by ROBERT SCHEER
(ScheerPost revisits Robert Scheer’s 1987 Los Angeles Times review: “From Moscow, First Report of an Unprecedented Call for Change: The Gorbachev Manifesto.”)
When Mikhail S. Gorbachev comes to the United States next month for his summit conference with President Reagan, he will convey the main theme of this book: The Soviet Union is now in the grip of a new realism about its domestic crisis and world priorities.
His top foreign policy advisers are convinced that the “new thinking” of perestroika in foreign affairs has permitted a breakthrough on arms control beyond the signing of a ban on intermediate range nuclear force (INF) missiles. They speak openly of a dramatic deal to halve each side’s strategic missile force in return for continued strict observance of the existing Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty.
Whether or not such a breakthrough is announced at the summit’s conclusion, Gorbachev will be seeking to leave behind in the United States an image of his perestroika as a domestic policy whose foreign policy postulate is an end to the Cold War as we have known it, thus providing a much needed period of peace for the remaking of Soviet society.
Perestroika, or restructuring, as vividly and conversationally described in this remarkable manifesto, is based on a profound criticism of the “stagnation” of Soviet society and an insistence on radically reordering its essential economic mechanisms. But perestroika requires for its success a breeze of glasnost blowing through the country’s stultified intellectual and political life.
A Second Russian Revolution?
If perestroika–for now a top-down movement with all of the limitations thus implied–succeeds in cutting through the morass of bureaucratic inefficiency and stupidity to ignite grass-roots support, it will represent a second Soviet “revolution.” Or so Gorbachev claims, writing as a new Lenin in this modern rendition (or revision) of the Soviet Founding Father’s “What Is to Be Done?”
“Perestroika means initiative,” Gorbachev writes, “and creative endeavor, improved order and discipline, more glasnost, criticism and self-criticism in all spheres of our society. It is utmost respect for the individual and consideration for personal dignity. . . . The essence of perestroika lies in the fact that it unites socialism with democracy. . . .” Reading those bold words in the historic National Hotel up the hall from Room 107 where Lenin sat in 1918 looking out at the walls of the Kremlin where his party inexplicably and suddenly held power leaves one wanting to dash out into the streets, like John Reed in the movie “Reds,” to witness the change.
Reinforcing the movie-land image of revolution is the presence of actress Vanessa Redgrave, here for the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, who sits each morning in the hotel restaurant huddling with her British Marxist adviser, speaking as if nothing has changed since 1917.
But it’s not that sort of revolution. When tanks move here as they did dramatically one recent night, sweeping through Red Square, it’s not for the seizure of power but rather practice for a parade.
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