Conservative Rejoins Attack on Radical Soviet Reformers

Nina A. Andreyeva, a Leningrad chemistry teacher who became the scourge of the Soviet Union’s liberal reformers last year, has returned to the conservative battlements with an angry--and anguished--warning that radicals are rapidly undermining the Communist system and threatening the country’s political stability.

The current demands of the radicals for bolder and faster reforms are propelling the Soviet Union into the same “counterrevolutionary” situations that Hungary fell into in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, Andreyeva asserts in the current issue of the conservative monthly journal Molodaya Gvardia, implying that the army might be needed to maintain order.

Soviet socialism, developed over more than seven decades, is increasingly imperiled, she continues, and the “working class” will fight to ensure that it is not destroyed in the process of perestroika , as President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s political, economic and social reforms are known.

Warning that “the Soviet state’s very ability to defend itself is endangered,” Andreyeva calls for a full-scale political debate on the country’s current course, a debate that she says will show “who is going the socialist way and who is against it.”

Although dismissed by most liberals as little more than a political crank, Andreyeva represents an increasingly evident stream of Soviet neo-conservatism, which is heard in the meetings of the Communist Party’s policy-making Central Committee, among longtime party members and trade union veterans and even among younger workers and intellectuals concerned about the course of Gorbachev’s reforms.

While supporting Gorbachev’s basic policies, the Soviet press has begun publishing more articles and letters from conservatives, offering more than a counterpoint to those by liberals but not a full-scale political assault.

“An ideological struggle is under way in our society,” a conservative writer said in a recent conversation, noting that his own articles have moved from obscure journals into the mainstream press, “and when all the facts are out, our side will not appear the worse.”

In March, 1988, a letter from Andreyeva attacking “left-wing intellectual socialism” and defending dictator Josef Stalin’s contributions to the Soviet Union was published in the newspaper Soviet Russia, provoking a controversy that raged for more than a month and reached the top levels of the party’s ruling Politburo.

Talking about Stalin’s place in Soviet history, she said: “The whole obsession with critical attacks is linked with his name and, in my opinion, this obsession centers not so much on the historical individual himself as on the entire highly complex epoch of transition--an epoch linked with unprecedented feats by a whole generation of Soviet people. . . .”

Although the government later acknowledged that it had made a “political error” in publishing the letter, entitled, “I Cannot Renounce My Principles,” the text was widely reprinted in provincial newspapers and studied in political classes, notably in the military and the police.

Andreyeva says that current attacks on Stalin and other Soviet leaders “are only a screen to camouflage a gathering of forces for the start of attacks on Lenin, Marxism-Leninism, the October Revolution and the victory of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War (World War II).”

“It is hard for many people to see where the plurality of opinion ends and the open jeering at everything sacred begins,” she says.

In scathing terms, she also attacks a number of liberals, including historians Roy A. Medvedev, Yuri N. Afanaseyev and Yuri Karyakin and sociologist Tatiana Zaslavskaya, for diminishing the stature of the Communist Party.

She denounces the newspapers Moscow News and Soviet Culture and the journals Ogonyok, Neva and Yunost for their support of the radicals. And she calls for curbs on the nationalist movements developing in the Baltic republics of Estonia, Lativa and Lithuania and in the republics of Armenia, Georgia and the Ukraine.

“Isn’t it time to stop the activities of the pseudo-supporters of perestroika ?” she asks.

In her current article, which also takes the form of a lengthy letter to the editor, Andreyeva, 50, makes clear her support for the underlying concepts of perestroika but calls for limits on the accompanying democratization and on glasnost , or political openness, as she outlines her fears that the reforms have focused on the political rather than the economic and will consequently fail.

“They pretend they are doing everything within the framework of perestroika ,” she writes of the radicals, denouncing them as “revisionists” and even “anti-socialist forces.”

“They are using the historical necessity of perestroika as well as its slogans very effectively, and they have taken into account the experience of their clumsy predecessors.

“Their justification for an assault on socialism has been an excessive exaggeration of economic difficulties, but it is not accidental that there are now assaults on the Communist Party’s rule and its program, which allegedly do not meet present-day demands.”

She is even sharper in her attack on the course of perestroika than she was a year and a half ago. How, she demands, did the country manage within four years under the leadership first of V. I. Lenin, founder of the Soviet state, to win the civil war against the White Guards fighting for the return of the czar; how did it later manage under Stalin within the same period of time to defeat Nazi Germany; how did it then manage to rebuild its war-torn economy, again within four years?

“Now, it has already been four years that we have been speaking of perestroika --in fact, we speak more of restructuring than we carry it out,” she said, “but what have we accomplished?”

Andreyeva warns against abandoning the Soviet system of centralized planning and management of the economy, saying that there is nothing to replace it, and she mocks reform economists for launching the country on a course that had not been fully thought out.

“How was it possible to start such an experiment involving 300 million Soviet people?” she asks. “What are these dozens of academies and other economic institutes, the State Planning Committee and other planning organizations doing except drawing their pay?

“The situation is becoming very troubled because our leading economists and those ‘managers’ of perestroika planned a very hopeful future for us. They promised us that the main problems would be solved in only two or three years, and now they want us to be more patient and not to count on fast results. Perestroika , they now say, will take dozens of years and require lots of sacrifices.”