Which Meaning of <i> Perestroika?</i> : Renewal? Reform? Revolution? No Vodka?

Just as most Americans are for democracy and most preachers are against sin, so most Soviet citizens are for perestroika . The only difference is that whereas by now we know how ambiguous the first two concepts are, and how much argument can occur over defining their characteristics and analyzing their application in different context, we are only just beginning to reflect on the meaning of that key word of the Mikhail S. Gorbachev era.

In most official Soviet translations of their documents, perestroika is rendered as “restructuring,” though a recent collection from a Soviet publisher of some of the writings of notable reformers prefers “reconstruction.” Perestroika can also mean “reorganization,” “reshaping,” “renewal,” “reformation” or “revolution.”

Between a mere reorganization at one extreme and a “revolution without shots” (to cite Gorbachev) at the other, there are varying connotations of far-reaching change invoked by, for instance, “reconstruction” and “reformation.” That is why the ousted Moscow party chief, Boris N. Yeltsin, and the Politburo’s No. 2 man, Yegor K. Ligachev, can be as sincerely for perestroika as is Gorbachev. The only thing is, for each of them it means something different.

The term can certainly lead to confusion. There are Soviet reformers who say that Pravda is not giving its full backing to perestroika . According to its own lights, of course, Pravda is completely in favor, but it is thus far a less radical conception of perestroika than that espoused by several popular journals less well-known in the West. There is a sense in which the main party newspaper, Pravda, can be seen to be holding the ring between the various competing tendencies and groups within the party who are all marching behind a banner emblazoned perestroika .

Not all Soviet citizens, though, are prepared to offer even formal support to perestroika . For many of those standing in the long lines for alcohol, perestroika is the name of the period when it became fiendishly difficult to buy vodka, and their views on perestroika would not be readily printable in a family newspaper. Or, reaching for a somewhat broader notion of perestroika, there is the Soviet worker who told a British journalist: “Stalin tried to reconstruct me, Khrushchev tried to reconstruct me, Brezhnev tried to reconstruct me, and now Gorbachev is trying to

reconstruct me, but none of them can do it.”

Perestroika may, according to the eye of the beholder, mean the crackdown on alcohol consumption, the imposition of stricter discipline, or the settling of old scores. But it can also mean “radical reform,” to borrow yet another phrase that Gorbachev himself has used. While it makes life simpler to have one all-purpose translation of perestroika, ideally one should, as I have indicated, be invoking a variety of English words to distinguish whether a Soviet speaker is talking about reorganization or reformation. That varies a lot, according to the person’s political disposition and the context.

If we must have one general term to encapsulate what the more serious of Soviet reforms have in mind, let us settle for “reconstruction.” That, however, brings to the fore an issue that is often passed over in glib talk in the Soviet Union and the West about perestroika. To put it in the words of a prominent Moscow historian, “we need to know what it is that we wish to reconstruct.”

That, in turn, presupposes serious research on the whole of Soviet history--a search for foundations worth building on and a differentiation between structures that may be suitable for renovation and others that are strong candidates for demolition. Thus, party intellectuals who are serious about reconstruction or radical reform are pressing also for renovation in the social sciences (where progress is being made) and in the study of history (where it is much slower) as a necessary condition for economic and political change that will not merely repeat the mistakes and tribulations of the past.

The period that is being appraised increasingly favorably by Gorbachev himself, and which comes closest in the minds of many reformers to a time when something worth reconstructing might be found, is that of the New Economic Policy launched by Lenin in 1921 and brought to an end by Stalin in 1928. Gorbachev has praised this period as one of “initiative and creativity,” and in his speech in honor of the 70th anniversary of the revolution, said: “We are turning more and more often to Lenin’s last works and to the Leninist ideas of the New Economic Policy and striving to take from that experience everything which is valuable and necessary for us today.” He went on to observe that since the Soviet Union is now at a different stage of development, not everything that was relevant is appropriate now, but he has given the most positive account thus far by a leader of a period that for long was seen as nothing but a tactical retreat from full-blooded socialism.

To a Westerner, it may well appear that no one period of Soviet history offers anything approaching ideal foundations on which to build a new edifice. But history is not architecture and neither is it a blank sheet on which well-meaning (and some ill-meaning) Westerners can write down new chapters for a people who are rooted in their traditions. Fortunately, these traditions are more diverse than is often assumed, but we must recognize that if those who wish to reconstruct the Soviet system find no indigenous foundations on which to build, they will fail.

Those Western politicians who demand nothing less than instant assimilation of Soviet norms and institutions to Western ones are being as unrealistic as they are ahistorical. They are also doing a disservice to genuine reformers within the Soviet Union. I include Gorbachev, though he is not the most radical--and could not be. As leader of a 19-million-strong party embracing far more diverse institutions, groups and views than the old totalitarian concept of the Soviet Union ever allowed for, he cannot afford to be too far ahead of the crowd. He is, however, on the reform wing of the Politburo, and if the political tendency he represents should triumph, reorganization may yet become reconstruction--or even reformation.