Perestroika radicals: the origins and ideology of the Soviet new left

Sympathetic Western journalists present the reforms in the Soviet Union in terms of misguided socialists finally seeing the light, i.e. the capitalist free market. A Soviet columnist responded tartly to an especially self-congratulatory New York Times editorial along these lines by pointing out that the importation of the Thatcherite "economic miracle" into his country would translate on a per capita basis into almost twenty million unemployed and a few million homeless. These polemics rarely rise above a trivial contest for ideological debating points. But when set alongside each other, they provide a fine illustration of the world-historical fact that the Soviet reform drama is only a nationally specific manifestation of a protracted general crisis of industrial civilization in both its capitalist and statist variants.

This article will explore this universal dimension of perestroika by concentrating on the activity of an emergent Soviet New Left. In particular, I will concentrate on the vision of an alternative socialism elaborated by these activists. Many members of this new generation of Soviet socialists are quick to acknowledge their intellectual debt to Western Marxists and to the American

New Left. But they seem to be learning from our mistakes and shortcomings as well as our strengths. Brezhnevism and the Containment of the Soviet Left

The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia aborted a great deal more than the Prague Spring of 1968. This military action also represented a preemptive strike directed against the proponents of fundamental economic reform and socialist renewal in all statist societies. The ensuing political retrenchment of the Brezhnev era marginalized the left-liberal elements of the Soviet power elite and suppressed the de-Stalinizing intellectual currents unleashed by the Twentieth Party Congress of 1956. Nevertheless, a close reading of Soviet political debates during this period often turned up suggestive rebuttals to proposals which were barred from appearing in the public record. .

For example, an unswervingly orthodox discussion of industrial organization was suddenly punctuated by a conservative's blanket rejection of a proposition put forward by unidentified participants for the replacement of the narrowly

competitive and Tayloristic prototype of the Zlobin Brigade by a shop floor crew model based on the principle of "mutual aid and mutual assistance."' Yegor Ligachev personally confirmed the existence of at least a small band of industrial democrats within the party when he condemned advocates of a reform paradigm closely resembling the Yugoslav system.' Then Second Secretary to Konstantin Chernenko, Mikhail Gorbachev adopted a more conciliatory position in this theoretical shadow-boxing by coupling a repudiation of orthodox Brezhneviteswho "deferred the practical realization of self-management to the highest phase of communism"-with a chastising of party radicals whose notion of industrial democracy was "pitted against state administration.

The launching of perestroika immediately prompted many liberals and conservatives to issue dire warnings about insurgents using the cover of reform to usher in an "orgy of democracy" and push changes "beyond the boundaries of socialism" as the orthodox demarcate them. This containment strategy mainly took the form of menacing utterances by Politburo hardliners and a continuing media embargo against any detailed discussion of the specifics of the program of the inchoate Left. The late summer of 1987 witnessed the first major breachings of the press blockade and the advent of a qualitatively new stage in the struggle to define the tempo and content of reform. The Gorbachev thaw is now opening the political terrain to the radical wing of the perestroika coalition, which is striving to fill the spiritual vacuum left by a bankrupt Brezhnevism with the vision of ohnovlenie (democratic socialist renewal).

The Coalescence of the Soviet New Left

Despite the monolithic Orwellian stereotypes prevalent in the West, counter-cultural enclaves and a broad array of unofficial youth groups have long existed in the Soviet Union. This demimonde presently includes radical Marxists, neopopulists, greens, hippies, punks, rockers, and a slice of the intelligentsia pursuing discreetly unorthodox lifestyles. The current liberalization has allowed these subcultures to emerge from the underground for the first time. The political activists among these fringe elements have taken advantage of the liberalization to establish a legally recognized coalition of autonomous civic groups around a common ideological platform.

