The Thinking Reed

In those anxious moments Kagarlitsky and his association were active in supporting Yeltsin. They were on the streets collecting signatures in his support; calling for the minutes of the meeting that disgraced him to be made public. Kagarlitsky was frankly pessimistic about the consequences of Yeltsin’s dismissal if it came. On the eve of this week’s conference we talked again. In what follows we can discern the stance — novel, portentous and precarious — of an emergent socialist revival in the Soviet Union.2

AC: It’s now nearly three months since Yeltsin’s enforced resignation. What changes has his fall produced?

BK: There are contradictory signals. In some ways the situation is not good. We can’t get the level of glasnost' that prevailed before November. It’s not that the conservatives are gaining the upper hand, but they are more efficient and active than they were three months ago. But in another way the situation is better, as witness the possibility of this conference.

AC: What are you hoping from your conference?

BK: We want to democratise and formalise the structure of the Federation of Socialist Clubs, and produce a document to be used for its legalisation. This is very important. Right now the state is drafting a law concerning ‘voluntary organisations’ which is actually worse than the existing law, which was promulgated under Stalin in 1932, so you can imagine how bad it is. We want a return to the revolutionary law of 1926, and the conference will be a venue to agitate for that. Also we want to plan practical actions concerning education, prices and so on. Official, or unofficial, either way, it is going forward.

AC: I’d like yo to go back now to Gorbachev’s speech of 2 November.

BK: It was disappointing. People were waiting for more on Bukharin and something positive about Trotsky. Without saying something about Trotsky’s participation in the establishment of Soviet power and the Red Army, you can’t have a real history, which is very important in a country where people are crazy about history and are eager to get the empty parts of the past filled in. Trotsky is treated as a criminal for saying something about the peasantry that was really wrong, but Stalin is not treated as a criminal for putting the same outlook into actual practice. The solution should be to say, Trotsky made a lot of mistakes, but Stalin was a criminal. But we have the reverse situation. Another thing, there’s an anti-Semitic campaign that says Trotsky was responsible for all the evils in Soviet history. It would have been important if Gorbachev had said something to counter the anti-Semitic arguments of such Fascist groups as Pamyat'. There was one favourable mention of Bukharin, but all the major criticisms of him resurfaced in the speech. All the same, you mustn’t say that it was a Gorbachev speech. It was a speech of the Central Committee delivered by Gorbachev. There had been many versions, but the final one was dominated by conservative thinking.

AC: What is the emphasis of official reform?

BK: The big issue involves rewriting the Party history. What does this mean? It means rewriting ideology, because in the Soviet Union history is ideology, and ideology is history. So there’s a lot of struggle inside the group now preparing the Party history. The Stalinists say, You are destabilizing the system by saying the truth about Stalin or about Trotsky or about Bukharin. Saying the truth about Bukharin means saying the truth about the real nature of collectivization.

AC: Could you draw a politico-intellectual map of what is going on?

BK: One current that is gaining ground now is the neo-Stalinist one. It’s a very real danger that under perestroika Stalinism is becoming much more popular than it was under Brezhnev. Stalinists are trying to become populists. Traditional Stalinism was simply manipulation of the people by bureaucratic means, and propaganda was simply a matter of explaining orders to the people. Now hard-line Stalinism, for the first time in its history, is trying to conquer the hearts and minds of the people.