Soviets Optimistic : Glasnost--New Life for Old System

Georgy A. Arbatov is like a man reborn.

Seeing him today, an old acquaintance finds it hard to picture this Soviet official as he was just three years ago: crestfallen, his hopes for change in his country tied to a life-support machine in the Kremlin hospital where Yuri V. Andropov lay dying. A dying KGB head as reformer? In the land of the czars, one takes what one gets.

Then came the dull days of Konstantin U. Chernenko, when it looked like the pattern was set. Old men, old ideas, nothing changing.

Two years ago, the clouds parted for Arbatov--and the many Communist Party loyalists like him--who had been waiting for a system they once thought of as revolutionary to show some sparks of life. After Mikhail S. Gorbachev won out in a power struggle to lead the Soviet Communist Party, Arbatov, beside himself with excitement, grabbed a reporter’s arm and proclaimed: “Gorbachev is a modern man! Now you will see the changes, the new thinking!”

Veteran of Many Twists

Recently, at the Soviet Academy of Sciences institute that he directs here--the USA and Canada Institute--the 63-year-old Arbatov, a member of this nation’s ruling Central Committee and veteran of many past Kremlin twists and turns, recalled the earlier conversation and asserted that Gorbachev had performed beyond Arbatov’s wildest expectations.

Few Western observers would disagree that the Gorbachev era has brought many unexpected--and even unimaginable--changes here. What they add up to and just how far they will go are the subjects of a debate that can only be resolved by time.

But dozens of interviews conducted here recently with top Soviet officials, including members of the Central Committee, its Secretariat and Politburo, as well as with leading scientists and editors, provide an outline of what Gorbachev and his allies in the party think they are up to in this era of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction).

‘Depressing Developments’

“It was not sudden,” Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir F. Petrovsky says when asked why these concepts suddenly have come to the fore. “People in the party and in government felt that something is wrong, that depressing developments were taking place; there was not much economic development; social justice had been violated in the country. . . . And we see in glasnost, democratization and in a democratic people the only remedy against all of this. A democratic people will make bureaucrats behave properly and observe certain rules of behavior.”

Petrovsky is no budding dissident, but a top team player in the Soviet foreign policy Establishment who currently oversees many of his government’s relations with international organizations. Relaxed with a visitor in his Foreign Ministry office, he shunned diplomatic qualifiers and made no requests for anonymity, obviously speaking with the full confidence that he was stating the leadership’s position.

Neither Petrovsky nor any of the other top people around Gorbachev talk about replacing or diluting socialism. As Politburo member Alexander N. Yakovlev said in an interview, hitting his desk with the palm of his hand for emphasis: “We want more democracy and we want more socialism. The two are indivisible. We are not moving towards your system; we are making ours work.”

To make things work efficiently in a society where not much does work is the essential goal. The new generation that has come to power regards the Soviet Union’s physical sciences--with their notable achievements in space and military technology--as islands of effectiveness. As a result, this is also the time of the scientist here.

Generational Shift

One of the most important of these scientific leaders is 52-year-old Yevgeny P. Velikhov, a physicist who argues that the new thinking represents a generational shift, as well as a victory of the scientific method over political cant. His generation is the one that came to adulthood after the death of Stalin and during the brief “thaw” of the Khrushchev years.

It is also Gorbachev’s generation. Velikhov recalls the atmosphere in the early 1950s, when both he and Gorbachev, now 56, attended Moscow University. Although Gorbachev was a few years ahead of him, Velikhov recalls that both participated in a reform campaign aimed at the ultra-conservative party officials who ran the university.

It is not that Velikhov rejects communism; indeed, both he and Gorbachev were then members of the Communist Party’s Komsomol youth group that led the push for reform. Velikhov is now a member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee and is one of those who elected Gorbachev general secretary. But he insists that socialist theory must accommodate the scientific method rather than war with it.

‘Socialist Logarithm’

Similarly, another of the prominent scientists--Roald Z. Sagdeev, the physicist who heads the Soviet space program--speaks of the necessity of finding a “socialist logarithm” to set the country on a new course. He notes that it is simple to understand the basic laws of capitalism by playing the game of Monopoly, which he enjoys, but that “no comparable game like Monopoly exists for our system.”