Many of the participants in the August 1987 inaugural conference of the Socialist Civic Clubs (SCC) were keenly aware of the historical significance of this unprecedented event. *5 The Informational Meeting-Dialogue was quietly sponsored by establishment liberals who perceive the need to reinforce a counter-elite war of position against conservative elements of the dominant class with what they hope will remain a controlled popular mobilization.' The diversity and vitality of the New Left put its collective political capacity to the test from the outset when factional feuding and petty internecine power plays led to an imminent breakdown of preliminary negotiations over the agenda of the conference. Such dissension is the natural by-product of a multi-tendency coalition which runs the ideological gamut from conventional "dissident" organizations like the pacifist Confidence Group and the liberal Democracy and Humanism Seminar to radical militants like the cultural revolutionaries of the Perestroika Club and the democratic socialists of the 'Obshchina or Community CTub. The latter trend clearly predominated in the first programmatic joint statements of the alliance, with their Eurocommunist critique of "actually existing socialism," their ecological consciousness, and their internationalism. Most significantly, the participants chose to exclude foreign journalists from their first conclave in a symbolic indication of their intention to break with the failed dissident strategy of using the Western media and governments as their chief interlocutors. Instead the coalition is trying to establish roots in a domestic popular base through mass educational and organizational work at the local level.

Over the course of the conference, a sense of common purpose and willingness to compromise combined to override the fractiousness of the various signatories to the founding charter of the coalition. 7The final declaration claimed as its paramount objective the completion of the democratic socialist revolution begun in 1917 and arrested by the triumph of Stalinism. It singled out the free establishment and proliferation of independent social organizations as a principal contributor to the "development of socialist self-management and the supersession of the administrative-bureaucratic structures" inherited from the 1930s. SCC signatories proclaimed their readiness to support the reform party within the CPSU against the tories, while reserving the right of the coalition to 'Jealously defend its autonomy and advance its own demands which go significantly further in their radicalism than party resolutions."

In a fundamental departure from the liberal oppositionists of the past, the New Leftists demanded that the introduction of a market socialist economy be coupled with th"provision of firm guarantees for the preservation of the social conquests of the working people-full employment, minimum wage, pension security, etc." The radicals consider mass working-class support indispensable to the success of democratization. This strategic perspective explains their adamant opposition to the neoliberal variant of economic restructuring, which would impose the greatest sacrifices on the vast majority of the working class.

After some heated debate, the conference participants also reached a consensus that "enemy number one" was the various neofascist groups like Pamiat (Memory) which have likewise availed themselves of the thaw to campaign aggressively for a radical-right retrostroika. The New Left has decided to meet the obscurantist threat head-on through concerted educational work in the factories, schools, and community. Sympathetic reformers have pointedly credited informals, as Soviet New Leftists are called, with taking the initiative to combat racist propaganda in provincial towns more vigorously than conservative local officialdom.

Boris Kagarlitski, a coordinator of the coalition, reported that the total number of affiliated socialist clubs has grown from 300 at the beginning of 1987 to 500 by the end of the year. Official estimates set the total number of autonomous organizations at 30,000.9 An auspicious trend is the springing up of socialist clubs in provincial towns far away from the more cosmopolitan urban centers. Bukharin Clubs composed of both workers and intellectuals were established in the remote industrial city of Naberezhnye Tselny in 1982."' They concentrated their educational campaign on securing the political rehabilitation of Nikolai Bukharin, whose historical reputation is inextricably bound up with the legitimation of the prospect of "another socialism" beyond the Stalinist model." In the major urban centers, the clubs have chosen as the focal point of their work a public petition for the construction of a memorial to the victims of Stalinism.

Conservative critics have been especially incensed by the campaign of the informals t"go to the people" in the nineteenth century Populist tradition. A pair of hostile journalists accused the radicals of trying to "destabilize the situation in production collectives," where they were finding a receptive audience among segments of the workforce described disparagingly as "discontented individuals, troublemakers, sloppy workers, and drifters."" Official liberalism and the dissident movement of the 1970s tended to view the working class as the objective ally of the bureaucracy in a paternalistic authoritarian social contract. This elitist perspective reduced the political terrain to a Saint Simonian war of the skilled against the unskilled which severely circumscribed the social base of reform and forfeited the strategic initiative to a resurgent Right.

