According to the book of Ecclesiastes, there is no new thing under the sun. But at first glance, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev would seem to be proving the ancient sage wrong. His program of domestic social and economic reforms, gathered under the umbrella of glasnost or "openness," is if not an entirely new thing then certainly a surprise.
Gorbachev and his allies are doing their best to shake a moribund communist system back to life. They seem determined to disprove the Reaganaut doctrine of Cold War metaphysics, which holds that communist societies are inherently unreformable.
In the last year, scores of Soviet prisoners of conscience have been released. Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, the international symbol of the Soviet human rights struggle, was returned from exile and restored to his position in Moscow's scientific community. Literature, films, plays, music, and other artworks long suppressed have surfaced to great public fanfare.
Straightforward news reports of unpleasant events, including strikes and anti-government riots, are being broadcast for the first time. Criticism of corrupt and incompetent officials by the public and the Soviet media is not only tolerated but actively encouraged by the Gorbachev regime. On the economic front, Gorbachev has charted a new course of decentralizing the creaky and unproductive state planning machinery, giving more power to individual plant managers and market forces.
Those are the facts of the case as widely broadcast by the Western media, which the Soviet reformers are eager to court. But what those facts mean is open to a range of interpretation both in the West and in the Soviet Union itself. Does glasnost herald the long-awaited advent of "socialism with a human face," or is it just a cosmetic touch-up on the old, familiar regimen of state control?
The answer seems to be both, and neither. Gorbachev does seem intent on making the Soviet system more workable and livable for its people. He entertains dreams that Soviet communism could someday again be considered a viable alternative to the Western systems. But he is not out to overturn the old Soviet system. He is, instead, out to save it from itself by curbing its worst tendencies.
GORBACHEV INHERITED A SYSTEM in an advanced state of decay. By the end of the Brezhnev era in 1982, every statistical indicator of social and economic health was looking grim. Per capita income, productivity, and average life expectancy were going down. Infant mortality, alcoholism, and the cost of living were on the way up. The general deterioration of Soviet life was even becoming a national security issue, as generals complained about the ill health and poor education of young conscripts.
The sad state of Soviet society testified to the material cost of a system in which people are neither allowed nor expected to participate. In the Soviet Union's highly centralized one-party system, all ideas and initiatives came in the form of directives from a detached and self-interested bureaucracy. Citizens were expected to take it on faith that this structure operated in their interest in some vague, almost mystical fashion. In return the system promised to provide for the people's basic material needs.
The original socialist idea was that capitalism's cold-blooded reliance on material incentives ("work hard enough and you might get rich, slack off and you starve") could eventually be replaced by the moral incentive of common participation in a society in which everyone had a stake because its resources were owned collectively by all the people. But in the Soviet Union, that ideal was dead at least by the time of Stalin.
All power became centralized at the highest levels of the state and party, leaving the people with no say over the resources they supposedly owned and even without a meaningful vote on who would manage them. The life of the socialist citizen devolved to one of working as little as possible, keeping quiet, and getting as much out of the system as possible through bribes and favors. For those who, for reasons of political conscience, religious faith, or ethnic pride, were unable to go g along and get along, there was always the gulag or the psychiatric ward.
Gorbachev is trying to inject an innoculating dose of democracy into this system. He wants to get people interested in their lives and in doing creative and productive work. The Gorbachev reforms have been focused especially on the realm of culture and ideas because the committed participation of the intellectual class is especially needed to bring the Soviet economy into the computer age.
Gorbachev seems to assume that he can create enough "openness" to get the people involved and mobilized but not enough for any substantial number of them to begin questioning the essential boundaries of the one-party system. His hard-line opponents in the bureaucracy do not share his confidence in the system's adaptability.
GORBACHEV'S "OPENNESS" is, of course, being kept within the confines of the state-and party-controlled institutions and media, where the doses can be regulated. The big stick of repression remains available to deal with those, like members of the independent peace movement or the various religious and ethnic groups, who exercise their human rights to free expression on their own initiative and outside of the official channels.
We can't forget that while the Soviets claim to have freed 140 prisoners of conscience, several thousand more remain incarcerated. In the public atmosphere of optimism that Gorbachev is creating, a note of principled realism is required from those of us who believe that human rights are in fact rights, and not privileges to be doled out by benevolent autocrats.
However, this skepticism shouldn't be seen as backing us into the Reaganaut corner where the Gorbachev reforms are condemned as mere propaganda. Andrei Sakharov himself recently said of the glasnost policy, "It's not right to say that it's only propaganda or window-dressing. It's not a matter of helping Gorbachev but of helping ourselves." Which is to say that it's always good when anyone gets out of jail. And, even within their currently defined limits, the Gorbachev reforms do create new space in Soviet society for internal debate and dialogue about their future that could always turn in some surprising directions.
A little democracy can in fact be a dangerous thing. And to the extent that glasnost takes hold in the Soviet Union, possibilities are heightened for much-needed openness, dialogue, and cooperation between the Soviets and the United States.
Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.
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