What is needed, then, is “a rethinking of the basic rules of how it works and how to make it work better, nothing less.” He talks unabashedly of learning from other socialist countries like Hungary and from the West.

Both Velhikov and Sagdeev cite past instances when the academic community had been deeply scarred by the intrusion of politics into science, particularly in the areas of biology and cybernetics, the science of artificial intelligence.

Sagdeev argues that Soviet backwardness in computers dates from that early distortion and compares it to the damage done by Trofim D. Lysenko, the charlatan who won Stalin’s favor and virtually wrecked Soviet biology.

“Everyone knows how difficult was the life of our molecular biologists during the Lysenko period, and perhaps fewer people would know that rather similar difficulties were experienced by those working in cybernetics.”

‘Bourgeois, Decadent’

“It is difficult for me to recollect the precise arguments because I was a student,” Sagdeev said, “but if you took an encyclopedia of that time and read what is cybernetics, it would have said it is bourgeois, decadent.”

During a conversation here, a reporter recalled Sagdeev’s own visit to California several years ago and how excited the Soviet scientist was when he emerged from a Radio Shack store proudly carrying a lap-top computer that matched the computing power of the big machine then on Sagdeev’s desk back home. This time the reporter fiddled with his own more powerful Toshiba 1100-Plus lap-top, and Sagdeev, who seems younger than his 54 years, went under the desk and delightedly pulled out the same machine. Did the visitor have any interesting software to swap, he inquired brightly.

It is a measure of the current Soviet difficulties that the man who runs one of the most complicated and successful scientific enterprises in the world often has had to hustle to obtain technology available to teen-age computer hackers in the West. While he is expected to coordinate the design, launching and movement through space of incredibly sensitive and complex equipment, his lab contains a motley collection of bastardized computers that are forever being patched up to meet various exigencies.

Through great effort, Sagdeev’s scientists have managed some notable successes in space and even made a breakthrough in the area of computer imaging, which allowed them to send back startling pictures from their most recent explorations. But it’s a patchwork operation, and the costs are high.

“We can do it by concentrating resources, attracting the best young scientists and innovating,” Sagdeev says, “but it’s hard to jump back on a moving train like computer technology.”

Unnecessarily Difficult

The task of jumping on that train has fallen to Velikhov, who--as deputy chairman of the Soviet Academy of Sciences--was asked personally by Gorbachev to make up for lost time. And while his office is now a crowded jumble of prototype computers to be placed throughout the land, he displays obvious resentment of those who came before and made his task so unnecessarily difficult.

Velikhov defies the Western stereotype of a Soviet official. He delights in shocking visitors with unexpected and controversial observations and deals easily with criticism.

As he lectured on arms control at Moscow University one Saturday afternoon recently, it was clear that he enjoyed debating with Soviet students, including one who asked, quite pointedly, why Velikhov used U.S. rather than Soviet data for his lecture. Velikhov freely conceded that the Soviet preoccupation with secrecy is excessive, that satellite surveillance made it irrational and that its end is among the coming changes.

‘Concerned About Substance’

He has traveled with Gorbachev on most of his trips abroad as the senior science adviser and, when asked what that was like, he replied: “It is very easy to talk to Gorbachev if you have something to say. It is not easy if you have nothing to say. It is not that he is strict about his time; he is never concerned about his time, but he is concerned about the substance, and if you have no substance, you get into trouble. If you have something to say, it is possible to speak with him for hours.

“I never felt any time pressure, which is very strange with a general secretary. If it is an interesting discussion, he will every time continue it to the end. He tries to solve the problem; he is never formal with me and other people, but he is businesslike. He is not intimidating. You feel very free with him, but he tries every time to make some consequence from this. He pays very serious attention to what you say to him.”

Sagdeev reports similar easy access to Gorbachev and recounts several occasions when ceremonial meetings he arranged between Gorbachev and visiting foreign scientists turned into open-ended three-hour discussions. Velikhov and Sagdeev both talked a great deal about the current high status of the physical sciences, which in part they trace to the weakening of social science in the past.

The physical scientists were able to defend their turf better than other disciplines because the preservation of their scientific methods was vital for the national defense. As Velikhov put it: “The social scientists just started to repeat or illustrate the political development, and after this, it was not science at all. Science is very demanding; if you are not honest with science, you lose very fast.”