The historical importance of this tentative collaboration between the radical intelligentsia and the working class was duly noted by a tory journalist who recalled how cultural liberalization in Poland eventually allowed a "small band of retrogrades" to become the think-tank for an autonomous labor movement. The strategy and ideology of the radical wing ofperestroika suggests that its most politically conscious members have learned a great deal from the example of Polish Committee for the Defense of Workers about combining a defense of working-class interests with a defense of all of civil society against an invasive apparatus. But in the far different Soviet context, the New Left can only achieve its stated objectives by consolidating its role as the crucial political linkage between a rationalizing restructuring from above and an emancipatory obnovlenie from below.

The Ideology of the New Left

The statistics on book borrowing at the Moscow Lenin Library contain a hopeful sign of the enduring vitality of Marxism as a source of critical thought in the Soviet Union. After Marx, Engels, and Lenin, the most widely read Marxist social science author was Antonio Gramsci. This Gramscian influence became immediately evident when the Left broke through the conservative press embargo with a series of articles in authoritative journals expounding a coherent radical alternative vision ofperestroika to elite and popular audiences.

The most explicit and comprehensive manifesto of the political thought of these insurgents came in the August 1987 issue of the usually staid Problems Of Philosophy. The survey piece was written by the historian Andranik Migranian and may represent the most provocative intellectual product of the Gorbachev thaw to date. The article is conspicuous both for its historical breadth and the wide range of sensitive subjects touched upon, if only superficially, in order to bring hitherto taboo subjects into the realm of public debate.

Migranian draws heavily on Gramsci's analysis of nascent Stalinism in The Prison Notebooks to argue that economic backwardness and a loosely integrated social structure require a "Socialist state in a post-revolutionary society to assume functions which were not envisaged by Marxist political theory." 0bjective circumstances compelled the Bolshevik government under Lenin to shoulder the historical burden of "establishing a new civil society; the gradual limitation of state intervention in economic and socio-cultural life; the fostering of civic consciousness; and voluntary associations, unions, and organizations for translating creative energy and popular initiative into action."

Migranian teaches at the renowned but generally orthodox stronghold of IMEIMO (Institute of World Economics and International Relations). But his academic affiliation did not deter him from openly flouting Stalinist historiography by describing the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s as a stage in which the "necessary prerequisites for the development and perfection of civil society were being established." Defying fifty years of authorstarian dogma, Migranian contended that the nurturing of a socialist civil society was the only possible path to the "eventual withering away of the state." Referring to Gramsci's dissection of statolatry as a political phenomenon common to late developing capitalisms, the historian specified the severe economic crisis of the late 1920s as the crucial juncture allowing a modernizing state to break free of its political moorings in a weakly integrated civil society and "transform itself into the uncontrolled master" of a ruthlessly compressed process of industrialization and collectivization.

Migranian spelled out the contemporary relevance of his pioneering analysis of Stalinism in asserting that if the "socialist state in the form of its bureaucracy and petty officialdom assumes a certain autonomy with respect to civil society, it would seem to be imperative that civil society should possess real potentials and institutions for exerting effective pressure on the organs of state power." At this point, the IMEIMO academic began to push his analysis beyond the familiar liberal insistence on constitutional guarantees, a codified separation of powers, and the removal of incorrigible state personnelwithout, however, depreciating the importance of any of these for a successful democratization. Migranian insisted that the (,sole real possibility for the effective control of society over the organs of power lies in the energizing of civil society and the institutionalization of its basic links." He described participatory democracy in the form of cooperatives and unions as "one of the cardinal steps on the path to the change of the correlation of forces between the bureaucracy and civil society in favor of society." Here Migranian summed up the ultimate political objective of the Soviet New Left with the declaration that the major task of revolutionary perestroika is the achievement of the complete control of civil society over the state by means of all the instruments presently at its disposal and those which it will acquire in the process of the progressive strengthening and institutionalization of civil society."

