Reinventing Politics

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  In addition to the reshaping of Soviet attitudes toward the bloc countries and the diminishing fear among the East Europeans, a structural crisis affected each country’s society with the growing realization, among both regime supporters and regime opponents, that no intrasystemic reforms would be able to resolve the growing tensions. There was a general awareness that socialism, in its Soviet-style version, had exhausted any internal resources for self-regeneration and had become completely hackneyed. Any effort to keep the system going was only a recipe for the prolongation of society’s terminal agony. No society can function in the absence of at least a limited consensus among its members about common goals and values. In Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, especially after 1988, such a consensus vanished. The same thing applied to Yugoslavia—a country not directly integrated in the bloc structure—where the speed of Soviet reforms and their contagious impact in Eastern Europe accelerated the drive toward sweeping reforms and exacerbated the conflicts between conservatives and liberals, often disguised as tensions between the more pluralistic Croatian and Slovenian elites and the more authoritarian Serbian leaders.

  The last key element, the Western pressures on these regimes—both governmental and nongovernmental—to live up to their international pledges, especially in the field of human rights, played an important part in strengthening domestic opposition. Especially after 1975, when the Helsinki Agreements were signed, but even more significantly after 1980, the West continually pressed the Soviet Union to relinquish its imperialist strategy. Capital mobility and the growing Soviet need for Western assistance also played significant roles in the dislocation of the foundations of communist regimes. The politics of cultural and political isolationism traditionally practiced by the communist governments, the systematic censorship on correspondence, and the jamming of Western radio stations all were intended to cut the links between the emerging human rights groups in the Soviet bloc and their potential supporters in the West. The feeling that there were people outside the borders of the Soviet bloc who cared about the fate of those who defended the rights of the individuals in the bloc, that the West was not silent when infringements of those rights took place, was extremely important for the development of civil societies. In order to understand the reinvention of politics in Eastern Europe, the role that the West played in the East European upheaval cannot be ignored. In other words, the impact of the West on the scope and speed of changes in Eastern Europe was no less important than the Gorbachev-led Soviet Union’s influence. They both concurred on creating an international environment in which the fossilized communist bureaucracies of Eastern Europe looked like vestiges of an embarrassing past. But whereas the West encouraged the rise of pluralist, democratic forces interested in a systemic seachange, the Kremlin staked its hopes on local communist reformers whose agenda would be to streamline rather than disband the existing economic and political mechanisms.

  GORBACHEV THE REVISIONIST

  When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in March 1985, he was the embodiment of the successful apparatchik. Nothing in his previous career indicated serious liberal propensities. True, he had been a protégé of the former General Secretary, Yury Andropov, but like his patron he seemed committed to the basic Leninist tenets, including the sacrosanct principle of the party’s leading role in society. Like Andropov’s, his rejection of Brezhnevism was inspired not by liberalism but by his belief that socialism could be regenerated through a return to the true Bolshevik values tainted by the nepotism and corruption rampant in the apparatus throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. All Gorbachev’s public pronouncements and actions were suggestive of a pragmatic, disciplined, and party-minded communist. During his first two years in power, the new leader directly challenged no entrenched ideological dogmas. His anti-Stalin campaign proceeded quite slowly, with numerous setbacks. Gorbachev initially avoided offering any direct support to the proponents of genuine liberalization. Andrei Sakharov, the celebrated physicist and human rights activist, continued to live in internal exile in the city of Gorky. But from the very beginning keen observers could detect some flexibility in Gorbachev’s approach to theoretical and cultural issues. There were indications that many in the General Secretary’s entourage were committed to a resumption of Khrushchev’s aborted attempts at de-Stalinization.

  Confronted with bureaucratic inertia, Gorbachev’s ruling team realized that only structural reforms, affecting the very foundations of the existing system, could lead to a breakout from the ongoing decay and unleash long-repressed social energies. The attack on the existing institutions started in the form of de-Brezhnevization. At the Twenty-seventh Party Congress, which took place in February 1986 (exactly thirty years after the historic Twentieth, when Khrushchev had denounced Stalin’s cult of personality), Gorbachev attacked the “command-administrative system” and called for daring reforms in both the social and economic areas. In unleashing his campaign, Gorbachev expressed the political interests of the middle-aged Soviet bureaucracy and of a certain group of party-linked intellectuals who had come to resent the corruption and incompetence of the Brezhnev era. He championed the values of a generation of the Soviet elite that had internalized the values of the Twentieth Congress, including the ideas of political and economic reforms, peaceful coexistence with the West, and the general deradicalization of the Marxist Utopian blueprint. In the initial stage, the thrust of Gorbachev’s criticism was the routinized corruption and lack of political imagination in the decision-making process. At the same time Gorbachev insisted on the role of the masses as a reservoir of political inventiveness and allowed the formation of thousands of informal organizations in the Soviet Union.

