The Thinking Reed

BK: What was very important for my generation was the failure of ‘official dissent’, meaning the dissident movement of the sixties and seventies. It failed not only to change anything but also to establish any kind of ideological alternative. People ended up just saying that in principle you can’t do everything in this country, so the only thing you can do is criticize it, for reasons of pure criticism — which means recognizing that you are a complete failure politically. They tried to formulate their views using the same modes of thinking as those used in the Stalinist textbooks. They were as intolerant as the Stalinists. It became clear that this wasn’t the way forward. If you read dissident materials, you can find a lot of inverted Stalinists. For example, Stalinists say socialism is what exists in the Soviet Union now; the dissidents said the same thing. No democratic socialism is possible, say the Stalinists. Agreed completely, said the dissidents. So on theoretical points the dissidents agreed 100 per cent with the Stalinists. They simply changed plus to minus, ‘good’ to ‘bad.’ When Solzhenitsyn wanted to criticize Western left-wingers, he always quoted Stalin. When he wanted to formulate views on the Russian Revolution, he always quoted Stalin as the final authority. After studying that we said, Something is wrong not only with the Brezhnevite system but with the modes of thinking that prevailed in that system. So an alternative had to be discovered. We began to study Marx and Lenin, and other thinkers like Bukharin. Some people were interested in the role of Trotsky. People suddenly came upon the Gramscian tradition and discovered that there is a whole culture of the Western left, as well as Eastern European reformism. That was the first stage, which came about ten years ago. Now the problem is not to copy Western models of thinking and acting but to find out the Russian way of being a left-winger.

AC: How would you describe the crisis that produced such developments as glasnost', perestroika and so on?

BK: Essentially, as the failure of the Brezhnevite historic compromise. Soviet society was never monolithic in the sense required by theories of totalitarianism developed by Western Sovietologists. The Soviet system always included different social and political tendencies. The problem was, How to balance the different forces within the system? During the Stalinist period the balance of forces was established through terror, inside the system as well as among the population. Under Khrushchev there was a political struggle that ended with the Brezhnevite compromise. Under that compromise every tendency managed to consolidate itself. The whole society was stabilized, and in that sense the Brezhnevite period was very positive. In the previous periods society was constantly disrupted — by collectivization, by the war, by the terror, by the Khrushchev reforms. Khrushchev, for example, began abolishing kolkhoz I.D. cards [used to keep peasants on the rural collectives]; very democratic but very destructive of the social fabric, because millions of peasants rushed to the cities. So the social structure of both the countryside and the cities were destroyed.

This produced both stability and instability; stability in the apparatus, which took advantage of the social chaos, arguing that it was the only force capable of managing under such conditions; instability in the social structure. Under Brezhnev the contrary occurred: stabilization of the social structure; political destabilization inside the apparatus, which came under pressure from below — not just from the masses but from the lower echelons of the apparatus itself, which had in this same phase of stabilization engendered interest groups. The Brezhnevite compromise, therefore, was in a sense based on overexploitation of the country’s resources. Every group got its slice.

AC: Not a zero-sum game.

BK: No victims. Russia is resource-rich, but there are limits. The Brezhnevite system arrived at its own limits, which accounts for the emergence of perestroika even before Brezhnev’s death. With the start of the 1970s the limits were evident.

AC: What sort of limits are you talking about?

BK: Money, for example. You can’t just print it. I’m not talking merely about salaries but about the costs of running the apparatus and the enterprises. If the enterprises — industries and so on — are losing money, then you have to subsidize them more heavily. And if each enterprise or sector wants to expand, and thus acquire more bureaucratic influence, you have to find even more money. So there was maybe not the most important but the most visible thing: a financial crisis.

AC: What does economic reform really add up to?