Migranian closed with a flourish sure to send shudders down the spine of Soviet and Western conservatives alike. The historian urged Soviet radicals seeking to elaborate a model of socialism based on self-management to mine the experience of the U.S. New Left of the 1960s, with "ethic of cooperation and repudiation of predatory competition and individualistic pursuit of egoistic personal interest."

Specialists in modern East European history will immediately note the parallels between Migranian's article and the writings of those Czechoslovak intellectuals who laid the theoretical groundwork of the Prague Spring by renouncing the pernicious negation of civil society" in orthodox dogma and brandishing the young Marx to argue that the "concept of civil society is clearly broader than the concept of bourgeois society."" The orthodox conflation of state and society provided Stalinism with an ideologically consistent means of conjuring away, at least in theory, the inevitable contradictions between the two. With the same flair as Adam Ferguson or Marx crossing pens with apologists for political absolutism, Migranian has become the first contemporary Soviet scholar to rehabilitate the concept of grazhdanskoe obshchestvo (civil society) as an ideological lever for overturning the venerable Stalinist equation of socialism with the extension of the power of the gosudarstvo (state) .

Migranian's imagery of the state "swallowing" civil society during the 1930s signals the beginning of a concerted campaign to reassert society against a state apparatus which incorporates the hegemonic fraction of the dominant class, and to reclaim for citizens and non-governmental organizations the authority usurped by the state during the stage of primary capital accumulation. The crux of Migranian's article is that progress in an advanced society moves from civil society to the state; in a country undergoing a catch-up industrialization, the reverse is the case. Consequently, a modern socialist polity must redress a historically skewed balance of power in order to favor a dynamic civil society, permitting the emergence of social organizations which can serve as the autonomous representatives of pluralist interests and institutionalizing democratic forms of mediating the resulting conflicts.

Migranian and the Soviet New Left are striving to go beyond the static Stalinist conception of the socialization of the means of production. Orthodox Soviet theory maintained that nationalization in itself qualitatively transformed production relations, and the future required only the refinement of this integrally socialist system. Migranian's article offers a dynamic conception of socialization as a process rather than a single magisterial stroke. The transfer of the economic base to the control of society is viewed as a long revolution in which the democratization of the means of production becomes the supreme criterion for gauging the degree of socialization.

One of the few positive consequences of the tortuous disintegration of Brezhnevism was the dispelling of the utopian illusions which became rampant after the crushing of the Prague Spring. This disabusal turned some committed reformers in the direction of a self-managed socialism. Perestroishchiki like Migranian have taken up the broader human challenge of integrating direct democratic institutions into the framework of an advanced industrial economy, representative democracy, a pluralist political system, and constitutional guarantees. The maximalist wing of the reform coalition has only just begun to grapple with the dilemma of how to reconcile the dynamic equilibrium of a plan-market synthesis and the instability inherent in the "creative destruction" of outmoded production forces with the microeconomics of full employment and socialwelfare entitlements. But the more militant radical economists have already pushed the terms of the debate on restructuring beyond mere technical issues. A pair of industrial democrats took the neoliberals to task in the main party theoretical journal for their tendency to react to concerns raised about the effective implementation of self-management with the proverbial "ironic smile" and go right on treating the problem of production democracy as an innocuous ideological placebo designed to make harsh marketizing reforms and austerity go down more easily for the working class.

A more representative portrayal of the political mentality of Soviet radicals was contained in the personal account of a meeting of a small study group written by a Komsomol maximalist and published in the youth newspaper of the Young Communist League. The author was quick to parry conservative equations of radical dissent with a lack of patriotism by noting that he and many of his generation had been inspired by the writings of such luminaries of the Russian revolutionary past as Radishchev, Chernyshevski, Belinski, and Korolenko. Youthful political sensibilities formed by this highly principled intellectual tradition could only react with disgust to an "actually-existing socialism" of endemic graft, ubiquitous production fraud, and the "unlimited power of bureaucrats." The most disillusioned had even taken to describing their society as "state capitalist" rather than socialist.

