuming that the first passage quoted above was a fair, though wordy, description of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost. In fact, it is taken from perhaps the greatest monument of the golden age of fellow-traveling--Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, by Sidney and Beatrice Webb--and the USSR they were describing was the regime of Joseph Stalin, not Mikhail Gorbachev.
The "caveat" in the second quotation is matched, in substance, in the most significant passage in Gorbachev's interview of May 22 in the Washington Post:
“Our people, while firmly in favor of the renewal of society, and of change, have firmly expressed the view that changes could happen only within the boundaries of socialism, and on the basis of socialist values.”
The general secretary returned to this theme several times during his speech of June 28 at the special All-Union Conference in Moscow. In a significant passage, he referred to proposals for the creation of opposition parties and for the redrawing of borders as "abuses of democratization."
The point to note is that the Webbs' massive work was published in 1935, whereas Gorbachev spoke in 1988. How much, then, has changed in more than 50 years of communism in the Soviet Union?
Let us note that Sidney Webb was a founder of the Fabian Society, which preached (and still preaches) the doctrine of "the inevitability of gradualness" in the attainment of "socialism." In their seventh decade, he and his wife spent several months in the USSR, and, in common with so many fellow travelers of that period, came back convinced that they had "seen the future" and that "it works."
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