Opening Soviet Politics to Openness : The Current Candor Is Simply Useful; It Should Be Permanent

The recent release of Andrei Sakharov and his wife from administrative exile is a development of considerable symbolic importance, given Dr. Sakharov’s immense and deserved moral standing, but one is bound to ask whether it is any more than a stratagem in the diplomatic chess game. Does it really mean that the Soviet government is moving toward stricter legality and greater openness, or is more ready to listen to unwelcome facts and opinions?

The other much-publicized releases that have taken place in the past year--those of Anatoly Shcharansky, Yuri Orlov and Irina Ratushinskaya--have clearly been aimed at improving the Soviet image in the West at a sensitive diplomatic juncture. Yet, as these ex-detainees have all emphasized, most of their former labor-camp comrades are still being held in atrocious conditions; indeed, Anatoly Marchenko, veteran writer and human-rights campaigner, died only recently as a result of protracted prison brutality and medical neglect.

Sakharov’s release and his subsequent outspoken criticisms of the regime to Western journalists do not yet spell the end of political oppression in the Soviet Union. On the other hand, I think that the West would do well not to react with undiluted cynicism to Sakharov’s release.

There have been a number of signs that Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s campaign for “openness” is producing results. The reporting of the explosion in the Chernobyl nuclear-power station was, after a shaky start, pretty frank and complete, in the opinion of Western nuclear experts; a play even was performed in Moscow that hit hard at the corruption and mismanagement that caused both the disaster and the initial secrecy.

To give another example, last May the cinematographers’ union swept away its old leadership and installed as its chairman 41-year-old Elem Klimov, a maker of controversial films that the previous leaders had banned. He immediately ordered a review of recent items that had been kept off the screen, as a result of which several previously forbidden films are reported now to be showing in Soviet cinemas.

The writers’ union congress in June was also a dramatic event, even though the personnel changes implemented were not so far-reaching.

Gorbachev met some of the leading writers beforehand and encouraged them to be forthright about revealing the shortcomings of Soviet society. He is said to have confided to them: “Between the people who want changes . . . and the leadership, there is an administrative layer, the apparatus of the ministries, the party apparatus, which does not want alterations and does not want to be deprived of certain rights and their accompanying privileges.”

He aptly diagnosed the problem of fighting such people in a one-party system. “We don’t have an opposition,” he is reported to have said. “How then can we monitor ourselves? Above all, through openness . . . . The Central Committee needs help. You cannot imagine how much we need help from a contingent like the writers.”

Some writers took the cue to complain publicly about the suppression of good literature, about the degradation of the environment in thoughtless economic development, and about the spread of what some delegates darkly called the “spiritual emptiness” in modern Soviet society.

Even before the writers’ congress, Viktor Astafyev had published a novel about a small-town policeman, “The Sad Detective,” which was devastating in its exposure of provincial crime and corruption, including child abuse, rape and murder. And Kirgiz writer Chingiz Aitmatov brought out a novel, “The Scaffold,” which described both the hashish trade, never previously admitted inside the Soviet Union, and the devastation inflicted on the animal world by the bureaucrats of the planned economy.

Of course, it might well be argued that all this openness and criticism suits Gorbachev only while he is relatively new to the top job; it is a useful weapon with which to scourge his predecessor and prepare the way for his own new broom. The recent article in Pravda attacking Leonid I. Brezhnev’s complacency and lack of purpose would seem to confirm this view.

But writers, scientists and scholars often go further than their political protectors intend. The Aitmatov novel offers an example of this. It partly rehabilitates “God-building”--the idea propounded by Maxim Gorky in the 1900s that socialism is a new and improved form of religion in which man, by building a new society, in effect creates God. Lenin detested this idea, and, to judge by the continuing oppression of religious dissenters, Gorbachev does not have much sympathy for it, either.

But here Gorbachev is in a dilemma. Either he grants some measure of freedom to the country’s top scientists and artists--in which case they will contribute to the Soviet Union’s cultural distinction, economic strength and international standing, but as part of the bargain he must put up with their unwelcome ideas--or he continues to suppress them in the interest of the middle-ranking bureaucrats and their privileges.

There is another problem, too. Free speech brings conflicts into the open. At the writers’ congress the Georgian delegation walked out because a Russian speaker implied that much of the ubiquitous Soviet corruption originated in their homeland. On a more tightly stage-managed occasion that would not have happened.

Conflict between nationalities must be very much on Gorbachev’s mind in a month in which Kazakhs rioted because he had just replaced their native party secretary with a Russian. But conflict is an inevitable component of politics, which can be fruitful only when conducted in the open. Given the opportunity to articulate their grievances and express their aspirations openly, the Kazakhs might find something more constructive to do than riot. That is why it is in Gorbachev’s interest as well as ours that “openness” proves to be more than a temporary manipulative device and becomes a permanent feature of Soviet politics.