Whatever differences there may be over precise sociological definitions, the radicals converge on the common premise that production relations in the Soviet Union are not founded on socialized property because the "owner is the state," and that this impersonal state property has been transformed into the power base of a privileged apparatus-elite. The maximalist compared the typical Soviet bureaucrat to a "variant of the rentier living off dividends from the investment of his slowwitted tenure and useless Labor in a disheveled economic mechanism." As a result of the incompetence of"parasitic" elite stratum, the overall situation has finally deteriorated beyond the point where the state has more to fear from a sleepy unanimity""energetic diversity" in the political process.

The New Leftists are using the more decentralizing and libertarian strains of Lenin's political thought to critique the combination of a highly collectivized mode of production with a minimal level of socialization. The Komsomol radical prescribed a thoroughgoing democratization of the means of

production as the chief antidote to bureaucratization, because no other remedy could "strengthen the forms of social property behind the Labor collectives." If allowed to come to full blossom, the Hundred Flowers of the Gorbachev perestroika may bear out Zdenek Mlynar's supposition that the imperatives of reform within a statist framework will almost certainly generate social forces ready to probe the limits of democratization in production, accumulation, consumption, and all the major spheres of social life. In so doing, the Soviet New Left may provide some generalizable concepts for the optimal democratization of all advanced industrial societies.

The Party Renovators and the Informals

The most outspoken liberal champions of reform, like the sociologist Tatiana Zaslavskaia, have welcomed the rapid spread of the informal movement positive phenomenon testifying to the growing energy of the various social circles." The committed renovators within the elite view the populist insurgency at the grassroots, especially among the young, as an essential prerequisite for overcoming the "inertia and resistance of the bureaucratic apparatus." But these establishment reformers also worry that the anti-apparatus insurgency could mushroom beyond their control under the impetus of an "adolescent syndrome" or what they deem a maximalist infantilism.

The Yeltsin affair marked the first time in the post-Stalin era that a power struggle within the leadership found a reciprocal popular resonance resulting in a flurry of demonstrations and protest actions across the country. This unrest compelled the Gorbachev government to make reassuring gestures like offering a ministerial-level post to Yeltsin and publishing a bombshell article on Bukharin in a mass-circulation weekly, signalling his imminent rehabilitation. Boris Kagarlitski aptly summed up the ultimate outcome of the Yeltsin affair when he wrote that if the conservative scourging of the deposed Moscow party chief was meant to be the "signal for the beginning of a general attack on perestroika, then it failed in its objective."

The Yeltsin firing definitely emboldened conservative factions opposed to serious democratization. But this setback for the Left also provided evidence of the depth of resolve with in the reform intelligentsia. Instead of falling abjectly behind a new retrenchment line or biding his time until a muddled situation clarified itself, an undeterred Central Committee member, Mikhail Ulianov, sought to rally a shaken Left by declaring in a speech tha "we cannot retreat for a moment" b"if we understand the meaning of what is happening, we must lead the people behind us as if we were in combat at the front." In the face of increasingly brazen conservative reprisals, a radical 'ournalist warned that "our glasnost is not timidity but fearless thinking and a readiness to go to the stake for one s convictions. A radical historian urged his readers to draw the appropriate conclusions from a contemplation of "those key moments of Russian history when political freedom could have become a reality but was lost" through want of civic courage.

The initial success and promise of the informal movement may be most faithfully gauged by the rabid counter-polemics of a Right plainly dismayed by its rapid growth. A conservative novelist coupled an excoriation of the "shaggy-haired" purveyors of anarchy with an attack on a leading anti-Stalinist historian (luri Afanasiev) for abetting the "Athenian Night" of a promiscuous sexual revolution through his active sponsorship of youth groups. In a now notorious polemic, Nina Andreeva charged the clubs with promoting "extra-socialist pluralism" through their advocacy of an institutional separation of powers, free trade unions, and an independent press. The neo-Stalinist academic alleged that the New Left was calling into doubt the "leading role of the party and the working class," or less euphemistically the specific configuration of elite authority and privileges in the existing power structure. Establishment liberals have consistently come to the defense of the clubs against this hail of abuse, arguing that the informals sprung out most profound crisis of confidence among young people" which cannot be legislated away. But conservative fears remain that these first random showers of "loose rock debris" will eventually unleash a "spontaneous landslide."

