CENTREPIECE
No new flower generation in Gorbachev's Kremlin
COLIN WELCH
Ihave not had the pleasure of meeting Mr Gorbachev, liked by Mrs Thatcher, a
man she can do business with, displaying to Chancellor Kohl a 'notable mastery of material . . . collected, energetic and reso- lute, a man who can argue and listen and has a keen historical awareness'. Nor have I met Mr Shevardnadze, a name 'unpro-
nounceable' to the Economist, though I
can't think why, unless, like Cholmon- deley, it is pronounced quite differently from how it is spelt. Those few who have Met Mr S declare him dapper and charm- ing, with the quick wit, ability and smooth manners of the Georgian, a gifted people used to bargaining and negotiating. Even from a distance, however, it is possible for humble folk with any feel for Soviet Russia to suspect that most of this is tosh.
A recent article by Mr Healey in the Daily Mail was important for what it told us not about Mr Gorbachev and Mr S but about its author and other eager gulls. Like a fool's hold-all, it incorporates in a little space many of the current misconceptions about the new Soviet leaders. 'In just 16 weeks,' Mr Healey enthuses, 'Mikhail Gorbachev has changed the whole face of Soviet politics.' The face, perhaps, but the reality behind it? 'His blistering attacks on the corruption and incompetence of the Brezhnev years must be as startling and refreshing for ordinary Russians as Khrus- they's famous attack on Stalin.' Why should blistering attacks 'startle or refresh' ordinary Russians, who have heard them all before, from Andropov and Khrush- chev himself, and, knowing well who will he blistered, shiver in their shoes? Mr Healey bids us 'never forget that Gorbachev's overriding priority is to get the Soviet economy right. That means more and better goods in the shops, not more tanks and missiles, if he can avoid it.' Little risk of our forgetting this. It is ,repeated daily, perfect nonsense as it must be. Mr Gorbachev's overriding priority is not economic reform. If it were, he would turn, with his 'keen historical awareness', for inspiration to men like Witte and Stolypin, who presided over the fastest growth in Russian history. No, his priority Is the preservation of a system which cOnfers great powers and privileges on himself and a fortunate few in the nomenk- l.atura, and which makes economic reform In the true sense, as opposed to sterile tinkering, impossible.
His economic philosophy is that of his hero Andropov. You might call it police economics. It expresses itself in leaden phrases about the need to restructure managers' minds, to tighten up discipline, to squeeze industry and to extend high technology through the economy (not easy, without extending dangerous know- ledge too). It wages fruitless war on bung- lers, black marketeers, thieves, embezzlers and on 'hooliganism, parasitism and spe- culation' — a word which embraces nearly all normal economic life. It denounces as revisionism any concessions to market forces or private enterprise. It has all but destroyed spontaneous economic life in Soviet Russia, an achievement as grim in its way as the destruction of language would be. It renders the producer dear, the consumer dumb.
It presides (and will go on presiding) over an economy almost incapable of recognising or satisfying any normal hu- man want; incapable of innovation; incap- able of making its own technology as of using properly what it buys or steals; incapable of using or distributing what it produces, producing thus for itself; incap- able of repairing or maintaing anything; incapable of producing in adequate quanti- ties not only 'frivolous' items like fruit and vegetables but the necessities of life — not only specs, clothes and shoes, but housing, medical care and basic foods, which must explain why epidemic diseases are out of control and why infant mortality has risen and life expectancy fallen (though you'd never think so, looking at the Politburo geriatrics!), in sharp contrast to nearly all non-communist countries.
In other societies it might be thought foolish of Mr Gorbachev to advertise his concern about economic performance, a field in which he has no more to offer than a one-legged man at an arse-kicking party (immortal phrase coined for Mr Heath by 'Denis' in Private Eye) and in which failure is inevitable, sack he every dotard in sight. In Soviet Russia it may not matter so much, provided the military and police are kept happy. The same system which makes reform impossible also makes it less neces- sary: no awkward by-election in the Soviet 'parliament'! But failure at home must be balanced as hitherto by success abroad — a necessity which gives a more sinister sig- nificance to Gorbachev's threat of 'no more quiet life'.
Those who rave about Mr Gorbachev as a new broom or a complete break with the past can't realise how deep his roots are in the system. The mere fact of his elevation should have put them on their guard. Never would the sort of person Western dupes think him to be have made it to the top. Other signs are not lacking.
Vladimir Bukovsky, reported by Timothy Garton Ash in the Spectator, reminded us that Mr Gorbachev began his communist career by taking part as a student in Stalin's last campaign against 'cosmopolitans', intellectuals and Jews. In a remarkably shrewd article in the New Statesman Andy McSmith, a Labour Party journalist, recalls Gorbachev's formative years. The intellectual mentors and protec- tors of Gorbachev and his henchman Ligachev were Suslov, the Kremlin's fero- cious chief ideologue, a strict Stalinist in everything but the capacity to serve new masters after Stalin's death, and the grim KGB chief Andropov. Not exactly a liberal education, nor likely to produce 'party democrats', should any such exist. What Gorbachev retains from it bursts forth in reiterated harsh roars for the elimination of 'alien elements', 'moral degenerates' and 'antagonists of socialism', and in brutal affirmations that dissidents are in the right place — prison, camp, exile or 'psychiatric ward' as it may be.
His purges are not obviously designed to remove 'dead wood' and bring on a new progressive generation. Dotards survive, relative chickens are axed. His purpose is to weed out those promoted by his prede- cessors, and to replace them with servile apparatchiks from his own bureaucratic 'family' or conspiracy, owing all to him, and to increase the power of the KGB (stronger than ever before in the Polit- buro) and the party machine. People who think that the flower generation is dancing into the Kremlin are in for a nasty surprise.
Mr Shevardnadze is described by Mr Healey as having 'made his name fighting corruption in his native Georgia'. McSmith puts him in the KGB, a fact others do not mention though, if true, worth mentioning. Emigres accuse him of torturing prisoners. Perhaps the word 'corruption' needs some gloss. As Ronald Hingley pointed out in the Spectator (15 December 1984), corrup- tion is the norm in the nomenklatura.
Campaigns against corruption are nothing of the sort, but means whereby ruthless bosses terrorise, oust or kill their rivals and swell their own power. Andropov was a master of these hideous arts, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze his apt pupils. We have been warned against their flattery. Dis- praise from them would be no faint praise.
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