Velikhov is not against politics. But he is wary of the arbitrary intrusion of the one into the other. He cited an old peasant proverb: “Hair is a good thing, and soup is also a good thing; but when you mix the two, what you get is not good.”

Peasant maxims notwithstanding, for much of its history, the Soviet Union has been ruled by a politics that is stylistically and substantially out of joint with the requirements of a modern society. Thus, scientific technocrats like Velikhov and Sagdeev and many other influential Soviets believe that a profoundly different politics is now required if reconstruction is to proceed.

‘Decisive Turn to Science’

As Gorbachev himself said early this year in a major address defining perestroika for the party Central Committee, “Reorganization is a decisive turn to science, the businesslike partnership of science and practice to achieve the best possible end results, an ability to ground any undertaking on a sound scientific basis.”

But the scientific method requires an openness that is at odds with the confines of this historically closed and very secretive society. Among the reformers, this push for domestic change is tied to a re-evaluation of the Soviets’ foreign policy agenda.

At the heart of this “new thinking” is a challenge to the siege mentality built up over decades to ensure the survival of Soviet state power. On the foreign front, that translates into a recognition that 40 years of Cold War confrontations with the developed West and deep involvement in Third World politics have drained Soviet resources without a commensurate addition to Soviet security.

“What is your interest to have a war?” asks Arbatov, who argues that the historical identification of land, people and resources with national power has been denied by the world’s postwar experience.

German, Japanese Examples

“The Germans fought for lebensraum (living space), and now they have the smallest lebensraum in their history, and they are better off than ever,” he says. “The Japanese have less territory with fewer resources than ever, and they are the fastest-growing economy in the world.”

As Deputy Foreign Minister Petrovsky put it, “Nowadays, the initial Leninist concept that we could prove the triumph of socialism only through our domestic policies is now installed as an official policy.”

Concentration on domestic problems flows, in part, from a recognition that the vast Soviet military buildup aimed at parity with the United States has reached a point of declining returns, that the powerful arsenals are unusable in most instances. “The whole meaning of force changes now,” is the way Arbatov put it, adding that, “You can have a lot of military force and you cannot use it. The only size of war where you can be successful is a Grenada-size war; anything bigger creates great problems.

“All of the intricate military strategies are built on a foundation of illusions, if you really analyze the fundamentals. How can the weapons be used, where does the present trend lead and what is your interest to have a war?”

Mountains of A-Arms

This view was shared by Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev, chief of the Soviet General Staff, who replied to written questions submitted by The Times. “Today the use of nuclear weapons is meaningless,” Akhromeyev said. “No nation at present can strengthen its security by nuclear weapons. Mountains of nuclear weapons continue to grow. However, the security of the nuclear powers decreases.”

Akhromeyev also denied the plausibility of any fighting strategies for limited nuclear war, saying that “the use of not only strategic, but also operational-tactical and tactical nuclear weapons is not possible.” The result of any use of nuclear weapons, he argued, would mean “the entire humanity and the whole life on our planet would be annihilated.”

But while the reformers here see a reduction of military competition with the West as a necessity of their domestic reconstruction, they do not foresee an end to competition on other fronts. There is, for example, a strongly stated position among these officials and scholars that improvements in the quality of Soviet life and a move to a more flexible and pragmatic foreign policy will expose certain weaknesses in the U.S. model.

Military-Industrial Complex

For instance, Yegor V. Yakovlev, editor in chief of the Moscow News, one of the liveliest publications to emerge in the Gorbachev era, is convinced that the U.S. military-industrial complex will seek actively to prevent an end to the arms race and that the more reasonable the Soviet positions, the more obtuse and warlike will seem the U.S. response.

This view was defended by former Ambassador to the United States Anatoly F. Dobrynin one night in a lengthy and informal discussion in his imposing office at the Central Committee headquarters here. Dobrynin, now a secretary of the Central Committee, speaks a Washington columnist’s insider English and noted, “You know, this idea of a military-industrial complex was invented by General (Dwight D.) Eisenhower, not by us.”

And when a reporter replied that surely such a comparable complex must exist in the Soviet Union, Dobrynin, who spent more than 25 years in Washington, smiled and said: “When our generals retire, they go fishing. They don’t become vice presidents of aerospace companies or lobbyists to the Kremlin. As to the military industry, instead of tanks they can make cars. We need cars, and the profit will be the same because we set the profit.”