Even at this early stage of the reform struggle, the influence of the New Left on the public debate has been conspicuous. The official newspaper of the Komsomol has independently called for legislation guaranteeing the right to hold demonstrations. In a stunning letter to a major periodical, a young engineer blame"military industry" for siphoning off investments from badly underfunded social services and resisting both nuclear disarmament and deep cuts in conventional weapons spending. A well-mounted strike at a Iaroslavl motor factory was led by a self-styled "initiative group" of worker representatives which bypassed the official trade unions. Similar groups have taken the lead in organizing public demonstrations against the expansion of nuclear power and the ravaging of the local environment. A factory worker speaking at a protest against dangerously high levels of industrial air pollution posed a universal question: "Why have we become the hostages of industry? Why do we put profit before humanity instead of humanity before profit?"

Initiative groups have also been established within professional associations like the official organization of historians These generally serve as the vehicle for revisionist scholars seeking to circumvent or break the conservative monopoly within academia. An insurgent historian left no doubt about the final aim of the radicals: We [the Soviet government] now state that the means of production should be controlled by the worker collectives to a greater extent, that the means of production should come under the real use and control of these collectives in a definite sense. Can it be said that the scientific collectives have not developed the same degree of maturity? Why do scientific 'ournals operate separately from these collectives? Why don't scientific institutions publish their own bulletins and scholarly notes? Why do publishing houses operate like some third force? The meansofproductionofscientificworkshould be transferred unconditionally to the workers of science.

A radical economist endorsed this spate of grassroots selforganization with the once heretical argument tha"voice of the people is not just the October Revolution, the Soviets assuring the broad representation of working people, or the vanguard. The multiformity of Soviet society has finally broken through the monolithic facade of the Brezhnev era, and this polyphonic vox populi is still in the process of inventing new ways to make itself heard.

A group of establishment scholars led by the medievalist Dimitri Likhachev recently published a letter in a major literary weekly calling for the erection of a monume"our citizens who perished as a result of repression which had no legal justification." The radical de-Stalinizing campaign spearheaded by the informals has now become a rallying point for many reform intellectuals who recognize the need for a cathartic symbolic action which would signal a decisive rupture with an authoritarian past.

In a maj-or escalation of the campaign, a private petition echoing the de-Stalinizing demands of the informals was circulated within official circles following the February 1988 plenum. The organizers gathered 107 signatures among their inveterately wary peers before submitting their appeal for the construction of a memorial directly to Gorbachev. The ranks of the signatories ranged well beyond the usual liberal stalwarts to cover a broad cross-section of the Soviet elite. This is the first instance of a large segment of the establishment intelligentsia accepting the considerable personal risk entalled in throwing its collective support behind a contender in a still unresolved Kremlin power struggle. The breakthrough is also notable because the informals have succeeded through their educational work in creating a powerful emotive focus for a diffuse debate on the future political character of Soviet society. By defining the terms of the debate on this crucial aspect of glasnost, the informals have already had a political impact far beyond the weight of their present numbers.

Boris Kurashvill has taken these incipient trends to their logical strategic conclusion in asserting that the implementation of substantive reform is contingent on the emergence of a "broad-based socio-political organization which would at first be something like a popular front in support of perestroika.', But the radical legal theorist pushed his reform arguments far beyond the rather Weberian plebiscitary democratic vision of Gorbachev. Kurashvili openly expressed the hope that this loose coalition of committed party reformers and the new crop of autonomous informal social clubs would "later be constituted as a permanently operating democratic alliance for the renewal of socialism (or socialist development) under the generals leadership of the party; unifying Communists, Komsomol members, and mainly non-party people into an association which would have territorial-production organizations and cells, a material basis and organs of mass information." Stopping just short of explicitly declaring it, Kurashvili is proposing the establishment of an alternative party or social movement . which could bridge the gap between the radical renovators in the CPSU and the still amorphous popular constituencies of reform.

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