Luxuriating in the <i> Glasnost</i> Muddle
People all over the world are showing enormous interest in glasnost to get a clear idea of Soviet domestic and foreign policies, and so that they may better understand our miserable economy with its formidable budget deficit and commodity shortages.
A businesslike Westerner judges another country by its economic contacts rather than by what its media say. My country can’t yet offer extensive information of that sort, with joint ventures only just now getting under way and other forms of economic cooperation leaving much room for progress. Yet we do have our luxuriant glasnost to offer our Western reader--a tornado of contradictory information and mutually incompatible opinions that baffles the public at home, to say nothing of other countries.
As a topical writer, I feel at home only with the information about Soviet foreign policy. This policy is clear to my compatriots and foreigners alike. I believe in this policy, and I see my belief shared worldwide. This is natural, for my country has proved in word and deed that it means what it says. Our current foreign policy is the only one we can make, given the present social and economic conditions and public mentality.
This is the only field where I fully trust glasnost. Matters are hopelessly muddled at home, and no wonder--the world has never known a system like the Soviet one and so has never encountered problems like ours. We can’t find any analogues in the past or current practices anywhere in the world, and so we can’t make any dependable forecasts, even for short terms.
So glasnost has largely become an end in itself. Everyone is speaking up: industrial workers, farmers, big bosses and, surely, intellectuals--they all have ideas galore.
Ministries alone have chosen to keep silent, so that we have no reliable information about our own national budget and other financial matters, let alone the expenditures and profits in individual economic branches. They are silent not merely out of shame for their blunders but because they have no clear idea of their own income and losses, due to the clumsy workings of our state-contract system, where one ministry is both client and contractor more often than not. With one ministry running one kind of production and another pricing it irrespective of actual costs, there is no way to compute spending and profit. So the gross national product and percentages of actual output compared to the national plan targets are the only statistics available.
Even economists, to say nothing of laymen, do not know the truth about the economic situation--like in the long years before glasnost.
In fact, our newly found openness concerns everything but the economic heart of the matter. So the muddle gets even worse: Physicists mind things literary and poets come out with ambitious financial ideas. Public passions boil everywhere--in city squares, community centers, even in front of churches. Any site will do for a meeting or rally.
No one recognizes any opinions outside his tiny but loud group, whose ends, all too often self-serving, are termed political stances. You can’t invent a worse insult than saying that your opponent abstains from politics.
I can cite by the dozen the names of die-hard Stalinists who aggressively declared their nostalgic love of tyranny even in Khrushchev’s time and who later made an easy living by singing Brezhnev’s praises. Now they are proudly posing as perestroika partisans and scorn decent, unassuming, hard-working people for staying clear of the political passions of the day--though it is the hardest lot of a citizen now merely to work well.
Newly emerged entrepreneurs, the proud cooperative proprietors of tiny restaurants and minuscule fashion houses--these people do the least talking; they have too many things to attend to.
Last but not least, there are environmental disasters looming over us. I know this topic well, being president of an ecology and peace association, and having a degree in engineering and a long research record in hydrology. I have written more than 100 newspaper articles about environmental concerns, starting with the successful 1962 campaign to stop construction of a giant hydroelectric power station in the lower reaches of the Ob, one of the great Siberian rivers. That was a harebrained idea if there ever was one; the mammoth reservoir would have flooded the precious oil and gas fields of the west Siberian basin.
I’ve fought with people promoting many crazy projects, like the one to channel northern Russian rivers south, to the Caspian and Aral seas.
After long and bitter campaigning, the government stopped or at least suspended these projects--doubtlessly thanks to glasnost. This is just one instance showing that glasnost is necessary.
Our country’s problems grow with every passing day, while glasnost gets entangled in trifles. We can’t afford that, for glasnost is the main vehicle of perestroika.
What makes things even harder is that we have no clear idea where perestroika will take us--to an updated, revived socialism, says Mikhail S. Gorbachev. I don’t know what that is, though I firmly side with our leader. The only thing I know for sure is that there is no alternative to perestroika.
Yet many matters baffle me. How does one practice genuine democracy in a country under bureaucratic yoke? What can be done about ethnic strife? Which technology best suits the economic tasks at hand--sophisticated technology, with which our industry can’t yet cope, or the outdated technology we already have?
The capitalist approach is suggested, but vigorous, workable capitalism can’t be introduced by government decrees when the structure of capitalism has long been destroyed. It has to come naturally, passing through inevitable phases, bringing competition in its wake, until it gradually establishes institutions that acquire efficiency through long practice.
No, the Soviet Union has to grope for a road all its own. To find it will take the nation’s whole intellect, sound morals and hard work.
This game is worth the cost. By finding the right road, we would contribute to global affairs, all the more so since the whole world is looking for solutions of some kind.
We shall never find the road without glasnost. So it is a life-and-death imperative that we focus on the most basic issues instead of being diverted by hair-splitting and trivia.
