The Thinking Reed

A confidential memorandum prepared by some Stalinists in the central committee of the Komsomol indicated real fear at the emergence of the left-wing groups. They’re not afraid of the Pamyat' groups, the Fascist groups, but of the Left, which they see as a real challenge to the official structure of the Komsomol. We don’t think in such terms, by the way. At our August conference we didn’t even talk about the Komsomol.

AC: Ho w do you struggle politically for the federation’s goals?

BK: We have a lot of contacts with reformers in the higher echelon: academicians, the most left-wing reformers in official circles. But we are simultaneously trying to mobilize those at the grass roots, in whose participation we see the only possibility of saving perestroika. In official perestroika a draft proposal is prepared by experts. It accommodates the different tendencies, giving each one a piece of meat. Then the conservatives come in and amend the proposals. Finally the document goes to the Central Committee, to leaders who see the compromise as awful and reject the document. So it is rewritten once again, producing another mix, sometimes even worse. We don’t believe in the bureaucratic game, but we do act as a kind of political lobby, influencing official reformers to produce better documents.

AC: When you talk about the grass roots, what do you mean?

BK: Workers and especially students. We get involved at the enterprise level, helping people set up workers’ councils, which are now permitted but, all the same, have great difficulty in establishing themselves. We contact people at the administrative levels, trying to force them to allow us to go to the workers. If they allow us (sometimes because we have support from the Party organs), we try to draft a good document on the rights of the workers’ councils. We explain people’s rights in electing representatives. We have made some headway in that direction. There is now some prospect of functioning workers’ councils, which are not mere decoration on old structures. We criticize the statutes of some existing councils which have been explicitly drafted to prevent those councils from becoming an active force.

On another front, we give lectures, organize seminars, advance social and historical education. We combat the right wing and criticize the pro-capitalist elements. These pro-capitalist groups are saying, We are the democratic movement. That is simply not true. They have a kind of alliance with the Stalinist wing of the Party bureaucracy in the sense that the Stalinists hold them up as examples of the excesses of perestroika. From the left side we have more difficulty in pushing our positions into public circulation. There are Komsomol functionaries friendly to us. As far as publications are concerned, there’s Twentieth Century and Peace and some possibilities at Literary Gazette and Moscow News, which is the most radical. We take our documents to the Novosti Press Agency, which sends the information to different newspapers, which usually don’t publish it.

AC: So how does all this affect your hopes for the future? Are you optimistic or pessimistic?

BK: (laughing) I should say I’m not completely pessimistic. The balance of forces is moving slightly toward the more conservative end. If you try to change things you always get some kind of polarization. So the Left is growing stronger, as are the extreme Right and the conservatives, and the liberal-moderate tendencies are going to be weaker. All of which produces a lot of dangers, such as the possibility that the reactionary forces are growing stronger, faster than the radical currents.

AC: We haven’t talked much about international perspectives. What themes preoccupy you?

BK: As a matter of personal concern I’m interested in radical reformism, in its various guises, which can develop revolutionary potential, something ordinary reformism cannot do. That’s the major difference. Another theme I’ve worked on is the problem of the trajectory of a revolution faced with degeneration into some kind of totalitarian option or capitalist retreat. That’s the problem for Nicaragua. So radical reformist movements could either become revolutionary, or revolutionary movements could become reformist without losing their values, or betraying their original project. This raises interesting prospects for Nicaragua, because it is confronted with precisely this problem.

AC: In this context how did you see the Polish Solidarity movement? movement?