“Our intention is to have a period in which we would be able to concentrate on domestic affairs,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Petrovsky, who continued with a reference to Immanuel Kant: “This is the categorical imperative of our time. The best way to prove which system and which way of life is better is by putting your own house in order.

“Sometimes some people here thought that foreign policy could compensate for domestic shortcomings, and this is wrong. The roots of foreign policy are at home; for foreign policy to be effective, it must rely on a well-organized domestic order.”

Novel Question

Such an order, according to Dobrynin, must include democratization of decision-making. But he conceded that the institutionalization of public restraint on government is a novel question for modern Soviet society.

Ivan D. Laptev, editor of Izvestia, the government newspaper, considers this the main problem for the society but puts it positively that “the people must know everything. It’s the main measure of control, of monitoring official activities to prevent mistakes, and this is the main value of democratization and openness in our society, so that the whole party will be prevented from making mistakes and people’s eyes will be open.”

Toward that end, the Soviet press has been printing the results of Politburo meetings for the first time, running a variety of information from critical ministerial reports, muckraking journalism and some foreign observations.

In one startling article recently carried by Izvestia and titled “Where Did the No’s Come From?” the author listed dozens of negative rules ranging from dress codes to prohibitions on ideas. The answer offered was that the official “no’s” voiced in these areas were the result of the indulgence of mindless bureaucratic imperatives.

Laptev refers to this problem as a “disease of thoughtlessness” and says that “this disease is a heritage from those days when it was considered a rule that whoever is the boss knows the truth, and this disease took hold of our psychology. Now we are trying to change this mind set. We stand for open discussion--different opinions and effective solutions.”

The tough-looking product of a Siberian orphanage, Laptev, both of whose parents died in World War II, also is one of this country’s new men. He started his professional career as a crane operator, while studying in the evening to graduate from the Automobile Institute.

Top Bicycle Racer

Ultimately, he came to Moscow as a champion bicycle racer and entered the Moscow University School of Journalism, where he finished by writing a doctorate on the social and political problems of ecology. He has written several books, one of which, he says, predicted the rise of the pro-environmental Greens party in West Germany.

After a stint working for the party Central Committee, he went over to the party paper Pravda and ended up head of the editorial board. After 18 months of that, he was “unexpectedly brought here to edit Izvestia,” where he has been for the last two years.

Printed through satellite transmission at 56 locations, it is now the most widely read paper in the country. A thin, no-frills publication without advertising, it nonetheless now turns a hefty profit, which Laptev--operating under the new rules--intends to invest in better printing plants and “anything else the workers here decide.”

Subscriptions Soar

As with most Soviet papers, readership has been booming under the less predictable, more relevant and even controversial coverage permitted by glasnost, which in Izvestia’s case led to an increase of 1.4 million subscribers over the past year.

In fact, during visits to various newspaper offices here, it became clear that a circulation war of sorts is at hand, although it is still much restricted by the central allocation of newsprint. But as papers are permitted to buy their own newsprint, as is allowed in the new law, then something of a supply-and-demand situation will occur.

It also became clear that the editors of mass publications here are on the front line in exploring the limits of glasnost. Time after time, Gorbachev’s words were quoted as if providing reassurance that this new freedom is real and not an invention of the particular editor.

One favorite, cited by the Izvestia editor, was Gorbachev’s statement to the party Central Committee this past February that “there can be no party members beyond criticism or without the right to criticize.” While that begs the question of the rights of non-party members, it has also not been tested in criticism of those party members who happen to be in the Politburo. And while there has been devastating criticism of high-handed practices by lower officials, including those in the KGB, there have been only the most veiled references to the debacle of Afghanistan, where Soviet troops for years have supported the government in a war against Muslim guerrillas.

Criticism of Leader?

Asked about the prospect of Izvestia criticizing Gorbachev himself, the editor replied, “We haven’t had him for long, but I think that if this atmosphere of glasnost, of openness, will be established, you can expect this criticism to occur.”

Laptev resisted the suggestion that the three lengthy meetings--one lasting five hours--that he and other top editors recently have had with Gorbachev and other Politburo members were intimidating.

“On the contrary,” he said, “some of our editors had come to the conclusion that we had gone too far with the critical line, and the general secretary said that’s not the case. We must go on forever. He said that we need glasnost like air to breathe--it is an inalienable part of our democracy, and without glasnost, we won’t be able to go on. More glasnost is a necessity, absolutely.”

