Can Soviet Society Live with Democracy?

Robert M. Cutler

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Roy Medvedev is a unique figure in the Soviet Union today. Born in 1925, he became a Communist Party member in 1956, the year of Khrushchev's "secret speech" criticizing Stalin's excesses. Starting in 1962 he worked on a study of Stalin and Stalinism (published in English as Let History Judge), and in 1969 he was expelled from the Party after circulating an underground protest against official attempts to rehabilitate Stalin. Since then, Medvedev's political fortunes have risen and fallen with the times, but he has been able to express his opinions thanks partly to the protection of different patrons within the Communist Party.

Even Gorbachev's stated reforms, Medvedev says here, can be only a first step on the road of restructuring Soviet society and political life. Since the early 1970s, Medvedev has consistently argued (especially in his book On Socialist Democracy) that only a gradual democratization of Soviet society, based on a "return" to Marxism-Leninism, could close the gap between the Soviet Union and the West.

In a notable 1973 essay called On the Problem of Democratization and the Problem of Détente, Medvedev asked whether international pressure on the Soviet Union promotes internal liberalization. His answer was: not much, because domestic conditions were the greatest roadblock to internal Soviet reform. He pointed then, as he does again today, to bureaucrats and administrators who are comfortable with the status quo, including their privileges. They have little incentive to change.

Since Medvedev compares the effects of Brezhnevism with the effects of Stalinism in this article, it is of interest to compare the broad policy trends under Khrushchev—Stalin's successor—with those under Gorbachev.

During the years 1953-1956, Khrushchev's principal changes in Soviet political life were to subordinate the KGB to Party authority and to encourage literary and artistic freedoms. Gorbachev does not have to worry about subordinating the KGB to the Party, but as Andropov's former protégé he has inherited the KGB as a basis of political support. On the other hand, Gorbachev is definitely supervising a literary "thaw": he is mobilizing Soviet writers and film makers to help him make his case for reform, by encouraging them to use the images they create to criticize and redefine social reality.

Between 1956 and 1960, Khrushchev's most salient policies were the moral-political campaign to create a "new Soviet man" (which frequently meant Russifying other nationalities) and a series of judicial reforms under the umbrella of "new socialist legality." With Gorbachev it is now officially admitted in the USSR that the country's nationality differences will outlive even class differences—a remarkable turnabout in Marxist thinking. But his replacement of a Brezhnev holdover in Kazakhstan by an ethnic Russian (leading to the riots in Alma-Ata), was principally a politically motivated personnel shift. Perhaps more significant in the long run was the official condemnation of those riots as a "nationalist deviation."

Even non-Russian Soviet writers such as Chingiz Aitmatov have recently stressed social values that are directly associated with the ethnic Great Russians. Yet although Gorbachev is not attempting to resurrect "new Soviet man" (whose native language would have been Russian), nevertheless he is seeking to play down the political significance of nationality differences. This is natural, since managing the political effects of the population explosion among non-Russians—especially the Muslim groups in central Asia—is potentially the thorniest longterm political problem for the Soviet system.

A renovation of Khrushchev's idea of "new socialist legality" (guaranteeing the observance by the authorities of legal rights granted on paper) is not yet in evidence. However, it would seem important for realizing Medvedev's conception of socialist democracy, which includes "the right of independent criticism, the right of free speech and opinions and the right of opposition."

Medvedev wishes to renounce his personal right to independent criticism, granted as a political privilege, in favor of making that right available to everyone, as a political principle. Under Khrushchev, some Soviet lawyers advocated the independence of the judiciary in order to guarantee the universality of that right. What makes this problem difficult is that the Soviet Union did not inherit from Tsarist Russia a system of common law guaranteeing those rights, as did the Anglo-Saxon countries from Great Britain.

The Soviet judicial system, like the French one, insists on long preliminary investigations of criminal activity in order to be sure that defendants will be brought to trial only if they are almost certainly guilty. Broader supervision of those investigations would seem necessary in order to circumvent the potential for abuse.

From 1960 to 1964, Khrushchev's principal reforms were to coopt technically trained personnel into policy making and to institute wide-ranging organizational reforms. Clearly, Gorbachev has had some success in reorganizing the country's central economic administration and in reestablishing competence and efficiency as criteria for job evaluation.

Medvedev, like other Soviet critics of Brezhnev's political legacy, now points to the difference between people who cannot learn and people who do not wish to learn. The former can be simply replaced, but the latter must be given incentives to alter their attitudes and behavior. But as Medvedev himself noted in this newspaper on May 18, 1986, there are not yet enough well-trained technical cadre to go around who are motivated to do things in the new way. Problems in coopting technical experts, which Khrushchev faced, thus recur also under Gorbachev.

What emerges, then, is that Gorbachev is simultaneously pursuing selected reforms from all three phases of the Khrushchev era. For Medvedev, the question of political participation is key. This has received attention under Gorbachev, but only within the limited Soviet tradition of calling on the public to participate in carrying out the proclaimed reforms. As Medvedev notes, the Soviet public has heard such calls come and go from other leaders and, before making the effort this time, is waiting to see how transitory Gorbachev's initiatives may prove to be. (After all, it took more than a few years in the early 1980s for Americans to lose their skepticism about anti-inflation rhetoric in Washington.)

So we may have to wait until the early 1990s before we can evaluate Gorbachev's success in transforming the mood and temper of the Soviet populace. His ability to overcome political obstructionism in the meantime cannot be a measure of, but only a means to, his success in changing the way people think.

As Medvedev's commentary makes clear, political reconstruction in the USSR does not require the Soviets to become like us. The ancients said that one must choose one's adversary carefully, because one begins to emulate him. If, following this logic, the Soviets are lucky to have us for an adversary, then we owe it to ourselves not to adopt toward them the intolerance that we sometimes attribute to them.

This is important, because political reconstruction in the USSR does not guarantee the disappearance of U.S.-Soviet tensions. But if, without abandoning our political principles, we can appreciate changes in Soviet domestic policy under Gorbachev, then we should likewise be able to appreciate changes in Soviet foreign policy, also without abandoning these principles.

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DR. ROBERT M. CUTLER was educated at MIT and The University of Michigan, where he earned a Ph.D. in Political Science, and has specialized and consulted in the international affairs of Europe and Eurasia for twenty years. He has held research and teaching positions at major universities in the United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, and Russia, and contributed to leading policy reviews and academic journals as well as the mass media in three languages.

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