Gorbachev on Socialism

Gorbachev’s maiden column is an ample demonstration of why it was time for him to retire. Gorbachev complains because President Bush declared that the United States won the Cold War.

If the United States, and its allies, did not win the Cold War, then the United States and its allies (and especially the Soviet Union) did not win World War II. Of course, all sides were “losers,” in that the cost of that war was terrible to victors and vanquished alike.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Marxist-Leninist regime of the U.S.S.R. became as great a menace to the future of mankind as the Third Reich had been. Gorbachev writes that Stalin’s “system . . . did violence to society and perverted the ideas of socialism.” But Stalin’s system was no more based upon terror than Lenin’s. Stalin only extended the terror. The very essence of Marxism-Leninism required that sooner or later all private property had to be collectivized. In his book “Perestroika,” Gorbachev’s praises Stalin for the collectivization of Soviet agriculture. There is no reason to think that Lenin--or Gorbachev--could have accomplished this without Stalin’s terror.

The Cold War resulted from the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of the historical necessity of world revolution, and of the extinction of the “counterrevolutionary” bourgeoisie. The doctrine of coexistence was anathema to both Marx and Lenin. Communists like Gorbachev did not discover its virtues until it appeared that history did not, after all, guarantee the victory of communism. Now that it appears that communism (and/or socialism) however defined, is headed for history’s dustbin, Gorbachev is reduced to fighting for coexistence!

HARRY V. JAFFA, Henry Salvatori Professor Emeritus, Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate School, Senior Fellow, The Claremont Institute