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Introduction: The Iron Hand!
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17574 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1990 |
482 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
One of the most important issues now being debated in the Soviet Union concerns the decree power of Gorbachev. The selection that follows from the English edition of the Soviet magazine Literatornaya Gazeta (Literary Gazette) contains an eye-opening discussion of this topic. Although Literary Gazette, a publication of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, has been freer in its commentary than have been most other Soviet publications, few were prepared for its contemporary incarnation. Recent editions of Literary Gazette are remarkable for their radically changed perspective.
Occasionally one meets an individual who has been caught up in activities and then makes a radical break. Often, such a person will report that his previous life was like a bad dream that he can no longer understand. The selections that follow read as if the previous lives of the authors had been bad dreams from which they have awoken in shock.
Stalwart members of the Communist Party forsake the jargon and cant of the past. They recognize that the economy of the Soviet Union was wrecked by the dogmas that had been accepted, that the past must be jettisoned. And one writer even states that it was the senseless assassination of Alexander II that delayed reform and the transition to democracy in Russia.
If the writers below doubt the immediate virtue of democracy, it is only because of their doubt that a representative democracy could carry out the radical changes that the characteristics of advanced economies are inconsistent with the perpetuation of authoritarian rule. Letter writers to the Literary Gazette attack them not in the name of Marxist theory but in the name of representative democracy. And the interviewer clearly signals his own disagreement.
Although other currents can be found in the Soviet Union - from extreme nationalists to conservatives who wish to maintain party dominance - the genie no longer can be put back into the bottle. Marxists may get a respectful hearing in university circles in England and the United States, but they would be hooted down in the Soviet Union. Soviet citizens have lived with the system for seventy years and they want no further part of it.
In a subsequent issue of the Literary Gazette an author referred to the Manichean heresy. By this he meant the kind of utopianism that was represented in both the French and Russian revolutions and that divided the universe between good people who accepted utopian
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