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Introduction: The Transformation of the Soviet Union
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18704 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
776 Words |
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
Three articles in a recent issue of the Independent Newspaper from Russia cast significant light on transitional features of the dissolution of the communist system in the Soviet Union. When Literary Gazette, the famous official magazine, ceased its American edition--was it perhaps too forthright for the Gorbachev government?--the Independent Newspaper was put together to take its place. The independent newspaper from Russia has had its camera-ready copy for the American edition seized on one occasion. And it has been denied newsprint, a sign that the Soviet authorities do not wish Americans to see it. They are deeply mistaken. We see the publication of the paper as a sign of hope and view its repression as a sign that a hopeless Soviet regime wishes to hide the truth from Americans.
The phrase from Russia rather than from the Soviet Union is itself significant. The first article, "Soviet Economy Heads Westward," presents a surprising analysis of a transition in the Soviet economy that sustains Marx's concept that the new system is born from the bowels of the old. While Communist Party political apparatchiks are fighting the shift toward a market economy, the economic nomenklatura is borrowing funds from state banks to buy businesses of which they previously were the administrators. Although this may not accord with standards of justice, it may ease the transition to a market economy and fragment Communist Party resistance to reform.
The second article, "The Truth and Nothing But," deals with the case of General Vlassov, a Soviet general who formed an army from Russian prisoners of war to fight on the side of Hitler's Germany. One might think that Russians would be able to find nothing good to say about such a man, but revisionism with respect to Vlassov is even more significant than revisionism about Lenin.
Vlassov was one of Stalin's favorite generals. But clearly Vlassov had never had anything but contempt for Soviet communism and Stalin. Vlassov formed his army in the hope that it could participate in a revolutionary war against communism. He was not a fascist, but Hitler was his only alternative, for the West was committed to its alliance with Stalin. Despite the extreme patriotism of Russians, he was joined by a million of his countrymen who were determined to overthrow Stalin even though he and they knew by 1943, when Vlassov's army was formed, that Hitler would lose.
Consider the position of Vlassov. Totally under the dominance of Hitler's state and coming from a Russia that had known extreme anti-Semitism under
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