  The new leadership’s attempt to modernize was primarily inspired by Lenin’s late political and economic writings. In accordance with Lenin’s views on the New Economic Policy, Gorbachev favored decentralization and a reduction of the party’s controls over society. Reform had to be initiated from above, and the communist party had to preserve its leading role in society. That strategy was criticized by certain Soviet intellectuals who advocated a radical break with the past. Liberalization was seen as merely a continuation of the old system. Their recommendation was to democratize all institutions in order to permit individuals to express their political views fully. Giving voice to the discontent with party-controlled reforms, the well-known playwright Aleksandr Gelman, a strong proponent of restructuring, declared at a meeting of the party organization of the Cinematographers’ Union:

  Democratization provides for the redistribution of power, rights, and freedoms, the creation of a number of independent structures of management and information. And liberalization is the conservation of all the foundations of the administrative system but in a milder form. Liberalization is an unclenched fist, but the hand is the same, and at any moment it could be clenched again into a fist. Only outwardly is liberalization sometimes reminiscent of democratization, but in actual fact it is a fundamental and intolerable usurpation.2

  It took time for Gorbachev to realize that he could not avoid a full-fledged assault on the legacy of Stalinism. The ruling team at first thought it would be able to mend the system by renouncing only some of its features and remedying the others. That period, called acceleration, did not last long. Gorbachev and his supporters realized that without bringing large social groups into the political struggle and without revising the ossified party dogmas there was no way to solve the country’s problems. The Gorbachevites, among whom influential economists, political scientists, and sociologists were to be found, insisted that without political reforms there was no way to implement genuine changes in the economy. The vested interests of the military-industrial complex and of other powerful lobbies like the KGB and the party bureaucracy functioned as a main obstacle to any endeavor to modernize the economic system. As a result of the growing awareness of the intractability of the existing contradictions within the old system, the policy of perestroika was born.

  The means for perestroika t
o succeed by allowing the masses to participate in the changes and make them real was the policy of glasnost (openness or publicity). To his credit Gorbachev was quick to accept the need for a dramatic change of the whole vision of socialism. He recognized the need to reorganize the whole political system, limit the communist party prerogatives, and diminish the powers of the repressive apparatus. The search for a rule of law and the creation of a checks-and-balances system in the Soviet Union became priorities on the leadership’s agenda. The litmus test, and the most difficult challenge for the Gorbachevites, has been to renounce the communist party’s monopoly on power. To accept the emergence of parallel centers of initiative and to engage in dialogue with opponents of the existing system already went beyond the boundaries of Leninism. But while the Gorbachevites were ready to deplore the heritage of Stalinism, they were reluctant to embark on an adventurous criticism of Leninism. In many respects they echoed the Khrushchevite illusions about the reformability of the system without major convulsions. The talk was of course about revolutionary changes, but whenever they were confronted with dramatic challenges, Gorbachev and his team preferred to go only halfway.

  The General Secretary’s speeches vacillated between the commitment to radical reform and a fear that such reforms would fundamentally destabilize the system. But it was most important that Gorbachev had the willingness to reconsider the basic dogmas and to engage in a redefinition of the very concept of socialism. Despite all his hesitations, he was increasingly drawn to espousal of the revisionist concept of socialism with a human face. Like his predecessors, Imre Nagy in Hungary and Alexander Dubcek in Czechoslovakia, Gorbachev came to emphasize the intimate, indestructible link between socialism and democracy. Especially after the Communist Party’s Nineteenth National Conference in June 1988, he moved toward a reconsideration of the historical legacy of socialism in this century. He agreed that there were universal human values that prevailed over limited, class-defined interests. He also agreed that imperial diktat was morally condemnable and that the Soviet foreign policy had to be dramatically restructured. Yet Gorbachev’s strategy included an element of desperation. He could not ignore that the Soviet system was confronted with insoluble contradictions, but he tried to manage the crisis without completely abandoning the official tenets. As in the case of the Prague Spring reformers, the Soviet leader wanted to square the circle and went out of his way to postpone a complete repudiation of Leninism. In the meantime, his reformation had contributed to the awakening of both social and ethnic forces that could barely be controlled without the use of violence. But the whole philosophy of perestroika was opposed to dictatorial arbitrariness and called for legal means of solving political and national crises. The basic dilemma of Gorbachev’s leadership was convincingly summed up by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who showed that the ultimate obstacle to democratization was the Soviet leadership’s failure to renounce the Leninist ideological mythology completely:

  The political obstacles to a real perestroika are thus not only formidable but also insurmountable. A break with the Leninist legacy would require nothing short of a basic redefinition of the nature of the ruling party, of its historical role, and of its legitimacy. In fact, a real break would require a repudiation of the grand oversimplification’s central premise, namely that a perfect social system can be shaped by political fiat through which society is subordinated to the supreme state acting as history’s all-knowing agent. It would require an acceptance of the notion that much of the social change is contingent, ambiguous and often spontaneous, with the result that social complexity cannot be fitted into an ideological straitjacket.3

