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The Soviet Union Needs a Social Democratic Party: An Interview With Fyodor Burlatsky
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19842 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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5 / 1991 |
1,830 Words |
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Gary Lee
Gary Lee is a Washington-based journalist who occasionally
writes on the arts. |
Fyodor Burlatsky is editor-in-chief of Literaturnaya Gazeta, a progressive and influential Soviet weekly. A political commentator and Kremlin adviser off and on for the past four decades, he thrives in the eye of political storm. In 1959, after training as a political scientist, Burlatsky became an aide to Nikita Khrushchev and an outspoken advocate of the Soviet leader's reforms. When Khrushchev was ousted five years later, Burlatsky resigned in protest. He switched to Pravda, the Communist Party organ, but was fired for attacking the Soviet system of censorship. He later returned to the inner circle of Kremlin advisers, at first under Yuri Andropov, then Mikhail Gorbachev. A year ago, as the campaign for glasnost was peaking, staffers at Literaturnaya Gazeta ousted their conservative editor and elected Burlatsky to replace him. Now 64, Burlatsky is the author of 14 books and 2 major plays, including Black Sunday, about the presidency of John F. Kennedy.
In the interview that follows, Fyodor Burlatsky discusses his views on the Soviet Union with Gary Lee, who interviewed him for THE WORLD & I.
--Editor.
THE WORLD & I: You have survived many political crises in the Soviet Union, including the one that drove Khrushchev from office. How does the current crisis differ from earlier ones?
Fyodor Burlatsky: Khrushchev's reforms were different in large part because they were supported only by the leader himself and a few others in the leadership; they were not really backed by the rest of society. Today, in spite of the turn to the right that is taking place in the Soviet Union, it is the people who are most anxious to jump on the horse that will take them into the twentieth century. More important, back then there was a general idea that the Soviet system--Leninism, Stalinism, totalitarianism, communism, call it what you will--was quite all right. We wanted to set it right, to perfect it, to make it better but still keep it.
Now there is another order of business: We recognize that the problem is the system itself and we want to change it. We have realized, as in the phrase used by Gorbachev himself and popularized as the name of a current film, that this is no way to live. The current crisis is that of moving from one whole kind of society to another. And so, inevitably, it is more wrenching, encompassing, and dangerous than anything we have endured in the
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