He added that “while many journalists now tend to think glasnost is a tactical maneuver, the general secretary during this meeting stressed that glasnost as a policy is a strategic course of our life, a necessity.”

Yegor Yakovlev, the editor of Moscow News, who attended the same meeting, also recalls that Gorbachev emphatically stated that there would never be a return to Stalinism. According to the editor, Gorbachev pointed to fellow Politburo members Yegor K. Ligachev and Alexander N. Yakovlev, saying, “All three of us had victims of Stalin in our families.”

Ligachev, currently No. 2 in the Kremlin leadership, is often described in the Western press as a hard-liner. However, the Moscow News editor, who worked with him in Siberia, claims that Ligachev strongly supports Gorbachev’s reforms.

Much has been made in the Western press of the Soviet bureaucracy’s resistance to glasnost, but in Izvestia Editor Laptev’s eyes, the problem is somewhat more subtle.

“It would be simple to say that people resist--there are people who don’t like it who are touched by it. But what is more important is that many of us have an imp inside of us that inhibits us from carrying out this new policy of glasnost. This inhibition is a most serious obstacle to glasnost that we have to overcome.

“There is an element of self-censorship; no man can jump out of his past at once. Therefore, maybe many of our compatriots need an inner reconstruction. This leads to an imbalance: Either he acts as in the past or he tries to repudiate everything in the past and jumps into another extreme. These are problems being overcome step by step. Maybe they are more difficult than we thought a year ago, but we also understand them better.”

In Charge of the Media

Alexander Yakovlev, a former ambassador to Canada, who is the Politburo member in charge of the media, connected press freedom with guarantees of the rights of the individual and asked: “Do we have violations of the rights of individuals? Of course we do. We write openly about it. There was a journalist (unjustly) arrested in the Ukraine, and as a result, the first secretary of the party, the local chief of the KGB and the chief police prosecutor and the minister of internal affairs were all dismissed.”

But this case involved a reporter for the most important paper of the party. What about lesser individuals and the institutional protection they might require? Yakovlev replied that the codes to accomplish that were then being drafted “and will be clear and strong.”

Yakovlev insisted that decentralization of decision-making would provide the main safeguard against bureaucratic censorship and that it would be applied not only to industry but to the arts as well. Indeed, he insisted that the most rapid progress had been made in that area.

“It’s their business,” he said of recent decisions by the newly elected officials of the cinema and theater unions to release previously censored works, even in cases where Yakovlev and other high party officials might disagree with their judgment.

‘It’s Up to Them’

“Why not?” Yakovlev asked, adding: “By the way, I don’t like many of the films being released.” He added: “It’s up to them; the cinema leaders have been elected in a very democratic way and should decide. That’s what they are elected to do.”

Following a series of questions about the limits of dissent, Yakovlev seemed to grow tired of the discussion and stated simply but emphatically: “The key to all of that is the development of democracy on all levels and in all spheres. People should be the owners of everything that happens in the country.”

Good enough--until some people exercise their freedom in ways that others, particular those who are powerful, term dangerous to the very fabric of the society.

For the reformers here, the answer to that question seems to be that the hand of a reconstructed, revitalized and democratized Communist Party will operate much like Adam Smith’s invisible hand to keep things nicely in balance.

The rubric here is “Direct Democracy,” a process that, all agree, is still very much in the defining stage. But as the Politburo’s Yakovlev agreed, this is no simple task.

As he sees it, what emerges will be quite different from “Western schemes and recipes,” though he adds that “quite different does not mean that it is opposite or mutually exclusive.”

Yakovlev argued instead that a planned socialist society faces an even more formidable challenge in granting public control over decision-making since that would include the management of state factories and other enterprises. As he describes it, reconstruction will entail a “direct democracy” in which directors of farms and factories will be elected in competitive, secret elections, which already are under way in some places.

“But this does not mean we are going closer to your system of democracy,” he said. “We are going further apart. Workers in your country will never be able to replace the owners and directors of a plant by secret ballot because that would mean socialist revolution.

“The democracy we envision is much more radical than anything you have,” Yakovlev added, unable to resist a peasant aphorism: “You cannot just paste a mouse’s tail on a crocodile and turn it into one.”