  The meaning of Gorbachev’s early efforts to rescue the system through the elimination of its most obnoxious features was described by Adam Michnik in 1987 as a self-styled version of “counterreformation.” Michnik referred to Leszek Kolakowski’s application of the notion of “counterreformation” as a political and ideological movement that not only rejects reformist (heretical) criticism but also incorporates and assimilates some reformist themes in order to ensure the adaptation of the existing structures to changed circumstances. In other words, this view sees the counterreformation as an attempt to change the values and institutions from within the system. It is an effort to integrate critical ideas into the functioning mechanism of the established order so that they cease to be antagonistic and subversive: “So if we accept that Solidarity was a great reformist movement within the boundaries of the communist world, then Gorbachev must, therefore, earn the title of the ‘Great Counter-Reformer.’ This is the meaning of his ‘reforms from above.’ This is the counter-reformation which is to rescue the communist system.”4

  Recognizing Gorbachev’s intentions of reforming the system without abolishing its ideological foundations, primarily the Leninist principle of the communist party’s hegemonic role, was not to say that perestroika was simply window dressing, a propagandistic farce. On the contrary, to understand the true meaning of the Soviet transformations initiated by Gorbachev, one must take into account all the economic, social, cultural, and strategic constraints that had made such a dramatic overhaul indispensable for the very survival of the system:

  Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy is the result of the generational conflict within the Sovietnomenklatura; it is the result of technological backwardness and several years of the Afghanistan war; it is, finally, the result of the fear of military confrontation and the uncompromising stance of President Reagan. Gorbachev is not a play-actor—he is a counter-reformer.5

  In those conditions, when the center was undergoing such tremendous mutations, when the language of the dissidents was being appropriated by the ideological apparatus and turned into official party doctrine, when socialism was defined in terms of its ability to create a state of law, the margin of activism for East European independent movements widened significantly.

  The counter-reformation in Moscow can open the way to new thinking on the philosophy of political compromise. It can teach us to use compromise to regulate international conflicts or social conflicts within the countries of actually existing communism. It is worth relying on this form of compromise today, even if one must not forget that the totalitarian foundation of Soviet institutions has remained unchanged.6

  Later, after 1988, the self-imposed limits of the democratic movements in Eastern Europe would increasingly lose their basic rationale. As the Soviet Union became more tolerant of autonomous, unofficial domestic activism, there was little reason to believe that Gorbachev would automatically side with the besieged communist elites in Eastern Europe at the moment of serious political and social unrest. The Soviet counterreformation opened the way for a real revolution in Eastern Europe.

  The break with Stalinism in Moscow was the green light for a break with Leninism for those in Warsaw, Budapest, and East Berlin. As for Gorbachev himself, he increasingly realized that simple liberalization would lead him and his supporters into Khrushchev’s predicament: Hated and subverted by the party apparatus, he did not have a popular base to rely upon. That explains the decision to open up the political system, to create a genuine parliament, and to reduce the party’s power drastically after 1988. Forced by the logic of political struggle and encountering the overt or covert sabotage of the bureaucracy, the General Secretary had to admit that only democratization could ensure his political survival. In 1989, despite all his hesitations and doubts, Gorbachev recognized the role of the civil society as a counterpart to a rigid political system in desperate need of change. That need was obsessively stressed also by Gorbachev’s main critic within the party (until his resignation from the CPSU at the Twenty-eighth Congress in 1990), Boris Yeltsin.

  As the political struggle intensified at the top of the Soviet bureaucracy, Gorbachev himself seemed to understand the imperative to rip off the ideological straitjacket. The same man who in November 1987 was still ready to praise the virtues of Marxist-Leninist doctrine boldly moved toward a redefinition of the fundamental values of the Soviet po
litical culture. The historical and theoretical debate advanced to an unprecedented level. Advocates of perestroika like Alexander Tsipko and Yury Afanasyev directly questioned the whole legacy of Soviet-style socialism. After 1988 the very notion of the enemy changed in official Soviet doctrine. The West ceased to be demonized as a perpetual fomentor of anti-Soviet conspiracies; socialism stopped being considered tantamount to the rule of inept bureaucracies over demoralized masses; and the Soviet national interest was reconsidered in the light of a “common European home.” The entire philosophy of communism, as it had existed for more than seven decades, suffered a rapid decline as a result of the Soviets’ official recognition of the historical failure of the existing system. The triumph of the philosophy of revisionism in the Kremlin affected not only the inner empire but also the outer empire, the whole community of nations long known as the Soviet bloc. The margin of Soviet tolerance for political experimentation in Eastern Europe widened considerably. What used to be anathema from the Soviet viewpoint under Brezhnev—the idea of socialism with a human face—had become, especially after 1988, the official Soviet line. In Brzezinski’s words: