The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State From 1917 to the Present. - book reviews

THE INTELLIGENTSIA AND SOVIET CHANGE

Revolution from Above: Where Is the Soviet Union Going?

The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State from 1917 to the Present

Genuine socialists and Marxists are not innumerable in the Soviet Union. Boris Kagarlitsky is one of the few, and the name is familiar because his texts often appear in the West in publications of the New Left. The surprising thing is his age. How did he manage in his 31 years, of which one was spent in jail, to absorb so much? After all, this is his second book, and it was written some time ago. It reveals not only a sure grasp of Russian sources but also a very impressive, if eclectic, knowledge of Western writings on the subject. All this material is harnessed to analyse the relationship between intellectuals and the state since the Russian Revolution. A great merit of the book for outsiders in to remind them that glasnost has a background, that it is not just a gift from heaven or from Mikhail Gorbachev.

To begin with, the author must define russia's prerevolutionary intelligent--reminiscent of Sartre's intellectuel engage--committed in this case to the modernization of his or her country, to social change, quite often to socialism. He also explains the early spread of this phenomenon in Russia by the contrast between the relatively high number of educated people and the absence of jobs like those provided in the West by bourgeois society. This intelligentsia, while welcoming the fall of tsardom, did not, on the whole, get on too well with the Bolsheviks. The relationship was awkward, though the freedom enjoyed by writers or artists under Lenin and Trotsky had nothing to do with what happened afterward.

Stalin's rise and the crushing of the opposition inaugurated the total subsmission of the intellectuals. Stalin eliminated the old intelligentsia and mass-produced a new one, including the so-called engineers of souls. Socialist realism, Kagarlitsky points out, should be used in quotation marks, since the purpose of this art was consolation not realism. The purges were at their bloodiest in the 1930s, but subservience was at its worst after the war with Zhdanovism in the arts, the antisemitic attack on "rootless cosmopolitans," Lysenko in biology, and so on. It was too much for an educated country, and the ground was thus prepared for a revolt after Stalin's death.

We then get a timely refresher course on the first thaw, with its search for sincerity in the essays of Pomerantsev, the poems of Yevtushenko, in Dudintsev's Not By Bread Alone, and the memoirs of Ilya Ehrenburg. The climax was reached with the publication of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The movement ended not with the fall of Khrushchev in 1964, but four years later with the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The author stresses to what extent Czechoslovakia was a turning point for the Soviet intelligentsia which then switched from criticism within the system to criticism of the system (and shows how difficult this exercise was for writers like Yevtushenko). He then draws up a balance sheet of the ensuing period. Among the drawbacks are the revival of nationalism and the rise of the right. On the asset side are the shedding of illusions, deeper criticism, and the development of the necessary pluralism among the intelligentsia. The conclusion is rather optimistic. After a period of disillusion with socialism, the intellectuals have apparently become "disenchanted with disenchantment."

And yet one puts down this valuable and stimulating book with a certain feeling of frustration. The reason is simple. The bulk was written seven years ago for the Russian samizdat, and the few articles added by the publishers do not really bring it up to date. If somebody with Kagarlitsky's acumen were writing now, when the Soviet intelligentsia fights for the broader interests of society (in glasnost) and also for its own privileges (in perestroika), he would have analyzed more closely its social make-up, its interests, its inner divisions. We get a glimpse of what he might have done in the conclusion where he writes about the narrowing frontier between the working class and the intelligentsia. Our appetite has been whetted, and one would normally conclude that a second volume is now urgently needed. The snag is that, when history quickens pace, activities may be unable to find the time for writing books.

Tariq Ali is no Sovietologist. Born in Pakistan, educated at Oxford, he was one of the leaders of the protest movement in Britain in the 1960s and has been a prominent figure of the New Left ever since. Because he is essentially an activist and not a Kremlinologist, the author conveys the feeling that history is here in the making, that the Soviet Union is at the very beginning of a period of monumental change. A stranger, a visitor, he manages to pass on to the reader the excitement of a country where serious periodicals sell like hot cakes, where books, films, plays are political events, where people simultaneously discover their past and the art of political debate.

The purpose of the book is polemical, and it is aimed at the western left. The author proclaims himself the champion of this "revolution from above." Naturally he too would have preferred to see a mass movement from below. "That would have been very nice, but it didn't happen that way," he remarks rather rhetorically, attacking left-wing skeptics for their over-critical attitude toward the Gorbachev experiment. While agreeing that one should never quarrel with history or sulk because the red mole is not digging in the expected fashion, I am not quite convinced that to welcome perestroika one must somehow identify with the Soviet leadership.

Indeed, in this lively book its Marxist author does not really deal much with social forces. Admittedly, the social analysis of the Soviet Union is not very easy, but its absence leads to ambiguous conclusions. Tariq Ali, whose heart is on the left, instinctively rejects, say, the proposition of a Nikolai Shmelev that "everything that is effective is moral," or Tatyana Zaslavskaya's tendency to confuse payment according to productivity with social justice. Yet to what extent do they represent the views of a professional intelligentsia defending its own interests against those of the nomenklatura? And what is the position of Gorbachev, or of Yeltsin for that matter, in the unfolding struggle between the managers and the apparatchiks? Ali aptly points out that Gorbachev "has to effectively dismantle a gigantic bureaucratic apparatus, and he wants to do this with the agreement of those whose privileges will be swept overboard." But whose interests does he represent? To say "the reformist wing of the Soviet elite" does not quite answer the question.

To dig deeper one would have to take a position on Gorbachev's own stand on equality, his distorted emphasis on the slogan "to each according to his labor" as the Marxist gospel. One would have to analyze further what the author calls "socially-controlled marketization." Granted that Soviet citizens have every reason to be mad as consumers or that a "mixed economy" is inevitable during a long period of transition, the real problems are the direction in which the economy is moving, the inner logic of the system, and its proposed property relations. It is in this context that one should also examine the reentry into a world capitalist market of an economy which still has a much lower level of productivity.

Ultimately it all comes down to Rosa Luxemburg's famous argument about the superiority of an erring mass movement over an infallible central committee. To seek signs of a movement from below should not be interpreted as teaching Russians lessons. It is a natural consequence of a certain conception of socialism based on the growing political consciousness of the masses. This attitude in no way neglects the importance of changes from above. Yet, in the last analysis, Tariq Ali himself welcomes Gorbachev and his perestroika because they are likely to, indeed because they have already, set the masses in motion. But does it necessarily mean that one should "establish direct contacts with official bodies in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe"? (To say that the overwhelming majority of Soviet socialists are in the CPSU does not mean that they are a majority in the party.)

What I have said above attests to the author's achievement. His purpose is to provoke, and in this he clearly succeeds. His book deserves to be read by all Western leftists interested in the fate of the Soviet Union, which should be a pleonasm. Whether one agrees with him or not, his chapters raise all the issues the left must tackle: the resistance of bureaucracy, market and planning in a single state, the relevance of memory, the power to be granted to the soviets, and, finally, russia's relations with the outside world. Besides, the book is topical despite the furious pace of events. It ends with a plea for Lenin's mummified body to be removed from the mausoleum. As I write these lines, in June 1989, the same proposal made by writer Yuri Karyakin at the Moscow Congress of People's Deputies has provoked passion throughout the Soviet Union.

Daniel Singer is The Nation's European correspondent and author, most recently, of Is Socialism Doomed?: The Meaning of Mitterand.

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