Grim Fairy Tales About Gorbachev : West Must Cut Through Misunderstanding on His ‘Weakness’

We have had a terrible time getting Mikhail S. Gorbachev right.

At first we thought that he was too young to be elected general secretary of the Communist Party. Then we thought that the collective leadership would not let him change personnel. Next we thought that he was a technocrat who was against reform. Now that Gorbachev clearly is a reformer, we still say that the Soviet Union cannot change, because resistance from the Politburo or the bureaucracy will stop him. This conclusion is as wrong as the previous ones.

The clearest example of the depth of our misunderstanding of the Soviet system is the widespread belief that Gorbachev, at last month’s Central Committee plenum, had sought a significant change in the way that regional party secretaries are elected. Actually it is opponents of the Soviet leader who might want such a change, not Gorbachev himself.

Our basic problem is that we have been forgetting the lessons of 40 years of Western scholarship, and have been taking our interpretation from two unreliable sources: the emigrant-dissident Marxist view of the Soviet Union, and the “leaks” from the supporters of Gorbachev in the Soviet Union who are trying to strengthen his power.

Think about the current American conventional wisdom about the Soviet Union. It is a classic Marxist analysis: All power is in the hands of the managers of the means of production (the bureaucrats); the ruling class is parasitical and interested only in its economic privileges; the political leadership is a weak superstructure that is a tool of the ruling class, and the ideology is a conservative justification of the status quo.

Gorbachev’s spokesmen are privately supporting this version of events for their own reasons. They want to distract the Soviet Union’s liberals from the thought that Gorbachev is accumulating dictatorial powers, and indeed they want to enlist those liberals in this effort by treating the general secretary as a besieged figure who is extremely weak.

Yet as recently as the beginning of the Leonid I. Brezhnev era the scholarly image of the Soviet Union was very different. We said that the general secretary was extremely strong (even a dictator), that the “bureaucrats” were the weak and suppressed educated middle class and that ideology promoted change, sacrifice and a drive for world supremacy. Those conclusions were right. And they are still right.

The power of the general secretary flows from many factors, including political skill and a politically intelligent program. At its heart, however, the power of that position rests on the ability of the general secretary to control the selection of regional party officials and to build a political machine based on them. These officials have a dominant role in the party congress and the Central Committee, to which the Politburo is responsible, and they strongly tend to support “their” boss against Politburo opposition.

For this reason, if the selection of regional party secretaries were strongly influenced by a secret ballot, the very core of the general secretary’s political power would be undercut. Gorbachev would support such a reform only if he were a Western-style democrat, and this is very unlikely. Gorbachev’s actual language on the subject was extremely cautious.

The political story of the plenum is a continuation of Gorbachev’s accumulation of power. His chief domestic- and foreign-policy strategist, Alexander N. Yakovlev, was moved onto the Politburo. Meanwhile, the promotion of Belorussian party chief Nikolai P. Slyunkov to the Central Committee Secretariat means that Gorbachev will gain closer control of that republic with the selection of a new first secretary. Also, the process of discrediting Ukrainian party chief Vladimir V. Shcherbitsky has finally begun, preparing the way for his probable removal next year around the time of his 70th birthday.

Gorbachev is determined to transform the Soviet Union so that it can challenge again for world leadership. He is a Peter the Great both in his orientation to the West and his ruthlessness. The so-called conservative bureaucrats are the country’s middle-class college graduates--the ones who wanted jazz and blue jeans and Western films when they were young--and they are more eager for change than Gorbachev is. Gorbachev is offering them greater openness to the West and Western ideas in exchange for a rougher life at work. They will accept the trade gladly.

Still, it is unclear whether Gorbachev’s economic reform will bring Soviet technology toward world levels by the end of the century. But the problem is the inherent difficulty of reform, not bureaucratic resistance. What is important for us in the 1980s is to keep in mind what Gorbachev told the editors of Time magazine--that “foreign policy is a continuation of domestic policy.” We will have to deal with the foreign-policy imperatives of the general secretary’s reform effort long before we know whether his reforms will succeed or fail. Our job is to think about how to respond to Yakovlev’s foreign policy (anti-American, pro-European and pro-Japanese), not listen to fairy tales about Gorbachev’s weakness.