The Thinking Reed

It is not accidental that societies of the Soviet type outside the USSR proved much less stable. The point is not that the statocracy has ruled in Eastern Europe for a shorter time than in Russia and has been unable to educate the masses properly. The rulers of Eastern Europe made up, between the fifties and the seventies, for the short time they had been in power by means of greater economic efficiency than existed in the USSR. The explanation is simple. The Soviet statocratic system proved extremely stable owing to the abundance of resources in Russia. Until the eighties we had plenty of everything — sources of power, raw materials, land, manpower, and so on. These resources could be so squandered that no economic inefficiency, no bad management would hinder further growth. In Eastern Europe the Stalin-type system started to crack as early as the fifties, immediately after the cessation of mass terror. Only cheap Soviet power resources made possible the maintenance of a more or less high standard of living and comparative social stability in these countries during the sixties and seventies, although they did not prevent the acute crises in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and in Poland in 1968, 1970, 1976 and, finally, in 1980-81. However, Eastern Europe is not able to decide its future destiny on its own.

A qualitatively new stage began in the eighties when, for the first time in its thousand years of history, Russia came up against the problem of insufficient resources. The results of bad management came home to roost. ‘The Brezhnev period of “historic compromise’”, writes the Russian émigré sociologist V. Zaslavsky,

is at an end. In fact we are on the eve of a conflict between the political rulers and wide sections of the working class, even if this conflict does not develop into open and organized struggle.5

The working class will remind the rulers of its existence through strikes breaking out now here, now there. Fresh forces will enter the historical arena. The workers experienced neither great expectations after the Twentieth Congress nor disenchantment after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The independent spiritual development of our working class is only beginning, and the intelligentsia must help them from its own rich historical experience. This does not mean ‘going to the people’ and instilling the workers with new ideas: the masses will pick those ideas up in their own time, if the intelligentsia develops them and makes them widely known. What is wanted above all is not to form a ‘Union for Emancipation’ but to emancipate ourselves spiritually.

The French right-wing socialist J.-Ph. Revel wrote in his book Ni Marx, ni Jésus that democratic socialism cannot be realized first in the ‘Third World’ or in Western Europe. One can agree with many of his arguments, but this sober appreciation of the situation in the countries of the Old World has led the writer to the strange conclusion that the world revolution will begin in the USA. It may be, of course, that there is something here that we in Russia do not understand, but this prospect does seem, at the very least, unlikely. The complex processes going on in American society suggest anything but revolution. Revel does not even try to estimate the possibility of changes in Eastern Europe, yet Russia is becoming ripe for change.

In The Dialectics of Hope (my previous book), I tried to substantiate the proposition that the Soviet Union stands on the threshold of democratic socialism. How true that is we shall see in the coming decades. In any case, the second half of the eighties will greatly clarify the social situation in our country. Whereas in the sixties and seventies the democratic intelligentsia, despite its immense moral superiority over the bureaucracy, was like Pascal’s thinking reed, lacking real power to resist the bureaucrats’ policy, in the eighties it can already rely on the movement of wide sections of the working people and become part of that movement. The Polish experience has once again confirmed what Marxists have always said: social transformations are impossible unless the working class participates. The experience of summer 1980 in the Soviet Union showed that our working class, too, is able to come forward as an independent active force. The strikes of that time were only the first test, the first step.