Communism by Richard Pipes

Author:Richard Pipes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9781588360960
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2001-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

No moral onus was attached to stealing state property. Indeed, a popular saying encouraged it by telling Soviet citizens, “If you don’t steal from the government, you are stealing from your family.” This manner of thinking led to the corruption of the entire nation.

The general relaxation encouraged bolder spirits to challenge the regime, giving rise to the phenomenon of dissidence. The dissidents were punished in the customary manner, to which Brezhnev’s security chief, Iurii Andropov, added the innovation of confining them to mental institutions, where they were subjected to drug treatments and other tortures. It is estimated that by the late 1980s, the KGB had a staff of at least 480,000, of whom about a quarter of a million, assisted by tens of millions of informants, engaged in domestic counterintelligence and surveillance.31 But the movement once started would not stop, and even if their numbers were minuscule, dissidents continued to sap the government’s prestige.

So did developments among Soviet dependencies in Eastern Europe. In 1956, when the Hungarians rebelled to reclaim their national independence, Moscow crushed their defiance with military force. The same happened in 1968 when the Czech Communists attempted to adopt democratic socialism. But when in Poland in the 1970s there emerged a powerful trade union movement called Solidarity, which challenged the Communist regime head-on, Moscow could no longer muster the courage to intervene. Afraid lest the movement infect Soviet workers, it insisted that the Polish Communists take the initiative in crushing Solidarity. After long hesitation, in December 1981, the Polish government imposed martial law on the country and arrested nearly all the leaders of the labor movement.

In the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union confronted a genuine crisis, not one artificially concocted to justify the dictatorship. It was caused by a progressive atrophy of all sectors of public life. It confronted the Communist regime for the first time with a problem that could not be solved by force. It required far-reaching reform—that is, concessions.

Resolution was postponed for a while by the choice of elderly and sometimes sick first secretaries, who made certain not to rock the boat. But by 1985 the decision could no longer be put off. The Communist bloc found itself in what Lenin had defined as a “revolutionary situation”: the bloc’s governments could no longer rule in the accustomed manner, and the people would no longer allow themselves to be thus ruled. The result was a tense stalemate that could explode in revolution. To avert the danger, in 1985 the Politburo appointed a relatively young member, Mikhail Gorbachev, as its first secretary. His task was to reanimate the system without upsetting its foundations. This assignment proved impossible to accomplish because all efforts at reform ran into the resistance of the entrenched nomenklatura, which quietly sabotaged them. By 1988, Gorbachev and his advisers had concluded that Communism was unreformable and took steps to transform the USSR into a democratic socialist state.

First came glasnost, which meant an end to government secrecy and a significant relaxation of censorship. The regime

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