Gorbachev and <i> Perestroika</i> : ...

These two books are more alike than they might seem--and not simply because they are both about Russia’s future and have challenge in the title. Goldman and Yanov depict Gorbachev, like Hamlet, taking “arms against a sea of troubles” and--more than likely--ending his dreams with failure. They paint Gorbachev as a last-chance reformer of the Soviet economy and society. If his perestroika, or restructuring, does not work, the whole nation may pass into a “systemic crisis.”

The two books are starkly dissimilar, however, in many respects. Marshall Goldman’s “Gorbachev’s Challenge” is a high-technology buff’s advice to the Russians that they carry out an economic migration that would leave behind the puffing chimneys of the Russian Rust Belt and lead to the halcyon dales of a Soviet Silicon Valley. Alexander Yanov’s “The Russian Challenge and the Year 2000” is an anguished appeal to the West to help Soviet reformers, including Gorbachev, fend off the imminent threat of a new Fascist, Russian Orthodox aggressive empire.

Goldman, to take his book first, believes that the “third industrial revolution” in high-technology has left the Soviet Union trailing far behind the West and that a shift from a centralized, planned, command economy to freer enterprise, market-controlled pricing and decentralized industrial management is crucial to further Soviet economic progress. Gorbachev must free himself “from the need to spend so much on heavy industry and the military” and “divert the country’s resources to light industry and consumer goods.” Only then will Soviet peasants and factory workers “feel like working.” In turn, this would stimulate “improved productivity and quality.”

According to Goldman, the Soviet economy worked well during its massive catch-up phase under Stalin. In fact, Goldman is oddly flattering to Stalin. But now the Soviet Union’s ponderous, centralized government is suffering from an “economic gridlock” in which every reform depends for success on other reforms--which cannot be made because of interlocking political and economic impediments. Moreover, the Soviets are ill-organized to absorb foreign technology--particularly state-of-the-art high technology. Goldman describes these problems well, and he is also good at showing the antecedents of the current reform efforts. Virtually all of the measures the Soviets have taken or contemplated had been tried already in one form or another in the Soviet Union or in other socialist states.

Goldman’s chapters on the economic reforms undertaken in China, Hungary and East Germany are illuminating. He describes Chinese stock markets, organizations such as the Young Presidents, the number of private businesses burgeoning from 140,000 to 18 million in seven years, decollectivization in the countryside, and other experiments that must utterly scandalize Soviet planners and ideologues. In comparing Chinese agricultural reforms to Soviet prospects, Goldman suggests that the idea might not work so well in the Soviet Union because of Soviet peasants’ disinterest in Chinese-style family farming. This reviewer doubts that peasant disinterest would be a problem. Profound ideological and political opposition in the Politburo would be the stopper.

Goldman concludes: “If the reforms are to make a difference, the Soviets will have to face up to the dismantling of the bureaucracy, the transfer of power from the center, and the frank acknowledgement of the warts of unemployment, inequality, inefficiency, and the negative balance of trade.” In truth, Goldman is really talking about the abandonment of socialism as the Soviets know it. Such an outcome is most unlikely--as Goldman himself acknowledges.

Like Goldman, Alexander Yanov sees a systemic crisis approaching in the Soviet Union. He has a theory that Russian history moves in cycles of incipient reform, counterreform and stagnation, and he presents graphs that show a remarkable consistency in these patterns. The only trouble is that Yanov somewhat deforms the historical record to produce his extraordinary result. For example, he calls Peter the Great “the father of one of the most terrible counterreforms in Russia’s history . . . . Whereas the reformers have always tried to destroy Russia’s medieval political system, the counterreformers have sought to perpetuate it.” While Peter’s endless wars and head-tax on the serfs (and slaves) impeded the development of a peasant middle class, it is nevertheless difficult to cast Peter in the role of a counterreformer out to perpetuate the medieval system. Some of Yanov’s characterizations in the Soviet period suffer from the same problem.

In any case, Yanov sees Brezhnev-era stagnation as having passed into Gorbachev’s incipient reform. In the meantime, “the Russian Ideal”--counterreform--is gaining ground. This idea has its roots in the 16th-Century messianic assertion by the monk Filofei that Moscow is the Third Rome and that Russia is the predestined savior, illuminator and leader of the world. The 19th-Century Slavophiles were in the same tradition, which degenerated, according to Yanov, into expansionist imperialism, xenophobia, bigotry, anti-Semitism, the pogroms, the Black Hundreds, autocracy and obedience as a way of life. If Gorbachev’s halting reforms fail, the cycle will be repeated, and a nuclear-armed reincarnation of Ivan the Terrible will lead Russia’s neo-Fascists against a West perceived as dominated by “the international Jewish conspiracy” and against the “Yellow Peril” of the Chinese in the East.

Yanov describes some thoroughly nasty characters who populate the Russian New Right. He also does his best to demolish Solzhenitsyn (who is not a Democrat, it’s true) and some other Russian Orthodox thinkers like Nicholas Berdyaev. There is no question that chauvinist punks are roaming the streets of Moscow, and Pamyat and other such organizations are abroad in the land. It is another question, however, how many right-wing nationalist activists there actually are in the Soviet Union. For better or worse, the Soviet authorities have acted against some of these people.

Yanov anticipates these objections, pointing out that there were not very many Bolsheviks in 1903 either. He also describes what he believes is an appropriate line of correct U.S. policy, which is to manipulate trade with the Soviet Union to favor the autonomy of middle-level Soviet managers (by insisting on trading directly with them and not through the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Trade), and to encourage Eastern European centrifugal forces (initially through a Marshall Plan for Poland). This reviewer suspects that the Soviets might end up by manipulating us rather than us manipulating them--or overturn the poker table and refuse to play. Nevertheless, Yanov is absolutely right in warning that things worse than Gorbachev and his reformist regime could befall the Soviet Union and the rest of the world.

A sad thought is that neither Marshall Goldman’s maximalist program nor Alexander Yanov’s suggestions are likely to be adopted by the Soviet leadership or even by our own. The consolation is that the Soviet Union--with or even without Gorbachev’s continued leadership--may not be doing quite so badly, and may not be quite so close to an ugly systemic crisis, as Goldman and Yanov think it is.