BOOKS
Circling Red Square
Christopher Booker
here has been no more dramatic de- velopment in this decade than the emerg- ence of Mr Gorbachov as the leader of the Soviet Union. His striking personality, his promises of far-reaching reforms in his own country, his impact on superpower rela- tions and the future of arms control, have all created a mood of intense expectation throughout the world. And it is not surpris- ing that already a number of books have appeared, like these by two recent British Moscow correspondents, Martin Walker of the Guardian and Mark Frankland of the Observer, seeking to set these startling events in perspective.
But we cannot really analyse the nature of what Mr Gorbachov is up to, or under- stand the force with which he has erupted into the centre of the Soviet stage, without first understanding the real depth of the impasse which Soviet Communism had arrived at a few years ago, before the upheavals of the Eighties which provide these authors with their theme.
One of the hardest things for any Wes- terner to grasp about the Soviet Union — even for a Western correspondent who has lived there — is what it really means to live in a totalitarian country. Not only does a totalitarian system seek to exercise the tightest centralised control over almost every aspect of people's lives. It does so according to an ideology which claims to explain everything, to provide an answer to every question, which insists that it is carrying the country inexorably, by the scientific laws of history, towards a perfect society and a future in which everything will eventually come right. And the trouble is that the whole of this all-embracing ideology rests on a glaring contradiction. It does not work. It does not really explain anything. So far is it from leading to a perfect world that it produces a society almost exactly the reverse of all its original- ly proclaimed ideals — corrupt, unjust, riddled with privilege and wretched. Yet such is the all-or-nothing nature of 'scien- tific socialism' that no one can admit any of this openly without rejecting both ideology and system.
Such was the appalling psychological straitjacket in which Lenin trapped his people. And yet for the first 60 years of its existence, the Soviet Union was able to stumble forward without ever having to face up to the impossibility of squaring the circle, because there was always some excuse to fall back on, some new bout of wishful thinking to be indulged in, to explain the fact that paradise had not yet arrived. In the Twenties, after the hell of war, revolution and civil chaos, there was the limited return to private enterprise, to make life easier until the time was ripe to build 'real Communism'. In the Thirties there was Stalin's heroic drive to collecti- visation and industrialisation over the bodies of millions of 'kulaks' and 'Trotskyite wreckers'. In the Forties, after the hell of mass-starvation and purges, there was the Great Patriotic War, iden- tifying the Party with the national struggle against a common enemy. In the Fifties, after the hell of Stalinism, there was Khruschev's 'Thaw' and the dream of liberalisation. In the Sixties there were the Brezhnev-Kosygin economic reforms, promising more consumer goods and an easier life. Always there was some reason for hoping that things might one day get better.
Only in the late Seventies, as the eco- nomy once again sunk in stagnation, as the great cultural exodus took place and the dissident movement dwindled, as the pall of boredom and inefficiency lengthened ever further over Soviet life, did frustration finally give way to despair, to a sense of bezizhkodnost, 'no way out'. Drunken- ness, corruption, divorce, abortion all soared to =paralleled levels. The appalling deadweight of the system, the grey old men at the top, the awful meaningless charade of Soviet life seemed destined to go on forever. And for the first time there was absolutely no excuse left, no war, no post-revolutionary teething troubles, no ideological enemy to blame. Despite all its astonishing achievements — the triumphs in space, sport and science, the rise in educational and living standards, the open- ing up of the vast mineral wealth of Siberia — the great Communist experiment seemed spiritually, economically, socially, to be petering out in a morass of failure.
It was against this background of despair that, in 1982, the death of Brezhnev plunged the Soviet Union into that succes- sion of upheavals which in recent years held the world fascinated — and which Walker and Frankland take as their start- ing point. Both cover much the same ground in their lengthy reconstruction of the political jockeyings which followed — the false dawn of Andropov, who at first seemed the intelligent, vigorous new broom who was going to tackle the mess, but all too soon turned into another failing geriatric; then the grey, decrepit nonentity Chernenko, briefly trying to put the clock back to the worst of the Brezhnev era. But finally, in 1985, came the arrival of Gor- bachov.
Both authors describe at length the more familiar features of Soviet life which cried out for reform, the inefficiency, the cor- ruption, the drunkenness. Both are drawn by the more attractive features of the Russian people, their warmth, their intelli- gence — and are awed by the immense potential of the Soviet Union as a sleeping giant ready to be awakened. And both write with almost unqualified admiration of Mr Gorbachov himself, who is obviously the best possible man for the job the Communist system could have hoped to throw up. He is highly intelligent, he has charm, by any standards he is an outstand- ing leader, and already he has done all sorts of things which a few years ago would have seemed unthinkable. He has loosened up the system, moved towards experiments with private enterprise, kept up the momentum towards an unprecedented measure of arms control — and he has done it all in a manner which provides such a staggering contrast to any of his prede- cessors that he has inevitably aroused the hope, both in the Soviet Union and in the outside world, that his driving energy will somehow manage to carry his country into an entirely new era.
But even if in this respect the wishful thinking of Western observers happens (not for the first time) to coincide with that of many people in the Soviet Union itself, there are many who take a more cautious view of the miracles that Mr Gorbachov may be able to work. For instance, it is one thing to wish to encourage private enter- prise in the Soviet Union — but when this goes hand in hand with a drive to stamp out corruption and the the huge black eco- nomy which in recent years has been such a flourishing example of private enterprise in practice, the end result may scarcely be to the Soviet people's advantage. As one Russian put it to me a few months ago, 'we had got so used to the black economy as the only way to get anything to work at all that, now it is being closed down, it is creating a lot of resentment and opposi- tion'.
. In fact what is ultimately lacking from either of these rather dewy-eyed books is any real appreciation of the depth of the problem Mr Gorbachov faces. Both au- thors, particularly Frankland, make play With the fact that Mr Gorbachov, like Andropov before him, represents a return to the almost puritan idealism of Commun- ism at its best — a determination to clean Up morally, stamp out drunkenness and Sloppiness, restore national pride and self- respect (both make the point that these ideals have been recovered by soldiers fighting in Afghanistan, singing the songs Of World War Two as they zap the muhajt- deen). In other words the essence of what Mr Gorbachov is trying to do is simply. to find a new, more effective way of building Communism. The endless repetitions of the need for glasnost and perestroika, the experiments with incentives and co- operatives, the limited measure of party democracy, even the wish to transfer re- sources from the huge arms build-up to domestic spending, all these things are only a last gigantic effort to make the system work, not to change it. And the thought that all the terrible spiritual ills which have afflicted the Soviet Union in recent years — the drunkenness, the inefficiency, the apathy, the despair — might actually be inevitable symptoms of the inherent vacui- ty and unworkability of socialism, rather than just a falling away from its proper morality and discipline is a thought which has never entered his head.
Last year, in a speech to a writers' congress, Mr Gorbachev asked one of those resounding cosmic questions with Which Russians have confronted the seem- ing intractability of their country's prob- lems since long before the revolution. In those days the question, asked by Chemy- shevsky, Tolstoy, Lenin and countless Others, was Thto delat? — What must be done?'. The question Gorbachev put to his audience was 'If not us, then who? If not now, then when?'. What he meant by this cry from the heart was — if the system is going to be made to work, then it has to be U.S who make it work and now, because we all know after the nightmare of the past ten years that this is our last chance.
But just as much today as ten years ago the Soviet Union is a giant enmeshed Laocoon-like in the coils of that dreadful, all-embracing system — and ultimately Mr Gorbachov is not going to let it go. He may achieve many remarkable things, he may give a few years of hope to countless millions of people, both inside and outside the Soviet Union. But unless he can actually come to the point where he is prepared to throw off the shackles of Marxist-Leninism in some absolutely fun- damental way, not all his intelligence, charm and drive will eventually save either him or his country from stumbling forward into a new twilight of disillusionment and despair. So far there are no signs that he is going to do it.
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